At Family Studies, Kay Hymowitz discusses a new sociology book, Paying for the Party, which looks at class differences at Indiana University. The sociologists find that higher education works very, very differently for kids with different backgrounds. Girls from wealthier families came to college with the knowledge of how to pick majors, how to navigate the frat system, and how to get to manage the social life. ” Less privileged girls wore tube tops and sported home-dyed hair that immediately labeled them as less-thans.”
The less privileged girls ended up making bad decisions about majors and became social pariahs. “The upper-class girls cultivated what the authors call a “being mean nicely” approach to their inferiors. They found ways to remind their less affluent peers of their beta status on a daily basis, by talking about designer brands and vacation destinations unfamiliar to a Walmart crowd, or ignoring them when it came time to go to dinner, or posting photos on Facebook from the previous night’s party from which the “losers” had been excluded.”
Five years after the first interviews with the subjects in their Freshman year, most of the wealthier girls had graduated and had good jobs in a major city. The less affluent girls weren’t so successful. “Five years in, only one of the twenty girls of the mid to lower middle and working class had a job with benefits that required a college degree. Others were waitressing, teaching preschool, working as bank tellers, or for one reason or another, still working on their B.A. All but one of the working class girls had dropped out of MU. The most successful were those who transferred to regional colleges where the costs, curriculum and culture more suited to their predicament.”
I graduated from a state university in the late 1980s. The school had roughly equal numbers of first generation college students and more traditional, middle class students. All the girls on my dorm floor graduated in four years. I didn’t experience any of the Darwinian nonsense described in this book. I’m not sure why my experiences were so different from the scene described in this book. Maybe it was the college, which was known for academics, not parties. A good number of my cohort were stellar students who were accepted to Ivy League colleges, but couldn’t afford to attend. Maybe the economic differences between families were less skewed in the 80s.
Apt. 11d 
I went to college surrounded by people who were the first in the family to go to college. I didn’t see anything like that either. Of course, we didn’t even have a Facebook.
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Facebook and social media generally does jump out as an obvious explanation.
Facebook means high school social issues–forever.
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I went to the same college as 1/3 of my high school class, so it wasn’t as if those changed for me either.
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I think it would be much more informative to ask the first generation students at your school Laura, rather than you. I went to a state school for under grad and definitely experienced some of this even though I finished my degree and did so on time. Grad school was actually much worse in terms of the class reinforcement bullshit even though I had learned code switching and lost my accent by then.
My advisers still don’t understand why I didn’t want to stay in academia, and I have never found a way to make them understand just how much I hate the class based medieval hierarchy of it all. They just can’t see it, or get past their own privileged upbringing.
Oddly enough, the only time I run into that sort of class reinforcement bullshit now is when we have a government client.
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Laura and I are about the same age. I was technically second generation, but my dad was the first to go to college, and he did so mostly when I was a baby (he got his masters when I was 5 or so). But I was from Long Island, and I don’t remember any sense of class difference in college. I guess in a way I had already gone through the class wringer in high school, though the class differences were relatively mild (there were Salisbury kids, and kids from the other areas; Salisbury kids lived in the bigger split-level houses). (OMG, Wikipedia even agrees with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury,_Nassau_County,_New_York; as an FYI, Bill O’Reilly grew up in my part, albeit 10 years earlier.)
I think the greater economic inequities today are what cause some of this class conflict in colleges. I see it a bit among my students, particularly in roommate battles.
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You have a parent with a master’s degree. That leads, I think, to a very different understanding of higher ed than someone from a working class background. I think asking you or Laura if you sensed class based differences as about as useful as asking the white kids if they saw race based differences. I want to know what the black kids think.
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“I see it a bit among my students, particularly in roommate battles.”
That must be epic.
I remember moving into a college apartment with my college-chosen roommate, and discovering that she had already occupied all of the closet space, which she “needed” for her stuff.
As I see now, she was an upper middle class kid.
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“I think l would be much more informative to ask the first generation students at your school Laura, rather than you.”
Yes.
I didn’t experience that stuff either despite coming from a lowish income family small, rural town and going to a school nicknamed University of Spoiled Children, but 1) my parents both had master’s degrees (although they were living an essentially lower middle class life until I went to college) and and 2) I did an honor’s program as an early-entrance freshman where all the honors kids lived in the same dorm 3) I did a lot of stuff with a Protestant Christian fellowship and 4) given my particular social characteristics at the time, rich girls could have name-checked designer brands to me all day long, and I would have been bored and annoyed, rather than cowed 5) I was primarily interested in working on my Russian.
There’s also been an explosion in on campus living standards for upper middle class kids, which makes differences in standard of living much more obvious.
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I recommend the book. Very eye-opening.
