{"id":5544,"date":"2012-12-26T08:17:36","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T12:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=5544"},"modified":"2012-12-26T08:53:42","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T12:53:42","slug":"social-class-higher-education-and-random-thoughts-from-a-parent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=5544","title":{"rendered":"Social class, higher education, and random thoughts from a parent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason DeParle’s New York Times<\/em>\u00a0December 22\u00a0profile of three young women from Galveston<\/a>\u00a0has created a great deal of online discussion despite the holidays and semester breaks, when you’d expect most faculty and higher ed journalists are ignoring these things. But the attention is deserved, both because DeParle’s piece is beautifully detailed and because he raises important issues about the difficulty working-class teenagers face in attending and completing college. In the article, you get a brief glimpse of the limits of programs like Upward Bound, the often-maddening financial aid bureaucracy at private colleges and universities, the difficult choices many of today’s college students face, and the ways in which social and cultural capital operate to magnify inequality. At one level, the three women are examples of successful educational changes in the past half-century: all graduated high school, and all have a few years of college, more than many in their own peers in Galveston or their parents’ generation of peers.<\/p>\n

And yet DeParle is correct to describe their higher education paths as unfulfilled promises and a damning failure of institutionalized cooling-out<\/a>. If after reading the article you’d like to throw the book at Emory’s financial aid office for underestimating the financial need of Angelica Gonzales, your view is broadly shared. If you want to shake these women’s current and former boyfriends for holding them back, be my guest. If you want to ask how an Upward Bound counselor didn’t coach high school seniors on the essential deadlines for filing material, I have the same questions.<\/p>\n

From a parent’s perspective–my daughter is in the middle of her junior year in college, and my son is a high school senior–I am troubled by Annette Lareau’s elision of what happens in college with her cultural-capital research on middle-school-aged children:<\/p>\n

Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the affluent also enjoy an advocacy edge: parents are quicker to intervene when their children need help, while low-income families often feel intimidated and defer to school officials, a problem that would trail Melissa and Angelica in their journey through college.<\/p>\n

\u201cMiddle-class students get the sense the institution will respond to them,\u201d Professor Lareau said. \u201cWorking-class and poor students don\u2019t experience that. It makes them more vulnerable.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The three women profiled by DeParle do not fit Lareau’s dichotomy of laissez-faire parenting by working-class parents and “concerted cultivation” by professional parents: the women busted out in high school, highly motivated to achieve and using the resources given them as substitutes for whatever cultural capital Lareau observed in her professional-class family sample<\/a>. Lareau’s portrayal of professional-class parents as successful<\/em> helicoptering is inconsistent with her book’s argument (that childhood experiences under “concerted cultivation” teach how to be a successful young adult in a professional track) and also at odds with my observations as a parent and faculty member. The few helicopter parents I have encountered in my role as a faculty member have not generally helped their children. The college students who survive academic and personal difficulties have a range of resources, but parents swooping in to call financial aid and the presidents’ office is not what I think of as great support, nor is it what students tell me they need. To paraphrase from the title of a book on parenting young adults, college students tell me that in addition to financial support, they see their parents as most important as consultants for being a functioning adult.<\/p>\n

What the young women in the DeParle story and their peers need is coaching, not helicoptering, and more effective public policies. Some thoughts on related issues:<\/p>\n