<p>Has anyone else read this book yet? I just finished it, and found it an eye-opener. </p>
<p>We all have preconceived notions about college life, based on experience and anecdote. This book is based on real data, a research study of 50+ women from the day the move into the freshman dorm, to post-college outcomes. Lots of interviews and data - real stories. Its conclusion is that many universities institutionalize a "party pathway" that is appealing to wealthy full tuition students, but is an obstacle to success for middle class and below. </p>
<p>Whether or not you share that conclusion, it is an interesting read for people with kids in college currently, or soon to be.</p>
<p>Seems like it is more about how inherited SES continues to provide significant advantages once students are in college and after graduation, rather than the overemphasis on partying at the expense of academics per se.</p>
<p>It goes on to say the advantages of high SES in the university setting are made possible by the institutional design, not just from chance. This design also creates roadblocks to upward mobility from lower SES, which was the original promise of public education. </p>
<p>I think this is a result of privatization of large public U’s, and focus on full tuition OOS students. It’s unfortunate that so many of these students are attracted to the “party pathway”, perpetuating the issue. The University is giving them what they want.</p>
<p>Other than the fact that expensive tuition can saddle lower-SES students with exhorbitant loans thus limiting their future options, I cannot tell from ucb’s links what the authors conclude the universities are doing to “disadvantage” the lower SES students. If universities are going to charge high tuition, then it makes sense that they need to make the experience “worth it” for those who are paying the full amount.</p>
<p>The authors found that social acceptance on campus was a factor in their study, limiting social networks for lower SES women, which are important to success during and after college. In addition, parental support and savvy was not as strong for lower SES in their study, and they also found this to be an important factor in overall success.</p>
<p>50 non-random people from 1 dorm for a “study” Ok then. Not impressed. Rich girls party some at college that was pretty easy to get into at the time. WOW–alert the media.
Wonder if this blast from the recent past was in that dorm.</p>
<p>I’m not really sure why anyone would imagine being higher SES would not continue to confer advantages. This is one of the reasons studies show that low SES are the highest beneficiaries of selective school admission. </p>
<p>But I’ve noticed too that there is a bit of a different attitude among students today about this. When I was in college, the child of a working class background, I was always happy to be with successful people and their families. I watched what they did and listened to them. I learned. I was mentored by parents of my peers, and attribute much of my success to their assistance. </p>
<p>I’ve tried to pay this forward with friends of my own kids.</p>
<p>The articles point to specific ways that colleges put lower-SES students at a disadvantage:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Lack of access to advising. This impacts a variety of decisions including choice of major and course sequencing (leading to extra semesters and more debt). This advising comes in the form of both savvy advice directly from parents as well as the counsel obtained through the assistance of savvy parents.</p></li>
<li><p>Tuition increases and high student fees to pay for gratuitous amenities. These appeal to high-SES students who can afford them but saddle the lower-SES students with more debt. Students who graduate with high levels of debt (and do not have starting salaries supplemented by wealthy parents) simply cannot interact with the same social circles as no-debt/parental assistance kids.</p></li>
<li><p>Recruiting international and full-paying OOS students results in the “country club-ification” of public schools. Less emphasis is placed on academics since parental networking is more important after graduation than course work and performance.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If it was a level playing field, then grades would be the differentiator in college, and low SES would be able to move up through academic performance alone. Higher SES would have to prove themselves academically also.</p>
<p>College has always been this way, to a large extent. </p>
<p>However, I really believe colleges ought not be allowed to charge more than Pell to instate Pell eligible students. Just this one simple fix would make it as workable as it was when we were they age. </p>
<p>I truly believe we are generation theft with all the debt we are loading onto our kids. Nobody did that to us.</p>
<p>ETA. No. Higher SES is not ever going to have to prove themselves in the same way academically. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Lower SES students should take advantage of this and make connections.</p>
<p>Are you saying that public universities intentionally keep their advising resources secret from lower SES students? I don’t think one can argue that there is something wrong with high SES students having parents who assist them in this regard. Perhaps what is meant is that public u’s need to do a better job of making advising options well-known to lower income students.</p>