I haven’t read the review. One important detail. The authors were researching, advising women, and living in a “party dorm” on the large state college campus. Thus, their conclusions might not be true of all students attending that college.
They note astutely that many of the girls from the wealthy families chose the dorm, because they knew it was a party dorm, and they wanted that lifestyle. Other girls were placed in the dorm, but had no idea what they were getting into.
The authors mention other dorms on campus which have different cultures.
The “party track” is expensive. It’s hard to keep up with girls whose parents support their party lifestyle.
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My HS & college experiences were two extremes, neither of which are likely to be captured in the description of a MU nor are either likely to be representative of any average experience. So, I can’t speak from any form of personal experience. I think it would be interesting to understand how much of the book’s qualitative work is generalizable, though, to different environments (because, I do think, that a party floor at a particular university, at a particular time, could create it’s own toxicity, say, in the form of a mean rich girl with power, instead of a kind one, both of whom could wield power).
But, I’m sympathetic to the hypothesis that leveraging all kinds of capital (have always liked the description of skills, physical, social) has become a more important component of success (though the “more” might be valid only for the short post-war period).
Contributing to the success of leveraging is the ability of those with sufficient knowledge to know to look for information to have access to a huge amount of information. I know nothing about the Greek systems, or how one would go about navigating success in one. But, if I thought it were necessary, I would have access to information, at the very least, and potentially, if it were important enough, expertise.
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teaching preschool
A fate worse than death.
Isn’t Indiana University pretty big? I’m surprised that these trends hold up at such a large university where there is usually space for everyone and it’s too big of a place to form a high-school style hierarchy.
I haven’t read the book yet, but are the so-called less-thans actively trying to participate in the social sphere of the wealthier girls? That seems like a very specific, very different type of girl than the typical girl from a true middle-class family.
Have we made no progress since the time of Breaking Away?
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I read the linked piece now. This strikes me less as a work of sociology and more as another volume in the vast library of “your daughter will go to the big city and be ruined” books that have always sold really well to parents who don’t want their kids to leave home anyway.
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How about “Don’t send your non-academic kid to college and expect a miracle to happen” or “sleeping in the garage won’t turn you into a car.”
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I find this absolutely fascinating — I’ve been noticing with my own kids the degree to which parents do guide their kids into college experiences, often based on their own preexisting knowledge. I watched a really bright kid from our high school who might have done really well at a Liberal Arts College get advised by his parents to go to a big state school — mostly because there own knowledge of college had a lot to do with watching college sports on TV. I wonder what kinds of specific guidance they are giving him about majors and how this will affect him in the long-run. He’s a guy I would have looked at and thought — graduate school, PhD — but this may not be where he ends up, because of who he’s going to meet at Massively Hugely Large State University and the advice he’s going to get.
As my kids have made college decisions I have done the following: looked up an old friend from grad school who is now a dean at a college we visited and asked him specific questions about the faculty in the department my child is thinking of majoring in; called a friend of mine who is a dean of a business school to ask about specific business school accreditations after my daughter visited a university where the business school bragged about their accreditation status. ALthough my parents were educated, they were both first generation college attenders and I think they were intimidated by their own college experiences and were not particularly pro-active when I made my college decisions.
There’s a great memoir by Walter Kirn about his years at Princeton in the 1980’s. He was a kid from a small midwestern town, whose parents were not educated. He talks about how he always felt like a fish out of water at Princeton, didn’t have the money for the clothes, or a car, or vacations. His roommates brought brand-new furniture for their suite and then told him he couldn’t sit on the couch for 4 years because he didn’t kick in his share for the leather couch and Oriental rug. Nice. Classy.
I went to Wellesley and was clueless about what sorts of clothes to wear to social events. I watched a couple of girls go to a lot of parties at Harvard business school starting freshman year (directed there by their moms who also got them the right clothes), and they all married hedge fund managers. I didn’t understand the importance of the networking trip to Wall Street my senior year, never understood most of the name dropping about particular suburbs and particular schools. Realized later that the rich girls from prep school had a completely different freshman year than I did — I had never been challenged intellectually before and had no study skills. They were re-taking all the AP classes they had already taken in high school, getting easy A’s and boosting their GPA’s.
This book sounds fascinating because it backs up a lot of what my husband and I had always wondered about — the unwritten curriculum, the importance of social capital, the things that just accepting someone at a college can’t fix. As a professor myself, I’ve noticed that my minority students are much more likely just to assume that I couldn’t possibly extend a deadline for them, give them another try on a paper they had trouble with, etc. THey tend to assume the rules are the rules — while other kids know that you can also go to the prof and ask for help, ask for leniency, etc. I have been wondering for a while how we can better equip our first generation college attenders in particular with these types of skills — getting the advice you need about the sequences of courses to take, etc.
