as perhaps the only protection, dicey as it may be, against future family downward mobility.31 Most middle- and upper-middle-class families no longer pass on the family firm, so the ability to boost the succeeding generation into a better, or even the same, class is largely dependent on the next generation’s credentialing success.
Middle- and upper-middle-class parents are willing to invest large sums of money and time to make this a reality. In her work on the upper-middle class, Michèle Lamont explains that most “American upper-middle class men spend a considerable part of their life savings for the education of their children.”32 Families are willing to make such a large investment because higher education is at the heart of social reproduction.
But that money is not only spent on tuition. Parents are savvier than ever, investing both time and money so that their children get specialized instruction outside of the classroom.33 For many kids, extracurricular life is focused on athletics and other organized games. And those extracurricular activities, specifically sports, can offer an admissions boost, particularly at the most elite colleges and universities.34 Even though this boost is far from guaranteed, parents are willing to hedge their bets.
Participation in competitive activities is especially appealing in honing skills that will matter in the more weighty tournaments to come, because these proving grounds look like recreation. While parents in many Asian countries encourage their kids to spend countless hours hitting the books in English schools abroad or in cram schools at home,35 many American parents prefer to shroud the honing process in activities that can be—and are generally experienced as—fun. It is crucial to the American ethos of competition that it should not look too much like work, especially for children, even if the competitive experience clearly has work-like elements.36
At the same time it would be a mistake to think that parents of kids as young as Jeremiah fixate on specific college admissions offices every Saturday out on the soccer field. Instead they understand the grooming of their child as producing a certain kind of character and a track record of success in the more proximate tournaments of sports or dance or chess.
But were parents to think in directly instrumental terms about that thick admissions envelope, they would not be far off the mark. Activity participation, particularly athletics, does indeed confer an admissions advantage, through either athletic scholarships or an admissions “boost,” giving students an edge when applying to elite schools.37
A 2005 New York Times article on the growing popularity of lacrosse explained, “Families see lacrosse as an opportunity for their sons and daughters to shine in the equally competitive arenas of college admissions and athletic scholarships.”38 One parent is quoted in the article saying, “From what I hear on the coaches’ side in Division III [lacrosse participation is] worth a couple hundred points on the SAT.” (Participation in sports like lacrosse also provides a social class signifier in an era of needs-blind admissions.)
All of the Playing to Win parents were realistic about their children’s very slim chances of earning an NCAA scholarship, especially to a Division I school.39 Instead what the parents I met are looking for is what lacrosse is thought to provide: an admissions boost. This boost is strongest at Ivy League schools, where students are not awarded athletic scholarships, and at top liberal arts colleges, where sometimes more than half of the smaller student bodies are collegiate athletes.
Higher education admissions systems are certainly “tied to Little League and high school sports and [are] related as well to the shared sports values of our national culture.”40 While we don’t know with certainty that it is these specific activities that help children succeed in the college admissions race and beyond—because kids were not randomly assigned to competitive after-school activities—what matters is that parents believe participation in these activities is crucial and act accordingly while their children are still young.
That U.S. colleges and universities consider admissions categories other than academic merit is rooted in history and is uniquely American. Jerome Karabel shows how the “Big Three” of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale developed new admissions criteria in the 1920s to keep out “undesirables,” namely Jews and immigrants.41 This new system valued the “all-around man,” who was naturally involved in clubs and athletics. Karabel explains that the definition of admissions merit has continued to shift over time, and parents’ concern with college admissions for their children is “not irrational, especially in a society in which the acquisition of educational credentials has taken its place alongside the direct inheritance of property as a major vehicle for the transmission of privilege from parent to child. And as the gap between winners and losers in American grows ever wider—as it has since the early 1970s—the desire to gain every possible edge has only grown stronger.”42
While researching Playing to Win I met one father, who actually did not attend college himself, and he told me about his motivation for his third-grade daughter’s participation in competitive chess: “Well, if this helps her get into Harvard . . .” Another mother said that her son’s achievements “might help him stand out and get into a good school.” When I asked her to define a “good school” she replied, “Ivy League or equivalent, like Stanford”—though she had not attended any of these colleges.
While these parents had not attended the schools they were interested in for their children, that was not true for all the families I met. Karabel and the journalist Daniel Golden do find that at many institutions legacy status is powerful; Golden finds this to be especially true at the University of Notre Dame.43
We cannot know for sure that the way these affluent kids spend free time in their childhood will lead to their admission to these schools, which in turn will help maintain a class advantage. But we can say that the skills they acquire by participating in competitive childhood activities are certainly correlated.
In a society where a bachelor’s degree has become common, and in many circles is expected, the institution at which a degree was earned becomes a distinguishing feature,44 and many parents correctly believe these activities can help gain entry to more elite institutions. According to sociologist Mitchell Stevens, in his study of college admissions at an elite, private liberal arts college, “Families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.”45 Efforts to create this quantifiable virtue in children have led to the creation of a second shift for kids, which in turn has created what I call Competitive Kid Capital.
OVERCOMING CREDENTIALS BOTTLENECKS: THE ACQUISITION OF COMPETITIVE KID CAPITAL
Whenever children participate in activities, including unsupervised play or organized noncompetitive activities, they acquire skills through socialization.46 This is also true of participation in organized activities that do not have an explicitly competitive element, as I have argued elsewhere.47 But many activities that were previously noncompetitive have been transformed from environments that emphasized only learning skills, personal growth, and simple fun into competitive cauldrons in which only a few succeed: those who learn the skills necessary to compete and to win. Kids learn particular lessons from participation in competitive activities apart from normal childhood play.
There are two avenues by which parents think competitive activities can help children gain an edge: the specialist and the generalist avenues. Both pathways aid families in dealing with credentials bottlenecks because they help kids acquire skills and focus their time and energy. Parents think these activities help kids develop the kind of character that will be critical to success in the competitions that colleges, graduate schools, and employers pay attention to when making decisions.
The “specialist” avenue to the top has children competing to achieve national championships or awards for exceptional
