Abstract
Prevailing perspectives attribute higher education’s immense and increasing importance in modern societies nearly exclusively to the economic value of a college degree and role of higher education in the legitimation of stratification. This forecloses consideration of the possibility that higher education’s power and influence may derive, in part, from its own considerable moral or symbolic significance in modern culture. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with adult undergraduates in the United States I explore the meaning of higher education in contemporary culture, drawing principally on institutional theory. The bachelor’s degree emerges as the central and default indicator of not only intelligence but valued moral traits: responsibility, tenacity, and ambition. College completion confirms/constitutes graduates as agentic selves to both others and themselves, and indicates assimilation of scientific and cosmopolitan universalism. I suggest that these findings can be explained through three interrelated, institutionalized interpretation rules: education is a strong moral good, education changes the self, and education accesses the universal. And I argue that we must take seriously the insight—often made but little-explored—that higher education is a quasi-religious as well as an economic institution.
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Notes
I refer here to what Bourdieu calls embodied cultural capital. He also discusses educational credentials as institutionalized cultural capital. But in Bourdieu’s own work on education and certainly in the literature that draws on his concepts, cultural capital in its embodied form predominates.
Frequently this perspective is called “new institutionalism” or neoinstitutionalism, but given that its founding works are over 40 years old these names seem no longer apt.
In institutional theory, an “institution” is any cultural element (practice, organization, category, etc.) that comes to be taken for granted and “treated as an exterior or objective constraint”. Institutionalized models are “frameworks of programs or rules establishing identities and activity scripts for such identities” (Jepperson 1991, p. 147). This usage at variance with how “institution” is commonly used in education – as a synonym for “formal organization”.
I make no claim these codes have exclusive capacity to organize and describe these data. Qualitative data analysis is an active interpretive encounter between reader and text, rather than a neutral “uncovering” of meaning.
I did not employ a set of steps established in advance for identifying or building themes. My approach was intuitive, inductive, and hermeneutic. I was guided, however, by presumptions about how interview data can best be used to study culture. In brief, I see the interview as a setting for social action, albeit one that is institutionalized and so has a given structure and expectations. During a life-history interview, the interviewee improvises discourse about themselves in response to interviewer inputs and in accordance with a number of bounds institutionalized into the interview form. One bound is created by the expectation of truth-telling on the part of the interviewee. Another is the expectation to “create coherence” out of the raw material of one’s life (Linde 1993).
Interviewees do not create a narrative out of thin air. Instead, because they must improvise, they draw heavily on cultural scripts, tropes, and associations in order to scaffold their narrative and imbue it with significance. And it is here that interviews become useful for accessing the underlying structure of associations that constitutes the shared cultural order. Indeed, I suspect that interviews may be more useful for suggesting what tropes and associations are generally culturally available to a competent member of a discourse community in the moment of a speech act than they are for revealing what the interviewee “really” believes or thinks.
In a pre-interview survey, 94% of respondents said that getting a better job was a reason for enrolling, 86% expected to have a different job after graduating, 83% agreed that it is difficult to get a good job without a bachelor’s degree, 78% expected their income to increase after graduating, and 64% said that their desired job requires a bachelor’s degree.
In general respondents used “educated” to mean “college educated”. This does not seem unusual; it seems clear that in present-day American culture, one only qualifies as “educated” if one has completed a bachelor’s degree.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Alexander and the reviewers from AJCS for their incisive comments, which helped improve this paper greatly. I would also like to thank the following people for their comments on prior versions of this paper: Paul Attewell, Janet Gornick, Mary Claire Lennon, Dirk Witteveen, and Sara Martucci. Finally, I would like to thank Eric Grodsky and others from the Midwest Sociology of Education Conference, which provided the first venue for this project's presentation and from which I received crucial encouragement and feedback.
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Monaghan, D.B. Moral education: the cultural significance of higher education in the discourse of non-traditional undergraduates. Am J Cult Sociol 10, 164–195 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00104-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00104-z