Thesis Final Full Post-Edit

“Majority Rules, But Not All Are The Majority:”
Social Mobility and Class Values in a Private Los Angeles High School
Celestina DiMauro
An Honors Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of a Degree in Sociology & Anthropology
Lewis & Clark College
May 5, 2015
Advisor: Professor Sepideh Bajracharya

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Abstract
This thesis investigates how a private high school, like the one I worked with and attended called
Campbell Hall, becomes an arena where certain forms of class values and social mobility are
distinguished and cultivated – particularly as a result of the school’s situation as private and elite.
I refer to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, structural and symbolic violence, and
distinction to argue that students at Campbell Hall are identified, and self-identify, according to
two forms of class and social mobility. I argue that the wealthier, upper-class students experience
what I call a “maintenance-oriented habitus,” or outlook on their educations, seeking simply not
to lose status. Alternatively, the relatively middle-class students experience what I call a
“mobility-oriented habitus,” seeking both to maintain their current status and to achieve upward
social mobility into the upper class. Interviews and surveys I conducted among classmates from
Campbell Hall between May 2014 and March 2015 as well as media analysis and photography
all contribute to support these arguments.
Key Terms: high school, wealth, structural and symbolic distinction, capital, habitus,
maintenance-oriented, mobility-oriented

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Dedication
This thesis is dedicated to all those who wish to be students but are not afforded the resources
and opportunities to do so.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Professor Jennifer Hubbert for her help and inspiration to apply for the Student
Academic Affairs Board grant that allowed me to travel to Los Angeles to conduct the initial
ethnographic research for this thesis (thank you to SAAB as well for awarding me that grant) and
for her continued feedback and support throughout the process; to Professor Jennifer de Saxe
who guided me through my preliminary research on education and for her continued support
throughout the process; to Professor Sepideh Bajracharya for her wise and extensive guidance
through the roller coaster of this final and culminating semester – I could not have asked for a
more sincere, encouraging thesis advisor; and to the Sociology & Anthropology and Education
departments for all of the professors and courses that prepared me for this project.
A huge thank you to all of my interlocutors – friends, acquaintances, former teachers, and former
administrators – for they were incredibly responsive and, like any ethnographic research project,
this thesis simply could not have been possible without their participation. Final and never over-
emphasized thanks go to my friends and family for their understanding of Saturday nights at the
library and phone calls cut short. It has been quite the journey.

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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................. II
DEDICATION.............................................................................................................................................III
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...........................................................................................................................III
INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................................5
CHAPTER I................................................................................................................................................17
INSTITUTIONAL CLASSIFICATION: “THE COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY” ...........................................17
PRIVATE PARTS .......................................................................................................................................18
GATED & GUARDED................................................................................................................................21
ADMISSIONS (YOU WISH!)......................................................................................................................23
ALL YOU NEED IS… MONEY....................................................................................................................25
CHAPTER II ..............................................................................................................................................31
INDIVIDUAL CLASSIFICATION: “UNLIMITED AMOUNTS OF MONEY”...........................................31
A SELECTIVITY OF PUNISHMENT.............................................................................................................32
THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-MORES .......................................................................................................38
CHAPTER III.............................................................................................................................................45
TWO EDUCATIONAL HABITUSES: “OUR PREP SCHOOL FUCKED US UP” ...................................45
SO WHAT IS SUCCESS, AFTER ALL?..........................................................................................................46
THE METRICS: GRADES, GPAS, AND COLLEGE ......................................................................................48
CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................................55
REFERENCES ...........................................................................................................................................61
APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................................64

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INTRODUCTION
I, no different than any other student at Campbell Hall, was socialized into
a very particular worldview with aspirations of material accumulation and
superior social status. In junior high I got my first MacBook and started thinking
about what brand new car I wanted in years to come. I had the Verizon Chocolate
phone in lime green before the brand new Voyager came out, which soon became
the Blackberry before returning to the Voyager 2. I was good at this game – the
“game of things” where winning amounts to accumulation of the most stuff. The
game sounds disconcertingly like Hungry Hungry Hippos, and that’s because it is
disconcertingly like Hungry Hungry Hippos. I became a seasoned pro at this real
life version of a game of insatiable consumption. My hopes consisted of indefinite
wealth and materialism and my fears were, well, anything else.
A strange, quasi-horrifying, and embarrassing thing happened to me,
though. Somewhere between the end of junior high and the beginning of high
school, I began to realize that something was gravely different between most of
my friends and me. My friend’s mom traded in her BMW hard top convertible for
a new Bentley. My dad still drove his Chevy Trailblazer. Another friend started
selecting her favorite designer handbags to ask for during the holidays. I was
content with See’s Candies and the latest DVD seasons of Criminal Minds (and
maybe a new phone upgrade). I had become enlightened to my dismal fate. My
fears were now the only thing that had materialized.
I was poor. So it began – my struggle with “poverty.” I could no longer
keep up with the Jones’s.
---
I am now absolutely certain that I am not poor – not even remotely close.
My status in life has been an amalgamation, though, of my economic, social, and
cultural capital. As everyone’s is, presumably. While I was not raised with as
much wealth as my peers were growing up, I was raised with enough social and
cultural capital for me to make up the difference. I was never ostracized for being
part of the upper-middle class rather than the upper-upper class. On some level,
it didn’t matter, as long as I could put together acceptable outfits, talk about the
right topics, and be enough of a socialite to keep up on gossip and news.
This vignette is a splicing of excerpts from a personal essay I wrote for a creative non-
fiction writing course during my junior year here at Lewis & Clark College. Our task was to
explore an event or aspect of our lives through the lens of some historical, academic, or popular
context. My experience growing in up in a private, K-12 school community – Campbell Hall –
since age 5 led me to investigate exactly how it was that wealth and capital instilled the classed

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values in my peers and me that formed our aspirations then, and still continue to form them as a
part of our identities today. For a while, I honestly considered myself to be poor. That said, I did
recognize that there were people outside of the Campbell Hall community that were poorer than
me. Nonetheless, I felt that because I was unable to keep up with the lifestyles and purchases of
my friends, I was living in poverty. Much of my motivation to “do well” in school was driven by
a recognition that I was not an equal to many of my peers. I found myself aspiring to attain the
same class status as they had by getting great grades, admission into a reputable college, and a
well-paying job. In college, I began reflecting on my experience at Campbell Hall. I began to
wonder specifically about the significance of the class-based values, ideals, and aspirations I had
assumed and cultivated during my time at Campbell Hall.
Campbell Hall, though, is just one example of a community that assumes the values of
heightened and concentrated wealth. The classed, communal, and personal experiences that I and
my former peers experienced at this institution of private education might equally apply to other
community-based institutions of concentrated wealth. The research I conducted between May
2014 and March 2015 that forms the foundation of this thesis explores the effects of privatized
communities of concentrated wealth on its members. I ask how members of the elite majority
and the members of the less elite minority relate to the classed values assumed, structured,
cultivated, and embodied by these intensely capital-driven institutions. Students associated with
the elite majority already feel a part of a community with identities that easily align with the
classed values of capital accumulation. Students associated with the lower-, middle-class
minority, such as myself, find themselves striving to accumulate the classed values and materials
of such a class-based and capital-driven institution. I ask how students in the Campbell Hall
community internalize and begin to live those respective class identities and aspirations.

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⌘
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the building of personal and communal
identities relies on certain methods of structural and symbolic processes (Bourdieu 2001). The
effects of structural and symbolic pressures are assumed, internalized, and cultivated in each
individual as a “habitus” of norms and habits (Nash 1990). In an essay titled “The Forms of
Capital” (1986) Bourdieu parses out the terms of economic, social, and cultural capital to explain
how social identities are framed and assumed. He presents economic capital as intersecting with
cultural capital and social capital to comprise the types of material and embodied assets an
individual is able to inherit or acquire.
…capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital,
which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be
institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is
convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be
institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital,
made up on social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain
conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a
title of nobility (Bourdieu 1986:241-258). [emphasis original]
The “symmetrically and inversely structured relationship” between economic capital and
cultural capital1
is critical to Bourdieu’s argument (Bourdieu 1986). For any given class
status, there is a sum of economic, social, and cultural capital that comprises and
determines the appropriateness of that status. A decrease in economic capital might thus
lead individuals to seek newfound cultural and social capital in order to maintain their
original class statuses, or vice versa. Class status, however, requires recognition from the
larger community and peers, a recognition based on observable acts of consumption,
embodied “tastes,” and habitual preferences (Bourdieu 1984).