Sorority girls? I’m not sure there’s any cure for that — but it does raise interesting quesitons about how effectiveness college diversity policies really are.
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I had a similar experience at university – I was the first of my family to go to undergrad, let alone grad school. I remember showing up dressed in what I thought was appropriate for this event or that and missing the boat entirely.
I had a great group of friends and I DID figure it out but the point that I think Louisa and I are making is that privilege comes in many different forms. Having an innate understanding of “how to be” is very important. The academic knowledge is just a part of success at university and in subsequent careers.
I liken it to moving overseas and living in a different culture. Then you expect it to be different and expect to have to learn how to act. It’s not as appreciated that jumping social and economic classes has a similar culture shock.
The dominant culture is often blind to their own privilege and also the specifics of their culture that are assumed to be “normal” or “the way things are”.
Louisa mentions something that I’ve referred to here recently – that expectation of help and expectation of a “deal” or an alternate way.
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I read this book last month. It was pretty grim reading, seeing the lower-quintile girls having trouble and not understanding that they did not have the contacts to go forward on the paths the higher-quintiles sorority-oriented girls did. The authors have some sort of conspiracy-theory tendencies in looking at the origins of the problems – I tend to think that bad things can happen without some Doctor Evil type lurking in the background and plotting them. Their proposed solutions would fit right in on the NY Times editorial page, high-minded expenditures of lots of money.
My guess is that better incoming counselling would be helpful. The idea behind the resident associate is good, and my guess is that the person responsible on this floor on this year in this dorm was pretty ineffectual. I will try hard to persuade my kids that nothing good for them comes through fraternities/sororities.
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“It was pretty grim reading, seeing the lower-quintile girls having trouble and not understanding that they did not have the contacts to go forward on the paths the higher-quintiles sorority-oriented girls did.”
Our local very expensive college (that used to be more affordable) has a number of surviving home economics degrees that are probably one of the most expensive MRS in the US. I would REALLY worry about any girl who had any student loans doing one of those degrees–it would function like a huge negative dowry, which is pretty much the opposite of what you want in an MRS.
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Hmm, majoring in interior design and moving to a city to live off an allowance from home while looking for a guy is not what I would consider a success for my daughter. But I agree with some of the commenters, it is hard to be sure how generalizable this story is: is the situation similar at private universities? at LAC’s? at other state U’s? in other dorms at IU? for guys? for geeky girls (i.e., the ones who don’t have colored hair at all, home or salon)?
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This conversation seems to be emphasizing the social aspects, but that isn’t the real problem. My problems in undergrad were of the type Louisa emphasizes – not knowing to ask for help, for leniency etc. My last two years of undergrad were absolutely miserable because I had to take a very heavy load or spend an extra, unaffordable year. I largely blame that on the (lack of) advising I received. When I complained, I got the “well you didn’t ask about that” response. That is true, but it is because I didn’t know to ask about that.
This is why I want to emphasize that Laura and Wendy’s experience is irrelevant – you would not see this kind of issue, nor would you experience it. I’m only a few years younger than Laura but my kids are out of house now. That too is shaped in part by class.
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“This is why I want to emphasize that Laura and Wendy’s experience is irrelevant – you would not see this kind of issue, nor would you experience it. ”
What? I had one parent who went to college in New York City while he was working as a fry cook and at the post office on Long Island and raising a family, and I would never have experienced class-based social issues?
” I largely blame that on the (lack of) advising I received. When I complained, I got the “well you didn’t ask about that” response. That is true, but it is because I didn’t know to ask about that.”
And you know that I never had this experience because….? I was way out of my depth in college in many ways. I learned a lot by observing what was going on around me. I didn’t know I could do X, but if I paid attention to my friends at college, I would find out they asked to do X and got it, so maybe I could, too. I made some bad decisions, but I also made some good ones. A lot of that was simple situational awareness.
Look, I’m not going to say I wasn’t pretty privileged. I wasn’t working class; I was lower middle class. But I was white, and I was born in New York in 1966 at a time when the middle class, even the lower middle class, was pretty stable. And that was kind of the point I was trying to make–that relative class stability and lower level of income inequity are probably significant factors in the lack of class conflict I experienced. Today, there is greater income inequity, and thus greater class conflict, even/especially among college students.
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Above, you said your parent finished the master’s when you were five. That is a very different experience than having parents without high school degrees. You had a parent you could ask about how college worked. I was born in 1969, I did experience class conflict, so I don’t think the issue is the change in income inequity between your experience and my experience. It may be worse today, but it certainly did exist in the late 1980s as well.
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“You had a parent you could ask about how college worked.”
Um, sure. I never did, mainly because his college experience was so far removed from my own as he was working two jobs and raising a family while commuting an hour into the city to complete his courses in a science major.
