Multiplying Status Locations

2018 ◽  
pp. 158-202
Author(s):  
Steven Brint
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
High Status ◽  
Leadership Programs ◽  
Elite Colleges ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
High Achieving

This chapter examines how, in the college-for-all era, colleges and universities simultaneously maintained and expanded high-status tracks and locations. In most cases the mechanisms that colleges used to encourage high-achieving and motivated students reinforced rather than redistributed family-related social advantages. These mechanisms ranged from increased levels of selectivity in the country's elite colleges and the maintenance of rigorous standards in quantitative majors to the addition of new honors and leadership programs. By multiplying status locations on campus, colleges and universities maintained and invented new hierarchies of privilege even as they accommodated intensifying demands for democratization and equity. Diversity was desirable so long as it did not harm white upper-middle-class students' own opportunities.

A Fine Balance: Negotiating fashion and respectable femininity in middle-class Hyderabad, India

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMANDA GILBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
High Status ◽  
Double Binds ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractDrawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.

Early Days

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
Chester E. Finn ◽  
Andrew E. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
High Schools ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Advanced Placement ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Growing Pains ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Prep Schools

This chapter discusses the earliest days of Advanced Placement (AP) and the growing pains of its first two decades. At the outset, AP was explicitly intended for the strongest students at top high schools, those who “already had the luxury of being bound for prestigious colleges and universities, room to excel and an inducement to continue to work hard.” However, while the lore surrounding the program's birth associates it mostly with eastern prep schools, in fact the “pioneer schools” were a mix of independent and public institutions, the latter mostly located in upper-middle-class suburbs of major cities in the East and Midwest. Acceleration and degree credit were not the only appeal—or benefit—of AP. Many students were “content with the enrichment that the AP courses had provided” and “never applied for either AP credit or advancement in college.” For all the excitement and expansion, however, after two decades AP remained predominantly a boon for relatively privileged kids.

Privilege Accumulation Among Upper Middle-Class Youth in Mexico

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minor Mora-Salas ◽  
Orlandina de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Mexican Families ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Class Youth

This chapter demonstrates how upper middle-class Mexican families mobilize a vast array of social, cultural, and economic resources to expand their children’s opportunities in life and ensure the intergenerational transmission of their social position. The authors analyze salient characteristics of families’ socioeconomic and demographics in the life histories of a group of young Mexicans from an upper middle-class background. Many believe that micro-social processes, especially surrounding education, are key to understanding how upper-class families mobilize their various resources to shape their children’s life trajectories. These families accumulate social advantages over time that accrue to their progeny and benefit them upon their entrance to the labor market.

Suburban Opportunity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fiction

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-177
Author(s):  
Sarah Bilston
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Popular Novel

Sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes plenty of jokes at the expense of the suburbanites reading her novels, poking fun at the interests they shared, the ambitions they nursed. Yet the suburbs function narratively in her works as places of movement, opportunity, and change. Braddon deploys the plot arc of the suburban popular novel (first discussed in chapter 3) to lift worthy heroines out of the lives into which they were born. Striving heroines begin in dusty, down-at-heel Camberwell; if they work hard, and are lucky, they are rewarded with the pleasures of upper-middle-class Richmond.

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