The Social Construction of College Access:
Confronting the Technical, Cultural, and Political Barriers to Low Income Students of Color
Jeannie Oakes, John Rogers, Martin Lipton, & Ernest Morrell

EDH 6053
Critique by Mary-Anne Primack

The Social Construction of College Access:
Confronting the Technical, Cultural, and Political Barriers to Low Income Students of Color
Jeannie Oakes, John Rogers, Martin Lipton, & Ernest Morrell

Eligibility requirements for admission into higher education institutions are primarily based on assessments that support the myth of meritocracy – if students would only work hard enough, they will be fairly compensated for their efforts. Oakes, Rogers, Lipton, and Morell (2000) explain that significant increase in diversity in higher education is not likely to be a result of “efforts to mold low-income Latino and African American students into applicants who fit the university’s current narrow constructions of eligibility” (Oakes et al., 2000, p. 7). Oakes et al. (2000) posit that the current classification of eligibility represents far more than a “culturally and politically neutral standard of academic excellence that is operationalized through culturally and politically neutral measures such coursetaking patterns, grades, SAT scores, and so on.” The authors challenge that a more complex conception of eligibility requirements must be accounted for as they argue that “eligibility reflects social decisions shaped by cultural traditions and political struggles over how “merit” is defined, what indicators or proxies of such merit are legitimate, and the relevance of merit and its indicators to success in the university and to the larger social good.” (Oakes et al., pp.7-8)
Commonly held understandings of standardized testing that is “cloaked in the aura of science” do nothing to convey the complexities resulting in the consistent stratifying effects these tests perpetuate. Outreach approaches attempting to close the disparities in achievement between less advantaged communities and privileged groups faces almost insurmountable odds in competing with the obvious but underacknowledged “cultural capital of white and wealthy families” which “masquerades as meritorious “natural” ability, rather than as a function of social privilege” (Oakes et al., p.11).
Oakes et al., discuss the missing element creating a discrepancy between students’ performance in conventional college-preparatory and advanced high school courses and the high-level intellectual work in research universities. The authors describe that in rigorous high school classes students rarely engage in “the process of creating or discovering new knowledge – the defining characteristics of a research university” (Oakes et al. 2000, p.22). The seminar discussed by Oakes et al. (2000) included young people in the work of a research university, thereby challenging two notions undergirding the logic of college admissions – “that students must demonstrate readiness before, rather than through, participation, and that student performance on standardized assessments is the most meaningful (and non-biased) indicator of readiness or merit” (Oakes et al. 2000, p.22). In their seminar, Oakes et al. (2001) explored whether students engaging in research