Authenticating privilege in global higher education: The case of “premium” counseling in India

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Meritocracy, Marginality, and Digital Inclusion: Global Perspectives on Equity in and Access to Higher Education

Proposal

This article uses overseas college admissions consultants hired by India’s upper classes as an instance to examine how international educational intermediaries (re)produce inequality in global higher education.

Existing research on the uptake of college admissions consulting focuses largely on Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) in the US who cater to students applying domestically, overlooking admissions entrepreneurs who support international students in their pursuit of selective universities overseas (Tuxen and Robertson 2019; Ying and Wright 2023; Chen 2023). Much of the burgeoning scholarship on international higher education brokerage does not clearly distinguish between university-affiliated student recruiters and independent consultants who are hired by students and their families (Robinson-Pant and Magyar 2018; Nikula and Raimo 2023), and many studies focus exclusively on the former (e.g., Baas 2007; Collins 2012; Thieme 2017; Nikula and Kivisto 2017; Beech 2018). And while researchers have highlighted the propensity for unethical practices among university-affiliated agents (Reisberg and Altbach 2011), independent consultants have largely evaded critical scrutiny for their role in reproducing hierarchies among aspiring student migrants and higher education destinations. Responding to calls for greater attention to the “politics of movement”, including the legacies of colonialism and contemporary economic and geopolitical power relations that organize the flow of student migrants (Altbach 2015), and the ethical responsibilities of receiving institutions, states, and educational intermediaries (Yang 2020), this article investigates the infrastructures that facilitate mobility among the most privileged student migrants.

Following research on IECs in the US, I conceptualize premium counseling as a form of “shadow education”, or activities for enhancing student achievement that take place outside formal schooling, particularly during key milestones like the school-to-college transition (Stevenson and Baker 1992; Bray 1999). This conceptualization captures how counselors support socioeconomically privileged parents to pass on advantages to their children (McDonough 1994; McDonough, Korn, and Yamasaki 1997; Weis, Cippalone, and Jenkins 2014; Smith and Sun 2016; Sun and Smith 2017; Huang 2024). Additionally, given their role in facilitating student mobility across national borders, I view premium counselors as “migration infrastructures”, which are defined as, “systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, S122). Following the influential “new mobilities paradigm” in studies of migration (Sheller and Urry 2006), I examine student mobility in terms of the power to move, or the resources, dependencies, and unequal power relations that enable (or constrain) movement (Lee and Waters 2024), and attend to counselors’ role in steering mobilities and producing categories of mobile students that become taken for granted (Lindquist, Xiang and Yeoh 2012; Lin, Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2017, 168).

This article draws on interviews with 21 overseas college admissions consultants in India, who refer to themselves as “premium” (also “bespoke” or “boutique”) counselors. My secondary data sources include the websites of these counseling firms and less structured conversations with 11 other key informants from India’s international higher education brokerage industry. Acknowledging the role of language in reinforcing dominant ideologies and the social structures they promote (Fairclough 1992), and specifically, in the production and circulation of class ideologies and maintenance of material inequality, I apply the lens of “elite discourse” (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017) to examine how elite status is constructed in the language and communication of premium counseling. My analysis attends to both avowals and disavowals of eliteness (Kenway and Lazarus 2017), like counselors’ appeals to distinction (e.g., self-identification as “premium” and internationally educated) and moral superiority (e.g., emphasis on purpose over profit), and construction of counseling as seemingly open, welcoming, and available to all.

Preliminary findings: Premium counselors deploy a range of discursive strategies to construct themselves as uniquely ethical players in the market for college admissions assistance, and in doing so, obfuscate the structures that produce elites and their others in the global field of college admissions.

Discourses of ethicality: Confirming previous findings (Tuxen and Robertson 2019), my interviewees distanced themselves from university-affiliated agents, reinforcing the stratification of international educational intermediaries (and their clients) in line with hierarchies among higher education institutions. Counselors denied engaging in practices like ghostwriting essays, filling in college applications, and fabricating students’ achievements and contrasted themselves favorably to educational service providers that operate at a larger scale, including elite schools and edtech startups and supplementary academic tutoring centers that serve India’s broader middle-class. While counselors highlight their track record of admissions to highly ranked colleges in their marketing outreach, my interviewees insisted that they were as invested in the application “process” as its “outcome.” They described applying to selective overseas colleges as a vehicle for cultivating “life skills” for succeeding in the “real world”, and a “journey” of “self-discovery.” They also emphasized that premium counseling is more than just a “business”, celebrating their relationships with their clients and their satisfaction in “giving kids a shot at a world class university.”

Discourses of inclusivity: While counselors acknowledge the substantial economic advantages of their clientele, they also emphasize granular distinctions in capital among them and their collective disadvantage in the race for selective overseas colleges. Interviewees pointed to the growing popularity for their services among students who are the first in their families to apply overseas and those lacking the financial liquidity to completely self-fund education abroad and described their support to such students as driven by desires to “help as many kids as possible.” In interviews and on their websites, counselors touted their students’ successes in securing scholarships and financial aid. Interviewees shared that even relatively affluent and well-informed clients feel ill-equipped to support their children through the increasingly competitive selection processes of highly ranked overseas colleges. Such descriptions illustrate the very real challenges facing international applicants to selective universities, who compete for fewer spots than domestic applicants, navigate cultural and juridical borders, and often pay higher tuition. However, premium counselors’ emphasis on relative disadvantage within, and across, the narrow slice of Indian society that can afford their services also obscures long-standing systems of caste, religious, and class oppression that continue to benefit their clients, and constructs admission to selective overseas colleges as a product of hard work and merit.

Author

• Swati Puri, Harvard University Graduate School of Education