Privileged careerists, working-class idealists: complicating the relationship of class, college values, and curricular choices

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that class-privileged students value learning for its own sake and study the liberal arts, while working-class students believe college is a means to an end. However, recent studies indicate that these associations are weakening. This paper investigates the link between class background, college values, and curricular choices, specifically course selection. In interviews with 68 working- and upper-middle-class liberal arts majors at two public universities in the northeastern U.S., nearly all students endorsed liberal education values (the belief that higher education is for personal edification) which they claimed to value above labor market outcomes. Working-class students chose courses in accordance with those values; however, upper-middle-class students chose courses for perceived career relevance or those rumored to be an ‘easy A’. Although it appears that college logics have flipped, I argue that they remain rooted in social class. I then consider implications for social reproduction: while working-class students’ adoption of traditional HE values and practices suggests some leveling of the playing field, it means little if privileged students have moved the goalposts to maintain advantage. I apply Sigal Alon’s theory of effectively expanded inequality, whereby the privileged classes adapt to increased access and competition by deploying new strategies to secure their class position.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• Inequality/social exclusion in education
• Social class
• Philosophy of education
• Bourdieu

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. ‘College’ and ‘university’ are used synonymously in the U.S. to mean 4-year, B.A./B.S.-granting postsecondary institutions.

2. For the purposes of this paper, ‘privileged’ refers to class privilege.

3. First-generation status is often treated as proxy for a working-class background.

4. Grade point average is a running average of a students’ final course grades (A – F) converted to numerical form where A = 4.0, B = 3.0, etc. GPA is independent of any degree classification system and is calculated for all students who matriculate at accredited postsecondary institutions.

5. Cultural theorists have argued compellingly that today’s elite are cultural omnivores rather than consumers of exclusively highbrow culture as theorized by Bourdieu (1984) in Distinction (for example, see Peterson & Kern, 1996).

6. This can be conservatively estimated as a B average (a 3.0), the current average for U.S. university students.

7. In later work, he acknowledges the problematic nature of this claim; (see Lehmann, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary L. Scherer

Mary L. Scherer is an assistant professor of sociology at Sam Houston State University. She earned her doctorate in sociology from UMass-Amherst. Her research areas include social class, higher education, qualitative methods, the intersections of race, gender and class, and urban sociology. Her research focuses on social inequality in higher education, specifically the effects of class-cultural background on students’ academic experiences at different types of colleges and universities. She is particularly interested in how some institutions reproduce inequality between working-class students and their class-privileged counterparts while others may reduce it. Her research is grounded in her experiences teaching at very different institutions, from an elite liberal arts college to a comprehensive regional public university. Her work has appeared in Sociological Forum, Race, Gender, & Class, City & Community, and Sociation Today.