The Campus Social Class Climate

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer 

Why is campus social class climate important?

Campus racial climate is getting a lot of deserved attention lately. On the other hand I recall in the spring of 1969 (yes, I am that old) that campus racial climate got highlighted quite loudly and publicly because of black student activism and black student organizations. It's been more than 50 years and we are still having these conversation on campus. Really? Did campus leaders learn nothing? What about foregrounding women on campus? Hispanics? GLBTQ students, faculty, staff and administrators? These issues have been foregrounded and backgrounded for at least a half century. So, why is social class ignored?

Issues of first generation students came to the campus with the advent of the Land Grant institutions, again in post WWII, again with the rise of vocational technical education, and again with recent awareness of campus demographics. The primary modality for dealing with any campus minority group member has been assimilation and not accommodation. Pre-enrollment and enrichment programs are a mainstay, and data supported, assimilation programming effort for first generation students on campus.

Is assimilation enough. Have these first generation students been took, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok? (See Malcolm X Movie speech.) With the number of scholars attending to first generation students, the sleeping campus social class giant issues are being woken.

Commentary about social class on campus has been a mainstay of the post-secondary education literature in the US (Bourdieu, Payne, Barratt, Van Galen, Ardoin). Action about social class on campus has been rare. Elite private schools and flagship state universities fight over offering economic enticements to the high scoring, high grade, low income kids. That's about the extent of the action. Knowledge about social class on campus has been limited to demographic descriptions: percent of Pell Grant students, percent of legacy students, average parental income, and the like (College Navigator). 

Step zero

Ask the right question."What is the social class climate of your campus?"

Any physical space designer knows the power of context in stimulating, or suppressing, behavior. The campus physical, social, interpersonal, and demographic environment has a profound effect on students. When the effect of the campus environment is retention or departure, we need to pay attention to the causes of retention and departure. Students who depart are no longer learning in classes.

The environment is critical. Kurt Lewin famously wrote B = f (P,E) to focus thinking that behavior - B - is a function - f - of person - P - and environment - E. This formula morphed into the B P E triangle used by Bandura in describing reciprocal determinism. Barker explored Person - Environment interactions at the Midwest Ecological Field Station, ignoring the behavior and person distinction. Banning morphed Lewin's formula into B = f (PxE) to highlight the person-environment interaction. My favorite is Louis Pasteur's deathbed statement “I was wrong. The germ is nothing. The terrain is everything.”.

A Caveat - The terrain is important. And the map is not the territory, to paraphrase a principle of General Semantics. Campus social class climate is one map of the campus, it is not the campus. Is a weak map better than no map? Absolutely yes. Information, even weak information, is good, is useful. Graphing maps our data, and the graph is not the data. College Navigator includes lots of information, and the information is not the campus. City maps feature roads, or public transportation routes, or the electrical grid, or whatever layers of Geographic Information Systems you want, but these maps are not the city. Even Google Earth has layers that you can select. Good Institutional Research offices have massive amounts of data, often under-analyzed and under-used, and that data is not the campus. The campus 'fact sheet' is hardly enough. A few narratives from 'typical students' is hardly enough. 

The Campus Social Class Climate Map

Climate is the look and feel of a campus - basically what is experienced on campus (socially, intellectually, aesthetically, etc.). We can collect that data from a lot of people using a survey, aggregate it, and make some statements about the collective perception of the campus climate. Further, we can divide people into groups (gender for example, recognizing that gender is a non-binary idea, but for the sake of analysis we just ignore that inconvenient truth) and describe how different groups perceive the campus climate differently - and we would infer that this reflects their experiences on campus.

What are the layers of a good Campus Information System? Certainly social class should be one layer.

Why is social class data/information ignored on campus? Every campus has the data, and it's as if no one is looking. There is a blinking red light on the campus data dashboard that no one notices.

