Engineered Struggle and "Earned" Success: Preparation for Upward Social Mobility via Elite Boarding Schools

• In Event: 75.061 - Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.061-3 - Voices of Students and Professionals at Elite, Faith-Based, and International Institutions

Abstract

Using ethnographic data, I investigate the relationship between the academic curriculum and the emotional experiences of students at Launch, an organization that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding high schools. I explore how the program engineers the experience of academic and emotional struggle for students, how students experience these struggles, and what students learn from this process. I argue that, while the emotional gauntlet students endure in the program supports the educational advancement and emotional adjustment of individual students entering elite boarding schools, it may ultimately serve to reproduce rather than transform the individualistic, meritocratic discourses that support the patterns of social inequality the program seeks to disrupt.

Author

• Amanda Barrett Cox, University of Pennsylvania