Sociology of Education, Ahead of Print.
As organizations committed to providing upward social mobility and leadership development for academically high-achieving working-class youth of color, transitional school programs (TSPs) prepare students to transition from urban public schools to elite, mostly private high schools. However, TSPs’ dependence on wealthy, White institutions to achieve these goals highlights racialized contradictions in the organizational field. How do TSPs navigate the race and class conflicts between the goals of their program and the racial organizational field of elite schools on which they depend for survival? Drawing on two years of ethnographic research at Ascend, a TSP in a northeastern city, this article demonstrates how because of racialized dependencies, Ascend is compelled to adopt the inequitable practices and assumptions of the racialized organizational field of elite education. Yet over time, the organization begins to resist this organizational order by decoupling their practices from elite schools. Student voice and activism contributed to destabilizing this racialized organizational order through direct action. As Ascend’s loose coupling to the field became untenable during national student protests, the organization sought to recouple to the demands of student protesters by explicitly renegotiating the terms of inclusion for their students in the racialized organizational field. These findings contribute to a limited literature about TSPs, organizations critical to the desegregation of elite schools. The findings also demonstrate how studying an organization in the context of its organizational field can reveal how organizations become racialized in practice. Finally, the case of Ascend shows that decoupling, previously theorized to be a method of evading commitments to equity, may also be a method of subverting racialized dependencies.

Sociology of Education, Ahead of Print.
Researchers have repeatedly found that within modern higher education systems, students from wealthier backgrounds tend to be concentrated in the most advantageous sectors. Dubbed “effectively maintained inequality,” this process allows these groups to maintain a competitive advantage in the labor market by virtue of acquiring more elite credentials. But what happens in nations with flatter university hierarchies, where there is relatively modest vertical differentiation in the brand strength of domestic universities? Through this study, we provide the first national-level analysis of the relationship between parental income and access to more selective, better resourced, and higher ranking Canadian universities. We also assess the extent to which there is an earnings premium associated with attending these more elite institutions. Our results suggest there are few differences in the types of universities attended by Canadians from different economic strata. Moreover, any earnings premium associated with attending a more elite Canadian university disappears once we account for basic demographic and field of study controls. We theorize that Canadian universities’ flatter institutional hierarchy drives wealthy families to seek advantages through enrollment in elite majors (e.g., business, engineering) and other tactics that take place outside the higher education system.