Globally Elite

You know when you’re working on a project and have way too many tabs open on your laptop at once? That’s me right now. As the literature review writer for our project, I am researching the relationship between elite schools and their students’ views on the future, particularly regarding future career aspirations. My research doesn’t pertain to Croft School exclusively, because other literature on the topic will help form a comprehensive analysis and discussion.

SO many resources

To be honest, between online articles and journals and library books, sometimes it feels like there are TOO many resources. However, after doing some investigating, I realized that there were quite a few sources that I’d initially thought would pertain to our topic better than they actually did; for examples, they featured elite universities instead of elite high schools, or discussed starting a career at a private school as opposed to private school student’s opinions on careers. That being said…

Here are my findings so far:

1.) Expectations of success

Between teachers, peers,  parents, and society, students at elite schools have grown up amidst expectations of success. Conversations about college have never been an “if.” but rather a “when” and “where.” These expectations are so internalized that the idea of not being able to go to college because of money or grades is foreign to them. Some students, like our interviewee, recognized that it happens to others, but also insisted that it would never happen to her or her immediate peers.

2.) Greater capital = better how to guide for life

Pierre Bourdieu’s stratification of capital implies that the more capital one has (economic/cultural/social), the more knowledge they have to manipulate life to further themselves. While manipulate often holds negative connotations, elite students have a significant amount of capital they can use to fulfill the expectations placed on them, which manifests into an effective how-to guide for life:

• Economically, they (their parents) will be able to pay for any college they get into, which sets no limits.
• Culturally, they understand which future careers will make the most money or be the most successful, and what steps they need to take to obtain these careers.
• Socially, they have a powerful network of powerful people to help them find and gain opportunities.

3.) Forward thinking

Elite students always seem to bethinking about the future. Our interviewee’s experience and understanding of what her future will be like (successful) is reinforced in many studies, which showcase elite school’s focus on the future (think career centers and networking) and their students’ places in the (increasingly global) world.While our interviewee certainly held this mindset of assured success, it is not isolated to Chile: Colby students, too, are constantly using their capital to think of what their big summer internship will be or how they can form connections now that will help them later.

While I definitely still have more research to do, it is clear that themes of expectations, use of capital, and focus on the future are revealing itself in each reading. Like lions and tigers and bears, these three themes are honestly a bit daunting considering that they are such crucial factors in the lives of young students. They are, however, all necessary, but not necessarily negative aspects of Bourdieu’s theory of the use of capital in elite reproduction. While Dorothy may have the brains, heart, and courage of her companions to combat the lions and tigers and bears all along, elite students have economic, cultural, and social capital to rise to meet expectations and ensure their future success.

It’s official: my friend Emily and I are traveling to Taiwan in January! In a matter of weeks, we’ll be interacting with the students at Takau English School, collecting additional observation notes, interviewing teachers and administrators, and taking photographs to contribute to the arts-based component of this much larger “Globally Elite” project. In addition, while we’re there, I’ll be completing an education practicum. I know I can speak for Emily when I say that we are both beyond excited!! However, I can’t lie… I’m also incredibly nervous. Without further ado, I present to you:

Why I’m Freaking Out About My Trip to Taiwan

• Neither Emily nor I speak Chinese. While the students and teachers at Takau English School are required to speak English at all times, the rest of the country predominantly speaks Mandarin Chinese. Emily and I plan to spend the grand majority of our time in Taiwan at the school, so hopefully this won’t be a problem. However, if we want to explore at all, we’d better be feeling adventurous, because of this next reason…

• We have no idea how to navigate Taiwan. Although Emily has done quite a bit of world traveling herself, neither of us have been anywhere in Asia before. We’re not particularly familiar with the culture and we don’t know what to expect in terms of the city structure. On Google Maps, the streets look as though they are reasonably easy to navigate. In addition, I’ve heard that Taiwan is generally considered a “nice country;” if Emily and I ever get lost, I’m hoping that we might be able to find some friendly people who would be willing to point us in the right direction. During January, I’ll keep you updated on how often we get lost.

• We have no idea how to find our hotel, either. We found the bed and breakfast through a travel website; it has excellent reviews, and it looks beautiful in the photographs. Unfortunately, however, the reviews also suggest that the hotel is extremely difficult to find, because its entrance isn’t well marked. Furthermore, the residence owners don’t speak English. But – fortunately – Emily and I have heard that their son does speak English, and quite well! If this is the case, he will probably be our new best friend and saving grace during the month of January. If we can just find the hotel on day one, I’m hoping we’ll be set for the rest of our stay.