1
Social capital is directly related to cultural capital and thus also symmetrically and inversely related to
economic capital, as Bourdieu defined social capital in his publication “The Forms of Capital” two years
after Distinction

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Seeking to investigate how senses of self, worth, and community are achieved,
one of my initial research questions was, how are students’ identities and statuses like my
own formed at Campbell Hall? Throughout this thesis, I employ the language and theory
of Pierre Bourdieu to tell the story of this personal and communal socialization of
students at Campbell Hall. I argue that economic, social, and cultural capital conditions
influence institutional (school) and individual (student, faculty, staff, and administration)
values, interactions, and identities through material structural and symbolic means of
distinction. Structural and symbolic distinctions operate at the institutional and individual
level, respectively, to form students’ senses of class identity and status. In Fresh Fruit,
Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Seth Holmes reasons that:
Structural violence is manifested as social inequalities and hierarchies, often
along social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Symbolic violence, as
defined by Bourdieu, is the internalization and legitimation of hierarchy,
‘exercised through cognition, misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, with the
unwitting consent of the dominated’ (Holmes 2013:89) citing (Bourdieu 2001).
In this thesis, I draw on notions of structural and symbolic pressures and relations to describe the
ways that students become distinguished from each other and between themselves. Structural
distinction occurs at the institutional level and is the topic of chapter one in this thesis, while the
complementary symbolic distinction that occurs at the individual level is the topic of chapter
two. I argue that these distinctions serve to form students’ respective assumptions about class
values, social positionality, and mobility (Bourdieu 1984).
In trying to further investigate the way these values are embedded at the level of self,
worth, and identification, I refer specifically to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Roy Nash aptly
defines habitus as:
“a generative schema in which social structures come, through the process of
socialization, to be embodied as schemes of perception that enable a practical

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mastery of the world, a knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’ within fields of
practice, in such a way that individuals necessarily (or almost necessarily)
reproduce the underlying structures” (Nash 2003:47).
Nash’s explanation of habitus as “social structures” that are “embodied” “through the process of
socialization” is exemplified by student experiences at Campbell Hall. The structural coordinates
and symbolic pressures that are experienced in the Campbell Hall community distinguish
students from each other and between themselves. Students embody these distinctions through “a
generative schema” that leads to them reproduce the forms of their own difference. This
embodiment of structural and symbolic distinction is what Bourdieu refers to as habitus.
At Campbell Hall, I argue that class values relate to two prevailing forms of habitus. One
habitus is experienced and embodied by the upper-class students; the other is experienced and
embodied by those who are considered and consider themselves relatively middle-class. I refer to
what upper-class students experience as a maintenance-oriented habitus, and what relatively
middle-class students experience as a mobility-oriented habitus. For upper-class students,
“maintenance-oriented habitus” is concerned with maintaining the status quo and not losing the
high status that they already have as a result of their inherited economic, social, and cultural
capital. For relatively middle-class students, however, “mobility-oriented habitus” is concerned
with acquiring economic, social, and cultural capital that will allow them entry into the upper-
class schema. Upper-class students and relatively middle-class students thus experience their
education and the classed values of the community in different ways that are contingent upon
their respective relationships to the structurally and symbolically assumed class-based ideals of
Campbell Hall.
⌘

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Sherry Ortner’s ethnography New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of
’58 has been a cornerstone guide to my research both in terms of methodology and theory
(Ortner 2003). Ortner’s subjects were, similar to mine, her former high school classmates. Like
me, she returned to her high school to ask how class influenced their time in high school as well
as their time following high school. Although Ortner’s classmates were not of the unusual
economic makeup as mine are, many of the middle-class students at Campbell Hall share similar
features as Ortner’s predominantly working- and middle-class interlocutors – specifically their
drive for upward mobility (Ortner 2003). I thus refer to students that are less wealthy than the
upper-class majority as relatively middle-class to reflect their moderate wealth as well as their
position in a community of extreme wealth. It is the drive that students of the relatively middle
class express toward upward social mobility that identifies their mobility-oriented habitus. This
drive stems from a particular distribution of capital that renders them equipped with less
economic capital than their upper-class counterparts, but with enough access to cultural and
social assets to be able to compensate for this lack. Their habitus becomes mobility-oriented.
Students of the upper class are conversely more concerned with remaining a part of the upper
class that they are already included in – an embodied experience that I discuss in chapter three as
a form of maintenance-oriented habitus.
In addition to Ortner, I refer to Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids
Get Working Class Jobs as both a comparative ethnographic example and a theoretical
grounding for my argument. The working-class high school students Willis writes about embody
what he calls a “counter-school culture,” of which “the most basic, obvious, and explicit
dimension… is entrenched general and personalized opposition to ‘authority’” (Willis 1981:11).
Willis suggests that his interlocutors’ class status as working-class high school students frames

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their counter-school perspective. He argues that when students realize that school is no longer of
value to them because their working class status leaves them no option but to remain in the
working class, they develop a counter-school culture that devalues the school itself. Along the
opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum, I argue that upper-class students ironically create a
counter-school culture for similar reasons as Willis’ working-class students: they too believe that
school is of little to no value to them and their ambitions. At Campbell Hall the class of students
who express counter-school culture attitudes tends to be the wealthiest, upper-class whose
members realize that school is effectively of little value to them because of their other existing,
largely economic assets. Willis’s argument about counter-school culture applies to elite upper-
class students at schools like Campbell Hall for whom education is not a necessity, but merely
identified as a personal preference, an option, or a formality. Students of the relatively middle
class on the other hand tend to be more conservative and rule abiding, because they are
conscious of how school promises them upward social mobility into an upper-class habitus. This
is why relatively middle-class students typically cannot afford to participate in counter-school
culture.
⌘
The first chapter of this thesis investigates the structural distinction of Campbell Hall as
an elite, upper-class private school in terms of architectural access, bureaucratic procedure, and
the privatized costs included in the process of becoming a part of the Campbell Hall community.
The chapter analyzes the interrelated structural distinction of the members of the community as
generally elite and as reflecting back onto the institution in a mutually distinctive relationship. I
argue that the privatized nature of Campbell Hall, along with its structural dimensions of

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architectural access, bureaucratic procedure, and explicit and latent costs, structurally distinguish
both the institution and its community members as elite.
The second chapter focuses on how such structural distinctions bare on the symbolic
distinction of students at Campbell Hall in terms of their interactions with campus authority
figures, as well as their interactions with student peers. I refer to the system of punishment for
infractions at Campbell Hall to illustrate the symbolic distinction between students and the
school authorities. To illustrate the symbolic distinction that occurs between students, my
interlocutors recounted events and sites where students were distinguished by their peers based
on their appearances and material belongings. I argue that through these two means of symbolic
distinction, between authority figures and students and between students themselves, Campbell
Hall students identify as members of the upper class or the relatively middle class.
The third and culminating chapter of this thesis builds from the first two chapters to
analyze the way structural and symbolic forms of class distinction are embodied in how these
two “classes” of students distinguish themselves. I argue that these two “habituses” –
maintenance-oriented and mobility-oriented – are experienced by those marked and self-marked
as either upper-class or relatively middle-class students. For upper-class students who may
already possess much capital – economic capital especially – the acquisition of capital is not of
significant concern. For the relatively middle class students, however, the accumulation and
demonstration of capital becomes a primary influence in their experience of the institution,
themselves, and their aspirations. In the conclusion, I reference and contextualize the words of a
former Campbell Hall teacher to illustrate the detrimental effects of capital-focused ideals and
habitus in an educational setting. Ultimately, this research questions the role that secondary

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education, and particularly elite private education, plays in generating and assuming the ethos of
class-specific values and aspirations.

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METHODOLOGY
In May 2014 I returned to Los Angeles with the aim of interviewing current and former
members of the Campbell Hall community about their experiences and relationships to both
community members and the institution itself. At this point, I had not yet honed my investigation
of the specific values instilled at Campbell Hall, though many of my interviews ended up
emphasizing those values anyway.
I conducted my research over the past year using five main methodologies: participant-
observation, semi-structured interviews, structured interviews in the form of surveys,
photography, and media/artifact analysis. As a native ethnographer, my participation-observation
began well before the timeline of this project. I draw on experiences that transpired before this
research project by incorporating personal memory as an aspect of past participant-observation.
Because the topic of this research is a site and institution that I took part in for many years, I
have maintained knowledge and information about the student experience from both my
participation in and observations of the community. It would be both impossible and naïve for
me as an ethnographer to attempt to remove myself from this research in order to preserve a false
sense of objectivity. Instead, by acknowledging the critically reflexive subjective perspective of
the ethnographer, and more specifically the native ethnographer, I use my own experiences and
situation in the Campbell Hall context as a point of insight at different points throughout the
thesis.
My main guidance and inspiration for this reflexive methodology is Sherry Ortner’s New
Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Ortner 2003). Ortner had a nearly
identical native research relationship with many of her interlocutors, many of whom were, like
mine, former classmates. In the ethnography, she acknowledges her positionality and engages

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her subjective relationship to the topic and ethnographic context. Throughout this thesis I follow
a similar methodological ethos (Ortner 2003).
My second methodology, semi-structured interviews, generated a large portion of the
ethnographic material that came directly from my interlocutors for this project. I kept my pool of
participants broad at the start of my research by interviewing a range of former students, current
and former faculty, and current and former administrators. I intentionally conducted all semi-
structured interviews off-campus because I did not want my interlocutors to feel as if they had to
censor or embellish their thoughts because of the possibility that members of the Campbell Hall
community might overhear them. Most interviews thus occurred at coffee shops and restaurants
or the homes of former Campbell Hall students. In addition to being sites for interviews, the
homes of former Campbell Hall students were some of the off-campus sites where I conducted
participant-observation during my time as a student at Campbell Hall.
As a native ethnographer, it became vital to the integrity of my research to establish clear
divisions between my research relationships and my personal relationships. Keeping a constant
and vigilant awareness to that nuance, I emphasized transitional moments like the start of
interview conversations, turning on the recording device after establishing ethical research
practices and receiving consent to continue. I reminded interviewees that identifying names and
details would be obscured and subject to their final discretion. Emphasizing those transitions
appeared to ease my interviewees into feeling confident about the distinctions in my roles as
researcher and as a friend. Drawing from these semi-structured interviews and native participant-
observation, I will be incorporating portraits of several core participants who speak at length or
precision about their Campbell Hall experience throughout the chapters of this thesis.

