The Infrastructure of Inequality: Under-Embedded Boys and Over-Embedded Girls in American Higher Education

• In Event: Gender and Stratification

Abstract

While women increasingly dominate college enrollment, working-class women and men complete bachelor’s degrees at virtually identical rates—fewer than one in five. Drawing on 510 longitudinal interviews with 200 working-class and professional-class young people followed from adolescence through young adulthood, I develop a theory of relational infrastructure to explain this paradox. I argue that relationships function not merely as resources but as infrastructure, enabling and constraining educational attainment. Working-class youth face relational scarcity, lacking support networks that professional-class families construct. However, gender shapes how relational scarcity manifests: men experience under-embeddedness, lacking anchors during adolescence when guidance proves crucial, triggering early disconnection from school; women experience over-embeddedness, becoming family infrastructure as they simultaneously manage education, work, and caregiving, creating a “triple burden” that makes completion structurally untenable. By contrast, professional-class youth facing similar challenges receive support, transforming catastrophes into setbacks, and revealing how class-gender intersections create qualitatively different relational disadvantages. While working-class men disconnect from formal education early and visibly, their female counterparts persist until exhaustion prompts withdrawal. Understanding relationships as infrastructure requiring collective provision rather than individual resources reframes educational inequality from personal failure to the systematic absence of support structures that professional-class families take for granted.

Author

• Ilana Horwitz, Tulane University