Title: "Jumping the Ladder: How Low-Income Students Navigate Social Mobility Through College"
My research engages a pressing question among social scientists: how do “people processing” organizations shape life course trajectories and processes of social mobility, especially among marginalized populations? My dissertation - “Jumping the Ladder: How Low-Income and First-Generation Students Navigate Social Mobility Through College” - investigates the experiences and outcomes of low-income and first-generation students at elite colleges. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation with 150 students attending elite colleges and universities in four major US cities, I argue that first-generation and low-income students experience a consequential “double bind” throughout their college careers. Unlike their classmates from more privileged backgrounds, these students must simultaneously “buy in” to the elite educational opportunities while avoiding “selling out.” In other words, they must actively exploit mobility opportunities and the accompanying personal transformations without severing social ties to home communities or abandoning deeply meaningful cultural practices that have limited currency on campus.
By analyzing the causes, contours, and consequences of this double bind, I reveal a previously undertheorized reason for gaps in educational outcomes and assert that the production of inequality emerges through the experience of upward mobility for many first-generation and low-income students. Many university interventions seek to level the playing field by assisting low-income and first-generation students build human, social, and cultural capital. As my research reveals, however, these interventions fail to address the difficulties, disruptions, and “spill-over effects” such transformations create for students’ senses of self, community membership, and emotional well-being. Pinpointing this gap between university programming and student experience, I challenge longstanding assumptions in sociology and public policy that conceptualize social mobility as primarily (if not exclusively) an economic phenomenon. In theorizing the social and cultural mechanisms involved in “becoming upwardly mobile,” I re-conceptualize social mobility as a relational, longitudinal, and embodied process.
My first manuscript from this project leverages this framework to examine how structural and social similarities between elite high schools and elite colleges translate into advantages for some low-income students as they navigate the transition into college. This manuscript won a best paper award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Children & Youth and is currently under review at a top sociology journal. I am also developing a book prospectus from my larger research project.
My research engages a pressing question among social scientists: how do “people processing” organizations shape life course trajectories and processes of social mobility, especially among marginalized populations? My dissertation - “Jumping the Ladder: How Low-Income and First-Generation Students Navigate Social Mobility Through College” - investigates the experiences and outcomes of low-income and first-generation students at elite colleges. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation with 150 students attending elite colleges and universities in four major US cities, I argue that first-generation and low-income students experience a consequential “double bind” throughout their college careers. Unlike their classmates from more privileged backgrounds, these students must simultaneously “buy in” to the elite educational opportunities while avoiding “selling out.” In other words, they must actively exploit mobility opportunities and the accompanying personal transformations without severing social ties to home communities or abandoning deeply meaningful cultural practices that have limited currency on campus.
By analyzing the causes, contours, and consequences of this double bind, I reveal a previously undertheorized reason for gaps in educational outcomes and assert that the production of inequality emerges through the experience of upward mobility for many first-generation and low-income students. Many university interventions seek to level the playing field by assisting low-income and first-generation students build human, social, and cultural capital. As my research reveals, however, these interventions fail to address the difficulties, disruptions, and “spill-over effects” such transformations create for students’ senses of self, community membership, and emotional well-being. Pinpointing this gap between university programming and student experience, I challenge longstanding assumptions in sociology and public policy that conceptualize social mobility as primarily (if not exclusively) an economic phenomenon. In theorizing the social and cultural mechanisms involved in “becoming upwardly mobile,” I re-conceptualize social mobility as a relational, longitudinal, and embodied process.
My first manuscript from this project leverages this framework to examine how structural and social similarities between elite high schools and elite colleges translate into advantages for some low-income students as they navigate the transition into college. This manuscript won a best paper award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Children & Youth and is currently under review at a top sociology journal. I am also developing a book prospectus from my larger research project.