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The third methodology I used was structured interviewing in the form of an electronic
survey. This method, like the semi-structured interviews, garnered ethnographic data directly
from my interlocutors. After returning to Portland and analyzing my interviews, I realized I
needed to know more about the aspirations and goals of my student interlocutors during their
time at Campbell Hall. As much as faculty and administrator comments were compelling, the
scope of this project did not permit me to explore all three perspectives with as much depth as I
wanted. Furthermore, the compressed timeline of this thesis meant that I would be unable to go
back and individually re-interview my interlocutors. As a recourse, I sent out a survey to the
individuals I had already interviewed and to a few new participants to get targeted information
about students’ goals and aspirations. The results of this survey-styled structured interviewing
appear predominantly in chapters two and three.
The fourth methodology involved photography. I used photographs toward the end of my
research process when I decided that illustrating the physical space and architecture of the
campus would be integral to portraying the school’s exclusive, distinguished identity. In order to
compensate for my distance from the Campbell Hall site itself, I was able to solicit the help of
two friends still residing in Los Angeles to take photos of the campus.
The fifth and final methodology included in this thesis is media source analysis accessed
via the internet. I refer to the websites of both Campbell Hall and North Hollywood High School
to provide statistical contrasts in public and private education within the same locale. Both the
photography and media analyses appear in chapter one to illustrate Campbell Hall’s institutional
role in the student experience. The diversity and triangulation of my methodologies has afforded
me the breadth and depth of data necessary to make the arguments that follow.

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CHAPTER I
INSTITUTIONAL CLASSIFICATION: “The Community of Inquiry”
I really didn’t get on with the administration while I went to Campbell Hall. I felt that
throughout my time at Campbell Hall, the school stopped caring about the experience and
education of their students and really only cared about the reputation they could build and
the money they could make.
– Survey completed by Alice, February 12, 2015
Structural violence typically refers to how individuals experience violence or oppression
as a result of structural or systemic forces rather than at the hands of individual actions (Bourdieu
2001). In this chapter, I argue for an adaptation of this concept in which economic, social, and
cultural capital intersect to create the structural and symbolic terms that distinguish the
institution at the same moment it distinguishes its members. The creation of the community is
thus inherently exclusionary and predicated on the distinction of an “in-group” as separate from
an “out-group” (van Gennep 1960). The process of being accepted into a community can be
understood as a rite of passage in which individuals transition from being a foreigner of the “out-
group” to being a community member of the “in-group” (van Gennep 1960). In the context of
Campbell Hall, this ritual might be more accurately described as a rite of class distinction as
Vassos Argyrou defines in his book Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The
Wedding as Symbolic Struggle (Argyrou 1996). Argyrou analyzes the meaning of various types
of weddings on the Greek island of Cyprus, a native ethnographer and Greek Cypriot himself, to
understand typically Western, extravagant weddings as rites of class distinction for the couple
into the upper class. I, also a native ethnographer, apply this idea of rites of class distinction to
Campbell Hall as an institution and the creation of its community.
In this chapter I describe how Campbell Hall structurally situates itself as a private
institution through certain of rites of class distinction – architectural access, bureaucratic

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procedure, and privatized costs. These rituals establish Campbell Hall as a classed, elite
institution, creating the very exclusive “community of inquiry” (Campbell Hall d).
Private Parts

Campbell Hall sits on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, one of the most prominent boulevards
of the city, between the underpass of the major 101 Freeway and Moorpark Street. The other side
of the boulevard hosts a residential zone, a neighborhood called Studio City, with apartment
buildings and relatively modest homes for a city like Los Angeles. The residents of Studio City,
Campbell Hall’s neighbors, have both appreciated and resented Campbell Hall’s growth.
Beginning in 2010 the school went under the forklift and had a facelift that transformed a large
part of campus by demolishing an old building and replacing it with a brand new one,
necessitating many days of construction and obstruction of the busy boulevard. This facelift was
planned and executed entirely around the erection of this new asset to the institution: the Arts &
Education Center. The Center is a state of the art central hub of buildings, walk bridges, and
throughways, containing many of the secondary school’s classrooms and much of its new
technology.
“Arts & Education Center” (Campbell Hall a)
Both entrances to the campus face the boulevard, and both are commanded by security
officers in one-room booths to ensure the exclusivity and security of campus. The campus also
features a full turf football field which doubles as a soccer field, a second soccer field, two

19
baseball fields, underground parking, fully-equipped science labs, a three-story library building,
two gymnasiums, dance studios, a digital production studio, a complete nurse’s office, and the
list continues. Its history begins in 1944 with the initial purchase of land and 74 total students
enrolled for classes Kindergarten-6th
grade (Campbell Hall f). Since then, nine more acres of
land have been added to the compound and in the ‘10-‘11 school year Campbell Hall had a total
of 1,088 students enrolled (Campbell Hall a). January 2010 marked the public launch of the
Capital Campaign for the Arts & Education Center (Campbell Hall a). On August 30, 2012 the
Arts & Education Center was dedicated and officially open for use (Campbell Hall a). Today,
one can walk the outdoor halls of the Center and view plaques of varying designation bestowing
the names of all the donors that contributed to the funding of the building by tier of monetary
donation.
Display on an exterior wall of the Arts & Education Center (Darcy 2015, March 10)

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Zoomed in selection of above photo to show donor group titles (Darcy 2015, March 10)
As far as the makeup of the community, while Campbell Hall proudly touts that 24% of
the student body receives some sort of tuition assistance, that means 76% of their students do not
receive aid for the $32,690 (plus an approximately $2,000 in further fees dependent on grade
level) annual secondary school tuition (Campbell Hall e; Campbell Hall g). Furthermore,
someone who might qualify for the minimum tier of tuition assistance, $1,000, based on such a
large sum of tuition costs may not actually qualify for free or reduced-price lunch because if the
student attended a public school the portion of tuition that was paid to Campbell Hall would still
remain available for use (Campbell Hall e). To keep all raw data contextualized and to maintain
validity in this research, the local public high school, North Hollywood High School (NHHS),
can serve as a benchmark for the local, public community. At NHHS, 74% of students participate
in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program (North Hollywood High School ). Thus, only
26% of students do not receive free and reduced-price lunch. At Campbell Hall, 76% of students

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pay full $30,000+ tuition – annually. While Campbell Hall’s metrics for determining tuition
assistance are unlikely to be identical to the metrics for determining free and reduced-price lunch
eligibility, the disparity would likely only become more drastic with the proper metrics for
comparison, not less, given that the threshold for eligibility in the federal lunch assistance
program must be far lower than that to receive $1,000 or more tuition assistance at Campbell
Hall.
Gated & Guarded
One of the most tangible places to begin analyzing the creation of Campbell Hall’s elite
community is the physical, architectural site itself. As a private institution, educational or
otherwise, Campbell Hall’s campus is private property and the institution is legally entitled to
restrict access to the physical space of the school. Campbell Hall has two driveway entries to the
campus. One is traditional and is used more for guests and appearances than quotidian access.
First Gate, closed on a weekend
(Clay 2015, March 26)
Guardhouse on the left-hand side
after entrance through the first
gate
(Clay 2015, March 26)
It has a classic iron gate and is further away from the main parking areas and than second
driveway. This second driveway is far more heavily trafficked, used by faculty, staff, students,
and families of Campbell Hall. It, too, is gated, but leads into both the new parking structure
underneath the Arts & Education Center and to additional outdoor parking.

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Second, newer gate and guardhouse (Clay 2015, March 26)
Both entrances are monitored by guardhouses run by the campus security. The rite of spatial
passage, if you will, into the physical campus and community requires obtaining a parking
pass/decal for the current school year, each with a unique identification number linked to a
particular community member. Without the decal, cars are stopped and questioned as to their
presence on campus. During the school day, it is very challenging to get on campus without a
decal; if drivers can convince the security guard that they need to be on campus, the security
guards will write temporary passes. The license plate number, driver’s license number, date,
time, and reason for entry may be placed on the vehicles’ dashboard. Often times the security
guards will contact teachers or administrators of students who drivers claim to be visiting or
picking up. Some strong exceptions to this norm are sports events when, for logistical reasons,
the security is lax so as to allow supporters of other teams to attend the event. The only way to
obtain a decal for access to campus during standard school hours, though, is to be accepted as a
student. In other words, the rite of spatial passage is only one aspect of the larger rite of class
distinction for becoming part of the Campbell Hall community.

