The elephant in the (class) room: cultural capital as personal differences and college segregation

Abstract

This article presents the results of two projects exploring the experiences of working-class students in elite colleges. The first project is a nation-wide study that included 19 focus groups with 183 program participants of a condonable loan program, and additional interviews and focus groups with non-scholarship students, professors and administrators. The second project is an in-depth ethnographic project including 61 interviews with beneficiaries of the same condonable loan program and multiple ethnographic observations over 4 years. Two main consistent related themes appeared in the data. First, cultural capital and, more generally, social class differences are perceived as the result of personal preferences and individual choice. Second, this perception helps making social class invisible and allows the interpretation of college segregation as independent of the class structure. Both themes are related with the lack of open conversations about class in elite colleges and to the frames of abstract liberalism previously identified for the case of racism.

Keywords:

• Qualitative methods
• higher Education
• social class
• segregation
• cultural capital

Acknowledgments

Tiffany Jimenez, Paola Camelo, Mariana Vargas and Diana Viáfara were crucial for the qualitative fieldwork and analysis as research assistants. We are also thankful to the Colombia National Planning Department authorized us to use the data we collected, together with other co-investigators to generate a baseline for the Ser Pilo Paga program (Alvarez et al., 2017).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a sample of the main questions, go to https://osf.io/pn9s2?view_only=77dd43e2f2a546d8b2af007cad66f947.

Additional information

Funding

One of the authors (Professor Álvarez-Rivadulla) received the FAPA funding from the Universidad de los Andes for the in-depth study.

Notes on contributors

Javier Corredor

Javier Corredor is an associate professor at the psychology department of Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has a Ph.D. in Instruction and Learning from the University of Pittsburgh and has collaborated with the Games and Learning Society as visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also has conducted research on the process of historical memory education as a visiting scholar at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Specifically, his work has focused on the learning of history and historical memory in the context of the peace process in Colombia, and on how historical narratives define positions towards transitional justice. More generally his work focuses on the relationship among cognition, media and education. He is interested on the process of learning in informal environments, and on the impact of technology on human thinking, language and identity. His research has also included projects devoted to understand quantitively and qualitatively the demands that elite environments impose on low-SES students, and, more broadly, to characterize the dynamics of inequality and social class in very unequal societies.

María José Álvarez-Rivadulla

María José Álvarez-Rivadulla is a Full Professor of Sociology at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. She is interested in urban sociology and in the study of inequalities, particularly in the interaction of socioeconomic and spatial types of inequality. She pays attention to both marginality and privilege. She has also worked on social movements and on research methods, with special interest in mixed methods. Her book, Squatters and the politics of marginality in Uruguay, focuses on poor people’s politics in the city. It analyzes the history of the informal city in Montevideo, Uruguay, from the middle of the twentieth century to our days, paying attention to the interaction of squatters and the state from a social movement perspective. She has also written about gated communities in Montevideo, and residential segregation, social housing, and cable cars and slum upgrading in Colombian cities. She is currently looking at segregation in educational settings, studying the experiences of mobility and inter class interactions of underprivileged students in elite higher education (studying an innovative government program in Colombia).