Person-environment fit is a important. The work satisfaction and turnover literature tells us that people quit bosses (bad interpersonal environments) and not jobs. Students walk away from college for many reasons, one reason is fit. "Seeing people like me" is an important consideration for many students when choosing to go to college, where to go to college, and whether or not to stay. Is it any wonder that the drop-out rate for first generation students is nearly twice that for second generation students? Is having faculty and staff wear "I'm first generation" buttons enough? Well, at least the buttons make the invisible viable. 

What does the data say?

A classic human data collection problem is that humans are inherently biased - we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. Selective attention affects us all, so when we are asked about the world around us we respond based on the world we perceive. The same problem holds for self report - the Dunning-Kruger effect (very ignorant people have very high opinions of their knowledge, for example) is a real worry in every psychological study. Personal perception of the world around us is a human problem. On the other hand, we can use demographic variables (gender, ethnicity, social class, religion, etc.) to explore different perceptions.

Hard Work

Exploring campus environments, or any environment, is fraught with difficulty. I am reminded of the legend "Here be dragons" on old maps. Banning and Strange explored campus environments in Designing for Learning. They used physical, aggregate, organizational, and socially constructed environments as analytical lenses. These authors build from the work of Walsh who wrote "Theories of Person-Environment Interaction" in 1973. Indeed, the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Psychology contains many ways to explore the worlds in which we find ourselves and many ways to understand that world, from phenomenological psychology to systems theory. 

What is the right question? Should we focus on the campus Aesthetic environment, Cultural environment, Human aggregate environment, Intellectual environment, Perceptual environment, Physical environment, Interpersonal environment?

Campus climate is complex. Identifying what is important to measure and what is important to those trying to understand campus climate is tough. Too often "I'll know it when I see it" is what decision makers use as a rationale to define what they want. Too often, their conscious and unconscious biases focus their attention.

Lenses - Physical environment, social environment, interpersonal environment, and demographic environment lenses make a nice short list of data to collect. And, all of the data is perceptual - as in "How do you see the physical campus?". Our perceptions are guided by our life experiences and people with different social class background experiences will perceive the campus based on their experiences and meaning making. Analyzing perceptual data against 'objective' data (campus demographics) will make an interesting multidimensional map of campus - and will not be the campus.

So what?

Good management decisions are based on good information. We have emerging good data on campus racial climate. We do not yet have good data on campus social class climate.

 

 

Bringing Back the Middle-Class: College Enrollment Trends. By Riccardo Purita

 Riccardo Purita

With the increased tuition rates as well as student debt doubling over the last decade (Hess, 2019), college enrollment has continued to decrease over the years (Fain, 2019). The effect of lower enrollment has varied in severity depending on the institution, but it means less revenue. This decline has largely been caused by fewer undergraduate middle-class students enrolling in higher education (U.S. Department of Education, 2019).

            The most frequent answer that middle-class students give for not attending college is the cost of attendance (Marcus, 2019). Many students and their families are unable to look past the potential expense for higher education and the likelihood of debt. If a student gets past a college’s sticker price, applies, and is accepted, their enrollment will be dependent on how much the institution costs. Net prices (tuition minus financial aid awarded) for both public and private institutions have generally increased over the years (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). Furthermore, middle-income undergraduate students are taking out loans for college at similar rates to students from lower-income backgrounds (Fry & Cilluffo, 2019). Some of these families are expected to pay 30 percent-45 percent of their household income for their students’ college attendance (Institute for Research on Higher Education, 2016). This analysis relied on data prior to the COVID-19 pandemic which has likely exasperated these issues further. Overall, many students from middle-class backgrounds have financial needs that are not being met by institutions and reducing college enrollment.