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Admissions (You Wish!)
The admissions process at Campbell Hall is extremely competitive: on average, private
schools in Los Angeles like Campbell Hall are now receiving up to 10 applications per opening,
including for admission into Kindergarten (Davidow 2008). The bureaucratic application process
is exhaustive. For kindergarten applicants, families must submit an online application, a $135
non-refundable application fee, a preschool teacher evaluation form, a preschool administrator
evaluation form, and a financial aid application if applicable. Once the application is submitted,
applicant interviews and evaluations are scheduled. Parents are interviewed and the prospective
students (preschoolers) are taken for a short tour and readiness assessment. Additionally, these
Kindergarten applicants attend a one hour “mini-day” where they will be observed “socializing
with other students, following directions, listening and responding to a story and song, and
participating in choice play time” (Campbell Hall b:2). For applicants for grades 1-4, the
interviews include both child and parent(s), students are required to take an admission test,
another recommendation form is typically required, and transcripts/report cards are added to the
list of required application materials. To apply for admission for grades 5-12, the admission test
is a standardized exam called the Independent School Entrance Examination (ISEE) and all
applicants are required to submit scores (Campbell Hall b:2; erblearn.org 2014).
Especially for kindergarten applications where testing and scores are not applicable, two
of the major components of the application are the teacher/administrator recommendations and
the interviews/observations with applying students and families. In the case of the
recommendations, prospective students and families must have the social capital of being
familiar with those preschools, teachers, and administrators with the most clout as recommenders
in Campbell Hall’s eyes. In the case of interviews and observations for the preschool students,

24
both parents and students must have cultural capital in order to navigate the questions and
ambiguous criteria put forth by Campbell Hall’s admissions team (Bourdieu 1986:241-258).
What is and is not acceptable in the sandbox, or what aspirations are and are not acceptable for
parents to have for their children, are norms and expectations understood only by those with the
cultural capital to do so.
Furthermore, the explicit and implicit costs of the application process provide a burden of
economic capital. The application itself explicitly entails a $135 non-refundable fee. Implicitly,
though, parent(s) must participate in interviews with their respective student(s); while Saturday
interview slots are available, they are booked on a first-come, first-served basis. Thus, if a family
were to apply after the Saturdays were already scheduled full of interviews, the parent(s) would
have to find time off of work (assuming they work during the 5-day workweek) in order to
accommodate the interview requirement of the application. A second implicit burden of
economic capital is the expectation of preschool enrollment. Interestingly, there is no written
stipulation of eligibility for prospective Kindergarten students to have attended preschool.
However, it is written in the admission guide that the “Preschool Evaluation” form and
“Administrator Recommendation” form are both required for the Kindergarten application.
While preschool may be more normative today than ever before, it is still an economic burden as
it currently is not a standard offering of the public school system.
The criteria for admission at Campbell Hall, and many private institutions alike, are far
more than paperwork and questionnaires: in fact, they are more aptly described as social,
cultural, and economic capital (Bourdieu 1986:241-258). The attainment of physical access to
Campbell Hall’s campus and the granting of coveted admission into the student body are two
components of the rite of class distinction. They define the exclusionary creation of Campbell

25
Hall’s community through architectural access and bureaucratic procedure, less obvious than the
last step of this ritual – privatized costs. This final step to the ritual requires the payment of what
can be amounted to “membership fees” or “annual dues” to truly be a part of the Campbell Hall
club and community: tuition and fees.
All you need is… money.
The economic burden of being a part of the Campbell Hall club is a function of the
school’s intertwined statuses as both a privatized and an elite educational institution: for, in the
public school system, both elementary and secondary school are free of charge and do not
necessarily demand the same upper-class lifestyle as Campbell Hall does. As previously
introduced, the 2014-2015 tuition for elementary school (K-6) and secondary school (7-12) was
$27,690 and $32,690, respectively. However, in addition to the base tuition, “Other Fees” are
also imposed including, but not limited to, the Tuition Guarantee Plan, $225, the Student Body
Fee, $65 for grades 7-12, and Experiential Education, ranging from $350 to $1,400 depending on
grade level.
While Campbell Hall is not naïve to the burden of these costs and offers payment plans
and financial aid, the realities of these options are limited and can actually impose further
economic burden in a form similar to loan interest. The three available payment plans offer 1) a
single payment of full tuition, 2) tuition divided into two payments2
, or 3) ten monthly payments
with an 8% service charge for families who have not been awarded a partial financial aid grant.
This service charge can be understood in a similar way as loan interest in which individuals are
reaping the benefits of funds or a service before having paid for it. In other words, families who
select the third payment plan are not only indebted to the school, but must pay 8% “interest” on

2
No information is provided as to the timing of the two payments

26
that “loan.” Thus, if a family did not receive a financial aid grant (only 1 in 4 do), then in order
to enroll in a payment plan, they may be charged up to an additional $2,792 (calculated from
total costs of tuition and fees for grade 11) (Campbell Hall e; Campbell Hall g).
For those families that are seeking financial aid grants, another fee, approximately $40, is
imposed in order to submit the School and Student Services (SSS) financial aid application
(Campbell Hall c:1). Families must possess the cultural capital to fill out the Parents’ Financial
Statement, submit 2012 and 2013 taxes (or whichever years are contemporarily applicable), and
write an explanatory letter justifying or explaining the need for financial aid (Campbell Hall c:1;
Bourdieu 1986:241-258). Ultimately, only 24% of students at Campbell Hall receive any degree
of tuition assistance ranging from $1,000 to full tuition grants (Campbell Hall e). Campbell Hall
does not release data regarding the distribution of funds among that 24% of students, like how
many receive $5,000 or less, for example. It is possible that more than half of those students
receive the minimum grant of $1,000, or it may be possible that most students receive $10,000 or
more. Thus, it is impossible to ascertain the actual impact or reach of Campbell Hall’s financial
aid offerings simply from the information that 24% of students receive aid of at least $1,000.
In order to even be considered for financial aid, a student and his/her family must
therefore have demonstrated enough cultural and social capital to compensate for and justify the
lack of economic capital that requires financial aid. This is an example of the “symmetrically and
inversely structured relationship” between economic capital and cultural capital3
(Bourdieu
1984:613). One’s class status is bound by one’s capital, which is comprised of economic, social,
and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986:241-258). To maintain a given status, upper-class for
example, one must possess a high amount of capital. Those students or families who may not

3
As previously footnoted in the introduction, social capital is directly related to cultural capital and thus
also symmetrically and inversely related to economic capital

27
officially have the economic capital to be members of the Campbell Hall club may, however,
accumulate sufficient social and cultural capital to make up the difference and gain admission to
the school. It is this possibility that contributes to the moderate range of diversity that exists at
Campbell Hall: while the vast majority of students are very wealthy (76% pay full tuition), at
least 24% of students accept some financial aid; even within those families who do not receive
financial aid, there are varying degrees of wealth.
While there is discrepancy among students and families at Campbell Hall, overall the
population is wealthy and belongs to the upper class. In this chapter I have argued Campbell
Hall’s barriers to entry to its community – physical and guarded landscape, highly competitive
and intensive admissions process, and all-encompassing costs – as rites of class distinction. In an
entirely different context, Vassos Argyrou used the term “rites of distinction” in his book
Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle to describe
what would otherwise be recognized as a rite of passage: weddings (Karakasidou 1998:68-69).
He analyzes Cypriot weddings with regard to the class and sub-culture of the participants and
concludes that the style and form of weddings actually serve to distinguish the bride and groom
in particular ways, classed and otherwise(Cassia 1998:156-157). While the process of gaining
access to Campbell Hall does not have such a succinct term as a “wedding,” this thesis argues
that that process would also typically be referred to as a rite of passage, but can also be
understood as a rite of class distinction.
Though the official costs of a Campbell Hall education can be obstacles in the rite of
passage and class distinction of becoming a member of this exclusive community, there are yet
more economic experiences to being a Campbell Hall student. These latent costs are incurred

28
throughout the duration of one’s membership in the community, reflect the institution’s
reputation, and influence students’ and families’ decisions to remain at the school.
Megan Wells, who identified herself as a member of the relatively middle-class
community at Campbell Hall, came to the school in 10th
grade. In discussing the prevalence and
pressures of wealth in the student experience, Megan explained the ubiquity of economic
expenses for students:
MW: It’s not like we could even avoid it because, if you go to like the pre-proms, the pre-
proms are catered where you have to spend like, thousands of dollars on like, an hour
long event for the parents and kids to take photos and like, even the party buses are so
expensive…. All the school-sponsored events are so expensive and you have to buy a
dress and that’s like also expensive. And, um, like joining the volleyball team you have to
like pay for, um, like athletic hear and all that stuff.
CD: Really?
MW: You have to pay, like they’ll do like a spirit pack or whatever where you have to
have like sweatpants and sweatshirts, and like, all, everyone has like a matching warm-up
shirt…. I mean, it’s all over. And it’s not something that’s hiding at Campbell Hall.
For proms, and other dances like Winter Formal, Megan described the latent costs incurred
simply to be involved in such events. “Pre-proms” are the events that begin a few hours before
the dance at the home of one friend in a particular friend group. Often these events are hosted at
the largest and most picturesque homes of anyone in the friend group because a stunning
background to the photos is a requisite to the entire “pre-”event. After getting dressed in brand
new dresses for the dance, the females do their hair and makeup, or even often take turns getting
their hair and makeup done by house-call stylists. Then, after the catered food is set up, the rest
of the students who may not have gotten dressed at the house of the pre-prom but are invited to
the photo-event begin to arrive with their parents, cameras in tow. Students and parents nosh on
hors d’oeuvres and drinks while they mingle and start to congregate around the best location for
photos, often a view of the city, a terrace in front of a garden or a pool, or a spiraling staircase in
the foyer of the home. After photos have been taken of students – individual, date pairs, and