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<p>As a full-pay parent three times over, I can tell you that I do not find those “gratuitous amenities” appealing at all. I’ll take lower tuition over gyms, pools, luxury dorms and multiple dining options any day.</p>
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<p>Not if a student wants to continue on to grad school, but I do agree that parental networking definitely helps with finding jobs. I don’t know what the solution would be to put lower SES students on equal footing, other than the uni’s improving their career placement services.</p>
<p>Sample size of 50 is too small to draw any conclusions. Not sure we need a statistical study to learn whether high SAS is better than low SES, but there are many studies out there that are more robust than that cited in this book.</p>
<p>We are well off, and my wife and her siblings are all doctors. Two of her nephews and nieces are in medical school, and I would not be surprised if our bright daughter becomes a doctor. She will not lack advice on how to get into medical school, and she won’t be distracted in college by financial concerns (unless we suffer a big reverse). But our daughter is still going to have to take organic chemistry, and calculus, and take the MCAT etc – she <em>will</em> have to prove herself academically, a message we are sending all of our children.</p>
<p>Well yes Bel. But just because my kids have done well academically does not mean they haven’t benefitted by certain things I had to learn to do from others. </p>
<p>Studies have shown that kids from higher SES backgrounds know how to get results and get better results even from doctor visits simply because they know how to speak to people. </p>
<p>Being well travelled was a big part of my
Oldest getting her career job out of school. Part of it was having a lot in common with her boss. </p>
<p>These kinds of things just aren’t part if the curriculum. Clearly she had a good CV and recs, but they spent zero time on that and a lot of time on places they had both spent a lot of time in outside the country.</p>
<p>A lot of the privilege of wealth and connection is the ability to ignore bourgeois values. Rich kids can party through college and then have daddy call a former business partner; the rest of the world needs to buckle down and work. Rich people can have children out of wedlock and pay for nannies and tutors; when the poor do that, they are sealing their own demise. Rich people can buy new things every season and new cars every few years; everyone else is best off using things until they wear out.</p>
<p>In a more sane world, we would tell middle-class and working-class kids that college is NOT the great equaliser: their wealthy classmates can party and take easy majors, and, upon graduation, get fine jobs through their connections and their innate comfort with the elite who run things. But since life isn’t fair, the same won’t happen to a working-class student who parties and he needs to run his life differently.</p>
<p>Bel, I don’t think anyone here is arguing that wealthy kids are exempt from organic chemistry requirements; what we are arguing is that for your basic entry-level jobs, SES [connections, mannerisms, comfort with the world, etc.] matters a lot, and often matters much more than grades do.</p>
<p>While there is a difficult academic path to get to the MD, note that there are substantial advantages to coming from a high SES family if one does pre-med. This is not to say that coming from a high SES family makes it easy to get an MD, but coming from a low SES family makes it more difficult.</p>
<ul>
<li>The high SES student may be less likely to need student loans to afford undergraduate school, and more likely to have parental help with expensive medical school costs.</li>
<li>The high SES student may not feel the pressure to major in something overtly pre-professional in order to have a backup plan in case s/he does not go to medical school, since s/he is more likely to be able to make use of parental connections to gain employment as a failed pre-med with a non-career-specific major (especially if it is biology). Overtly pre-professional majors may consume more schedule space, making fitting pre-med courses into the schedule more difficult, may not have as much room to cherry-pick “easy A” courses to boost GPA, and tend to be frowned upon by medical school admissions.</li>
<li>The high SES student may have less need to work to earn money to pay for school, allowing more time for the usual pre-med extracurriculars.</li>
<li>The high SES student’s ability to afford more possible undergraduate colleges may allow choosing one with a higher level of grade inflation or otherwise better optimized for pre-med purposes.</li>
<li>The low SES student who starts at a community college for cost reasons may find that medical school admissions frowns upon taking pre-med courses at community colleges.</li>
</ul>
<p>Depends what you mean by equalizer. College makes you much better off than your poor/working class parents in many/most cases. Do you join the elite–maybe not but more still is a lot better. There still are plenty of good jobs for lower SES kids coming out of college. There are not that many rich kids to begin with. They cant begin to fill many of the jobs and many jobs require actual skills–tech, engineering, accounting, high finance, medical etc etc. No rich kid gets to play nurse or bridge engineer no matter what.</p>