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/

 

The Phenomenology of Social Class on Campus

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer and Professor Emeritus 

Phenomenology, used here, is concerned with our individual experience and meaning making of the world around us. I have written elsewhere about social class identity: that we all have a social class of origin (where we come from), a current felt social class (what we think of ourselves now), and an attributed social class (what others think of us). I want to focus here on our social class of origin and how the college experience might change that.

College is not a level playing field

My colleagues who are thinking, researching, and writing about first generation students on campus (Sonja Ardoin, Becki Elkins, and Krista Soria are among my favorites) foreground the campus experiences of non-typical students, in these authors' cases first generation students. They all note articulately that the four-year college is not a level playing field, and among other factors social class is responsible for the tilt.

The percent of first generation students on campus varies by campus, two-year and four-year institutions have very different demographics. According to PNPI "Only 39% of first-generation students attended four-year institutions". The Center for First Generation Student Success notes that either 24% or 56% of students on campus are first generation, depending on definitions. That is a lot of people. Social class ranks high in the demographics of diversity.

First generation students are at a cultural disadvantage on a four-year campus in that they do not know the normative expectations extant in the college environment. First Generation students do not have what Bourdieu calls Cultural Capital. This is not a deficit, Cultural Capital refers to the cultural knowledge and skills of upper middle class. First generation students on campus have moved into a different culture and need to learn (assimilate) the normative expectations in this new to them social class culture. Soria has written eloquently about this topic in Bridging the Divide.

For social class non-normative students college can be a transformative experience, a conversion experience as they learn to negotiate the normative expectations of the upper middle class / ruling class environment. This is very hard, especially without supports along this journey. This identity transition is a major life change.

Upper middle class / ruling class students come to campus with an advantage - their social class of origin matches the social class environment normative expectations of the campus. For social class normative students college is a confirmation experience of their world view and they slip easily into the greased grooves of the campus environment that was created for them by people like them. These students have their social class of origin world view (what they see and how they see it) confirmed and not challenged. And I assert that this is a bad thing.

 Phenomenology

We all have a way of perceiving the world that is based on our personal experiences. What we see and how we see things are driven by our brains in interesting ways. The philosophy of phenomenology occupies the space trying to understand this process of perception and meaning making.

Example: I lived in Roi Et, Thailand for 3 years as part of my becoming an adventurer (adventuring is sometimes about being and sometimes about becoming). My wife and I were 2 of the 4 Europeans living and working on the Roi Et Rajabhat University campus.  My perceptual set, what I saw and the meaning I made of it, slowly changed as Thai faces became normative. Traveling to Bangkok became an adventure because European faces stood out, were foregrounded by my perception, didn't look normal, which was meaning made by my brain. So what does this have to do with the phenomenology of social class on campus?

Our social class of origin defines who we are, and the experiences of that identity shapes what you see and how you see it. On campus differences are foregrounded for the non-normative people. This foregrounding of difference and contrast is troubling, exhausting, and can lead people to leave their new environment.  And people wonder why minorities (non-normative individuals) don't persist on campus?

One of the persistent and troubling problems is that majority / normative students on campus experience sameness, and the issues of non-normative students get backgrounded as the familiar is foregrounded. 

Issues of social class and first generation students are intertwined in the systems of post secondary education. This systemic classism is an emerging topic in the literature. "An Open Letter to Ninth Graders" and "Social Class and College Readiness" are excellent examples of this emerging discussion.

Foregrounding, Backgrounding, and Learning

Our experiences get integrated into our conscious and unconscious minds and drive what we see and how we make meaning of the world. According to the Rock Man in the "The Point" "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear." According to Qui-Gon Jinn "Your focus determines your reality".

Imagine the different pre-college experiences of a first generation student and a fourth generation student. The relationship between parental education, parental income, home environment, and pre-college test scores is well established. The explanation of score differences is not about money or education, but about the experiences of pre-college student provided by money and educated parents. 

We experience the world around us. If my world is different than yours then my experiences will be different than yours and my perceptions and meaning making will be different than yours. In a not-so-subtle classist way the phrases 'cultural enrichment', 'cultural advantage' and 'cultural disadvantage' are used to describe the experiences of people in these two social class groups in the USA.  Everyone has a culture of origin, and one culture is believed to have more prestige. "All animals are equal, some are more equal than others" (George Orwell in Animal Farm).

Systemic classism is the direct result of the mental models of reality based on the early experiences that help shape our social class of origin (read also gender of origin, ethnicity of origin, or whatever other identity is important to you). The people who did well in college perpetuate the system in which they did well - for some writers this is about the reproduction of social class. 

Immigrants, members of a minority group moving into a majority culture, are keenly aware of the systemic issues that they confront. How we deal with strangers, with the other, says a lot about us as individuals and as a culture. Do we accommodate or assimilate minorities on our campuses?

But what of social class majority members on campus? Their experiences in the formation of their social class of origin are harmonious with the campus social class environment. There are no contrasts in cultures for them, no microaggressions, no systemic issues that they confront. College is a confirmation experience of their social class of origin identity. This is a bad thing. The unexamined life is not worth living, according to Socrates.

A Whack on the Side of the Head

How do we point out water to a fish? 

How do we change the perceptual set of the majority social class student (or faculty, or staff, or administrators) on campus? 