29
group – the students file into the party bus or limousine that awaits them to attend the dance that
they, or their dates, have purchased tickets for.
Invitation to a pre-prom almost always comes with a price tag, one’s “share” of the event:
for example, $40 for hair and makeup stylists, $30 for food and drinks, $60 for the party bus to
get to and from the event – $130 for the pre-prom. While the hair and makeup costs affect
females more than males, males are often expected to buy the event tickets for female dates,
often around $50 each. While females have some ability to navigate the price of their respective
outfits, the hunt for the perfect dress is often part of the event itself beginning weeks before the
dance. The norm for a dress purchase is likely around $200. With leeway for new shoes, often a
necessity, an average estimate for the costs of one school event might be $3004
.
It must be noted that not all students participate in these school-sponsored events at all,
and some that do might not participate in the extravagant pre-proms even if they attend the
dance. Some students opt not to go to the dances after freshman year to save money. Others do
their own hair and makeup and are supported by a small group of friends to intentionally buy
frugally for the event. However, as Megan notes, the norm is for expensive preparation, clothing,
cuisine, and transportation. In her words, “it’s not something that’s hiding at Campbell Hall.”
This vignette of one aspect of the Campbell Hall community serves to explain how even
after admission has been garnered, tuition and fees are paid, and students are afforded access to
the campus, the institution still reinforces its capital-intensive lifestyle in the intimate decisions
its members make in order to belong. As Alice introduced this chapter explaining, this process is
one of structural distinction concerned with reputation and class. Alice, like many of my
interlocutors, was in my class at Campbell Hall and participated in my research by taking a

4
There are discrepancies between the expectations of males and females for these formal events, but
unfortunately the scope of this thesis does not afford the opportunity to explore those gendered aspects of
the cost of being a member of the Campbell Hall community

30
survey about her Campbell Hall experience. She identified the relationship of students to the
Campbell Hall institution as one of reputation: “the school stopped caring about the experience
and education of their students and really only cared about the reputation they could build and
the money they could make.” The idea of “reputation” can be understood as akin to that of
“distinction” seeing as they both consider the public acknowledgment of status. As a private
institution born to attract capital, structural distinction of the Campbell Hall institution itself
unfolds into the symbolic lives and experiences of students themselves.

31
CHAPTER II
INDIVIDUAL CLASSIFICATION: “Unlimited amounts of money”
In the first chapter, I explained how structural distinction and rites of class distinction
condition the terms of entry and belonging at Campbell Hall. Through its privatized
architectural, bureaucratic, and costly rites of distinction, Campbell Hall creates a community of
members that ascribe to its elite, capital-based class values. In turn, this community’s status as
elite reflects on the identity and reputation of the school as exclusive. In this chapter, I consider
how within the generally elite community, there are in fact two differently distinguished groups
of students. Many students attain their elite status and entry into the community by compensating
for a lack of economic capital by cultivating certain types of social and cultural capital. I argue
that there are in fact differences that symbolically distinguish two major class statuses: an upper-
class status and a relatively middle-class status (Bourdieu 1984:613).
I consider how distinctions occur in two types of interpersonal relationships. The first is
the relationship between students and authorities on campus, and the second is the relationship
between students and each other. In the former, teachers and administrators distinguish students
by using and maintaining their claims to authority and discipline. At Campbell Hall and through
my research, this manifests most obviously in the decisions made by the school’s Academic
Honor Board and the administrators who control it. In the latter, students are distinguished
among their own peers by the symbolic standards of upper class consumption. I argue that these
means of symbolic distinction strengthen the class status with which these students are identified,
and with which they begin to self-identify.

32
A Selectivity of Punishment
“All [students] are equal, but some [students] are more equal than others.”5
MS: I was a part of the Academic Honor Board, um, which, should I explain what it is?
CD: Yea, sure.
MS: Um, which was, uh, a board, a student, well not really student-run, a student- co-run
with teachers and adults, board that uh, I guess deliberated on like, like, academic
infractions in the student body. Which excluded, um anything that was over-tutored.
CD: Hm.
MS: So anything that involved parents’ money. We didn’t deal with any of that. And we
fought to try to deal with it, but we, we didn’t get anywhere.
The above excerpt is spliced from a much longer transcript of my interview with
Meredith Sherwood, a former Campbell Hall student, as she begins to discuss the implications of
economic capital in the discipline and distinction of students by authority figures on campus.
Meredith came to Campbell Hall in primary school, a few years after kindergarten, and remained
through graduation. One of the first questions I asked in my former student interviews was
whether or not the interlocutor had received financial aid at Campbell Hall: Meredith never had.
She did however have a very particular experience of the community that afforded her special
insight into the structures and norms of disciplinary action at Campbell Hall: she sat on the
Academic Honor Board (AHB) as a representative of her class each of the four years of high
school. Since she was a student herself, her position as a peer authority gave her unique insight
into the way that teachers and administrators did and did not discipline students for various types
of academic infractions.
Right away at the start of our interview Meredith highlighted a very poignant aspect of
the role and responsibilities of the AHB. Explaining that the AHB heard cases of academic
infractions, she highlighted their jurisdiction by saying they “excluded, um, anything that was
over-tutored. So anything that involved parents’ money. We didn’t deal with any of that. And we

5
Orwell, George
1990 Animal Farm. San Diego: San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

33
fought to try to deal with it, but we, we didn’t get anywhere.” Some students on the Academic
Honor Board realized that there was something unequal about the types of infractions they
disciplined: they were not able to hear cases of infractions like over-tutoring that are, at least in
large part, a result of financial means. While the AHB is a confidential site of discipline and only
the student in question and the members of the board hear the cases, they operate under bylaws
that are available to all students. Anyone in the student body could have known that the AHB
was excluded from hearing cases of over-tutoring. However, many readers may point out that
high school students aged 14-18 might not seek out the AHB bylaws in their free time on
Saturday nights. Nonetheless, high school students are a part of the Campbell Hall community
that has a certain set of norms and a disciplinary structure that is enforced and reinforced
everyday. Just as other norms and structures are socialized, so was the knowledge of the
jurisdiction of the AHB and the lack of transparency behind financially-backed academic
infractions like over-tutoring.
The students at Campbell Hall, whether directly relating to the jurisdiction of the AHB or
experiencing the disciplinary system themselves and with their friends, were distinguished by
selective disciplinary standards. As Meredith was quick to point out, the AHB did not oversee
any cases that were directly influenced by the wealth of a family like over-tutoring since tutors
are a luxury of the wealthy.
MS: The over-tutoring thing was so bad. That was the worst part of it, was that we
couldn’t get any kids who were over-tutored, like teachers complained about that all the
time, that they’d get like an essay from a kid and like, the tutor did their homework, and
you knew the tutor did their homework, but the kid was like, “No, like I did it on my
own.” And they don’t know half the words that are in their essay, you know. So it’s like,
they, they just don’t know what their essay was about.
CD: Mhm
MS: Like that kind of stuff. And, the teachers couldn’t do anything about that.
CD: Wow.
MS: We, and we couldn’t get it. We could never get those cases. They made like a board
of administrators to deal with those cases.

