Transitioning into the Middle Class after College: Hidden Injuries and Partial Mobility

• In Event: 331 - Regular Session. Sociology of Higher Education I - Aspiring Students, Aspiring Organizations: The Social Construction of Identity and Status in Higher Education

Abstract

One of the expectations of many scholars, administrators, and policy thinkers is that students from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds graduating from elite colleges will have strong opportunities to become upwardly mobile. However, little scholarly work has examined the transition of low-socioeconomic status backgrounds out of college and into middle-class adult lives. In this paper I draw on interviews with 19 low-income, working-class, and/or first-generation graduates from an elite women’s college conducted between one and four years after they completed their degrees. I focus on the ways that respondents understand their own class mobility by asking how they locate themselves in class terms and how they reflect back on their elite college context. Building on the concepts of hidden injuries and symbolic boundaries, I show that respondents have achieve a partial mobility in which objective markers have been obtained but subjective perceptions have not kept pace. Respondents are uncomfortable with the prospect of middle-class status and do not seem to have fully realized the soft-skills benefits of elite college graduation, such as networking, that would arguably support further mobility.

Author

• Elizabeth M. Lee, Ohio University