How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret.
Inside Graduate Admissions presents admissions from decision makers' point of view, including thought-provoking episodes of committees debating the process, interviewing applicants, and grappling with borderline cases. Who ultimately makes the admit list reveals as much about how professors see themselves--and each other--as it does about how they view students. Professors in these programs say that they admit on merit, but they act on different meanings of the term. Disciplinary norms shape what counts as merit, as do professors' ideas about intelligence and their aversions to risk, conflict, ambiguity, and change. Professors also say that they seek diversity, but Posselt shows that their good intentions don't translate into results. In fact, faculty weigh diversity in only a small fraction of admissions decisions. Often, they rely upon criteria that keep longstanding inequalities in place.
More equitable outcomes occur when admissions committees are themselves diverse and when members take a fresh look at inherited assumptions that affect their judgment. To help academic departments promote transparency and accountability, Posselt closes with concrete strategies to improve admissions review.

Over the past decade, a wave of Chinese international undergraduate students—mostly self-funded—has swept across American higher education. From 2005 to 2015, undergraduate enrollment from China rose from under 10,000 to over 135,000. This privileged yet diverse group of young people from a changing China must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the two most powerful countries in the world. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does this experience mean to them? What does American higher education need to know and do in order to continue attracting these students and to provide sufficient support for them?
In Ambitious and Anxious, the sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of this new wave of Chinese students based on research in both Chinese high schools and American higher-education institutions. Ma argues that these students’ experiences embody the duality of ambition and anxiety that arises from transformative social changes in China. These students and their families have the ambition to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet the intricacy and pressure of these systems generate a great deal of anxiety, from applying to colleges before arriving, to studying and socializing on campus, and to looking ahead upon graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also considers policy implications for American colleges and universities, including recruitment, student experiences, faculty support, and career services.

More than one million American children are schooled by their parents. As their ranks grow, home schoolers are making headlines by winning national spelling bees and excelling at elite universities. The few studies conducted suggest that homeschooled children are academically successful and remarkably well socialized. Yet we still know little about this alternative to one of society’s most fundamental institutions. Beyond a vague notion of children reading around the kitchen table, we don’t know what home schooling looks like from the inside.
Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education—one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society.
Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so.
Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s.Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.

Cut Adrift makes an important and original contribution to the national conversation about inequality and risk in American society. Set against the backdrop of rising economic insecurity and rolled-up safety nets, Marianne Cooper’s probing analysis explores what keeps Americans up at night. Through poignant case studies, she reveals what families are concerned about, how they manage their anxiety, whose job it is to worry, and how social class shapes all of these dynamics, including what is even worth worrying about in the first place. This powerful study is packed with intriguing discoveries ranging from the surprising anxieties of the rich to the critical role of women in keeping struggling families afloat. Through tales of stalwart stoicism, heart-wrenching worry, marital angst, and religious conviction, Cut Adrift deepens our understanding of how families are coping in a go-it-alone age—and how the different strategies on which affluent, middle-class, and poor families rely upon not only reflect inequality, but fuel it.

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.
Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty―providing their children with opportunity―and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the "student finance complex"―the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.
Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.

Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiance. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it," Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful expose of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it. Drawing on findings from a five-year interview study, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton bring us to the campus of "MU," a flagship Midwestern public university, where we follow a group of women drawn into a culture of status seeking and sororities. Mapping different pathways available to MU students, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a "party pathway" anchored in the Greek system and facilitated by the administration. This pathway exerts influence over the academic and social experiences of all students, and while it benefits the affluent and well-connected, Armstrong and Hamilton make clear how it seriously disadvantages the majority. Eye-opening and provocative, Paying for the Party reveals how outcomes can differ so dramatically for those whom universities enroll.

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

本书运用历史比较方法，围绕“国家形成”这一核心概念，深入探讨了英国、法国、美国等国家教育体系的起源及发展过程。全书包括“各国国民教育体系发展的不平衡性、国民教育体系的社会起源、教育与国家形成、欧洲大陆的教育和中央集权制、美国的经验：教育、民族性和地方分权、英国教育和自由国家”六个部分，作者以另类视角运用了马克思主义的国家理论、葛兰西的意识形态和霸权理论阐明了国家形成对于解释现代教育制度起源的重要意义，分析了国家形成与教育之间的关系，指出了教育在国家形成过程中的作用。该书具有较高的理论价值及实践意义。
本书是英国伦敦大学教育学院比教育学家和教育历史学家安迪·格林教授撰写的一部享誉西方教育学术界的教育比较史研究著作，作者在翻译过程中尽管碰到语言上、思想上、学术上的诸多问题，但尽力准确地传达作者在本书中的所思、所想。

Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools.
Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from “first-tier” schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school’s ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials.
Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools’ career service departments. Because graduates’ job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students.
The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school’s rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.

