Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

350 Pages·2015·3.69 MB·English

by  Lauren A. Rivera

Pedigree
PEDIGREE
how ELITE STUDENTS get ELITE JOBS
LAUREN A. RIVERA
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2015 by Lauren A. Rivera
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton
University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom:
Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
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All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-691-15562-3
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Mom, with gratitude
No man is an island.
—John Donne
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
1 Entering the Elite 1
2 The Playing Field 29
3 The Pitch 55
4 The Paper 83
5 Setting the Stage for Interviews 113
6 Beginning the Interview: Finding a Fit 135
7 Continuing the Interview: The Candidate’s Story 147
8 Concluding the Interview: The Final Acts 183
9 Talking It Out: Deliberating Merit 211
10 Social Reconstruction 253
11 Conclusion 267
Appendix A Who Is Elite? 287
Appendix B Methodological Details 291
Appendix C List of Interviews 307
Notes 315
References 347
Index 365
Acknowledgments
This book stems from my long-standing interest in elites. I collected the
data while a PhD student at Harvard University. I am deeply grateful to a
variety of individuals for supporting me throughout my windy academic
journey at Harvard from studying posh nightclubs to political elites to Wall
Street. I wish to thank my graduate school adviser and doctoral
dissertation chair Michèle Lamont for her outstanding mentorship,
invaluable feedback, and continued intellectual support. I am particularly
grateful to Michèle for teaching me how to frame a sociological argument
and how to navigate the discipline. I also extend my deepest appreciation
to Frank Dobbin and Mary Brinton for initially piquing my interest in
hiring, for teaching me the ropes of economic sociology, and for their rich
insights about the project from conception to completion. I am also
extremely grateful to Christopher Winship and the late J. Richard
Hackman for their support and encouragement throughout graduate
school. Life in William James Hall was made brighter by the close
friendship and intellectual partnership of Simone Ispa-Landa, Chana
Teeger, Allison Binns, and Therese Leung. As qualitative research is a
time- and resource-intensive endeavor, this research would not have been
possible without generous (cid:633)nancial support from the Ford Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
at Harvard.
Since leaving Cambridge, Massachusetts, my colleagues at
Northwestern University and the Kellogg School of Management have been
instrumental in shaping my thinking about social inequalities and
organizational diversity. I am especially thankful for the ongoing
mentorship of Jeanne Brett, Gary Fine, Paul Hirsch, Brayden King, Angela
Lee, Willie Ocasio, and Brian Uzzi. Nicole Stephens has been a wonderful
friend and an intellectual sister in studying social class.
I wish to thank Eric Schwartz and Princeton University Press for the
opportunity to transform this book from an idea into a reality. I am deeply
grateful to Katherine Mooney for her keen editorial eye and for helping me
to re(cid:633)ne my argument. I appreciate the care with which the two reviewers
read an earlier draft of this manuscript and the insightfulness of their
comments. Additionally, the feedback of Roberto Fernandez, Annette
Lareau, Mitchell Stevens, and Viviana Zelizer along with that of Andrew
Abbott, David Bills, David Brown, Tony Brown, Katherine Donato, Larry
Issac, Holly McCammon, Kevin Stainback, and the anonymous reviewers at
the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and
Research in Social Strati(cid:633)cation and Mobility on articles related to this book
have greatly influenced the ideas presented here.
No woman is an island, and my family has been integral in supporting
me before, during, and after this book. I wish to pay particular thanks to
my mother, Eliana, for always believing in me and for teaching me
resilience and persistence in the face of challenges. Unbeknownst to her,
she equipped me with vital skills that have been an asset in qualitative
research, including how to really listen, to look at American culture with a
distanced eye, and to embrace the unknown and unexpected. My brother,
Richie, has been an inspiration when it comes to writing. I am also
immensely grateful to my husband, David, for his unrelenting enthusiasm
and support for my work and for being a formidable partner in life and
laughter.
A question that I frequently receive is how I became interested in social
class and elites. In this respect, I am immensely grateful to the Brentwood
School for being both a source of intellectual inspiration and a vehicle of
upward mobility. Brentwood was my (cid:633)rst exposure to upper-class culture,
since I grew up in a single-parent, low-income, immigrant family. Without
the formal and informal education that I received there and the school’s
former policy of giving the children of sta(cid:643) free tuition, I would never
have been able to enter the elite worlds that I now study. At Brentwood, I
am particularly indebted to the late Lynette Creasy, Jennifer Evans,
Lynette Gelfand, Judith O’Hanlon, and Sarah Wallace. At Yale University,
my professors equipped me with theories and methods that helped me
make sense of upper-class culture. I thank Joshua Gamson for (cid:633)rst
introducing me to Pierre Bourdieu and theories of social closure; Joseph
Soares for piquing my interest in classical theory; and Todd Little for
instilling in me a love of empirical research and the desire to become an
academic.
Last but certainly not least, I wish to thank my research participants for
their openness and insights and for taking the time to share their
experiences with me despite their grueling work schedules and various
outside commitments. I am particularly appreciative of those who rallied