Many universities have taken steps to address middle-class financial needs. Over the last few years, scholarships specifically marketed for this group have been established at several schools. These universities hope that awards advertised and targeted to the middle-class will increase enrollment numbers. Below I offer a few other recommendations for universities to consider increasing enrollment of these students:

Recommendation #1: Advertise external scholarships and funding on college website. One of the common ways in which prospective students attempt to pay for college is by applying for external scholarships. If a student can secure funding from these awards, it will make it more likely for them to attend college. Therefore, universities benefit by helping prospective applicants with that process. Carnegie Mellon University has a page of outside scholarship databases on their college’s website (Fellowships and Scholarships Office, 2020). Other schools should consider this approach as well.

Recommendation #2: Rethink how to best advertise college cost. Several private colleges have used a tuition-reset strategy which involves reducing the cost of tuition by as much as 40-50 percent to attract more applications. This strategy tends to be deceptive as schools often need to reduce the financial aid offered to offset the revenue lost from tuition. This also may not affect the actual net price of college attendance (Seltzer, 2017). However, even if this approach does not change cost, it may be valuable if this increases the number of applications from middle-class students. It would be important to incorporate tuition-reset with other strategies like offering other financial awards to reduce college cost.

Institutions can also work to learn from their current students by sending a feedback survey about the financial aid experience. Some questions could ask students about financial information they did not know when enrolling, experiences with applying for scholarships and loans, and whether their financial costs match their expectations. Universities should then use this knowledge to inform their practices with marketing financial expenses.

Recommendation #3: Consider scholarships that focus on other basic needs like housing and food. While it is typical for universities to offer financial aid that focuses exclusively on tuition costs, there are many other expenses that a student needs to consider. Mandatory fees, housing, food, books, and transportation costs can all affect a student’s ability to attend college (Miller-Adams, 2015). Not only is it responsible for universities to address these basic needs, it would help reduce the other costs that may deter students from attending college like room and board. Overall, these recommendations should be used collectively to not only increase their individual impact, but also the general impact towards middle-class enrollment.

References

Fain, P. (2019, May 30). College enrollment declines continue. Inside Higher Ed. http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/05/30/college-enrollment-declines-continue

Fellowships and Scholarships Office. (2020). Outside scholarship databases. Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.cmu.edu/fso/outside-databases/index.html

Fry, R. & Cilluffo, A. (2019, May 30). A rising share of undergraduates are from poor families, especially at less selective colleges. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/05/22/a-rising-share-of-undergraduates-are-from-poor-families-especially-at-less-selective-colleges/

Hess, A. (2019, December 30). Student debt increased by 107% this decade, federal reserve data shows. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/30/student-debt-totals-increased-by-107percent-this-decade.html

Institute for Research on Higher Education. (2016). College affordability diagnosis: National report. Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. https://irhe.gse.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Natl_Affordability2016.pdf

Marcus, J. (2019, October 2). The students disappearing fastest from American campuses? Middle-class ones. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/the-students-disappearing-fastest-from-american-campuses-middle-class-ones/

Miller-Adams, M. (2015). Promise nation: Transforming communities through place-based scholarships. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Seltzer, R. (2017, September 25). The tuition-reset strategy. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/25/trustees-and-new-presidents-lead-push-tuition-resets-despite-debate-over-practices

U.S. Department of Education. (2017). Percentage of recent high school completers enrolled in college, by income level: 1975 through 2016. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_302.30.asp?current=yes

U.S. Department of Education (2019). 12-month enrollment component final data (2001-02 - 2017-18) and provisional data (2018-19). National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

 

 

Why is social class on campus important - 10 years on: Why do campus leaders ignore social class?

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer

In 2011 I wrote "Why is social class important?" because of questions I had been asked at that point. During the last 10 years the emerging literature on social class on campus has ballooned. The number of thinkers and scholars addressing this question has risen - and here I include scholars on first generation students. Further, the number of random internet posts on why social class is important has dramatically risen.

Don't just take my word for it:

Top 7 significance of social classes - explained! by Puja Mondal

"Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature" (Psychological Bulletin, Vol 141(3).

