Sophie Cyker

With all the research projects I’ve done before this class, the work stops when I turn in my paper and finish the semester. I get closure by answering my own research questions and relief in knowing I’ve done my job. I think the most challenging, but also the most unique, aspect of this research opportunity is that even though we are individually done with the class and therefore done with our contributions, the work still continues.

Because this project involves so much personal participation for us, especially for those who have to form connections with students through interviews, ending our work without ending the project is a little challenging. In contrast, in my English seminar in queer theory this semester, I designed my own research questions, workshopped the paper with classmates, and eventually came to a satisfactory conclusion through my exploration of the poetry I was studying. Though we may have answers to our immediate questions about Chile and Croft School, we don’t get to stay with Adam to see the end result of this whole, multinational project. How do all these schools perform the same and different functions? What is global citizenship, anyways? Ending the semester without getting closure on these guiding questions is a little tricky.

On the other hand, it’s definitely a special experience to be a part of a project that is so much bigger and ambitious than the research we get to do on our own as undergraduate students. We can see how much hard work past students, even ones we’ve never met, have put into the project. I feel invested in the future of this project, and I’m encouraging my underclassmen friends to take the class next fall so that I can see where the research stands then. Through Adam’s connections, we’ve gotten to interact directly with the subjects of our inquiry rather than spending a whole class reading abstract theory about eliteness. It’s also just very exciting that the work we’ve done in this class is eventually going to help contribute to an actual publication, which is something not a lot of students, especially those who don’t study science, get to experience.

In the end, even though the design of this research project could be challenging, confusing, and overwhelming at times, the experience of getting to contribute to a project that so many other people have worked hard on was incredibly rewarding. Getting the chance to do work that serves a greater purpose than just getting a grade is an opportunity that I wish we had more of through our time at Colby.

When we started the research process at the beginning of the semester, Adam warned us that gaining and maintaining access is consistently a major obstacle in the research of elites and elite institutions. Since these schools are often extremely selective, they attempt to limit, or at least control, the information that is released about them. They are especially wary of published critiques, like the project we’re working on. Though we all accepted this advice, our class, especially my research group, had to learn about the barriers to access firsthand.

We saw how the Croft School  was working to control our perceptions of their school from the beginning of our research. Even though Adam and his research assistants asked for four subjects for student interviews who represented the average student, the dean they were communicating with chose four prefects to be interviewed. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, prefects are upperclassmen who are chosen (usually by the administration) to serve as leaders and role models for the school. They are generally the most involved and highest achieving students in the junior and senior classes. Think: Percy in Harry Potter.

This choice reminded me a lot of my own experience at an elite school. The students who were chosen as admissions tour guides or as speakers at open houses and other events were always the girls who were almost over-involved in campus life. One of my friends, a constant selection for school promotion, was also the student government president, newspaper editor, and a two-sport athlete our senior year.

While the search for average interview subjects delayed our process a little, access became an even bigger issue when we actually attempted to contact the student that our research group was assigned to interview. We were incredibly excited to start the interview process, so we reached out to our student immediately after receiving his contact information. We were confident that our student would respond to the friendly and enthusiastic email we drafted together.

However, with each passing day, our excitement turned into a mix of anxiety and frustration. We received no response from our subject as our classmates finished all three of their interviews. We sent follow-up emails checking in and religiously checked not only our inbox but our spam and trash folders as well. After almost two weeks, we got a short email back from our student. He apologized for being non-responsive, but said he had too much schoolwork at the moment and would get back to us as soon as he was available for research. We first reached out on October 27th, so we are now approaching three weeks without interviews.

While I can understand why the school wanted to provide us with overachieving students for our interviews, I can’t easily identify why our student has been so hard to coordinate with. Is his schoolwork so heavy or so stressful that he really is just too busy? Does he not consider this to be a priority of his? Does he feel awkward or concerned with talking about himself and his school with strangers? Even though we haven’t been able to collect anecdotal data on Croft School from our student, I think considering all of these possibilities still helps us generate questions and inferences about the student experience at this institution.

At Colby, our athletics program shapes a lot of our broader experience and our ideas of what it means to belong to the school community. Even though the NESCAC is just a sports conference, it determines who we consider our competition in admissions, facilities, academic rigor etc. The concluding line of the speech at my freshman convocation was “Beat Bowdoin.” And while we compete with these schools, their successes do help us be confident in our own eliteness: If Bowdoin is an elite school, and Colby is considered a direct competitor of Bowdoin’s, then Colby must be elite too.

Croft School also uses partnerships and organizations to make itself elite by association. During some research, I learned that Croft has an established connection with an elite New England boarding school where international royalty and members of prominent American families attended high school. Each year, Croft School participates in an exchange program with the American school where a select group of students visit over their summer vacation (February/March) and participate in the full extent of student life at the host institution: they take a full schedule of classes, play on athletics teams, and stay with the families of day students.

