scholarly journals Schoolcraft vs. Becoming Somebody: Competing Visions of Higher Education among Working-Class College Students

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
Academic Success ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Occupational Interests ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Official View

By exploring the meanings working-class students attribute to college and academic success, this article uncovers important and surprising disjunctures between the official view of college as a pathway to social mobility and students’ own needs and aspirations. While some working-class college students do use college as a “ticket out of the working class,” others reject this view, arguing that the twin functions of college as educative and credentialing should be delinked. It is important for researchers, as well as educators and policymakers, to recognize that working-class college students are not homogenous with regard to occupational interests and expectations of social mobility.

Moving Up without Losing Your Way

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Morton
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
College Experience ◽  
Career Opportunities ◽  
Community Finding

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, this book looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. The book reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, the book seeks to reverse this course. It urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. The book paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves.

Organizing Working-Class Academics: A Collective History

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-178
Author(s):  
Allison Hurst ◽  
Tery Griffin ◽  
Alfred Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Us ◽  
Working Class Studies ◽  
Key Questions

In 2008, the Association of Working-Class Academics was founded in upstate New York by three former members of the Working-Class/Poverty-Class Academics Listserv. The Association had three goals: advocate for WCAs, build organizations on campuses that would support both working-class college students and WCAs, and support scholarship on issues relevant to class and higher education. The Association grew from a small handful to more than 200 members located in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. In 2015, it was formally merged with the Working-Class Studies Association, and continues there as a special section for WCSA members. This is our collective account of the organization, told through responses to four key questions. We hope this history will provide insight and lessons for anyone interested in building similar organizations.

“Helping Me Learn New Things Every Day”: The Power of Community College Students’ Writing Across Genres

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-76
Author(s):  
Tanzina Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
Community College ◽  
Academic Success ◽  
Community College Students ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Diverse Students ◽  
Linguistically Diverse Students ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Genre Knowledge

Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letter, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they reflected on higher education in varied ways to achieve differing sociocultural goals with distinct audiences. Finally, students’ experience with classroom and narrative genres predicted their GPA, implying that students’ genre knowledge signals and influences their academic success. These findings demonstrate how diverse students attending community college can use genres as resources to further their social and academic development.

Coached for the Classroom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McCrory Calarco
Keyword(s):  
Academic Success ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Working Class Students

Chapter 1 explores how parents coach children to use class-based strategies for managing challenges at school and how children internalize those lessons. Middle-class parents felt a deep responsibility for their children’s academic success, and they taught children to secure that success using strategies of influence. Middle-class children thereby learned that when they encountered problems at school, they should use their teachers as resources, avoid consequences, and be assertive in seeking support. Working-class parents felt primarily responsible for their children’s character development. Reflecting on their own experience in school, they worried that teachers might punish students who complained or sought special favors. Thus, working-class parents taught their children to practice strategies of deference. As a result, working-class students learned to treat teachers with respect, take responsibility for their actions, and tackle problems on their own.

scholarly journals Excepcionalidad meritocrática y política de acción afirmativa en la educación superior en Chile

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Briones ◽  
Daniel Leyton
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Admission Policy ◽  
Affirmative Action Policy ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University

Based on Foucauldian notions such as discourse, regime of subjectification, and governmentality, the article analyzes one of the dominant discourses constituting the affirmative action policy in higher education in Chile. Our analysis is based principally on main documents associated to the discursive formation of the Support and Effective Access into Higher Education Program (PACE by its acronyms in Spanish), the main affirmative action program in that country. We argue that this program deploys a meritocratic exceptionality subjectification regime that governs inclusion and right to HE through a discursive chain that articulates notions of selectivity, excellence, quality, talent, sacrifice, responsibilization and critique against the dominant admission policy. This articulation is inscribed and mobilized in the discourses about working-class students, their families and schools, and the university. This makes possible, on the one hand, the legitimacy of the program as well as of their students as new constituencies with the right to HE, and on the other hand, the strategic foreclosure and invisibilisation of the structures of inequality that sustain the majority of working-class students and their knowledges excluded from HE.

Tightening bonds and professional access

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Payne
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Participation Rate ◽  
Student Diversity ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Occupational Outcome ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Personal Qualities

This chapter extends the sceptical discussion of meritocracy to higher education, and access to employment. The professions’ partially successful attempt to achieve a closed shop restricts entry by those from less advantaged homes, and the less academically skilled of their own children. Data on qualifications and ‘personal qualities’ required for recruitment show detailed connections between social and cultural capital, and occupational outcome, are complicated. Higher education is status stratified: not all degrees are equal. The Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (‘HEIPR’) exaggerates the number of graduates; other statistical sources do not include data on social class. Increasing student diversity does not automatically increase mobility: working class students continue to be disadvantaged once they enter university. Meritocratic and individualistic explanations of mobility are inadequate.

Students, Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism

Slavic Review ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Connelly
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Upward Social Mobility

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.

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