Rights of passage: Social class and the transition to college.
Item
-
Title
-
Rights of passage: Social class and the transition to college.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3231942
-
identifier
-
3231942
-
Creator
-
Bloom, Janice.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Michelle Fine
-
Date
-
2006
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Education, Sociology of | Education, Higher
-
Abstract
-
At a time when shifts in the national and global economy make college a prerequisite for social mobility, disturbing trends show a decline in the number of poor and working class students enrolling at selective colleges, and a growing gap in overall college-going between the poorest and richest young people. However, despite widespread agreement and wealth of data on the very different college-going outcomes that social class predicts, the complex nature of the mechanisms by which these gaps are produced/reproduced is not currently clearly understood. Likewise, the processes of the transition to college---the "rites of passage" that are involved in accessing higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century---have not been sufficiently examined or theorized. In this dissertation, I seek to fill both of these, gaps.;Through ethnographic research at three small public schools in New York City, this dissertation examines---across both race and class---students' experiences of the college application process in their senior year of high school. In order to explain the very different educational trajectories and life chances of students from different social class backgrounds, it focuses not only on the circumstances, behaviors and attitudes of the poor and working class in order to determine what they "lack", but also turns the lens in the direction of the middle and upper classes in order to make clear all of the structures and supports in place that create/allow for their successes.;While this research reaffirms the existence of many of the barriers cited in literature on the transition from high school to college, it takes their analysis a step further, by both stepping back to situate them within the larger societal structures that create barriers to access and simultaneously focusing in more closely on the lived realities within which students experience those barriers. In doing so, it seeks to construct a sufficiently detailed and complex conception of how social class resources interact with each other, and with individual agency and dispositions - and intersect with institutional demands and larger economic and political structures - to create specific outcomes in this critical moment of transition.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
