(Un)Rankings and Degrees
Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education
By Diane Reay, Miriam E. David and Stephen Ball
Trentham Books distributed in the U.S. by Stylus Publishing, 2005
192 pp., $29.95 paper, ISBN: 1-85856-330-5 Degrees of Choice provides an account of the overlapping effects of social class, ethnicity and gender in the process of choosing which university to attend. The shift from an elite to a mass education system has been accompanied by much political rhetoric about widening access, achievement-for-all and meritocratic equalization.
This book paints a full and different picture, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data to show how the expansion of higher education has also deepened social stratification, generating new and different inequalities. While gender inequalities have largely been defeated, those of social class remain and are now reinforced by racial inequalities in access. Employing perspectives from the sociology of education and particularly Pierre-Felix Bourdieu’s work on distinction and judgment, the book links school (institutional habitus) and family (class habitus) with individual choice-making in a socially informed dynamic.
The contradictions and tensions arising from attempts to expand student numbers rapidly are vividly brought alive through the narratives of prospective applicants to higher education. Students are seen to confront vastly different degrees of choice that are powerfully shaped by their social class and race.
Dr. Diane Reay is professor of education at London Metropolitan University. Dr. Miriam E. David is professor of policy studies in the department of education at Keele University and author of Personal and Political. Dr. Stephen Ball is Karl Mannheim Professor at the London Institute of Education.
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery
By Rebecca J. Scott
Harvard University Press, 2005
392 pp., $29.95 cloth, ISBN: 0-67401932-6 As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late 19th century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was overthrown, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people — cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers — forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the 20th century, Louisiana and Cuba had diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
