Search

In the United States, attending a selective liberal arts college is often a sign of success. Human capital theory assumes graduates from these colleges share similar outcomes, in terms of employmen...

This paper explores one of the enduring small mysteries of student life – why do women participate in study abroad programs more than men? To answer this question, original data collected from seniors and recent graduates of a sample of liberal arts colleges in the US were analyzed. Results show an intractable gender gap persisting, even after common explanatory factors are explored, although these factors also point to the problem as one of gender and class, not gender per se. It concludes with a discussion of the meaning of cultural enrichment and venturing away from home for elite college women (elite women’s venture capital), and a call for future studies that pay attention to the ways race, gender, and class intersect to produce particular meanings of study abroad participation.

In this chapter, Warnock, Hurst, Barratt, and Salcedo use SERU survey data from 12 public research universities to examine the relationship between social class background and student perceptions of campus climate. The authors draw upon theories and literature of social class inequalities in higher education to frame these analyses. They found that students’ social class background is positively, significantly associated with feelings of belonging, safety, and comfort on campus. Students from lower social class backgrounds are more likely to report hostile interpersonal interactions around social class. This study reinforces past work that demonstrates how institutions of higher education can be alienating environments to working-class and low-income students. The authors conclude their chapter with policy suggestions for improving the campus climate for this often marginalized student population.

Have college students become careerists rather than intellectuals? Are working-class students to blame for grade inflation, grade-grubbing, and the downscaling of the university’s noble mission of educating the whole person? These assertions, although somewhat buried in a mass of facts and findings, are present in almost every research study on college student ‘orientations’ produced since the 1970s. This article critically examines these assertions from a working-class perspective, pointing out the ways ‘intellectualism’ and ‘academicism’ have been culturally constructed to favor middle-class behavior and actions, arguing instead that anxiety over the economic value of a college degree reflects awareness of intense changes in the occupational structure and has little to do with increased materialism or anti-intellectualism.

This article will explore the shifting use of class language in party platforms during the Lochner era, a period of increased class polarization, social unrest, and laissez faire judicial philosophy. It explores the ways in which political parties responded to the growing inequality of wealth and the judicial distaste for “class legislation.” Using as a dataset all available party platforms of the presidential elections years during this period, I analyze the impact of class identity and class consciousness on politics and social movements during this time, finding that (1) class language increased during this period, with its sharpest images and depictions found in third party platforms; (2) the use of class language was directly connected to calls for an end to “government by injunction” and very specific proposals for workers; (3) the two major parties often took on some of these specific recommendations in the following presidential cycle or cycles, but without the attendant class language; leading to (4) a general muting of explanations for the cause of industrial conflict (irrecoof industrialncilable interests of labor and capital) in favor of specific reforms leading to government as mediator, picked up primarily by the Democratic Party.

I compare experiences and class identity formation of working-class college students in college. I find that all working-class students experience college as culturally different from their home cultures and have different understandings and interpretations of this difference based on race, class, and gender positions. I find that students develop fundamentally different strategies for navigating these cultural differences based on the strength or weakness of their structural understandings of class and inequality in US society. Students with strong structural understandings develop Loyalist strategies by which they retain close ties to their home culture. Students with more individual understandings of poverty and inequality develop Renegade strategies by which they actively seek immersion in the middleclass culture of the college. These strategic orientations are logical responses to the classed nature of our educational system and have very significant implications for the value and experience of social mobility in an allegedly meritocratic society.

College students from the working class have interesting stories to tell about the meaning and operation of mobility through education. The author, herself a "working-class academic," explores some of the issues and dilemmas of uncovering and presenting these stories. Specifically, the author addresses: (1) the effects of interviewing those similar to one's self; (2) the possibility of losing voice when interviewing too many participants; (3) the responsibility of the researcher to take seriously the importance of renaming interview participants to ensure both anonymity and integrity; (4) the question of audience; and (5) the issue of reliability. Key Words: Class Identity, Phenomenology, Insider/outsider Status, and Interviewing Introduction By the numbers, I probably never should have made it to college. I was the oldest daughter of teen parents who struggled to survive economically. We moved around a lot, sometimes when we moved to a new school district I would be given the same textbook I had used the previous year in a different school district. I began working outside the home before I was a teenager, doing odd jobs here and there, and then I worked full-time when I was old enough. I had teachers who looked down on me for being from the wrong side of town. I only took the SAT once, and that was more by accident than purpose. I only applied to one school because I was not aware that fees could often be waived if you were poor. My high school counsellor tried to encourage me to find an appropriate career that wouldn't require a college degree. In fact, I had to start college twice. The first time, at a big state school, my scholarship was delayed and I was evicted from the dormitories. With no one to turn to and no place to go, I simply stopped going to class and never registered for the second semester. Eventually, I did make it through college, law school, and graduate school. And it was while I was in graduate school, pondering choices for research, that I first saw my story sociologically. I remember exactly when this occurred. I was sitting in a seminar in which a book about female sweatshop workers in Los Angeles was being discussed. Some of the workers described their hopes for their daughters becoming educated so that they could come back and help them achieve economic justice. The idea was that education was to be a tool, a means by which their daughters could gain power to help in the fight against oppression. The daughters could help their mothers write petitions, understand the law, and speak eloquently in the master's own language. And I thought, did they? Did they really come back? Why did I doubt that a happy ending would follow? And what was I doing in a comfortable seminar room, talking about sweatshop workers, when my mother was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from her new "at-home assembly" job? I also began to wonder about the continuing decline of a strong working-class politics. What happened to the idea that our democracy would be strengthened as more people from the working class became educated? Why did it seem that education did so little for the working class? Sure, I was getting educated, but what did that have to do with my brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbours? How was my education helping them? Another time, I watched a TV special about a struggling African-American family in New York City and how the single mother and the older sister worked double shifts to put the first son through college and business school. The TV special celebrated the American Dream, but I watched in frustration as the son became increasingly more arrogant, more distant, more condescending towards his family. They didn't seem to mind all that much, but I did. What was happening to him? What was the point of higher education for those of us from the working class if it just made us leave everyone behind? I wondered, too, about myself, what I was doing, how I was acting and behaving. …

In the previous chapter we took a look at the first-year college experience of a few of our working-class students. In this chapter we will take a closer look at the experiences of our students in various campus spaces. We can learn much by exploring the built environment of the space around us. How spaces are apportioned, allocated, and maintained can give us clues about the priorities and the social hierarchies of the college.

It wasn’t until Maria met Mrs. Mendoza that she even considered going to college. Mrs. Mendoza was the Vice Principal of Patrick Henry High School. Maria first met her when she was called in to her office on suspicion of “vandalizing” the girls’ bathroom, along with her friends Rosalia and Piper. Seated along the blue vinyl bench crammed into the small entryway between Mrs. Mendoza’s office and the copy machine, the three girls took turns looking sullen, defiant, and terrified.

Janet was a smart kid who grew up in the projects.1 She did well in school and was often taunted by her classmates for being a nerd. In fact, “book learning” was a favourite insult, “They believed that common sense exists in inverse proportion to academic instruction, a notion that found expression in cutting comments such as ‘The girl ain’t got nothin’ upstairs but book learning’ and ‘You got about as much common sense as a speck on a fly!’” (35–36). When Janet did in fact manage to find her way to college, however, she received a new unwanted identity – “project girl.”

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, a young White woman attends “Ault,” a prestigious preparatory school, on scholarship. It is not until she is interviewed by the rather nosy Angie Varizi, herself a former working-class college student, that Lee opens up about her experiences. These include shame over her origins, envy of fellow students’ material possessions and cultural capital, and confusion about her own place on campus.