My Parents Were Right About College Being Unequal — And Science Confirms It.
Of course, I didn't listen.
The Research
I was recommended Paying For The Party — How College Maintains Inequality by Peggy Orenstein (the author of Girls And Sex, a book I give every girl I know going to college) on social media. I watched the talks given by the authors about the research that went into the book (here, here, and here), and was mindblown enough that I got home and finished reading the book within three hours. And I haven’t stopped talking about it ever since.
Dr. Elizabeth Armstrong, and Dr. Laura Hamilton, two sociology researchers, spent four years in a university dorm, and followed the lives of 53 girls who lived there. Given that I used to be a disdainful college student, I’ll say that’s no small feat. They further followed up with the women at age 30 to see how things turned out for them. They conducted the study between 2003 and 2008, and wrote the book in 2013.
This style of research is called an ‘extended case study’, where you also collect a lot of extra data which helps see your observations in their natural context. It’s incredibly appealing, given the potential for storytelling, follow-up, and pattern recognition.
They identify the university only as ‘Midwest U’, a mid-tier flagship campus of a state university. It could be UT Austin, it could be ASU, it could be the University of Nebraska. They originally were looking to perform comparative studies on different social circles and experiences in college life, but seeing as they ended up in what they call the ‘party dorm’, they focused on the lives of the women who lived there.
What they found really blows every notion I had about undergrad life in an American university out of the water.
TL;DR: The rich get richer. The poor stay poor, or get poorer. Also, you need a helicopter parent.
The Pathways
Turns out, a large, diverse college still ends up having only a few unofficial tracks the students end up on. They found a few distinct pathways that the women they studied fell into.
First, there is the Party Pathway, which is basically enrollment in Greek life, and easy majors like sports broadcasting, or party planning. These are majors where schoolwork doesn’t matter as much as prior experience, personality, traditional expressions of femininity, and connections. A lot of the women who ended up in this pathway actually aimed to come to this university just for the social benefits. Think Lori Loughlin’s kids.
Then there was the Achievement Pathway, which is characterized by ambitious majors, merit based incentives, lots of attention from professors, freedom from paid work, and heavily invested parents. Think Amy Chua’s kids.
Finally, there’s the Mobility Pathway, which is majors that don’t require family intervention for success, like nursing, low tuition, and scholarships or flexible schedules that allow for paid work on the side.
The Findings
Rich, privileged women in the Party pathway do well after college. They manage to use their family connections to find jobs in their chosen domains, and their parents manage to subsidize their stay in big cities as they work internships and first jobs for little or no pay.
Girls who are from the middle or lower middle classes in the Party pathway are downwardly mobile. They don’t have the connections or finesse to find internships and other relevant experience in the easy majors, and even if they do, they cannot afford to work low-paying jobs and internships in expensive cities. Their easy majors don’t give them transferable skills, which is why they end up in jobs that don’t require a college degree in the first place. The startling thing to me was that several of these women came in for a harder major, like business, but found that they couldn’t keep up with both academics and the activities demanded of them by their sororities, so they ended up downgrading to an easy major.
On the Professional pathway, women with high parental involvement do well. Parental guidance with navigating social and professional situations, advice regarding limiting partying, helpful connections in finding internships and other co-curricular activities were just a few of the ways in which these women were aided to do better.
Children of parents with limited resources (time, money, knowledge) do worse in the Professional pathway, because you need clear goals, selective majors, relevant extracurriculars, and a limited social life to do well in this pathway, and the lack of parental guidance left them clueless, with several of them getting sucked into the whirlwind social life on campus, and limited guidance from advisors and professors.
The Mobility pathway was blocked on this campus. Only one woman of the 53 surveyed got ‘creamed’, with scholarships, mentorship, encouragement, and networking opportunities. This university had resources only for a small number of students on this pathway. For others, loneliness and isolation and difficulty fitting in were constant, as they spent long hours on paid work, provided for their family, were in relationships with men back home, and lacked the resources to socialize on campus. They were not able to give their education as much time as they would have liked.
Startlingly, if these women quit this university and went either to community college or a smaller regional campus, they managed to come out better than those who stayed in the prestigious university. They could afford their education more easily, had no partying to distract them, could be closer to their families, and managed to find classmates who they could connect with.
Given the stark difference in privileges between sorority houses and other living options on campus, like dorms, the Greek scene becomes the only option to socialize in these universities. Greek living is the only place where alcohol is available (having alcohol in dorms gets you harshly punished), where non-lame social events happen, and which have enough clout to have tests and other academic events rescheduled to fit their party schedule. Hence, if students are not prepared, it is incredibly easy to get swept up in the Party scene, and as we’ve seen, if you lack the resources to effectively navigate them, it can be disastrous to your academic career.
The most astonishing thing about this whole study was that if a woman had limited career prospects, she often also had limited romantic prospects. Privileged women met and married privileged men. Living in a big city and having financial freedom gave women more choices in partners. The confidence that an income and a career gave women made them less likely to stick with abusive or even unsupportive partners, and they were more likely to hold out for someone who was good for them.
