Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education

A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared fo...