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While first-generation college students are "at risk", the majority "do" persist. Using in-depth interviews with 28 white college students I ask: How do white, first-generation, working-class students understand their college experiences, especially in terms of their academic, social, and cultural adjustment? Moreover, what kinds of factors seem to help or hinder their adjustment to college life? I discovered three patterns of adjustment among these students: (1) about half expressed few feelings of marginality and appeared well integrated into campus life; (2) one quarter experienced persistent and debilitating marginality; and (3) another quarter overcame their feelings of marginality en route to becoming socially and academically engaged on campus, with some transforming their feelings of marginality into motivation for social change. I argue that these variations can be understood by looking at how working-class students' economic resources may function as an asset, while their whiteness may function alternately as an asset and a liability. (Contains 1 note.)

Using publicly available data from RateMyProfessors.com, we explore whether an instructor's gender influences how students rate that instructor. Although RateMyProfessors.com may not accurately reflect quality teaching, it provides a unique window into how students construct their classroom experiences. Multiple regression analyses of 500 professors from five public universities in the state of Florida fail to reveal significant gender differences in ratings of "overall quality". Using more complex models, we test the hypothesis that female instructors are rated more positively when they display traditionally female traits, namely teaching in a traditionally female field and offering courses that are perceived as easier. Contrary to our expectations, our analyses fail to reveal the use of a gendered yardstick in quantitative evaluations of college instructors. Instead, perceptions of ease appear to be the great equalizer within this on-line context. (Contains 4 tables.)

Existing research portrays elite places as prone to exclusion, welcoming of upscaling, and focused on protecting their economic self-interests. This paper provides nuance to this research by exploring how stakeholders understand and respond to supergentrification. During the fall of 2016, a group of citizen activists in the exclusive community of Aspen, Colorado, initiated an ordinance seeking to limit the expansion of luxury chain stores. Drawing on qualitative data related to this case, we show that how communities respond to supergentrification depends on locally specific understandings of place and social class, and how class interests have been institutionalized in local policies. In Aspen, residents opposed luxury chain stores by marshaling narratives that foreground the community's history of class mixing and the significance of working locals. Elected officials responded by taking account of the political power of local residents as well as the city's dependence on tax revenues from affluent visitors and second homeowners. Our findings extend and complicate understandings of how power works in elite places, highlighting both the potential for, and limitations of, efforts to thwart supergentrification and associated dislocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affluent people have long used places, including residential areas and their associated commercial districts and public spaces, as markers of class status. In doing so, they have often sought places that are homogeneous in terms class, and often race/ethnicity, and sought to preserve elite enclaves through a variety of policies and practices. But as we detail here, affluent people are now drawn to different types of residential settings, and their presence influences these places in sometimes surprising ways. In this essay, we review both exclusionary forms of affluent placemaking and more complex and varied forms emerging in gentrifying and super‐gentrifying places. There, the strategies that affluent residents use to create and preserve places have become more varied, as have the relationships between place and class status. These more nuanced understandings of class and place reflects scholars' heightened interest in the cultural dimensions of social class, intersections of race and class, and attention to the ways in which class and affluence reflect and influence the political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of social class are an important object of study because how people talk about social class can translate into how they act on the basis of social class. Using data from sixty in-depth interviews with white college students from working- and upper-middle-class backgrounds at two institutions of higher education, I explore college students' social class awareness, whether they think that social class matters, and how they construct symbolic boundaries. I find that whereas there are some similarities in how working- and upper-middle-class students talk about social class, differences ultimately emerge whereby working-class respondents construct social class as a more salient issue. Moreover, in contrast to earlier research, both upper-middle- and working-class students construct symbolic boundaries vis-a-vis those above them in the stratification system. This pattern suggests some possible implications for processes of social reproduction. Keywords: social class; culture; discourse; college students

Discourses of social class are an important object of study because how people talk about social class can translate into how they act on the basis of social class. Using data from sixty in-depth interviews with white college students from working- and upper-middle-class backgrounds at two institutions of higher education, I explore college students' social class awareness, whether they think that social class matters, and how they construct symbolic boundaries. I find that whereas there are some similarities in how working- and upper-middle-class students talk about social class, differences ultimately emerge whereby working-class respondents construct social class as a more salient issue. Moreover, in contrast to earlier research, both upper-middle- and working-class students construct symbolic boundaries vis-à-vis those above them in the stratification system. This pattern suggests some possible implications for processes of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the book "Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education" by Jenny M. Stuber. Topics of discussion were higher education as a site of replication for the social and economic norms, visualization of the importance of the social capital build in experiences such as study abroad and extra-curricular activities and problematic selection of informants, and the variation in data collection.