What is Social Class and Why Does it Matter How Sociologists Define and Study the Concept by Niki Lisa Cole

Why Social Class Matters, Even if we Don't Agree what it means? by Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Impacts of Social Class is an academic class related site.

Still curious? Then so your own Internet search on duckduckgo.com (why is social class important) 

"Water is Wet." "No it's not."

The US national dialog around race/ethnicity is fascinating at the moment. One group wants to increase awareness, and consequent pro-social behaviors and celebrations, about Black Lives. Another group does not want to do this, wants to deny history, and to marginalize, criminalize, and demonize anyone who has ever said Black Lives Matter. Identity social activists are vilified. Vilifying social class activists is currently about shouting 'socialist' or 'communist' which fits nicely into the good/bad naughty/nice categories of US politics.

These dialectic conversations about race/ethnicity/religion/gender/GLBTQ and even social class have a long US history. Dialectic is the wrong word, it should be polylectic, but we are society stuck in a binary media world. 

Visible or Invisible Identity? Identity we can see is often more powerful from identity we cannot see. Visible identity looks good on the 6:00 news. Icons and flags provide backdrops for news bites. And now we have awareness ribbons for many 'invisible' issues. Campus mascots serve the same visual identification function. I am for my sports team means that I am against your sports team. I am for my identity group does NOT mean I am against your identity group, but the sports analysis in the US is pernicious. 

I've a simple question: What is the icon for social class identity issues? What color is that ribbon?

Campus leaders are building structures to address the wide variety of identity/status issues that students bring with them. And, in order to get access to those structures and services a student, or campus member, needs to be officially recognized as a member of that group. For example, the blind need to prove the criteria level of visual impairment. The level of race/ethnicity (cultural or genetic) to belong to any group is a matter of great debate. I love people trying to categorize Kamala Harris, Tommy Chong, or Tiger Woods. As I have written before, categories are stupid.

The data says that parental education and parental occupation (data we can collect to put students into social class categories) is the most important predictor of continued college enrollment (read continued customers). The only way in which social class is addressed on campus is through categorizing students as first generation (and of course there are multiple definitions depending if a parent went to, or graduated from, a 2- or 4-year college), or as economically disadvantaged (this category used to be 'poor') depending on US Federal definitions of poverty. 

A 'deficit' model is used for first generation and economically disadvantaged students - that is, first generation and economically disadvantaged students need extra help because these students are in need. In need of money is an economic capital view of class, in need of study skills is a cultural capital view of class, in need of networking is a social capital view of class. The need to 'enrich' students reflects a classist view of the underclasses.

A lot of publications note that grades and test scores are the best predictors of college success. Note please that higher social class students tend to get higher grades and test scores. 

What about economically, culturally, and socially advantaged students?

Um, well, ah . . . . . Oh, wait, this is the group that is mostly ignorant about social class on campus.

Why is social class on campus important?

Because it is.  The important question is: Why do campus leaders ignore social class.

Social Class, Search Engines, and Social Media

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer

You are a social class based market share to some corporation. The more that advertisements can be focused on you the more efficient the work of the advertisement dollars. College students have been a marketable commodity for a long time. Back in the day of paper campus directories there were ads in the directories targeting students. Campus bulletin boards carried ads for paper magazines. And the ever-present corporate logos on clothing remains the beginning of brand/team/campus loyalty. Junk mail, paper based spam from back in the day, used to fill student mailboxes.

What has this got to do with search engines and social media? Everything. 

Campus advertising moved into the digital world because paper media is dwindling on campus. Further, the wide availability of digital media made it easy for the small business, craft hobbyist, or whomever to access focused marketing. 

The more that advertisers know about you, the more focused the marketing - or properly the more efficient the marketing dollars become. Your social media posts, and more importantly your friends and connections, provide a lot of information. Your search engine searches provide a lot of information.

