Shadow Privilege: How Independent Educational Consultants Help Advantaged Families to Negotiate Access to Higher Education

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 06. Parental Involvement and Higher Education

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which economically privileged parents maximize their children’s chances to enter college by working with independent educational consultants (IECs). Drawing on 52 semi-structured in-depth interviews with IECs and IEC clients (including parents and students), we demonstrate how (upper) middle-class parents collaborate with the IECs whom they hire to prepare their teenage children to become optimal college applicants, thereby preparing the next generation for their transition to adulthood. Building on current literature on education and inequalities, this research delineates how the class standing of parents shapes the educational trajectories and life chances of their children.

This article highlights the processes through which IECs instruct the children under their supervision how to accumulate, display, and utilize various human, social and cultural capitals to facilitate success in the college application process. The IECs we studied provide “tailor-made” support that is not available either at school or to less economically disadvantaged families. The hiring of IECs not only mirrors the efforts of American economically-advantaged parents to reproduce class privilege across generations, but also points to the increasing commercialization of the US educational system.

Authors

• Jill M. Smith, Brandeis University

• Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Hong Kong Baptist University