Expressive Education: The Meaning of College and the Postsecondary Pathways of Disadvantaged Young Mothers

• In Event: 366 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. Post-secondary Experiences and Outcomes

Abstract

I employ an integrated, mixed-method approach to data analysis to understand how a group of economically disadvantaged young mothers makes decisions about post-secondary education over a six year period. Using data from The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project, I match in-depth interviews with 85 women to four waves of longitudinal survey data. By integrating survey and interview data on a single respondent from the beginning of the analytic process, I am able to understand each woman’s narrative in the context of her unfolding life course trajectory. I find that the narrative meaning a young woman attaches to a college degree is related both to the trajectory of her transition to adulthood and to the form her higher education pathway takes. In particular, women facing the most difficult trajectories over the course of the study relied most heavily on expressive logic, associating the pursuit of a college degree with continued opportunity to “be somebody.” Those mobilizing expressive logic report patterns of persistence—many programs, many institutions—that would be difficult to explain from a human capital perspective. I argue that, in the context of unstable lives, the pursuit of education allows struggling young mothers to assert claims of moral worth, despite a lack of material evidence to support their continued aspirations for upward mobility. The ubiquity of for-profit educational providers and online learning technologies facilitate persistence--and the maintenance of expressive logic—but with uncertain benefits and not without substantial costs.

Author

• Nicole Deterding, Harvard University