You seem to be acting as if there are only two possibilities: 1. everyone who was poor experienced class conflict in college in the mid-80s and 2. everyone who was poor didn’t experience class conflict in college in the mid-80s. I’m trying to qualify my statements right and left, and you keep treating my statements as if I’m insisting the 80s were some utopian ideal of classlessness. I’m trying to understand why I didn’t experience feelings of class conflict, and I don’t find your explanation persuasive since, well, you didn’t really live my life or know my parents or anything like that.
The factors that do seem somewhat significant to me:
1. My personality. As I said, I tend to observe and learn from those around me. I also have a pretty thick skin, and attempts to make me feel bad would have rolled off me.
2. The people around me in high school. I grew up in a middle class community in Long Island poor but around a lot of people who expected to go to college. That rubbed off a bit.
3. The nature of my college or dorm or whatever. For Xmas my freshman year, my parents bought me a little black and white tv. Now, that may look like a huge luxury. OMG, I had a tv in my room! But I was pretty much the only student in our dorm who had a tv in their dorm room, and there were far far wealthier students in my dorm. The students I was around didn’t value sitting around watching tv–they wanted to be out doing other things. In fact, it was probably a sign of my lower social class that I wanted to watch tv (my soaps! baseball games!) and of my social isolation–sometimes it was easier to watch tv than to mingle with people I didn’t always understand or fit in with. (Don’t weep for me–I was actually fine socially overall. I just withdrew a little more often than others.)
And 3 is what I’m really thinking about. I lived among people who didn’t measure their worth by consumer goods, so my lack of such didn’t make a difference. I had little idea how to navigate college, but I was with a group of people who pooled their knowledge and helped each other out. I got my work study job in the library because of a friend who had to turn down a job offer there because she’d taken another one. I never/rarely felt like I was competing against my friends for scarce resources; we were all in it together. Sometimes I think that’s what’s missing today.
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Perhaps relevant to Wendy’s experience versus that of the girls in the article: New York is much more cosmopolitan than the typical town in Indiana. Even a working class (or lower middle class) girl in New York is much more likely to know what are the “right” clothes than would a girl raised elsewhere.
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“You seem to be acting as if there are only two possibilities: 1. everyone who was poor experienced class conflict in college in the mid-80s and 2. everyone who was poor didn’t experience class conflict in college in the mid-80s. I’m trying to qualify my statements right and left, and you keep treating my statements as if I’m insisting the 80s were some utopian ideal of classlessness.”
This is not what I am saying. I am reacting to the idea that because you or Laura did not experience it (what I read you as saying) it didn’t happen, not just that it was less – but that it wasn’t there. If that isn’t what you are saying – then fine.
I am also trying to point out that there is more to class than money – having parents with college degrees leads to a different experience of college relative to a student whose parents lack them – even if the income is the same. And, as I pointed out above, it isn’t necessarily the social stuff (or material stuff – I was punk so my ratty clothes looked deliberate), so much as the lack of understanding how to negotiate institutional rules and when they can be bent or ignored. There are a lot of things people know without really realizing they know them. There is also the reaction of faculty and staff to someone with a lower class accent – not just how peers react.
I also learned the institutional stuff, but if I had known it two years earlier, things would have been a lot less painful. And, I think, looking back, that if I had shed the accent sooner, faculty and staff would have been a lot nicer to me.
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“I am reacting to the idea that because you or Laura did not experience it (what I read you as saying) it didn’t happen, not just that it was less – but that it wasn’t there. If that isn’t what you are saying – then fine.”
If I wanted to say that, trust me, I’d say it.
In the original post, Laura asked why her experience was different. I replied saying my experience was different, too. The appropriate inference: Some experiences are different.
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Or, again, cultural capital also matters. Why is the experience different? You both have a level of cultural capital that made you less likely to experience class conflict.
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“I largely blame that on the (lack of) advising I received.”
The most spectacular advising failure I’ve ever seen was a freshman chem (!) major I had as a Russian TA. She had somehow been allowed to sign up for four different languages in a single term and was (surprise!) struggling terribly with it. I wonder what her family background was like.
I would never, never, never in a million years allow my kids to do that.
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Oh, I know that first generation college students have all sorts of unique challenges. In one article that I wrote for the Atlantic, I talked about a girl who made a series of bad decisions that caused her to rack up tons of debt. She was a first generation kid.
But I was still surprised at the descriptions of Indiana University’s party dorm. I know that the not-quite middle class kids in my dorm had trouble paying the phone bill. They had a harder time with the academics in college. But we all wore the same thing, because it was the years of “grunge” and used overcoats from the Salvation Army. My clothes may have been shabbier than theirs. My dad was a college professor, so we didn’t go on fancy vacations. Nothing to brag about there. I was at that school, because we couldn’t afford the private colleges that I was admitted to. And we all graduated at the same time. That said, I’m SURE that they had a tougher time than I did, but I wonder if the challenges are greater today.