The discriminant analysis math and relationship mapping are pretty cool in focusing advertising. And it only works if the advertisers know something about you. Advertisers can predict your interests only knowing a few bits of information, and a few of your social media connections. The advertising focusing information comes from search engines and social media filtered through research firms like Nielsen, P$YCLE, and many others; some marketing focuses on products, some on experiences, some on politics, some focuses on fund raising. You are a social class based market share.

If you want to know about your attributed social class, pay attention to the advertisements that you see. Are you targeted with graduate school ads? High end electronics ads? Health and fitness ads? Ford? Mercedes? Natural Light? 

If it's free (all of market research based social media is free), then you are the product. This is systemic capitalism.

Spending patterns of demographic groups are well known. Social grouping is a data based process driven by social class (education and occupation are nice proxies for social class). You are not just upper-middle class, you are a special variety of upper-middle class. Higher education researchers, like Alexander Astin, developed college student typologies 40 years ago. Imagine how sophisticated those student typologies are now - based on massive amounts of social media and search data.

Want to stick it to the system? 

If you are passive-aggressive then use a secure search engine like duckduckgo. Do not use a search engine that collects data on you, do not accept any cookies, and delete your cookies often. Use a secure browser like Firefox in Private Window Mode, or use Brave browser. Google Chrome in Incognito Mode has been reported to have been collecting information all along. Check all of your social media privacy settings. Use ad blockers, tracking blockers, and cookie blockers in your browser. Read more about privacy. There are appropriate levels of paranoia if you don't want to be someone's social class based market share. And, there are many additional levels of increasing security for the very privacy conscious, for example see the TOR browser. Be aware that even using the TOR browser will change your status with your ISP and "the authorities".

If you are aggressive then you can lead advertisers on false trails to muddy your profile - you are a social class based market share already, so you can only obscure yourself to a degree. Use Google Chrome, or Microsoft Bing, or Yahoo! Search, any Apple/Mac based browser, or other popular browsers (browsers are data collection systems that also provide search functions) to search for random stuff - like Florida Keys Camping, Katmandu hotels, pet clothing, or whatever. Confuse the algorithms with odd data. Have fun, create a social class marketing persona for yourself.

tl;dr digital marketing uses social class to focus ads for you based on information and analysis of your social media posts, personal connections, and browser searches.

Bourdieu and Habitus

 Janet K. Weirick, Ph.D.

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of habitus as it pertains to education. This theory describes education as a means to produce and reproduce social class structures. Class behaviors and awareness of the power dynamics that require class distinctions are developed throughout childhood and are reinforced in formal, post-secondary education. These attitudes and behaviors become unconscious, as people describe them as “just the way it is.”

Bourdieu describes habitus as “the product of internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary capable of perpetuating itself after pedagogic authority has ceased and thereby of perpetuating in practices the principles of the internalized arbitrary.” (p. 31)

Bourdieu described the process through habitus is produced as a “prolonged process of inculcation producing a durable transposable habitus, i.e. inculcating in all its legitimate addressees a system of (partially or totally identical) schemes of perception, thought, appreciation and action. Pedagogic Work contributes towards producing and reproducing the intellectual and moral integration of the group or class on whose behalf it is carried on.” (p. 35)

“Insofar as it is a prolonged process of inculcation producing more and more complete misrecognition of the twofold arbitrariness of pedagogical authority, pedagogical work tends, the more it is accomplished, to conceal more and more completely the objective truth of the habitus as the internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary which is more accomplished the more the work of inculcation is accomplished.”  (p. 39)

It's important to note that Bordieu uses the term inculcation to describe the goal of education systems. Inculcate means to “instill (an attitude, idea or habit) by persistent instruction; teach (someone) an attitude, idea, or habit by persistent instruction.” (Dictionary. Com) In this sense, families informally instill a cultural understanding of the world through many years of reinforcement of attitudes and behavior.  Primary and secondary education systems reinforce local culture, including messages about social class and a sense of belonging. Cultural coding can include language, ways of dressing, recreational activities, food choices and access to money.  Because middle- and upper-class students have had access to better schools during their pre-college years, they come to campus with knowledge and skills that weren’t available to working-class students.  This difference can cause physical and psychological barriers for working-class students when interacting with more privileged classmates.