Croft School also plays host to students from the American school when students in the Northern Hemisphere are on summer vacation. The American school’s website advertises the program as an opportunity for all students, regardless of Spanish language ability, to develop into global citizens and participate in social and family life in a foreign country.

By living and learning with elites from another country, students expand their social networks with influential acquaintances. Not only are their host students likely to attend elite colleges and hold positions of power in the future, but their parents and neighbors are often in influential roles in the present. The students from Croft already possess elite social capital within Chile, but the exchange pushes them past national boundaries. They also learn about the cultural artifacts (art, media, etc.) that are popular among elites in other countries. This cultural awareness will facilitate their ability to maintain privilege and power in transnational/international contexts.

The students who participate in the exchange are not the only beneficiaries. The schools themselves use each other to confirm their elite status. By partnering with other institutions that have long histories of serving elite students and families (the American school and Croft have been around since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively), a school shows that it measures up. Since the world of elites is, by nature, a selective and closed community, only those on the inside can determine that someone or something, like a school, belongs. These two schools perform this act of validation for each other: as long as elites see each other as such, they are safe on the inside.

A lot of people come to college expecting a completely new environment for the next four years. When I decided to go to Colby, I started to expect four more years of the same.

In fifth grade, my parents learned they needed to relocate to Boston. I was lucky enough to earn admission and a scholarship to one of country’s top all-girls schools for sixth grade. I still remember opening my acceptance letter, which was full of confetti in the school colors.Coming from a public Magnet school and a low-income neighborhood of color in Hartford, I was mainly excited to stop wearing a uniform to school and finally have a reason to own a pair of jeans.

graduation, 2014

One of the first things I noticed during my first few days at the school was that there seemed to still be some uniform that everyone forgot to tell me about. Most of the girls in my class owned a velour Juicy Couture sweatshirt for every day of the week, usually with sweatpants to match. At least half the class already had the first iPhone, even though it had been released less than three months before the school year started. The most persistent difference I noticed between my new classmates and I was their apparent expert knowledge of colleges. Everyone seemed to know every school they wanted to attend, as well as what they wanted to study and what job they would eventually have. I onl
y knew about UConn and University of Hartford. I decided I wanted to attend UHart after a third grade class trip when I noticed that the dining hall had ice cream.

Now, I understand this is my 11-year-old self’s version of the “Colby culture shock” that many of my friends described experiencing as they met affluent classmates throughout our freshmen year. When I talk about Colby being more of the same, I mean it in multiple ways. After spending seven years at an elite New England prep school, I became familiar with the idea of people having a place where they “summer,” I learned that Vineyard Vines, L.L. Bean, and Patagonia were considered essential brands of classroom attire, and I recognized the names of reputable high schools, hometowns, and internship programs. When I arrived at Colby, I was familiar with these material items and status symbols, so when I saw them on other people, I knew to label them as “elite.”

Looking back at the way my school taught and empowered us, it’s clear that they tried to teach us that our elite positioning was deserved and that there were no limitations on our potential. I vividly remember a seventh-grade English teacher telling my class that we were smarter than the majority of American adults. We were repeatedly reminded that we were supposed to be influential leaders not only when we grew up, but also in the present. Over the course of my time there, the school adopted “Principles of Global Responsibility.” Similar to global citizenship, these told us yet again how special we were and that we were prepared to not only interact with the world, but to lead it.

Principles of Global Responsibility

In addition to these cultural symbols, I was also quite literally experiencing lots of the same at Colby. When I joined the class of 2018 group on Facebook, I encountered that I was already friends with or had at least 80 mutual friends with about a quarter of the class, who had also attended New England prep schools or some public schools in extremely wealthy Massachusetts towns. 6 other members of my graduating class were accepted to Colby, with three entering freshman year with me.

the athletic complex at my high school

My elite education didn’t just give me what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital:” privileged knowledge that proves one’s place in a group. True to its mission as a college preparatory school, I was probably over-prepared for college, especially compared to my closest friends, who all attended public schools in Maine. Watching them spend all-nighters in the libraries and casually miss deadlines showed me how what I considered the seven worst years of my life really meant for my future. Instead of resenting the experience, I started to feel pride in my struggle. The hardest part of being an alumna of my school has been trying to balance the critical perspectives I developed as a less-privileged outsider during my time there with an acceptance of the privilege the education has given me. Liking Facebook posts about my school’s Forbes and New York Times ratings and wearing my class ring often feels like a betrayal of the resistant student who struggled to learn the eliteness I was surrounded with. I feel like the experience made me the “outsider within” that Patricia Hill Collins talks about, and it’s a major reason why I am an Education major who takes Adam’s classes about social class, privilege, and oppression in American and global education. For students like me who were lucky enough to be taught, either by our families or others, how to be elite, I think it’s our job to make this kind of special education as non-elite and as accessible as possible.