Precarity Influencing Racialized Resource Hoarding In Higher Education

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 17: Higher Education

Abstract

Precarity defines a student before, during, and after higher education. Despite the inherent competitive nature of higher education and searching for a credential, students look to receive the greatest reward for the least amount of work (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2013). Students thus opt for vocational-like pathways towards a career, seeing higher education as a means to an end, with supposed promises of stability and high income that often can be solely guaranteed for those with social capital (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013). Nonetheless students have an unwavering faith in upward mobility with these chosen degree-to-career paths.
Public higher education has undergone neoliberal transformation where the public good has been privatized, commodified, and corporatized (Newfield 2016). As a result of commodifying higher education students have come to engage with universities as they would any other sphere, as consumers. Students refer to their relationship with education as an investment they expect to have a future return on. Thus, the public good is more akin to a positional good, which provides private goods to the individual that are inherently exclusive to others (Tomlinson 2017; Tomlinson 2018). Through a consumerist lens, privatizing public higher education becomes appealing and worth consenting to. Students cannot view how the public good model of the university would be liberatory to class processes as it would be non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Tomlinson 2018).
In my research, I ask, how does white conceptions of racial non-belonging for people of color fuel whites’ embracement of their own accumulation by dispossession? In other words, how do whites’ experiences and beliefs about the roles students of color have of belonging on campus affect their willingness to embrace instability in the workforce, paying tuition, and the extraction of their own wealth?

Author

• Danilla S Kowalczuk, SUNY Binghamton