How do we help colleagues to become social class 'woke'?

How do we help colleagues who are immersed in a social class environment on campus that reproduces and reinforces their world view, that foregrounds what they see and the meaning they make and backgrounds the world views and experiences of social class minority students?

How do we change what our colleagues see and what meaning they make of what they see? 

I'll not go into the literature on change here. Awareness is the first step. Helping our colleagues to see social class, social class advantage/privilege, systemic social class discrimination, and the myriad and sundry echos of social class on campus is a good first step.

 

 tl;dr - your experiences shape your perceptions, your perceptions shape how make meaning, your meaning making creates social, cultural, and organizational systems.

(As an aside, my life as an intentional adventurer has put me into many different social, cultural, and regional, environments, often international, so I know from personal experience how difficult these transitions to a new environment can be and how they have affected my identities. I have come to know a lot about what I think of as 'systems entry', and have always had the advantage of choosing a new system to enter and knowing what that entails. Sometimes I have had a guide, sometimes I have had a buffer such as a familiar hotel experience, and sometimes I have had no backup. The first few international system entries in my life, Salzburg, and Burssels, were not easy but I was buffered and assisted by my wife. Much of my adventuring now is about being in an unknown environment or culture.)

The Danger of Social Class Categories: Social Class is Fluid and Fuzzy

Will Barratt, PhD

Coffman Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Leadership Emeritus

Indiana State University

Categorical thinking is a bad idea. The classic western model of data types, (Stanley Smith Stevens, "On the Theory of Scales of Measurement", 1946) proposed Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ration types of data a model. This proposed scheme / typology is often taught as gospel / dogma in statistics and measurement classes. However, there are a lot of alternative schemata for typing data. Nearly all of these data schemata use some form of categorical data (Nominal in Steven's case, Discrete in others) and this is a problem. Simplifying reality, which is always a part of measurement, leads to simple thinking. We all simplify reality in order to make an orderly world, and we all try to ignore the consequences of categorical thinking.  

Example: How big is a 2 x 4, a standard piece of wood in the USA used for a lot of construction? The answer depends on how closely you want to measure the wood the day you measure it (tape measure or micrometer), on the humidity that day (moist wood swells, dry wood shrinks), on the temperature that day, and on many more things that might affect the  real size of the 2 x 4 (which are supposed to be 1 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (38 x 89 mm)).

Other convenient, and false, categories are gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, and social class. It is a psychological and  statistical convenience to treat these ideas as nominal or categorical data, and this leads to simple thinking about complex things. As an example think of how many levels of categories are there for Christian/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist to get clarity on the category of Christian/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist for Christians/Muslims/Hindus/Buddhists who you know? 

As I have said to the amusement of many friends "2 is a stupid number". Even the idea of trans-gender reflects a categorical data world view. Self identification of race on the US decennial census has only been used since 1960. Again, classifying people into groups simplifies analysis. Anyone who has gotten the results of their genetic analysis knows that categories fail when faced with percentages of ancestry associated with current nation states. How much sub-Saharan African do you need to be to be "Black"? How much European do you need to be "White"? One drop? How should we assign borders to these categories?

The categories of social class, working class, middle class and so on, are a convenience. I developed the Barratt Simple Measure of Social Status (this is a measure of status and not class) to help researchers work with status, and by inference class, as a variable. When queried, usually by young researchers, about how to turn the BSMSS score into a social class, I note, politely, that class is not a category but a fuzzy and fluid idea, so please use correlation in your analysis and not ANOVA (which is based on categorical membership).

Bourdieu, in Forms of Capital, provided a post-Marxist view of class by including social capital and cultural capital to add to the Marxist notion of economic capital. Bourdieu's model is better, in that it is a more comprehensive model of class, and looks at social, cultural, and economic wealth as continuous (not categorical) variables.  This is a much more fluid and fuzzy model, departing radically from class categories. 

Our minds confuse the map (categories) with the territory (real life). Our brains have been colonized with a kind of thinking that leads us to identify us and them, with all the consequences of that world view.

Fluid and Fuzzy

When I read or hear people use phrases like "White People", "CIS", or "Middle class" I am tempted to stop reading or listening because of their acceptance of categorical models of reality demonstrates ignorance of the real world. I am learning patience with categorical thinking, but it is a challenge. 

Fluid and fuzzy is a much more difficult way of being in the world. What used to be nouns become, well, nouns with permeable and flexible boundaries. At what point does yellow become orange? Fluid and fuzzy makes some people very uncomfortable. It takes a lot more energy to be in a fluid and fuzzy world than in a categorical world. 

Google social class categories and you will get an array of answers - all categorical. An old answer of mine would be that social class groups are arrayed like pearls on a string from low to high prestige. Even pearls imply discrete groups.  Even the 1% is categorical, requiring as of this writing an annual income above USD 540,000. Or do you mean the 1% in wealth in the world, which is about USD 4,400,000. Again with the categories. The clear bright line between 1.01% and 1.00%. Yeah, that boundary line to include and exclude is arbitrary.  Remember the 1 drop rule for being Black in the USA? Not 1/2 drop, but 1 drop. This is an equally stupid way to categorize what is not inherently categorizable - better check your genetic profile again to make sure of your racial category. 

tl;dr fluid and fuzzy is better than categories