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“But we all wore the same thing, because it was the years of “grunge” and used overcoats from the Salvation Army.”
Aha–that makes a difference.
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This sounds like the argument I had with a classmate about whether it was better to arrive in the US with a college degree or a 1/2 a million dollars. I think we concluded then that there were too many other variables to come to any conclusions.
That’s not to say that the discussion isn’t important, because I think it’s very important to talk about what trips students up and how to address the roadblocks. Some of the issues will be environment, others resources, others individual differences.
I think the costs make the problem worse today. Back in the day when working could reasonably pay the bills, more of the kids at the MU were paying their bills. Now, to use a Picketty term, you have the petite rentiers, with bills paid by parents, and the kids trying to get by on scholarships, aid, and work, even at the MU. And those kids on scholarship — they don”t have a way to pick up the pieces if they fail a couple of classes. Back in the day, I think they could drop out for a term, get a job, and come back with the tuition.
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I’d say 500k to invest, since it will buy you a green card….
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So can the degree. And, in fact, the appropriate degree buys you a green card more easily than the money, in the US (Canada is different).
It was a memorable discussion — my friends’ family came with the money, mine with the degree. We were both at the same school, friend paying in full, me with a lot of help, at a need-blind, meets full need school. Friend’s mom bought a BMW with cash when friend got into med school, for which they were going to play in full. I was generously supported with grants through school and grad school into the future and into jobs. In practice, in our example, neither was better, economically, educationally, . . . . Both were valuable assets.
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“I think the costs make the problem worse today. Back in the day when working could reasonably pay the bills, more of the kids at the MU were paying their bills. Now, to use a Picketty term, you have the petite rentiers, with bills paid by parents, and the kids trying to get by on scholarships, aid, and work, even at the MU. And those kids on scholarship — they don”t have a way to pick up the pieces if they fail a couple of classes. Back in the day, I think they could drop out for a term, get a job, and come back with the tuition.”
Not at an expensive private school they couldn’t. But at a cheaper state school, yeah.
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Yes, the problem is that the cheap State U’s (like Indiana) aren’t nearly as cheap anymore, especially compared with working class/middle class incomes + low skills jobs. The schools that have developed the “high tuition/high aid” models think they’re offering opportunity to the lower income students anyway (and subsidizing them with money from higher income students) (though the data shows otherwise). But, in practice, I think they’re creating a risky choice for low income students, since the scholarships/aid/etc. are of limited duration and do not flex to accommodate more complicated lives (where children aren’t supported with the same bucket of family resources).
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In my experience: My husband had a full ride to a state school via athletics and I got him the green card then citizenship via marriage. We would have been married a bit later than we were (23) if the option to stay past his 1 year visa extension was available. He was a BS-BIO and MBA. Both are ways to get in but the agro and costs with the green card took years off our lives. Canada is now putting restrictions on their pay to stay policy, I think the US is too. Husband arrived here from Canada via Ireland. Dual Irish/US now.
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So I read the book back when it came out, and I think you should too, Laura — a big theme that hasn’t been brought up here is the financial incentive for the state schools to recruit rich, dumb out-of-state kids to the party scene. In the world of dwindling state support for higher ed, they pay high tuition and they don’t demand academics, particularly. (And they have enough connections that a 2.0 GPA on a party planning degree won’t hurt their job prospects.) So yes, I think that the authors think that the scenario they’re describing is very different from the late 80’s.
Also lovely: in the notes on the fieldwork, their descriptions of how the party girls clearly thought they were WAAAAAY above the researchers, including the faculty, in social class… they did recruit one sorority member as an assistant and feel that that was really important to their getting the access they had.
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“Also lovely: in the notes on the fieldwork, their descriptions of how the party girls clearly thought they were WAAAAAY above the researchers, including the faculty, in social class… they did recruit one sorority member as an assistant and feel that that was really important to their getting the access they had.”
Oh yeah. I get these students every so often, usually in bunches because they all take classes in groups. I usually befriend them in a dorky big sister kind of way. Without words, we acknowledge my inferiority and they basically leave me alone to teach the class without talking too much. It’s usually a win-win thing. The last group taught me what “rolling face” means.
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“how the [party girls] clearly thought they were WAAAAAY above the researchers, including the faculty, in social class” that used to drive the grad students I knew at the Ivy’s nuts. It’s a dynamic that has to be carefully monitered at private HS, where parents/students wouldn’t imagine taking the job their teachers have (these days, with the demise of the gentleman teacher I still imagine might exist at some elite boarding schools and the demise of the highly-qualified nun or wife as teacher).
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Sounds fascinating. Will defnitely read this!
