role of social foundations in education school prestige, The

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bredo, Eric

The Role of Social Foundations in Education School Prestige1

The American system of higher education, while more pluralistic than some, is nevertheless hierarchically organized. Universities, schools, and programs are commonly recognized as falling in different ranks in a way that forms a nation-wide status hierarchy. In recent years this hierarchy has been codified in US News and World Report's ranking of colleges and graduate programs. Whatever one thinks of this effort, it provides interesting data for analyzing the character of the institutional status hierarchy and the sources of school and program prestige. In what follows I report on a preliminary investigation of the sources of the prestige of education schools. As will become evident, the study is relevant to those in social foundations because social foundations appears to play an important role in the prestige of education schools.

Measuring Prestige

Prestige or status refers to the honor accorded a person, position, or institution relative to others. The two terms will be used interchangeably here.

Prestige is commonly measured by asking people how they evaluate a given person, position, or organization relative to others. In the National Opinion Research Center scale of occupational status, for example, respondents are asked to give "your own personal opinion" of the "general standing" of each job (Hall, 1969, 267). The USNews and World Report rankings are based on similar data. As the process of ranking education schools is described by USNews, "Deans, program directors, and senior faculty are asked to judge the overall academic quality of programs in their field on a scale of 1 ('marginal') to 5 ('distinguished'). Nonacademics are asked to submit a list of up to 25 schools that they consider to be the best in their field.... Superintendents from large school districts are invited to identify the best schools of education based on their experience hiring graduates" (2000b). US News gathered this data using 1000 statistical surveys and 13,000 reputational surveys, although it is unclear how the respondents were selected or how the results were aggregated.

Clearly, there may be many problems with such measures. Those evaluating a school or program may be ill informed about it; they may base their evaluations on conditions that existed in the past while things have long since changed; they may have a particularly narrow set of concerns that they take into account, and so forth. In the case of status it can be argued, however, that perception-at least if widely shared-is reality. If status involves the honor that is generally accorded a person, position, or institution then insofar as people tend to agree about the honor generally accorded by others, this perception becomes a social reality quite independently of detailed facts about instructional quality. If most people think that others accord the object a certain prestige, this belief will have consequences that are real just as the belief that others are likely to drive on the right hand side of the road has consequences when driving. Adopting a logic somewhat similar to this, USNews argues that reputation and quality are much the same thing: "Experts in higher education have long considered reputation a valid measure of academic quality, and it seems clear that a diploma from a college or university known for excellence offers graduates a powerful edge in the competition for good jobs" (2000b). For the purposes of this paper, then, US News' measures will be accepted as valid measures of academic status, leaving aside the question of whether they are valid measures of academic quality.

Sources of Prestige

What enables one university, school, or program to gain higher prestige than another? The details of the process are undoubtedly complicated. Attaining high visibility for the school's faculty through publications, editorships, or election to office in professional organizations is undoubtedly part of the process. Having the resources to attract the "best" students and faculty is another. Being able to produce large numbers of graduates for key markets, who then engage in an incestuous process of mutual self-promotion, is a third. Much undoubtedly depends on being in the right place at the right time, such as being the first graduate or teacher training institution in a state, thereby establishing a position of dominance before there is any competition.

But there are also finer processes at work that have less to do with major historical processes and more to do with the way divergent evaluations of different sorts are combined to reach an overall judgment. People or institutions may be ranked differently in different task domains, being good at one thing but not so good at another. They may also be ranked in general ways that are relatively independent of specific task competencies, such as an individual's being accorded a certain status on the basis of class, race, or gender. The functional theory of stratification emphasizes the way generalized status is gained as a result of specific task competencies. Those who perform well on socially valued tasks for which expertise is scarce are thought to be accorded greater rewards, including honorific rewards like status, when purely tangible rewards are insufficient, so as to recruit the "best" to and keep them on the job. In this case evaluation in a specific domain generalizes, affecting one's overall status. Other theories focus on the way that generalized status affects judgments about more specific abilities, even when there is no rational linkage between the two. For instance, labeling theory and accounts of stereotyping suggest that generalized status influencing social evaluations of competence in particular domains, such as assuming that a person of lower general status will be less competent than one of higher status on a specific task. Clearly, inferences about competence or work quality can be formed either by induction from specifics to a generalized conclusion, or by deduction from a generalized class to a specific instance. Often one has information at various levels of generalization, such as knowing that a person who is not highly educated is nevertheless very good at a specific task. Suppose one has to judge how good this person would be on a new task, how would one reach a judgment-on the basis of their general education level or their specific competence one (or more) area(s)? There is a literature on this subject, investigated in status characteristic theory, which has mostly been applied to behavior in small groups.