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.