34
CD: Huh.
MS: So that would go straight to the administration.
CD: That’s interesting.
MS: Any case that had to do with over-tutoring.
CD: Which is directly,
MS: Yea
CD: a result of financial,
MS: Yea
CD: means.
MS: Yea, would always go straight to the administration.
CD: Hm.
MS: It would completely bypass us.
Meredith explains that cases of over-tutoring were in fact overseen, but not by the AHB.
Instead, a board of administrators was created to address the infractions, effectively eliminating
the transparency of disciplinary proceedings of academic infractions having to do with “money,”
like over-tutoring. Thus, an entire category of academic infraction available to upper-class
families who could afford tutors was not enforced: or, it may be more accurate to say that there
was no degree of transparency or proof that it was enforced. The infractions that resulted in
student disciplinary action were infractions that relatively middle-class students were susceptible
to committing. This processed allowedeconomic capital and class shape the student experience
of discipline (Bourdieu 1984:613). Meredith had some fascinating insights into the experiences
of both upper-class students and relatively middle-class students, though she did not use those
labels in her speech.
MS: Um, but, there were, there were kids kind of like, I don’t remember if Jake Mason
ever came in front of us, but those kinds of kids often did come in front of us that were
like, “Yea, whatever, like I really don’t care…”
CD: *laughs*
MS: *laughs* Yea they were like, “Yea, like, I didn’t do that…” Or, the really pompous
kids would say like, “Yea. Like yea. You can’t prove that I did it.” And we were like,
“yea, yea we can.”
MS: And then all the kids who kind of fucked up, who were like, you know, not really
rich kids, like those kids would like come in front of us and cryyy, and be like, “Are we
gonna get expelled?”
CD: Awww

35
MS: And we’d be like, “No, like you’re just gonna have to write an essay.” Like, it’s fine.
It’s not even, you’re just gonna have to answer like five questions, and you’ll be done.
*laughs*
An interesting paradox emerges when considering that Meredith identified that the cases
the AHB heard generally concerned two different types of people. She acknowledges the first
type of people as usually “not really rich kids.” These students would be genuinely remorseful
and worried about the consequences that could be imposed on them: “those kids would come in
front of us and cry and be like, ‘Are we gonna get expelled?’” Conversely, she characterizes the
second type of person by relating it to a particular student: “I don’t remember if Jake Mason ever
came in front of us, but those kinds of kids often did come in front of us that were like, ‘Yea,
whatever, like I really don’t care…’” I knew Jake came from a very wealthy family, was
involved in athletics, and hosted many parties at his home on the weekends. It is likely that he
knew, either explicitly or implicitly, that the administration would bring few to no repercussions
upon him considering his family’s economic support of the school. Even if he had come to the
board, or when students of his position did come to the board, there was no assurance that the
AHB could implement their recommended consequences.
MS: *laughs* And, when we wanted to suspend people, sometimes our consequences
would get overridden, by the administration. ‘Cause we, our consequences, everything
that we wrote up for them had to be sent to Mrs. Morrison and approved, and sometimes,
not often, but sometimes Mrs. Morrison, especially if it was a student who had a lot of
money, would send us an email back and say, “No, I’m sorry this isn’t gonna be used.
This isn’t gonna work. We can’t suspend this kid for two days. And we’d have to go back
and reconsider the consequences. We’d have to change them.”
Even if Jake Mason were to be brought to the AHB, there is doubt as to whether or not he would
have to endure any consequences. Meredith explains that even when the AHB had made a
decision, “sometimes [their] consequences would get overridden, by the administration….
sometimes Mrs. Morrison, especially if it was a student who had a lot of money, would send us
an email back and say…. ‘We can’t suspend this kid for two days.’ And we’d have to go back

36
and reconsider the consequences. We’d have to change them.” Mrs. Morrison was the principal
of the high school at the time. Thus, while both types of students, those of the upper-class and
those of the relatively middle-class, came before the board, the experience and threat of the
proceedings and potential punishments resonated in vastly different ways.
MS: I mean I think the population that we got was a bit skewed, because the kids who
really didn’t want to go to the board kinda really didn’t end up coming.
CD: Mhm
MS: You know, because it really was up to the teachers to, we didn’t get a student in
front of us unless a teacher had gone to the dean who then went to us.
CD: Okay
MS: So it was like this whole process of actually getting the student in front of us.
It is this process, as Meredith put it, “this whole process of actually getting the student in front of
us,” as well as the final determination of punishment that is governed by the teachers and
administrators. This process distinguishes students as either belonging to a privileged, upper-
class status or, in the alternative, a less privileged, relatively middle-class status.
At Campbell Hall, the master status or distinction for students is class, seeing as the
school is defined by its constituents’ wealth. In other communities though, the same principles of
favoritism or selective discipline can be seen based on the master status and distinction of that
community. Peter Demerath’s ethnographic research in Producing Success: The Culture of
Personal Advancement in an American High School (2009) serves to reinforce this relationship
of administrative distinction of students, but by a different barometer: athletics (Demerath 2009).
Demerath conducted ethnographic research at a school called Wilton Burnham High School
“located in Wilton, an affluent, though changing suburb of a large Midwestern U.S. city that
often promoted its own distinctiveness and appeal” (Demerath 2009:8). Three major differences
play into the two different manifestations of symbolic distinction of students by teachers and
administrators at Wilton and Campbell Hall: Wilton is a public school in a Midwestern suburb
populated by predominantly middle-class students while Campbell Hall is a private school in Los

37
Angeles populated by predominantly upper-upper class students. Nonetheless, symbolic
distinctions of some students as privileged persist in a very similar way at both schools. The
difference is in the criteria for distinction as privileged or unprivileged. At Campbell Hall, the
dominant symbolic distinction occurs when designating the upper-class students from the
relatively-middle class students. At Wilton, the dominant symbolic distinction occurs when
designating athletes from non-athletes.
Just as Meredith explained how the disciplinary system at Campbell Hall distinguishes
upper-class students from relatively middle-class students by favoring upper-class students,
Demerath’s interlocutors explain how the disciplinary system at Wilton distinguishes athletes
from non-athletes by favoring athletes:
‘It’s just disturbing. And it’s kind of like, everyone cheats as well even though, they
know it’s wrong to cheat…. And it’s sort of the same with the drug and alcohol policy
and over the years there has been, like, numbers of teens and tons of individuals who
have been caught abusing the policy, grossly abusing the policy. But yet nothing is done
because, oh they’re athletes and you know what would happen if on a Friday night half
the football team didn’t show up for the game. Then the newspapers are going to report it,
they’d probably make a big story out of it, and our school would get a bad rap…. I mean,
it’s a known fact we’ve had a good football team here for the past couple of years, this
year they’re, like, really good. (Demerath 2009:120).
For Wilton, the athletes, and specifically the football players, give the school credibility and have
a large impact on their reputation. This issue of reputation echoes Alice’s introduction to the first
chapter in which she outlines Campbell Hall’s reputation as reliant on capital. In what
Bourdieu’s words might be, economic capital is not a major determinant of privilege at Wilton,
but for that community social capital is (Bourdieu 1986:241-258). At Campbell Hall, as a
function of the structural distinction of Campbell Hall as an elite, wealthy private school, the
wealth of the school and the families of its students give the school credibility and have a large
impact on its reputation. Thus, unlike Wilton, economic capital is the major determinant of
privilege at Campbell Hall. As a result of this institutional and communal emphasis, the

38
distinction of being wealthy and upper-class is all the more relevant and valuable at Campbell
Hall. As the next section of this chapter will delineate, just as it is a “known fact” that Wilton
had had “a good football team,” many interlocutors from Campbell Hall describe the wealth of
upper-class students and their treatment by the school as obvious.
While Demerath’s interlocutor does begin to discuss cheating and academic infractions,
at Wilton it seems as if the selective leniency manifests most strongly in the context of drug and
alcohol violations. Differently, Campbell Hall actually manages to hold a rather steadfast
position of intolerance for drug use on-campus and an even hand that does not engage much with
drug and alcohol use off-campus. Nonetheless, the disciplinary system at Campbell Hall does
have selective effects, identifying and favoring the upper-class students while simultaneously
identifying and monitoring the relatively middle-class students. This occurred through a process
of symbolic distinction based on students’ economic capital (Bourdieu 1986:241-258).
The Haves and the Have-Mores
“You just knew.”
One of my interlocutors had a very simple way of describing the experience of
identifying the wealthiest, upper-class students at Campbell Hall:
You just knew when someone had money, and they flaunted it. And it, it was like
something that wealthy people like showed off. Like, I remember, Linea Bennett started
saying how much her outfit cost.
So it began, my interrogation of how “you just knew,” and what it would take to be part of the
upper-class tier of students at Campbell Hall, directly from the eyes and ears of the students
themselves. Part of me felt I knew this process instinctually, but in studying and investigating it
the dimensions of the process became even clearer. This process of either being identified as an
upper-class student or the “knowing” of relatively middle-class students that others “had money”

39
is a process of symbolic distinction. In this section, we understand this distinction of students as
it is carried out by students.
The passage above came from an interlocutor named Hudson who did not receive
financial aid while at Campbell Hall, but who also did not consider herself part of the upper class
of students. She had another sibling in private school, adding further economic burden on the
family, and her parents did not fare particularly well in the economic downturn in 2008. She had
also gone to Campbell Hall since Kindergarten, compounding the depletion of her family’s
economic capital to tuition and fees. In comparison to students who attended cheaper primary
and junior high schools6
before coming to Campbell Hall for high school, families who had
students at Campbell Hall for all 13 years often had put forth more money for students’
educations. Thus, she identified more with the relatively middle-class student rather than the
upper-class student, despite the fact that she did not receive financial aid. Another interlocutor
introduced in the first chapter, Megan, actually characterized this discrepancy quite well:
I mean obviously there’s like the cliques of people that are like cool and uncool, but then
there’s also the cliques of like, I would say like among the kids that were like considered
more cool there was like, the kids with money and then the kids that like, they still had
money but they wouldn’t, their parents wouldn’t give them unlimited amounts of money.
Megan, like Hudson, never received financial aid during her time at Campbell Hall. She, unlike
Hudson, joined Campbell Hall in high school and had a very stark confrontation with learning
the landscape of the community.
At first, I like dreaded going to school because I felt like it was really hard to make
friends because I felt like everyone had already made friends…. and also I had come in
like hanging out with like, the rich girl crew, ‘cause, like Abby Carter, the only one [at
the school] that I knew, was friends with all of them. Even though, like, she’s not
necessarily as rich as most of her friends.

