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It has long been assumed that college admission should be a simple matter of sorting students according to merit, with the best heading off to the Ivy League and highly ranked liberal arts colleges and the rest falling naturally into their rightful places. Admission to selective institutions, where extremely fine distinctions are made, is characterized by heated public debates about whether standardized exams, high school transcripts, essays, recommendation letters, or interviews best indicate which prospective students are "worthy."And then there is college for everyone else. But what goes into less-selective college admissions in an era when everyone feels compelled to go, regardless of preparation or life goals? "Ravenwood College," where Alex Posecznick spent a year doing ethnographic research, was a small, private, nonprofit institution dedicated to social justice and serving traditionally underprepared students from underrepresented minority groups. To survive in the higher education marketplace, the college had to operate like a business and negotiate complex categories of merit while painting a hopeful picture of the future for its applicants. Selling Hope and College is a snapshot of a particular type of institution as it goes about the business of producing itself and justifying its place in the market. Admissions staff members were burdened by low enrollments and worked tirelessly to fill empty seats, even as they held on to the institution's special spirit. Posecznick documents what it takes to keep a "mediocre" institution open and running, and the struggles, tensions, and battles that members of the community tangle with daily as they carefully walk the line between empowering marginalized students and exploiting them.
An anthropologist by training, Alex Posecznick manages the programs in Education, Culture, and Society, and International Education Development at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he also serves as a member of the Associated Faculty.
"Alex Posecznick's topic and argument are timely and compelling and his voice is readable and interesting. I feel like I know this school and its people and troubles as well as its specialness. The stories linger with me when I put the book aside."
Bonnie Urciuoli, Leonard C. Ferguson Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Hamilton College, author of Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class:
"In Selling Hope and College, Alex Posecznick successfully demonstrates that the notion of mediocrity in higher education is not an objective reality in and of itself but rather is a function of the way higher education institutions have generally become systematized. The very real and valuable services offered to a nontraditional student constituency by an institution like Ravenwood get overshadowed by the pressures on it to maintain its position in contemporary ranking systems. Such systems are shaped by contradictory dynamics: on the one hand, forces of meritocracy; on the other hand, of commodification. I know of no other ethnography of a college serving mostly adult working-class women of color, and Posecznick rightfully puts the focus on the precarity of the students' experiences in and outside the classroom. Selling Hope and College is an excellent—and poignant—read, and a book that I hope will be widely taught."
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