Listening to the Upper Class talk about College Admissions: Complex Tension between Class Awareness and Meritocratic Ideals

This MA thesis explores the perception of upper-class students navigating elite college admissions in the United States. While existing literature often focuses on structural barriers facing working- and middle-class students, this study directs attention to the full-pay, upper-class students. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews with domestic and international undergraduates at elite universities, the research reveals a complex tension between class awareness and the ideology of earned privilege. This research finds that 1.) participants shared a sense of entitlement to the substantial economic and cultural capital, such as paying full tuition, that facilitated their college admissions. 2.) The upper-class students internalized a narrow class success frame which normalizes elite college acceptance as baseline of maintaining class position. 3.) The respondents also expressed moral discomfort with the capital mobilized, considering their full-pay status a campus ‘taboo’. Lastly, this study presents a discussion of the psychological and social fragility of the upper class under meritocracy, where entitlement coexists with a compulsion to prove deservingness. These insights contribute to the broader sociological understanding of how privilege is reproduced and morally negotiated in higher education.