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I wonder how this study would turn out in another (non-party) dorm. When I was in college I lived (not by choice) in the party dorm my first year. Several nights a week you could find the party by following the noise. The next year in the decidedly non-party dorm I’m not sure there was ever enough noise for that. In both places there were lots of partying students and lots of studious ones, but if you didn’t know better you could easily think otherwise. I can certainly imagine someone who was just trying to fit in partying way to much if one dorm but working hard and getting good grades in another.
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This whole discussion is fascinating for me and brings up a lot of bad memories of college, where I didn’t fit in at all and had no idea what was going on. The problem is, if you’re not the right social class, you have no idea how to even function in that environment. I was so intimidated by my professors I never went to office hours and never dreamed of asking for assignment extensions. I studied obsessively, terrified of getting a bad grade, and had to work a lot so I had no friends, and I was a big rule-follower (typical for high-achieving working-class kids) so I didn’t drink or party.
You can send a poor kid to college, but if there’s no structure in place to show them the ropes, they will flounder after graduation. I had no idea how a college degree prepared me for a real-world job and didn’t even know what kind of careers I was suited for. I didn’t feel ready for a job, but when my favorite professor tried to talk to me about going for a PhD I was too embarrassed to tell her I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know about funding for grad students and the conversation never got that far because of my awkwardness.
Poor me, right? Ha ha. I’m fine, married an immigrant who became wealthy. But our kids are heading off to college with so many wonderful advantages and life experiences, no embarrassing financial aid, the right shoes and backpacks, and enough self-worth to never be intimidated by their professors. Money makes such a huge difference. My daughter is doing things in college I never could have dreamed of (and I went to a much higher-ranked university, too!)
I think my comment is too long, but reading about that book really struck a nerve. I feel so lucky that everything turned out OK for me, but I wonder if colleges have gotten any better about guiding their less worldly students. Some of them don’t have a clue, don’t even know how to take the first step. When I’ve talked to my daughter about her friends’ plans after college, I don’t get the feeling things are much better nowadays, plus they’re all saddled with huge loans.
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What would have helped? I would like to see more people talking to people about what might help, and, in this might be a case where hindsight is better, than asking people what they need now.
Are these class/expectations/rights/ issues a bigger problem for women then men? Are there just more women in this situation, because the working class boys don’t make it to the U in the first place? or if they did, they were already a personality type that assumed that they were awesome? Are the issues another example of imposter syndrome, which strikes women more fiercely? I’ve seen kids who are first gen make it in a big U, at least make it to graduation, but, they don’t get the outcomes of the more savvy kids, and, in this tougher economy, that might make the difference between working as a barista or starting a real job.
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It’s especially unfortunate for working-class children if they are seduced by their professors into going to graduate school, which is not a good idea for most people. I can see how it could happen if your professors were much more educated and superficially impressive than anyone else you had ever met. Fortunately, my father, who came from a working class family, met my mother, and thought her father was the most impressive man he had ever met (I guess that means even more impressive than Cleanth Brooks and Vincent Scully), so he went to law school.
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Looking back, I’m surprised I navigated the bureaucratic and organizational side of college as well as I did. There were occasional glitches (like the time I totally forgot to sign up for fall housing), but by and large, it was fine.
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I was also first in my family to go to college. Though my parents had no clue how to advise me at all, the Catholic high school I attended at least gave me the academic chops. I did notice that my friends who were from similar backgrounds had an easier time if they were in more vocational style majors (pharmacy, nursing, or engineering/architecture/computer science within a co-op program where the career path was structured and facilitated. I feel like I have my coming out during the late 80s when it was a lot tougher to live as a lesbian in Ohio to thank for propelling me to the west coast, which at least at that time had a better economy where I’ve taken my women’s studies degree self into a successful IT /banking career.
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I thrashed around some in college – didn’t really want to be there, but didn’t want to get drafted. Third year, it was clear they wouldn’t reach my draft number so I renounced student deferment, and after that my presence was voluntary. Things got better after I was there for a positive goal.
My parents had both gone to a flagship university for grad school (met there). Mom’s parents left grade school, but she and all her siblings went to college, and I’ve never heard from her that she had ‘first-generation’ problems. I didn’t get from them the sort of internship access/ academic advice which Paying reports for the rich girls on the floor, I think much of what I learned about making it was from discussion with the other students in the residence coop – where we ate together, and from which all the Greeks had already absented themselves.
What to do? A lot of colleges require incoming freshmen to read a book in the summer before. It is usually some dreadfully trendy work just a half step above YA fiction. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Paying was the assigned reading!
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That is a really interesting idea!
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At the college my kid will attend this fall, the weird Harry Potter-themed sex ed course is mandatory but career counseling is voluntary. We’ve thought about making the career course mandatory at the uni where I teach but we are getting major resistance from all fronts — faculty, administrators and even students.