My Interest
I went to a well-regarded engineering college in India for my undergrad in Computer Science. It was hard not to notice that among the women in my batch, their future depended heavily on their family background.
Women from families where independence and having a career mattered more than other concerns like marriage and children went on to pursue further education and top jobs. Others took up jobs that didn’t stretch them to the full extent of their training and abilities. They prioritized earlier marriage, children, and lived closer to their families. Their relatively lower income in comparison with their (sometimes lower qualified) husbands meant they moved to wherever their husband’s job took them, even if it was suboptimal for their careers.
While bank balance and job titles aren’t the only measure of success, watching my friends simply go on to replicate their parents’ socioeconomic classes was hard after seeing each other as equals for four years.
A particularly extreme example was of one of the best performers in my class choosing to not even apply to high-status jobs because those jobs weren’t located near her family.
This was in a university where you were assumed to not have any resources beyond the campus gates, and it was true for most of the students. It made me wonder about other colleges in India where privilege plays more of a role, and the academic focus is more diluted, with fewer qualified teaching staff and resources.
I do realize I cannot just superimpose this study on people who are starkly different from those surveyed. My college didn’t quite have a party pathway, but it did have people admitted on the basis of their ability to pay, and their pathways differed significantly from that of the others. There was also a rural-urban divide in outcomes and pathways. I want to understand at least some of the factors that might play a big role in these differences. People from different backgrounds have different challenges, and understanding each others’ concerns is often not easy. My unique challenges came from undiagnosed mental health issues, for example, while for others it might have been from lack of polish or financial difficulties, and they are not the same challenges.
While I loved going to grad school in America, I have met a lot of people since graduating, who dislike college, don’t consider it an essential ingredient of success like I do, and feel their college experience negatively impacted them. Trying to understand their perspectives was incredibly enlightening, and I concluded that in the whole system, there’s no one other than your parents who has your back, and if your parents aren’t familiar with college, it’s unlikely you’ll experience all the benefits.
Things my parents said (which I barely listened to)
My pathway was part mobility, and part professional. It was repeatedly drilled into me to avoid anything to do with what I now recognize as the ‘party pathway’. I did get swept up in the social life on campus, and this was despite my parents telling me to spend more time on academics. Whenever I’d say “But everyone is doing it!”, my parents would counter with “Everyone is richer/smarter/more connected/better skilled than you are. They can handle it, but you can’t.” Hearing this often enough made me overcautious enough that I didn’t create any lasting messes. Those of my friends who did had to put in a lot of work towards fixing the resulting financial, academic, mental, and emotional issues.
I was also heavily discouraged from pursuing majors that didn’t by themselves add to my career capital, and which required connections and money to have a successful career in. I chafed hard and wanted to quit Computer Science, and came close to doing so a few times, but each time, my parents made sure I stayed the course. It involved a lot of pushback, and a barrage of suggestions for alternatives to quitting. I second-guessed myself all the way from age 16 to 26 about my choice of career. But now, as someone passionate about my tech career, and with an appreciation for how easy it was to get off the ground as a programmer and financially support my family, and not be beholden to anyone, I realize that staying the course was the right choice.
The most successful people in my batch were those who were incredibly focused about their short-term and long-term aims. They did pivot several times about their choice of career, but having even a misguided or wrong long-term focus was much better than my not having one at all. The difference between those of us without a clear focus and those with was incredibly stark.
I also didn’t really understand why my parents pressured me into going into the most prestigious university I could get into. Wasn’t success ultimately dependant on your abilities as a person? A growing feeling, put into words by this book, is that going to an elite university connects you with an entire ecosystem of people, resources and brand names that make you feel like you fit in in the top line of career paths. Alumni of my college pepper all levels of achievement, and if I wanted to ask anyone for advice, all I needed to do was mail them and say ‘Hey, I too graduated from your university’, and it immediately brought on a kinship. Heck, even just seeing the name of my university on someone’s Linkedin profile made me feel like I would belong in their workplace. This gives me a boost I wouldn’t have had at a lesser-regarded university.
The Can Of Worms
For years, I wondered if I might have become a more well-rounded person if I had pursued my undergrad on an American campus. The American college experience appeared to be one where you used those four years on self-reflection and discovering yourself and your true passions, via meeting people who make you uncomfortable, and by changing majors to ones that might annoy your parents.
This book confirms to me that it might not have been the case.
Having a clear purpose, and focusing on acquiring and improving skills is what leads people to be successful in and after college. While this book doesn’t quite say so, it feels like not having a plan might work fine in campuses with better pathways to success. But given that your average American flagship public university has a prominent, and hence, default, party pathway, it’s more likely that would be the default option that anyone without a plan would fall into, and as we’ve seen, get chewed up and spit out.
