Inside the Struggles of a Less-Selective College

U. of Pennsylvania

The private nonprofit college whose inner workings are the subject of a new book struggles to enroll enough students to stay afloat, and very few of those who do enter its classrooms — in an urban office tower — would qualify academically to go to a more-prestigious institution.

The college’s standing is precisely what attracted Alex Posecznick, the author, to his anthropological study of its operations, which he describes and analyzes in Selling Hope and College: Merit, Markets, and Recruitment in an Unranked School (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2017). In an interview, Mr. Posecznick said he started with a simple observation: “A lot of the public discourse, and the media, and the scholarship focuses on the 3 percent of institutions that are in the luxurious position of having lines of people waiting to get in. It’s easy to understand the interest in that, but there seems to be so little about the bulk of institutions and what they struggle with.”

To prepare his book, Mr. Posecznick, an associated faculty member and program manager at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, spent a year embedded in the enrollment office at Ravenwood College (the pseudonym he uses). He analyzed the college’s many strategies, often desperate ones, to help an ill-served student demographic — predominantly older, female, and African-American. In doing so, he observed the pitfalls faced by many far-from-elite colleges.

For most of its history, Ravenwood has prided, and marketed, itself as a progressive, alternative institution, but Mr. Posecznick observes that the niche it has carved out for itself has also shackled it. It could not pitch itself as elite, because that would ring hollow and in any case would create expectations it could not meet. Nor could it afford to back away from its unusual historical identity, because that was its only competitive advantage. Any talk of changing mission provoked outcry from faculty members, students, and alumni, as well as anonymous posters to a blog who spoke of the college as a “sham” business whose degrees were regarded skeptically by employers. Mr. Posecznick said: “If you’re a niche institution, then you are by definition going to appeal to a smaller crowd; however if you want to grow and expand, and move beyond that, you have to appeal to a larger crowd, and then you’re no longer a niche institution.”

A core theme of Mr. Posecznick’s book is that colleges play a key role in racial and socioeconomic “sorting” in American life, and have done so since the earliest days of American higher education. Which students are worthy of being promoted as “elites” who are granted many privileges? Which may be consigned to also-ran status?

The graduates of Ravenwood do not dwell much on that analysis, he found. He describes them at a triumphant commencement ceremony, “cheering, shouting, and making catcalls throughout the ceremony, often encouraged by the speakers.” The graduates and their supporters were elated by a sense of accomplishment against stiff odds. Mr. Posecznick writes: “There are extraordinary, worthwhile, and hopeful stories in such ‘mediocre’ places.”