做父母，為何變得這麼難？？
以親職焦慮為鏡，折射出當代臺灣的面貌
人們經常以為教養是個別父母的煩惱。然而，面對不確定的全球化未來、擴大的階級不平等，種種看不見的結構力量與社會界線，正讓當代父母集體感到焦慮與不安。
面對貌似不安全與不確定的未來，當代臺灣父母採取不同的教育與親職策略，試圖保障下一代的安康。弔詭的是，這些保安策略卻經常讓我們感到更不安全。
從拚經濟到拚教養
在臺灣「拚經濟」的時代中成長的父母，如今「拚教養」成為人生重點。 他們渴望擺脫體罰與聯考的陰影，成為與上一代大不相同的父母，同時也希望下一代在全球化的時代裡，更有能力與機會去探索世界。儘管這一代父母擁有比過去更豐富的教養資源，然而，教養這件事卻讓他們益發焦慮，不時懷疑自己是否做太少、做太多、做不好、做不對？
透過教養焦慮，看見當代臺灣
本書以親職焦慮為鏡，映現出臺灣在全球化脈絡中所面對的風險與挑戰，包括相對停滯的本地經濟與薪資、與全球資本主義更緊密的連結與競爭、產業變化的不確定性，而日趨擴大的階級落差正透過教養形塑許多孩子的不平等童年。
臺大社會系特聘教授藍佩嘉，延續她在《跨國灰姑娘》中對於社會不平等的觀察與追索，從城市到鄉村，深入田野訪談近六十個家庭，並到學校教學現場實際觀察，扣緊中產階級與勞工階級的差異，分析臺灣目前幾種主要的教養模式，追問為什麼父母會做出某種選擇，以及這些選擇對家庭與孩子的影響，是理解臺灣當代教養現況重要的田野報告。

本书通过追溯19世纪下半叶到20世纪70年代晚期一百多年来的美国教育发展历史，主要以医学、法律和工程学教育为例，剖析了文凭社会是如何形成的、对社会产生的正面和负面影响，展现了文凭异化的过程，解释了学校教育与社会分层的内在关系，进而完成了对当代资本主义教育制度的反思和批判，最后则提出了化解文凭主义弊端的办法，预测了文凭主义在未来社会中的处境。 作者针砭时弊，揭穿了关于教育的诸多神话，认为建立在教育基础之上的文凭社会是一种不合理的分层机制，建议废除文凭。在当下这个文凭社会的势力越来越强的时代，书中内容有助于我们更好地理解当前面临的诸多教育问题，积极思谋应对之策。

本书介绍批判教育学的起源以及主要理论观点，并通过鲍尔斯（Samuel Bowles）、葛兰西（Antonio Gramsci）、布尔迪厄（Pierre Bourdieu）、伯恩斯坦（Basil Bernstein）及艾波尔（Michael Apple）的概念反思学校教育如何延续国家权力及阶级宰制。全书分成九个主题，通过对经典作品的介绍，作者希望能帮助读者掌握批判教育社会学的精髓，并进一步反思中国教育之中的不平等现象，为中国的教育研究开展不一样的道路。

本书是一部参与式观察研究的范本，作者通过考察一所美国精英高中的日常，研究精英意识和行为是如何一步步在社会互动中形成的。尤其是在现代信息社会知识易得的情况下，这些年轻人在接纳美式勤奋观的同时，不再比拼知识的占有。他们淡化了对“高尚情趣”和“你认识谁”的重视程度，取而代之关心一个人认识世界的方式和在这个世界里扮演的角色。这条成为精英的道路很特别，奇妙地结合了当代文化习俗和古典价值观。像圣保罗和常春藤这样的院校看上去越来越不像一个排外的游艇俱乐部，而是越来越接近我们多样性社会的一个缩影——一个包含细致具体的社会规则的微观世界。