Inequality and moral meaning-making in the admissions consulting profession

Abstract Prior research has described how middle-class and affluent families draw on private supplemental educational resources to help their children maintain an advantage in an unequal educational landscape. As the market for these privatized services continues to grow, we turn our attention to those supplying supplemental educational services. In this paper, we draw on research theorizing moral understandings of work to examine how private admissions consultants perceive popular concerns about inequality, and how these understandings shape how they view their work. We draw on a cross-study comparison of two original datasets: first, 50 interviews with college admissions consultants in New York and California; and second, a two-year ethnography of an educational consulting firm with preschool and kindergarten admissions consultants in New York City. We find that to make sense of their role in the unequal supplemental education marketplace, admissions consultants define their roles in ways that position themselves as qualified, ethical, and properly motivated, and they justify their roles by describing how they are similar to other legitimate professions and how they can help to alleviate or atone for inequality. These moral meaning-making processes are shaped by the distinctive features of the admissions consulting profession.