Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Blog Post #1: Topic Idea
My blog will focus on how socioeconomic background changes college success. I would like to further explore the differences of the experience between those from affluent backgrounds and those from humble backgrounds. I think it will be interesting to explore how it affects not only academics but many other facets of college life like living on campus, relationships and more. "Paying for the Party" was a good introduction to this, but I'd like to examine it further to see the male perspective, as well as the post college lives of the students (did not see this in the required reading).
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This would be an interesting topic of research. "Paying for the Party" is one book worth reading. But for the male experience, you might need to do some original digging. I wonder if anyone has written about how social class background affects success after college more generally? I do know there is some literature on the power of the Ivy League and elite schools in producing bankers and other folks on Wall Street -- and since these schools generally serve the elite (as discussed by The Chosen, for instance), it is clear that they are also helping to reproduce an elite social class. Karen Ho discusses this somewhat in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Those books would help somewhat. I'll see if I can suggest others.
ReplyDeleteA couple additional suggestions: Pew's Economic Mobility Project offers some data, which Matt Bruenig has mined in interesting ways. And there was an interesting article in The Atlantic on "Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality" -- which reminds me of another interesting piece along these lines in the NY Times that I blogged. What these articles suggest is that a lack of information often prevents students -- and potential college students -- from the lower classes from making good choices to advance themselves. They are constrained by the horizons of what they know. Rich kids have a broader social horizon and a better knowledge of how you get ahead in the world, as "Paying for the Party" also suggests.
ReplyDeleteLooking into "How College Maintains Inequality" (Armstrong and Hamilton's subtitle) might be a good place to start.