Home / Lectures / Professor Mitchell Stevens

Individualized Consideration and Social Inequality in Selective College Admissions

Professor Mitchell Stevens

Description

Semester:

  • Fall 2007

Speakers:

Professor Mitchell Stevens, New York University

Lecture Time:

Fri, November 9, 2007 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Lecture Location:

Room 4212, School of Education

Speaker Webpage(s):

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Mitchell_Stevens

Introduced By:

No introduction available.

Abstract

The 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the use of race in admissions protocols at the University of Michigan reiterated “individualized consideration” as the standard for best practice in the evaluation applicants at selective schools nationwide. The “individualized consideration” of “each and every” applicant is now broadly regarded as the ideal mode of evaluation at our most competitive public and private institutions. My ethnographic research among admissions officers at a highly selective private college indicates that individualized consideration produces subtle but highly consequential advantages to applicants from relatively privileged backgrounds. Because individualized consideration is fundamentally a narrative process, those applicants who are able to deliver the amounts and kinds of information amenable to the crafting of compelling stories are systematically favored. Applicants from relatively affluent families and schools enjoy more elaborate information delivery, which equates into evaluative advantage especially when cases are “tough calls.” The ethical and policy implications of this finding are non-trivial.

Recording & Additional Notes

Introducer: Ryan Smerek, Ph.D. Student, Organizational Studies.
Co-Sponsored by the Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund of the Center for the Education of Women (CEW) and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender