Learning about inequality in unequal America: How heterogeneity in college shapes students’ beliefs about meritocracy and racial discrimination

Mijs, Jonathan Jan Benjamin

doi:10.1016/j.rssm.2023.100814

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 63 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…On most campuses, poor and working-class students are denied the spaces for individual and collective critique, anger, or activism around class inequalities in their communities and on campus (Gill and Orgad 2018;Hurst and Warnock 2015;Wildhagen 2015). Few college students learn about the depths and consequences of economic and educational inequalities in the U.S. (Bañales 2019;Mijs 2023;Parkhouse and Arnold 2019) and all students are likely to graduate deeply naive about their own class positions (Aries and Seider 2007) and about policy debates around addressing growing inequalities (Haney 2015;Lee 2017;Lehmann 2014;Rice et al 2017;Smith et al 2016).…”

Section: Resounding Campus Silencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and Precarity: First Generation Students Compose Digital Stories of Class Mobility

Van Galen

2023

Social Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

bell hooks writes that to sustain myths of meritocratic educational systems, college campuses remain silent about social class differences. For poor and working-class first-generation college students, this silence means learning little about structural obstacles placed in the way of aspiring to and then succeeding in college. They commonly graduate from under-financed high schools in economically declining communities, yet internalize shame and silence as they struggle to compete with more privileged peers once on campus. Toward breaking that silence, I facilitated digital storytelling workshops with 78 diverse first and former first-generation students across the U.S. and later interviewed them. Drawing on Bourdieu’s analysis of class as both internalized and material, the paper discusses how these storytellers made class inequalities visible in speaking of their daily lives. From an emerging collective identity, they reported a new sense of agency and voice.

show abstract