“Any given mode of inculcation is characterized by the position it occupies between (1) the mode of inculcation aiming to bring the complete substitution of one habitus for another (conversion) and (2) the mode of inculcation aiming purely and simply to confirm the primary habitus (maintenance or reinforcement).” (p. 44)

Liam Gillepsie describes how habitus reinforces class difference through practices of various institutions. “Habitus produces relationships of domination through its institutions by default, because institutions distribute cultural capital differently and differentially among individuals. As Bourdieu elaborates, the unequal distribution of cultural capital creates and further exacerbates unequal socio-cultural settings; however, this inequality comes to appear ‘objective’, natural or meritorious within the habitus. Within habitus, the dominance of dominant subjects appears ‘objective’. The dominant can just ‘be’, while the dominated must first ‘clear the way’ before they can ‘be’.” (Criticallegalthinking.com/2019/08/06/pierre-bourdieu-habitus/)

The quality of pre-university education is fundamental to reproducing the status quo while working under the cover of “meritocracy” with testing and grading systems to guarantee that social class differences are maintained. It’s not just standardized testing, but subjective reactions to students’ speech patterns, dress, social skills and assertiveness.  Small talk between faculty and students can signal class differences that affect formal teacher/student interactions and subsequently student outcomes.

The subtleties of habitus “wiring” can sometimes result in faculty/administrators expressing “patronizing” behavior toward lower class students.  Going overboard to “help” working class students can further displace them from the presumed middle-class norms. Habitus runs deeper than norms and traditions. Habitus is not a conscious practice – it is unconscious and expresses the notion that an action or attitude is “just how it is.”

“Given that it must reproduce through time the institutional conditions for the performance of the work of schooling, i.e. that it must reproduce itself as an institution (self-reproduction) in order to reproduce the culture it is mandated to reproduce (culture and reproduction), every educational system necessarily monopolizes the production of the agents appointed to reproduce it, i.e. of the agents equipped with the durable training which enables them to perform the work of schooling tending to reproduce the same training in the new reproducers, and therefore contains a tendency towards perfect self-reproduction (inertia) which is realized within the limits of its relative autonomy.” (p. 60)

Because of this need to practice reproduction, part of the culture of most college systems is the practice of seeking and hiring middle class faculty and administrators.  Admissions departments create policies and procedures to attract students with the “right fit” for a particular campus culture. Sorting starts with recruiting, as Zip Codes become proxies for family income and quality schools. Most college applications include information about grades, extracurricular activities, club memberships and community service work. The required essays tell the admissions staff many details about a person’s social class, including vocabulary, topic, and subjective reference points. 

College Faculty expect students to meet campus standards for coursework, and they often make middle class assumptions about student expertise, academic background and life experience. Working class students can feel like they’ve “missed” something in their education, even when they performed well in high school. Because they have not learned the attitudes and behaviors expressed by those in charge of academics and student affairs, they can sometimes feel like “aliens” in and out of class.

“In a society in which the obtaining of social privileges depends more and more closely on possession of academic credentials, the School does not only have the function of ensuring discreet succession to a bourgeois estate which can no longer be transmitted directly and openly.  This privileged instrument of the bourgeois sociodicy which confers on the privileged the supreme privilege of not seeing themselves as privileged manages the more easily to convince the disinherited that they owe their scholastic and social destiny to their lack of gifts or merits, because in matters of culture absolute dispossession excludes awareness of being dispossessed. (p. 210)

Sources:

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2000.

Gillespie, Liam. Online, August 6, 2019. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/0806/pierre-bourdieu-habitus/