• I’m not sure what the food will be like. I am not a picky eater, and I love to try new things. However, in spite of this, I’m nervous about eating in Taiwan. For one, neither Emily nor I will be able to read the food labels, so we won’t know exactly what we’re eating. For another, foreign food preparation methods can cause illness if your body is unfamiliar with them. When I traveled to Costa Rica for my January term last year, I experienced horrible food poisoning. While it is possible that the food was prepared incorrectly, it is more likely that my body was simply unsure of how to handle the foods it had never been accustomed to. In consequence, I’ll probably tread pretty lightly with regard to eating new things in Taiwan – the last thing I want is for us to get sick!

• Emily and I may be the main attraction while we’re in Asia. On top of the fact that both of us are English-speaking, fair-skinned, pale, and freckled, Emily’s hair is stunningly red while mine is shiny and blonde. I’m sure that any time we get lost, it will be blatantly obvious to the people around us. There’s going to be no way of hiding how foreign we are to the Taiwanese city. Again, we can just hope that Taiwan is as friendly as we’ve heard, and we will try to avoid getting lost too often.

• What if the students at TES don’t like me? I am incredibly excited to meet and interact with them. Over the course of January, the school might allow me to get involved with the students’ academics, co-curriculars, extracurriculars, and athletics. I’m hopeful that the students will become comfortable enough with me that we can speak informally; this will give me the opportunity to get to know them much, much better. I am already confident that I’ll love the students… I just can’t help but worry that they might not like me!

• I hate to say it, but I’m bad luck when I travel. I have a tendency to fall victim to horrible snowstorms and long delays at the airport. In my past two January terms abroad, the countries I traveled to experienced some sort of panic within my first week there. For example, I went to Paris my sophomore year, and the Charlie Hebdo attacks occurred on my second day there. My junior year, the Zika outbreak promptly began after my arrival in Costa Rica. I’m praying for Emily and the country of Taiwan that my “bad luck” is just coincidental!

Stay tuned! There will be more to come about our trip to Taiwan soon!

After waiting months to get the names of our students at the Chilean school, my group was finally assigned a senior boy who we would get the chance to interview. Thanks to the student and to Marco, my group’s interviewer, all three interviews were completed within a single weekend. My role in the group was transcriber, so I was able to spend a lot of time with Marco’s recordings. Our student was very opinionated about his school and the way that it shapes its students. For me, the most interesting aspect of his answers was how he talked about the school’s mission statement and the way in which it was executed through the school culture.

The opening statement of the Chilean school’s mission is “We want to form young people who will be useful to this country and are trustworthy”. This was striking because the theme of our research project is global citizenship and how students understand themselves in terms of their country and the world at large. In our class, we define “global citizenship” as the recognition that an individual is a member of a developing world community that they are responsible for participating in. Surely, if the mission statement declared that the Chilean school was teaching their students how to be global citizens, then that must be the truth.

Turns out, our student did not feel as though his school was following through with this mission. When asked “do you think that your school is fulfilling its mission statement?”, he responded, “No, I think the students are very individualistic. Like they don’t care about society, they just want to be successful people”. Moreover, when asked how his school defines global citizenship, he could not provide a definition. Because the school places so much emphasis on global citizenship on their website, I was confused as to why the student’s understanding differed so much.

I gave the discrepancy between the school’s mission statement and the student’s understanding a lot of thought. Two things came to mind. The first was that the Chilean school was putting a polished and well-sounding statement on their website as a way to gain attraction and maintain their status as a globally elite academic institution. This quickly reminded me of our class’s conversations about the knowledge economy and how the increasing importance of knowledge and technology is creating a more globally connected market. Of course an elite institution like the Chilean school wants to compete within the growing knowledge economy in a way that maintains their competitiveness. Therefore, their emphasis on global citizenship in their mission statement is not a surprise. Even if they fail to execute properly, their mission looks impressive to outsiders.

The second thought that came to mind was the reliability of our student. Throughout the interview, he mentioned multiple times that he did not get along well with his teachers and that he spent a lot of time playing rugby and socializing rather than on academics. Additionally, he mentioned that he disliked his school for a range of reasons. Naturally, I questioned whether the school was failing to execute their mission properly or if our student was refusing to acknowledge their efforts.

However, if it is true that the student is not acknowledging the school’s attempts to teach about global citizenship, then this is still very significant. To me, it suggests that there is a disconnect in the transmission of information. Ultimately, I believe that it is the school’s job to understand the ways in which their students learn best about these topics and to adjust their curriculum accordingly. The fact that our student is a senior in high school and can not articulate the definition of “global citizenship” is worth exploring further. I am looking forward to reviewing his interviews further and identifying where the school could possibly improve its execution of its mission statement.

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.