Getting on the Inside Track: Class, Race, and Undergraduates' Academic Engagement

• In Event: 3559 - Race and Racialized Inequality in Schooling

Abstract

Many efforts to understand educational inequality, including at the college level, focus on individual attributes rather than interactions between individuals and institutions. Previous studies show that how students interact with authority figures in academic contexts shapes their academic experiences and acquisition of social capital. As such, the ability to engage with authority figures may be considered a form of cultural capital. Opportunities, decisions, and dilemmas that college students face along their pathways inevitably require input from authority figures on campus. Yet, there has been limited attention to the nature of interactions between undergraduates and the professors, advisors, and administrators that they encounter. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations at a four-year, private university, I analyze a socioeconomically and racially diverse group of students’ academic engagement with authority figures.

First, I show how working-class and middle-class students differ in their comfort approaching authority figures and in how they prioritize establishing these relationships. Yet, beyond differences in students’ access to and comfort with key players, I argue that undergraduates derive unequal outcomes from their interactions with institutional agents. Middle-class students more successfully negotiated for accommodations and customized pathways that were not offered to other students. Extending prior literature, I also show how middle-class students’ knowledge of university programs that facilitate interactions with professors gives them a head start over their working-class peers in establishing relationships.

Further, this study explores racial variations in the nature of middle-class students’ interactions with institutional agents. White students tend to become embedded in university activities that allow for frequent, informal contact with professors and advisors that builds relationships. Even middle-class black and Asian American students report more formality in their interactions. These differences may have implications for gatekeepers’ interpersonal evaluations. In all, this study shows how in small, yet pivotal moments institutions promote inequality or opportunity.

Author

• Sherelle Ferguson, University of Pennsylvania