6
Even if they did not attend Campbell Hall in particular for primary school, most students did attend a
private school in the area

40
Here, Megan talks about the disposition of the students at Campbell Hall, upper-class or
otherwise, and even addresses both “the rich girl crew” and Abby, one of my interlocutors who
best embodies the divide between the upper-class students and the relatively middle-class
students.
Abby was one of the 24% of students who received financial aid while at Campbell Hall.
This characteristic immediately places her in the relatively middle-class minority at Campbell
Hall. Yet, as Megan describes, she was friends “with like, the rich girl crew” and when Megan
came to Campbell Hall, that is the friend group she was exposed to. Abby Carter, similarly to
Hudson, told me about her experience in coming to learn how wealth manifested itself in upper-
classness and affected friendships at Campbell Hall.
CD: Do you think wealth every played a role socially, like in friendships?
AC: Oh, yea. I didn’t realize it until 8th
grade. Even in 7th
grade when people were
coming in with more money than I ever experienced I still hadn’t noticed it. In 8th
grade, I
noticed the size of someone’s house meant that they made more money…. Wealth made
things more fun, if I’m being honest. I had amazing experiences. Especially if I went to a
school that wasn’t private, I would’ve never had that experience. So I appreciate that.
Meredith, who we heard earlier discussing Campbell Hall’s Academic Honor Board, also
mentioned this “house size” barometer of wealth and class status. Meredith learned of this
barometer from one of her friends, Lucy, who was trying to create and maintain friendships with
“the rich girl crew,” as Megan put it. This caused strain on Meredith’s and Lucy’s friendship. At
one point, Lucy told her that she felt she couldn’t invite anyone of her friends, other than Lucy
and a select few others, to her home because it wasn’t big enough.
A similar sentiment was echoed by many of my interlocutors. Clothing and general attire
were a marker of class status and served as one avenue in which students were symbolically
distinguished both by and from each other. Abby shows us that another layer of symbolic class

41
distinction exists – the square footage and degree of luxury of their homes – as students’ off-
campus identities play a role in a student’s status on-campus.
Abby went on to explain that she, similar in relative class as myself, was friends with the
wealthiest people but did not have the same large quantities capital as their families did. She was
the exception to her close group of friends when it came to money and had to be “very realistic”
about her economic situation while her peers, and particularly her best friends, did not. In
describing this particular friend group, Megan actually gave the following characterization of
“the rich girl crew” in comparison to her own, more relatively middle-class friends that she
found a few years into her time at Campbell Hall.
For example like in our grade there was like a girl clique that literally had an unlimited
amount of money to do whatever they wanted to do, and like, that’s fine, but like, my, my
friends and I would be like the type of friends that would like sit outside in a backyard
and like drink a bottle of ‘two buck chuck’ as opposed to like, like, go to [the expensive
sushi restaurant called] Nobu and be like, “we spent seven hundred dollars on dinner it’s
so funny!”
Megan clearly describes the upper class girls as separate and distinct from her own experience,
characterizing the upper class experience as having “an unlimited amount of money.” Her own
experience consisted of cheap wine and backyards.
Abby offered yet one more anecdote to help paint the picture of the upper-class lifestyle
led by some of these high school students at Campbell Hall. She told me that she realized the
role of wealth in friendships only when her family started to struggle more with money than it
had before, beginning around Junior High and into High School. One weekend in Junior High
she was out shopping with some friends and one of their mother’s. They were in a large
department store and the girls found themselves in the sunglasses section, trying on pair after
pair in the mirrors. By the time they left the store, Abby’s friend’s mom had purchased her
daughter, and each of the friends including Abby, a pair of brand name sunglasses. Abby

42
commented, “I’d like to think my friendship with this person wasn’t about money, but I think it
started that way.”
Adolescence, and the consequent site of high school, is a state of constant self-reflection
that occurs both internally and through recognition and confirmation from others (Ito et al.
2008:vii-ix). The distinction, or classification, of individuals is thus not only unsurprising, but
maybe even expected. These distinctions of status based on material markers have immaterial
effects on social groups and the experiences of students related to the two major class statuses. In
this process of symbolic distinction between students and their peers, the economic capital upon
which the original distinction is based actually spawns social capital between the members of
each social group, or each class status.
As part of the upper-class at Campbell Hall, students must be wealthy enough to live in
large homes, wear inconspicuously expensive clothes, and spend lots of money on entertainment.
This is what Thorstein Veblen coins as “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 2007). Veblen
argues that “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the
gentlemen of leisure” (Veblen 2007:90). The observable behaviors of conspicuous consumption
serve as the markers by which students are distinguished by their own peers. Once this
distinction occurs, a commonly experienced social phenomena called homophily – recognized by
the common phrase, “birds of a feather flock together” – takes place and social groups form
predominantly between the distinctions of upper-class and relatively middle-class students
(McPherson et al. 2001:415-444). It is this process of homophily that establishes friend groups
like the “rich girl” clique where economic capital can spawn specific forms of social and cultural
capital (Bourdieu 1986:241-258). For upper-class students, their social capital is derived from
having access to each other, or the network of their class status, to reach from socially and, in the

43
future, professionally. For relatively middle-class students, they, too develop social capital
within their network of friends. However, the value of social capital is embedded in the status of
the individuals one knows or has access to. Thus, knowing people of upper-class status is worth
more social capital than knowing people of relatively middle-class status. As a result, upper-class
students receive even more social capital than relatively middle-class students do simply by
interacting within theit upper-class social group. This culmination of both economic capital and
social capital and its discrepancy between the status groups at Campbell Hall is investigated
further in the following third chapter of this thesis.
One more fine differentiation in my data must be acknowledged to give full credence to
the understanding of symbolic distinction. Of the four interlocutors featured above, only one
received financial aid. However, the other three did not consider themselves part of the “rich
girl” clique, or part of the wealthiest bracket of individuals at Campbell Hall at all. Two of them
had particular economic struggles within their families, though they were able to maintain a full-
tuition paying status at the school. One of my other interlocutors, Keith, similarly did not receive
financial aid and was definitely part of the upper-class of students at Campbell Hall. When I
asked him in our interview if he felt like wealth played a role in his friendships, he quickly
replied, “I don’t think so. The only thing, like I remember Rob Thorp used to steal from us. That
like, basically ended our friendship because of that. But, um…” I interjected as Keith paused,
“It’s fine if the answer is no.” He replied, “Yea, no.” Keith’s position as definitely part of the
upper-class status coupled with his lack of acknowledgment of the role that wealth played in
friendships supports Sherry Ortner’s argument in her 2003 book New Jersey Dreaming about
“who, then, sees, or acknowledges, class, and why?” (Ortner 2003:41). She quickly answered
this research question: “By and large, people higher up on the ladder did not see class” (Ortner

44
2003:41). As a result, symbolic distinction had different degrees of impact on, and internalization
by, students depending on which class they belonged to. As Ortner describes it, “most of those to
whom class was not just visible but almost tangible were from the lower end of the economic
spectrum” (Ortner 2003:42). That line strongly echoes Abby’s description of her handling of her
own economic positioning as “very realistic” and grounded in experience of material
consumption, like the sunglasses in the department store. Ultimately, symbolic distinction results
in an entire set of norms and ideals that affect students of each of the two dominant classes at
Campbell Hall in distinctly different ways.
Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is fundamental to understanding these assumed
values. Seth Holmes discusses symbolic violence as “the normalizing… of stereotypes and
prejudices” (Holmes 2013:43). It indicates “the interrelations of social structures of inequalities
and perceptions” (Holmes 2013:44). Thus far, Holmes’ definitions and explanations relate
almost identically to conditions of symbolic distinction. Symbolic distinction is concerned with
the “normalizing of prejudices:” in this case, a prejudice in favor of the upper-class. It is also
concerned with “inequalities and perceptions” as they are enacted by various actors within a
social structure: in this case, the various groups of people that make up the Campbell Hall
community.
The process of identifying and defining students as upper-class or relatively middle-class
and the subsequent selective treatment by administrators as well as the social awareness of peers
is concerned with the normalized identification and experience of class and capital based on
certain archetypical ideals of class value and distinction. As a result of symbolic distinction, the
students of each of the two dominant classes at Campbell Hall have different relationships to the
archetypical, ideal Campbell Hall student.

