Precarity past, present, and future: US higher education policy and practice under conditions of advanced inequality

• In Event: Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Proposal

In the U.S., as around much of the world, citizens and policymakers have held public higher education up as a meritocratic pathway to social mobility and improved quality of life. A growing body of data indicate, however, that while the effects of higher education on individual mobility and wellbeing have never been greater, access to and completion of a college degree has become much more class-inequitable (Bailey and Dynarski, 2011; Scott-Clayton, 2015; Shireman, 2016). The reasons for this shift include public defunding of higher education, changes in federal aid systems, and institutional cultures.
In the fourth decade of expanding global inequality, this paper tries to untangle how and why low-income students’ higher educational outcomes are increasingly diverting from those of their wealthier peers, and what their day-to-day college experiences might tell us about the practical and political implications of current higher education policies and practices for social equity, mobility, and wellbeing.
The paper asks:
1) How do low-income students experience their first three semesters in college; and what significance do these experiences have for students’ educational, social, economic, emotional, physiological and spiritual wellbeing?
2) How should we theorize the ethical and democratic consequences of low-income students’ experiences and outcomes in elite public universities?
The paper draws on an 18-month team ethnography conducted at four U.S. public universities that ranged in size, location, academic focus, average cost, selectivity, and makeup of the student body. Data collection included interviews with college administrators, faculty, staff, professors, current students, and alumni; observations of academic and social spaces on campuses; collection and review of documents and public sources. We also conducted extensive research with a diverse group of 12-15 low- and middle-income focal students on each campus.
This paper seeks to contribute to a deeper theorization of the role of higher education policy in the late liberal era, and the roles that policy might play in supporting greater social equity. We draw on Povinelli’s (2011) concept of late liberalism as an evolving mode of governing markets and difference in settler colonies, and on Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism, to explain the embodied precarity that we found marked low-income students’ university experiences. We define precarity as a persistent and ongoing experience of multifaceted — social, economic, physical, educational, spiritual —instability, characterized by a heightened awareness of the contingency of one’s present and future wellbeing. Fueled by decades of growing economic inequality, compounded by the rollback of social safety nets and the entrenched, racially segregated histories of housing and K-12 education in the U.S., our research shows how low-income students have been subject to an encompassing precarity: a persistent accumulation of stresses that enclose more and more of students’ social, familial and academic relations. In situations of encompassing precarity, students experience a near permanent sense of crisis that has serious negative consequences for their wellbeing. This encompassing precarity reinforces, exacerbates, and perhaps even creates new forms of socio-economic inequality that undercut individual wellbeing and the democratic and meritocratic promises of public higher education.

Author

• Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison