What is it about?
College graduates do not have the same outcomes. Some go to graduate school or get decent jobs while others flounder, working part-time, at jobs that do not make good use of their skills, or fail to find jobs at all. Even students who graduate from small liberal arts colleges in the US, colleges that are hard to get into in the first place, struggle with success after graduation. These struggles vary significantly by class background. with working-class students at greater risk for malemployment outcomes than their peers.
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Why is it important?
College is expensive in the US. The annual average tuition and fees at a small liberal arts colleges is $35,000. If WC students are not sharing the benefits of a college degree equally with their more privileged peers, they may be at particular risk for coming away from college worse off than had they gone, with accumulating debt to worry about. Analyzing the differential outcomes can help us craft interventions that can make earning a college degree of equal benefit to all students.
Perspectives
As a working-class college students who went to a small liberal arts college myself, I am eternally grateful for that experience, but I also know that my path from there to here (as professor/researcher) involved a lot of lucky breaks, that some of my peers do not share. I also graduated with very little debt, thanks to the generosity of private donors and the federal government. Had I graduated with debt, I do not think I would have been able to continue with my education. This study was my attempt to understand the lay of the land for students like me now, in the hope that by doing so we can ensure that college benefits everyone.
Allison Hurst
Oregon State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Classed outcomes: how class differentiates the careers of liberal arts college graduates in the US, British Journal of Sociology of Education, April 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2018.1455495.
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