Since modern society provides more opportunities for those with college and university degrees, the number of applications to most prestigious colleges and universities has risen. It is due to the premise that education from elite universities guarantees better social and job opportunities, putting pressure on those who are outside of high-income and higher-class social groups. Many elite universities increase the number of applications in order to ensure the best applicants into their incoming class. However, elite universities as traditional institutions are not well prepared for first-generation, minority, or low-income students, and we can find various types of inequality in an elite social institution, creating new forms of socioeconomic stigma. Thus, students found a platform that helps them overcome problems produced by socioeconomic stigma: Class Confessions, which is deployed through new information technology and social media as a tool for spreading personal and private problems, attitudes, and opinions of students with socioeconomic stigma.

Rho et al. open up these delicate issues within low-income and first-generation students as well as within various nationalities and races at elite universities, analyzing these issues through the Facebook “Class Confessions” forum showing the actual problems of socioeconomic stigma. Besides the brief but clear overview of stigma and the problems of stigmatized identity, readers will find descriptions of the elite university class confessions and related sociotechnical ecosystem. It is about various forms of social networking sites, including the people, processes, and policies forming a sociotechnical ecosystem.

Since Facebook is the most-used place for confessional posts, the authors used Facepager to collect data for analyzing the overall process of Class Confessions. They brilliantly present their findings in a way that distinguishes sociotechnical configurations shaping the nature of Class Confessions interactions from the restorative properties of elite university Class Confessions. The restorative properties of elite university Class Confessions shape the mutual connections of different social groups, making acceptable relationships between marginalized students. Thus, it is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature in the field of social stigma, especially in a college or university educational setting, opening new ways for further research in the field. This is highly recommended reading for all involved with new technology ecosystem use in encompassing tools for social stigma problem solving.