Colleges that urge first-generation students to be more independent — to express themselves, find their passions, and realize their individual potential — may be putting some of those students at an academic disadvantage.
Researchers call it a “cultural mismatch.” The seemingly positive values of empowering oneself and influencing the world — qualities that are often touted at universities — contradict the values of students with working-class backgrounds, who may have been raised to prize interdependent traits such as responding to others’ needs and being part of a community, a new study suggests.
“Culture can be really powerful in making people feel like they belong” in a college environment, said Nicole Stephens, the lead author of the study. “If you feel like you belong, it can really shape your academic achievement.”
When students find themselves in a college that doesn’t reflect their interdependent values, they flounder, researchers say. This is especially true for students who are the first in their families to go to college, according to the new study, which is from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
College Classes & Social Classes
13 Responses to College Classes & Social Classes
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I believe there are exceptions to this, notably DePaul University in Chicago, where my daughter is a freshman. I can comment only peripherally on the fact that DePaul is a Catholic school (the largest in the nation) — and I’m inclined to do so positively and constructively — and I mention it because my daughter — raised Jewish and with a Pagan father
— jumped right into their community service ethic and never looked back. I’d be proud of her regardless, but the DePaul community is the perfect place for her to shine and make a real difference in the lives of people around her, people she can see and touch. -
baconboy says:
If you look at the markers of interdependence, it basically comes down to getting a degree to help one’s family, rather than ‘finding oneself’. And this accords with my experience. Most of my students are from working class backgrounds and their primary goal does seem to be to help out their families — mostly because the majority of them are single moms. I’m not so sure that it is community oriented as it is family oriented.
But I also wonder if the problem is more about assertiveness vs. passivity. For the most part the upper class students are more assertive than they are independent, while the working class students are more passive and unwilling/able to ask for help.
Though I’d be interested to know which colleges they looked at. This might only be a problem at the more ‘elite’ schools. -
Charles Cosimano says:
Another thing that should be considered is that middle class students are used to competiton. Working class students have rarely been in any competitive situation other than gym class.
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Fran Macadam says:
Oh, “working class” students have been in a very competitive environment their entire life, one that they have been on the losing side of – after all, they have to work, while the other classes, by definition, don’t, yet profit more from that work than they do.
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Fran makes a good point. One of the issues that working class students face in college is that they have to, you know, work. Most of my students are working full-time, going to school full-time, and parenting full-time. It really puts a lot of obstacles in their way. And this is why I admire them so much and they are so fun to teach. There is no sense of entitlement and most of them are still capable of believing in something.
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Andrea says:
Some of those observations are true of the students I teach and it has some impact on the assignments I’ve given.
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AnotherBeliever says:
This is an interesting study. One of my grandfathers completed a college degree on the GI Bill, but no one else in the family had completed college. An obligation to my family was a very large motivating factor when I went away to college. I wanted to give back financially. I wanted to make my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles proud. I wanted to be an example for my cousins and brothers. Of course, I also wanted to not struggle from paycheck to paycheck like my parents did. But that wasn’t my inspiration. Family was.
Colleges and universities should take these differences into consideration and meet working class students halfway. Interdependence and collaboration are the norm in the many professional workplaces in today’s economy. But successful students will also have to learn and “grow out of” certain counterproductive aspects of the working class mindset, such as passivity, fatalism, and some types of interpersonal aggression. It truly is a matter of learning a new work culture.
My mother stocks shelves at Wal Mart. I am a mid-grade professional employee with a Federal agency. I remember discussing with her recently something about being late to work, and she was concerned I might be reprimanded. It finally occurred to me that we work on different planets. She has a job. In her world, the boss is an adversary, reprimands are common, expectations of competence and autonomy are low. There’s not much chance of advancement and turnover is high. I have a career. In my world, upper management may be an adversary, but the boss has my back and is nearly my peer. I am given the benefit of the doubt, if late, and simply make up the time, on my own. Autonomy, initiative, and competence are expected. The men and women I work with now will be my colleagues for decades to come. The management track is there for the taking (not that I want it.)
