Harry Brighouse calls the book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality “essential reading if you want to understand the culture of a large public university well”:
The authors lived for a year in a “party” dorm in a large midwestern flagship public university … and kept up with the women in the dorm till after they had graduated college. The thesis of the book is that the university essentially facilitates (seemingly knowingly, and in some aspects strategically) a party pathway through college, which works reasonably well for students who come from very privileged backgrounds. The facilitatory methods include: reasonably scrupulous enforcement of alcohol bans in the dorms (thus enhancing the capacity of the fraternities to monopolize control of illegal drinking and, incidentally, forcing women to drink in environments where they are more vulnerable to sexual assault); providing easy majors which affluent students can take which won’t interfere with their partying, and which will lead to jobs for them, because they have connections in the media or the leisure industries that will enable them to get jobs without good credentials; and assigning students to dorms based on choice (my students confirm that dorms have reputations as party, or nerdy, or whatever, dorms that ensure that they retain their character over time, despite 100% turnover in residents every year).
The problem is that other students (all their subjects are women), who do not have the resources to get jobs in the industries to which the easy majors orient them, and who lack the wealth to keep up with the party scene, and who simply cannot afford to have the low gpas that would be barriers to their future employment, but which are fine for affluent women, get caught up in the scene. They are, in addition, more vulnerable to sexual assault, and less insulated (because they lack family money) against the serious risks associated with really screwing up. The authors tell stories of students seeking upward social mobility switching their majors from sensible professional majors to easy majors that lead to jobs available only through family contacts, not through credentials. Nobody is alerting these students to the risks they are taking. So the class inequalities at entry are exacerbated by the process.
Last year, Allie Grasgreen talked to co-author Laura T. Hamilton about what prospective students should keep in mind:
Prospective college students who are working class and not wealthy, whose parents do not have extensive social connections — those on the mobility pathway — should be wary of attending a four-year residential university like Midwestern, Hamilton said. Rather than basing their decision on prestige, which is often encouraged, they should consider whether a university will meet their specific needs. That means looking at retention rates for minority and first-generation students, whether student services are large and accessible (universities often have small creaming programs that serve low-income students well, but only a very small number of them), which academic programs and pathways are well-resourced, and the visibility of Greek life and the party scene.
Listen to an interview with the book’s authors here.
The Dish 