45
CHAPTER III
TWO EDUCATIONAL HABITUSES: “Our prep school fucked us up”
Bridging the gap between relatively middle-class students and upper-class students
requires the acquisition of economic capital, an act of upward social mobility that represents two
different forms of class aspirations: one of the relatively middle class and one of the upper class.
These aspirations are embedded and embodied in the attitudes and experience – or what
Bourdieu calls the habitus – of students at Campbell Hall. I argue that the combination of
structural and symbolic distinction at Campbell Hall defines and creates two Campbell Hall
student habituses: the first is what I call a maintenance-oriented habitus, experienced and
reinforced by the upper-class students who desire to “maintain” their class statuses, and the
second is what I call a mobility-oriented habitus, experienced and reinforced by the relatively
middle-class students who seek to be upwardly “mobile” and increase their class statuses.
These two habituses have different relationships with Campbell Hall’s class-based ideals
of success; these ideals are most often defined by receiving great grades, prestigious college
acceptances, and lucrative careers. The effect of these dichotomous distinctions of students is
that two entirely different student experiences – or habituses – exist for students at Campbell
Hall (Nash 1990:431-447). While the ideals of getting great grades, getting into a great college,
and being wealthy all exist regardless of one’s class, the way those ideals do or do not play a role
in the lives of students differs relative to their respective statuses. For a relatively middle-class
student, getting great grades, getting into a great college, and gaining wealth from a lucrative
career are ambitions embedded in efforts toward upward mobility and upper-class status;
reaching those goals represents “success.” I argue that the structural and symbolic distinction of
relatively middle-class students results in a mobility-oriented habitus, or the embodiment and
reproduction of a mobility-oriented relationship (Nash 1990:431-447; Bourdieu 1984:613).

46
Among upper-class students, the archetype of the ideal student actually necessitates a
relationship of superiority over the relatively middle-class status and one of equality with the rest
of the upper-class students. The archetype of an ideal, wealthy student at Campbell Hall is the
upper-class student. Thus, a maintenance-oriented habitus is formed for the students of the upper
class as a result of their structural and symbolic distinction. This chapter addresses the varying
definitions of success and the varying relationships to those ideals of success as defined by
grades and college acceptance.
So what is success, after all?
I wanted to get straight A’s, make friends for life, and I wanted to be in every production
I could be. A huge part of it was that I wanted to get into a great school, I’d been sort of
programmed to think that way.
– Survey completed by Meredith, February 12, 2015
The excerpt above is from a familiar friend by now, Meredith, who we met in the
previous chapter discussing the Academic Honor Board. Meredith did not receive financial aid
but her wealth is still modest in comparison to those in the upper-class of students at Campbell
Hall. This chapter considers Meredith’s relationship to Campbell Hall as a member of the
relatively middle-class based on her own classification of herself as such throughout the
research. Meredith explained to me that she was “sort of programmed” to consider good grades,
social acceptance, extra curricular activities, and college admission as ideals of her high school
experience. Her understandings and experiences of success were guided by the archetypical ideal
of a Campbell Hall student that she would have to work toward from her status of relatively
middle-class to that of the upper-class. Her articulation of feeling “programmed” is an astute
acknowledgement of the strong socialized nature of the exclusive sub-culture that is Campbell
Hall.

47
An upper-class student named Bridget who did not receive financial aid articulated a
different perspective and response to the ideals of an archetypical Campbell Hall student. An
excerpt from her survey illustrates the contrast between her experience and Meredith’s:
I have a pretty firm idea of what I value and what matters to me, so for the most part, my
priorities came from me and from what I really genuinely cared about.
What was your number one concern in high school?
Mostly issues of social justice. I wasn’t too worried about my academic performance, and
I certainly didn’t care about my social life. So I cared about advocating for new policies
at school, bringing important issues into the collective consciousness of the student body,
and probably really annoying the administration.
– Survey completed by Bridget, February 12, 2015
Bridget “wasn’t too worried about [her] academic performance, and [she] certainly didn’t care
about [her] social life.” Instead, she chose to occupy her time with other things that aligned more
with her “priorities” that came “from what [she] genuinely cared about” like “issues of social
justice.” Bridget felt comfortable dedicating most of her time to pursuits that were personally
fulfilling rather than pursuits and ideals that were thrust upon her. She acknowledges that she
chose not to be concerned with “academic performance.” This is a luxury of the upper-class,
maintenance-oriented habitus. For Bridget, her upper-class status was nearly secured as a result
of her family’s wealth and she did not have the worry nor the pressure of seeking increased
socioeconomic status. Meredith, on the other hand, felt the pressure of social mobility. At other
points in my research, aside from the surveys, Meredith told me that her parents reminded her of
her obligation to aspire toward good grades so that she could not only get into a great college but
also have scholarship offers. Thus, Meredith’s perspective on success at Campbell Hall was
framed by her mobility-oriented habitus as a relatively middle-class student.

48
Success as measured by degrees of social mobility is not uncommon in academic
literature nor in popular discourse. However, success measured by the maintenance of one’s
socioeconomic status is less investigated. Beginning with Ortner’s explanation of success we can
understand Campbell Hall’s ideals of success:
Success is, to dust off an old concept, a key symbol in American culture…. Like all key
symbols, ‘success’ has highly variable meanings in American culture. Probably the
dominant meaning is… making a lot of money (Ortner 2003:188).
Because of Campbell Hall’s orientation as an educational institution preparing students
for an elite college experience, the dominant meaning of the key symbol of success,
“making a lot of money,” takes different forms while still representing wealth. Instead of
having a profession or income bracket to represent socioeconomic success at Campbell
Hall, the high grades, college acceptances, and social popularity of students mark them as
successful, largely based on the presumption that those qualities will further lead
explicitly to the “making a lot of money” iteration of socioeconomic success.
Relationships to this first iteration of socioeconomic success in high school are however
still indicative of students’ actual relationship to their families’ economic status. That is
to say that students’ perspectives of success within the Campbell Hall ideals of success
are indicative of their situation as upper-class or relatively middle-class students. Thus,
success is one avenue on which the maintenance-oriented and mobility-oriented habituses
can be understood. The contrasts between Meredith’s and Bridget’s visions of success are
stark examples of this.
The Metrics: Grades, GPAs, and College
High school grades are another avenue on which classed student experiences can be
analyzed and understood. Campbell Hall is not alone in the educational struggle between the

49
hunt for A’s or a 4.0+ GPA7
and the desire for an enriching education. The ideal of getting not
just good grades, but the best grades possible, is an incredibly powerful aspect of the student
experience. The metrics for success of being a good student, one of the ideal characteristics of a
Campbell Hall student, are the letter grades students receive in courses as well as their respective
GPAs.
Part of the title of this chapter comes from a text message I received from Megan, an
interlocutor introduced in the previous chapter. She, like Meredith, did not receive financial aid
but also did not identify as part of the upper class of students and instead identified with a
relatively middle class status. She was contemplating her current semester in college and the
value of her college experience in light of having felt overwhelmingly stressed out about her
courses and achieving collegiate academic success. In her words, “I’m afraid to fail. Our prep
school fucked us up really well.” I later asked Megan’s permission to use this information as a
part of my research. What is so striking about this short bit of data is that she offered it to me
completely unsolicited.
This statement illustrates how Megan carries the same mobility-oriented habitus with her
in college as she developed at Campbell Hall. Furthermore, the pressure of academic success at
Campbell Hall is uniquely wedded to the pressures of college admission and attendance. Grades
and GPAs are not necessarily important as indicators of learning, but rather as means toward
gaining admission to the best (read: most prestigious) colleges as possible. The colleges students
are accepted into as well as the college they respectively attend are measurements of success in
the college application and selection process. Since high grades and GPAs are only preparation
for and means toward colleges, the same logic seems to be brought toward the college
educational experience. The difference is that the stakes in college are perceived as higher: high

7
Grade Point Average

50
grades and GPAs are assumed to provide access to yet more academia, a graduate program, or to
open the doors to career opportunities, which are distinct markers of socioeconomic status. The
pressure and fear Megan was feeling not to “fail” is part of the mobility-oriented habitus that
relatively middle-class students learn to cultivate during their time at Campbell Hall and after
they leave.
While Megan did not refer specifically to parental pressure as a factor in the overall
academic pressure of success for the relatively middle-class, another interlocutor from the
previous chapter did. Abby, who did receive financial aid and is therefore surely not part of the
upper-class but rather the relatively middle-class, explained the academic pressure of Campbell
Hall in terms of her socioeconomic status: “I wanted to do well in school because I knew my
parents sacrificed a lot to send me there.” For Abby, not only did she feel as if the burden for
upward mobility were squarely on her shoulders, but also she understood that the burden was on
the shoulders of her parents in contributing the tuition that remained after her financial aid award
and generating the other resources required to be a part of that community. While for Abby her
understanding of her parents’ sacrifice instilled additional pressure to aspire toward academic
success at Campbell Hall, for students of the upper class, their parents’ sacrifices were
considered advantages and lead them further away from the pressures of academic success.
Like Abby, Jensen occupied a unique social space in which his friend group was
comprised predominantly of upper-class students while he identified as a relatively middle-class
student. He offers a very strong characterization of this experience:
I had the privilege to be surrounded by wealth. Uncomfortable wealth. Wealth that stares
down at you as you try to run for cover. I will never regret that privilege. The uniqueness
of being surrounded by individuals who will literally never have any idea that
consequences exist for most people…. There was no sense of urgency within my friend
group. They felt that they had the pillow of wealth to fall into if need be.
– Survey completed by Jensen, February 12, 2015

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