Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and political stakes inherent in calling something incommensurable. We provide a framework for future empirical study of commensuration and demonstrate how this analytic focus can inform established fields of sociological inquiry.

One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification – the production and communication of numbers – as a general sociological phenomenon. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences in Europe and North America as well as humanistic inquiry, we articulate five sociological dimensions of quantification and call for an ethics of numbers.

Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge, and hubs connecting multiple institutional domains. Bringing these lines of scholarship together facilitates new theoretical insights and research questions.

There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.

No abstract