Completely different worlds…
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JonF says:
As a working class kid who went to college, I have no idea what this is talking about. OK, I graduated 20 years ago, and I was a physics major, a discipline not noted for hippy-dippy “do your own thing” stuff. Still, I can’t recall any classes with one possible exception where “do your own thing” was the rule. The exception was my “Practical Botany” class, but as the son and stepson of avid gardeners that was hardly alien to me.
More disconcerting in my day was the gap between me and students who had well-to-do parents (common at the Univ of Mich) and were fully funded by family money. I had one friend who had never worked a day in his life; I had been working since 16, and worked c. 30 hours a week in college. The friend was a good guy, and his family (whom I met and stayed with on one break) were certainly not snooty rich people types. But there was a cultural disjunction, as when I first told him about helping my folks garden in the summer and you’d have thought I’d confessed a penchant for something kinky “But we have a service to do all that for us,” was his puzzled response,
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JustMe says:
First of all, I have a hard time expressing just how annoyed I am at the format of that article. It had no more content than an abstract peppered with a few quotes.
I’d imagine part of the cultural divide is the understanding of the unspoken assumptions of college. Namely that classes are a forum for “expanding your mind” and “fulfilling your potential,” but college, as an experience, is a place where you leverage the place to accomplish your goals, something that working class students might not “get” as well because those assumptions at some schools aren’t articulated.
I’ll use an example of the sciences to show how this dynamic plays out. Students with a more educated background spend their summers getting paid internships in their fields, working with professors or companies that give them the experience they need to build a credible resume. The working class students head back home for the summer to go back to their high school job waiting tables (maybe helping out their families), making good money but limiting their options.
In a college where there’s a huge cultural mismatch, the first-generation college students may perceive (correctly) that there is a whole bunch of stuff going on around them that they’re not connected to and feel frustrated and find their opportunities blunted. Quite possibly worse, they might not realize this stuff is going on at all. No one tells them that majoring in English Literature is being treated as an intellectual mind-expanding experience as a waypoint towards getting a job at McKinsey & Co. by their peers or that their summers need to be spent at internships if they ever want a full time job at a museum, but that’s what everyone else around them is doing because they just “know” that.
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Fran, you totally missing the point. Working class students may be in macro competition, but not in a micro one. In other words, they have never had to compete against students with a massive cultural advantage going in nor were they probably given any serious academic competition before. In effect they were the big fish in the small pond moving into a bigger pond with bigger fish.
Now this is a recent phenomenon. When us boomers went off to college it was a different world. The bulk of us were first generation and so we were not up against an established overclass as it exists now.
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Re: In effect they were the big fish in the small pond moving into a bigger pond with bigger fish
Doesn’t that pretty much describe any academically capable student moving from high school to college?
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Owen W says:
Just jumping into the dispute of the last two posts -
No, for many of the more fortunate students, the jump from high school to college is small (or even negative). I attended a very tough/selective college within the last decade, and there wasn’t a noticeable jump up in intellectual horsepower from the top cohort of my high school class. For me personally, there was a bit of an adjustment to the slickness/smoothness of the prep school kids – my high school and town specialized in math/science (read: nerds).
I think the key is encountering people smarter than oneself early. If that hasn’t happened prior to college, I can imagine that there would be a temptation to retreat and isolate oneself once in the ‘big pond.’
Interesting idea but I would question the premise. What evidence is there that working class students have been raised to value responding to other’s needs or being part of a community? It is possible that the individual student has been raised to think exactly the opposite, charitably assuming they have been raised to think at all.
I think that the folks at Kellogg should remember that the working class now is not the working class of say, 60 years ago and the only thing it’s members actually respond to may be the price of beer.
The problem with working class students feeling that they belong is probably simply due to their being working class. It is not a question of values, it is a question of are they valued and as the contemporary working class is as valued as ants at a picnic… Do they even speak the same cultural language as their fellow students? There are a lot of unspoken assumptions, which could be defined as values, that are vastly different between those of the middle class and the working class but I don’t think the ones the study mentions are actually among them.