Given what we know now, I wonder if it is incredibly irresponsible to tell children that any college is good, or that all majors are equally good, or that college is where you go to make connections to find jobs. This book clearly tells us that students self-segregate by socioeconomic class, scholarships are few and far in between, and poor students need to take up jobs to make rent and groceries. Further, the party pathway seems like a sure-shot way to downward mobility, and there are several barriers to trying out new activities and gaining an interest in them. Additionally, the university system does not attempt to desegregate their student body, or make them aware of all the options in front of them. The image of the American university we were sold seems to be a big fat lie… unless you’re already rich.
My biggest takeaway from this book was that in America today, you usually can’t succeed without parental support. Which is depressing, because as an immigrant student, I thought the US was where you go to succeed irrespective of, or even despite, your parents. Apparently your upward mobility through college is as dependent on your parents in America as it is in the Indian National Congress.
People can rant and rave about how we’re raising a generation of namby-pamby wishy-washy children with anxiety issues who cannot do anything by themselves, and how their helicopter parents caused this in the first place, but this book is proof that having helicopter parents is almost a necessity to graduate college better than you came in. The girls who showed initiative with working several jobs, paying their own way, and juggling multiple responsibilities did not do as well as they hoped. Keep that in mind the next time some perky ’50s throwback ‘scientist’ talks about how young people these days lack resilience and hence fail at college.
A Possible Solution
No matter which way I think about it, it looks like college has gotten complicated enough that even with all the money they spend on administrators, an 18 year old cannot navigate it all by themselves. The whole pipeline from high school, through college, and eventually the job market, seems to have become convoluted, with hidden doors and cheat codes that are privileged information. Having to rely on your family to navigate through college only widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Maybe that’s what college rankings need to focus on. Let’s judge colleges by how good they are with upward mobility, prospects of low income or working poor students after graduation, the usefulness of their counselors and advisors, the quality of their remedial classes, and the number and quality of jobs their students get through the official career fairs.
Apart from that, we need to start looking at majors differently. There seem to be several majors that look like vocational training, but don’t quite teach anything more than the basics, and grades have no bearing on finding jobs. This is because a lot of majors require connections to get started, or have incredibly low starting pay, or, usually, both. There’s a reason why some of the top American journalists come from incredibly privileged families (think Anderson Cooper or Ronan Farrow). Students are not informed about what it takes to sustain themselves in this job market.
Majors and college programs need to be rated based on how easy or difficult it is for someone with no connections or parental support to get more than a minimum wage job in the field. Enough with the ‘a philosophy degree trains you to do every job because critical thinking skills la di dah’ line of reasoning; it’s not like other majors ask you to leave your brain in your sorority house.
Maybe that’s the metric college needs to be optimized for — an enterprising young teenager should be able to navigate the system and achieve their best outcomes without having to rely on their families for advice.
I also hear now that Gen Z are less and less likely to aim to go to college unless they wanted a professional major, preferring instead to follow a vocation. I wonder what implications this has for our future workforce.
The authors suggest increasing government funding for colleges as a means to change this state of things. While I agree with the general idea, my opinion is that universities already have a lot of money and chronically mismanage it. Carrots and sticks to curb useless expenditure and creating bullshit jobs would be a better way.
Future Research
I’d really like to see this same study repeated with young men. For one, men are parented less, and are given more independence and resources to achieve the same goals. They are also expected to go into higher-earning professions, and are not pressured to get mommy-tracked. Seeing as there are many different ways for men to express power than women, I wonder if that leads to less socioeconomic segregation and differing outcomes, or more. One question I wonder about is if the wage gap is also caused by men generally taking up majors that require little to no parental intervention, as there is more pressure on them to begin making money sooner.
One thing that irked me a bit about this study was that none of the women surveyed were in engineering or computer science. I assume it is still a well-kept secret in most of America that the tech path is a professional/mobility pathway that welcomes a broad set of students.
I would like to use this paradigm to study and predict retention of women in the tech industry. As I’ve mentioned, one of the reasons I stuck it out in tech was that my parents did not let me quit, and always countered my annoyance with carrots, sticks, and kind words. What if everyone who started a tech career got that kind of support? Is it the presence of a social network and people invested in them which makes the difference between a woman who stayed versus one who pursued other careers? This paradigm might give us more insight into which populations are most vulnerable to attrition in tech, and maybe even suggest ways to remedy it.
In Closing
An education used to be the surest way to go up a social class. It looks like it still is, in India, thankfully. I have a newfound appreciation for my college which was in the middle of nowhere, on cheap land kept mostly underdeveloped and wild, minimal expenditure on non-academic activities, and one single entrance exam. It seemed incredibly stressful and bleak back then, but as I see my American-born nieces and nephews applying to college, I realize this system is even more stressful and bleak, not to mention terribly unequal. Maybe there’s some lessons there for a new kind of university in America, that focuses on core needs of young people these days over traditional notions of what college is and should be.