Social Class and Belonging: Implications for Graduate Students' Career Aspirations.

Our understanding of how social identities matter is greatly enhanced by paying attention to the contexts in which these identities develop. The academy is one critical context in which social identities matter (Ostrove & Cole, 2003; Stewart & Dottolo,2005). In this paper we endeavor to show how an important but understudied (Frable, 1997) dimension of social identity-social class-has implications for the extent to which graduate students are interested in becoming faculty members at top research universities. Specifically,we examine the extent to which graduate students' social class backgrounds structure a sense of belonging in graduate school, and the relation between that sense of belonging and graduate students' academic self-concept. We examine the ways in which all three of these variables(social class background, sense of belonging, and academic self-concept),as well as gender, inform graduate students' career goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]