I’ll Figure It Out On My Own! Social Class and Black Students in a Counseling Infrastructure

• In Event: 534 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Race, Class, and Immigration

Abstract

While past research suggests that urban, majority-minority schools have low counseling resources, we know much less about how students in such schools experience counseling infrastructure. I use interviews and fieldwork in an urban public high school with high student caseloads to examine college-counseling practices and the experiences of Black students across social class (N=44). This research shows that middle-class Black students, with close family-school relationships and multiple college-support systems, convey a sense of interconnectedness in a counseling infrastructure that they describe as broadly inclusive though not without problems. On the other hand, working-class and working-poor Black students report a sense of disconnect: they lack ties to college-support systems inside and outside the school and repeatedly say that they are on their own. Ultimately, institutional connectedness, or a student’s sense of being connected to multiple institutions, helps to mitigate low counseling resources.

Author

• Melanie Jones Gast, DePaul University