Also, my sense is that career counseling at a uni is not exactly a lucrative field and it appears that many of the career counselors at my son’s uni are actually faculty wives — nothing wrong with that, but I do wonder how many contacts they might have in employment circles and how much real world experience they might bring to the table.
One thing that they are trying at my son’s school is that there are a lot of “learn about this career” type events at the career center, where they bring in alums and serve a free lunch. THey encourage the kids to start going to these events starting freshman year. I didn’t visit the career center until I was a senior and no one ever told me that I should. I thought that doing so probably would have meant I was “bothering them.” Although I literally had no idea what I was doing, I did get some job offers. Kind of a fluke that I ended up in what was a hot field back then, and the economy was also much better. I don’t think a kid today would have the same kind of luck. I’ve told my kid I want him to be on a first-name basis with someone at the career center so that when that job opportunity shows up in their in-box, they’ll think to themselves “I know who would be perfect for this job!”
However, I also remember the Career people at my uni basically suggesting that everyone go to Barney’s and buy themselves a “really good” new suit, not taking into account at all that many people did not have the money for a high-end new suit, etc. I never understood how all those kids were able to afford to move to New YOrk City right out of college, etc. and I guess I never realized they were being subsidized with family money, etc. It all finally made sense to me when I was in the foreign service and we would have a presidential visit to some foreign city and we (women in our early thirties) would joke about the fact that the White House interns were all wearing outfits that cost around four times as much as our clothes did. I finally understood that their parents had bought them the internships and the clothes and that working was a hobby for them, but not for me.
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Harry Potter themed sex ed course? I… don’t want to know.
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I do!
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Both of my parents were first generation. Not only were they first generation, but they came from seriously fucked up families with no support for higher ed. Their siblings never graduated from high school.
My mom had to deal with an Italian father who forbid her from attending college, because he said that college girls were sluts. She had to defy him to attend Hunter College and then pay for it herself with three jobs and then pay her father rent. When she graduated, she was pregnant with me.
My dad’s dad was dead. His mom worked full time at Marshall Fields in Chicago. He was the youngest kid and nobody paid any attention to him. He attended University of Illinois for two years, where he had some fantastic professors who made him interested in books for the first time. Then he got a free ride at the University of Chicago for the last two years.
My parents are outliers. They were outliers in their families and in their communities. When I think about their story, I’m torn. Part of me says that we have to lower the obstacles for kids of a certain background, so more can succeed. The other part of me says that kids need more grit. Including mine. Maybe “the fight” to succeed is a good thing.
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I’ve been surprised at how long this attitude — women don’t need to be educated– persisted in certain white ethnic communities in the US. I know at least one woman my age who was told she could only go to secretarial school (she worked and paid her own way to a teaching degree).
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My paternal grandfather didn’t believe in paying for the education of his daughters either. My maternal grandfather did, conveniently for myself.
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I feel like some of these paths are being closed — I think that’s part of what feels like a change. There was the GI bill, which undoubtedly provided a path to a lot of very smart but working class/non-college bound men. There were these two year scholarships (Maybe your dad had one to UC?) and I read of them in books — scholarships to the elites after having started at a State U. There were prep school scholarships (I think Obama might have benefited, and I might have as well). There were costs low enough that federal/state aid made schools affordable. There was, also, an expectation of hard work in return for the school (and not college as an experience, even when it did provide one).
Now, it’s also possible that we’re seeing a threshold effect. All our examples are from people who benefited — because we don’t hear about the ones who struggled and failed. And, maybe opportunity has been expanded to the point where, say, the military school aid, ends up going to people who can’t, academically and intellectually, take advantage of it.
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Hm, it might be worthwhile (for me, maybe not for you) to do a history of higher ed among my family members. Two of my father’s brothers have masters degrees now, but they got them later in life. Both grandfathers were WW2 vets but I don’t think either took advantage of the educational benefits and went to college. And I’m realizing some may have tried college and just never graduated. I’ll do that this weekend. 🙂
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“Now, it’s also possible that we’re seeing a threshold effect. All our examples are from people who benefited — because we don’t hear about the ones who struggled and failed. And, maybe opportunity has been expanded to the point where, say, the military school aid, ends up going to people who can’t, academically and intellectually, take advantage of it.”
That all sounds very true. School was cheaper if you wanted to go in the past–but few people went.
My great-grandma (who had only about an 8th grade education–high school required going to boarding school at Washington State University and she got homesick and came home) sent all four of her children to college. One daughter got a home economics degree, married and did fine. One daughter got pregnant and came home, had her baby, and eventually got married to a hometown boy and had a large family and a reasonably middle class life (I believe her husband was involved with log truck driving). One son became a veterinarian (a very natural career path for a farm kid), had a hotsy totsy Pasadena small animal practice, but succumbed to alcoholism at an early age (as was the family curse). My grandfather did a little college, was planning to be a veterinarian like his older brother, wasn’t that hot academically, served in WWII as a medic (thanks to his vet courses), got married in 1946, flirted a bit with the idea of going back to college, but he was 25 by then, and the prospect of living in a trailer and going to school again was not very appealing. (Grandma also had a little college, and I believe 6 of her 7 siblings had at least that–it was a very different family.) Grandpa returned home, worked a lumber mill job for 40+ years and ranched. Thanks no doubt to grandpa’s WWII army earnings, my grandparents never had a mortgage. Grandma worked as a grocery store cashier (which was well below her capabilities), enabling my grandparents to send all three of theiir children to a private college in Seattle (debt-free, naturally). Out of the bunch, there was one English MA, one math MA, and one pharmacist. My dad was the math MA. He and my mom did not achieve a middle class income until I was well into college, but he did have quite a lot of college know-how and even when I was growing up, he just seemed to know a lot of stuff about SATs and admissions that even much more prosperous people didn’t seem to know about at the time.
Apologies for the huge family story.
Analysis:
1. Among my grandpa and his siblings, who were the first of that side of the family to go to college, only 1 out of 4 of the kids who went to college wound up with a college-type career, and as he drank himself to death in middle age, it’s hard to call that a success story.
2. In my particular ancestry along the line that I know best, there wasn’t any huge leap from blue collar to white collar–it was a very incremental, mutigenerational process. Great grandma had an 8th grade education, grandpa was a college dropout who worked blue collar jobs, my dad had an MA but primarily supported our family with blue collar work until I was quite grown up, I’m a dropout from a doctoral program, but have an MA and am an upper middle class SAHM. Who knows what my kids will be? I guess there’s a family gift for failing upward.
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My family history would show the same pattern as Amy P’s, multigenerational educational progress–or maybe what it shows is that increasing amounts of formal education are necessary to maintain the same socio-economic status. E.g., one great-grandfather was a school superintendent, he but did not have a bachelor’s degree, just a state normal school certificate; his three children were an accountant, a lawyer, and a normal school professor, all (I think) with bachelor’s degrees, plus a law degree for the lawyer, with all the degrees earned locally in Illinois; the lawyer’s daughter (my mother) went to college back east, married a Yale man who went on to law school. I’m pretty sure all my mother’s cousins had bachelor’s degrees too, though I’d have to look into that to be sure.
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y81 said:
“My family history would show the same pattern as Amy P’s, multigenerational educational progress–or maybe what it shows is that increasing amounts of formal education are necessary to maintain the same socio-economic status.”
I was wondering about that myself–is it just a pointless multiplication of paper credentials or is there actual progress? But I think that in my family, there has been a gradual accumulation of social capital. My dad somehow knew a lot for the early 90s about SATs and the admissions dance (I’m not really sure HOW he knew all of this), I know a fair bit about the mechanics of graduate school (thanks, Laura!), and I’m very consciously stopping and giving my kids little talks on subjects such as the evils of credit card debt (20% interest!) and how to deal with identity fraud (if it’s not yours–fight!). If they don’t know way more than I did about personal finance at the same age, it won’t be for lack of effort on my part.
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LT (as in very likely at least past 1000 years or so), my family has been pretty static, class wise, at least along my paternal line. They come from a country which was possibly unique in terms of class structure,* but we have been land-owning farmers for as far back as we have records, to the mid 15th century. Higher education has only appeared in the very recent generations, but overall relative wealth or class position hasn’t changed all that much.** This reflects the changing position of higher education rather than the changing position of my family, I would argue.
*Norway has had an almost completely flat social structure since the black plague, which killed off the entire Norwegian aristocracy. Since Norway never was feudal, the death of the upper class left a country of land-owning farmers. To this day, besides the current Norwegian royal family, which was imported from Denmark in the early 20th century, differences of wealth do not reflect and are not considered differences of class.
**I kind of get the sense some of my ancestors immigrated to the US as part of a fad, not for any material life improvements.
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I found this a horrifying read since I live in Indiana and my daughter is a freshman at the local public high where tons and tons of kids head off to IU every year. The popular girls in her class share all these qualities already — pretty, well-off, socially exclusive, obsessed with brand-name clothes, vacations in far-off places, and their profiles on social media. They also party like crazy and they are all intending to go to IU. I asked my daughter what she knows about the Greek scene there and she told me these girls (in the 9th grade!) have *already* chosen their favorite sorority and someone made a run down to Bloomington to buy sweatshirts, which the girls all wear to school. My daughter rolls her eyes and talks about moving to Brooklyn (bless her) but she also tracks these kids like crazy and is clearly fascinated/repelled by them.
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