Perfectionist Dreams and Hidden Stratification: Is Perfection the Enemy of the Good?

Abstract

Research from the 1960s shows that high school counselors acted as gatekeepers to limit college access, and community college counselors engaged in cooling out that is, dampening students’ ambitious plans and convincing them to reduce their goals of attending 4-year colleges. This research may have had some impact, since today many counselors deplore such actions and advise differently. Rather than cooling out students, guidance counselors now use new practices that encourage low-achieving students to pursue high-track 4-year-college pathways despite a low likelihood of payoffs, while ignoring alternate degrees with better outcomes, fewer academic demands, and shorter timetables.

The perfectionist model can help us understand this new approach. This model, originally described in studies of the sexual abstinence movement, is used here to identify comparable features in the BA-for-all movement. Perfectionist advice poses high ideals, but also leads to high rates of predictable failures, and failure is more damaging because it precludes realistic back-up options. We review several studies that find educators recommending idealistic goals with high failure rates, sometimes as high as 80%.

High goals should not be abandoned, but we must be aware of the limitations of perfectionist models and the importance of more complex advice, multiple options, and back-up plans. We propose three kinds of sociological analyses that could inform educators about the stratification implications of their well-intentioned actions and suggest more complex goals and procedures that would be more candid and perhaps lead to better outcomes.