Social Class Sentiments in Formation: Influence of Class Socialization, College Socialization, and Class Aspirations

Abstract

What explains social class sentiments among public university students? This empirical study uses a distributional model to define social class, which places students and their families with comparable resources over time into similar class locations. We survey a sample of students enrolled in four different schools at a large public midwestern university. The research finds that examining experiences with past, present, and anticipated or aspired future class locations is necessary for understanding the attitudes and beliefs associated with class that are held by young adults. We contend that future research designed to validly measure class consciousness or class sentiments must recognize that for some segments of the general population, class sentiments are not fixed, but are in a process of formation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the anonymous reviewers who made constructive and helpful suggestions.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Not all young adults preparing to enter the labor force are in colleges or universities. A known percentage of high school graduates and a number of persons who do not complete high school enter the labor force each year. Arguably, persons who do not complete formal education beyond high school, ceteris paribus, are less likely than college students to alter their social class origins and therefore, their class sentiments. Nonetheless, the ideal study of class sentiments would examine the problem across all socioeconomic segments of society.

² Social class location does not vary considerably among public university undergraduates. Nonetheless, we measure social class location with four variables and we do find some variation in the students' perceptions of their parent's social class location.

³ The university has 10 schools: agriculture, consumer and family sciences, education, engineering, liberal arts, management, pharmacy, nursing and health sciences, science, technology, and veterinary sciences. We selected four schools for this research, the two with the highest undergraduate enrollments (engineering and liberal arts), and two that enroll students with presumably varied social class interests (management and education).

⁴ The student enrollment is 37,871; 57.8 percent are men and 42.2 percent are women. There are more men than women on the campus because of the engineering, science, and technology enrollments. Because we administered the survey to education and liberal arts students, the sample is 49.6 percent female. The sample, relative to the university enrollment, has a smaller percentage of engineering and liberal arts students, and a larger percentage of education and management students.

⁵ This sampling procedure may introduce a bias. Only the students who attended classes on the day that the survey was administered participated in the study.

⁶ Executives, proprietors, or major professionals were coded “1.” Managers and other professionals were coded “2.” Owners of small businesses or administrative personnel were coded “3.” Clerical workers, sales workers, and technicians were coded “4.” Skilled workers were coded “5,” semiskilled workers and machine operators were coded “6,” and unskilled employees were coded “7.”

⁷ Students are not expected to know the amount of their parent's incomes. Our intention was to measure the respondent's perception of how much income parents earned, relative to the average family in the state.

⁸ To conduct preliminary analysis of the items, we used a principal components (with varimax rotation) factor analysis technique and found that three factors, with eigenvalues of 3.0, 2.1, and 1.0 emerged. The three factors account for 56 percent of the cumulative variance in the items. The national public opinion survey data (Social Research Institute 2001) yielded the same three factors, with eigenvalues of 3.7, 2.0, and 1.0. In the national survey of adults in the general population, the three factors account for 61 percent of the cumulative variance in the items. Thus, we are confident that the 11 items adequately reflect three distinctive types of social class sentiments.

⁹ Analysis of variance and post hoc Scheffe tests showed that engineering and education students had similar social class sentiments. For the stepwise regression analysis, we created a block of dummy variables to represent schools or college majors. We used 1/0 codes for liberal arts, management, and engineering or education students. In the regression equation, we omitted the engineering or education value to avoid singularity.

¹⁰ We constructed additional interaction terms, that is, gender × class socialization, gender × college major, and college major × class aspirations. None of the additional interaction terms were significant. Thus, they are not included in the regression models that we present here.

¹¹ In bivariate analyses that are not shown here, class aspirations are significantly related to all three types of class sentiments. Class socialization is significantly related to the “influence of corporations” type of sentiment only.