 Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. It's a great turnout. I want to thank President Sullivan and Dan and Carol Durak for hosting our speaker today. And special thanks to Emeritus Professor Beth Mints, my friend and dear colleague for the inspiration to bring our speaker here today. My name is Kathy Fox. I'm a professor in sociology and I'm grateful for the chance to introduce you to Elizabeth Armstrong. We've only brought a few sociologists here on a BRAC lecture. William Julius Wilson and Todd Gitlin. So Elizabeth, you are in great company. Her CV is too long for me to recount so I'll just give you some highlights. She's professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan. Currently she's enjoying a fellowship at Stanford and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her first book published by University of Chicago Press entitled Forging Gay Identities Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco 1950 to 1994. That earlier work was related to social movements but began the thread of research into sexuality and sexual identities. In recent years her work has received a lot of attention because of its topical relevance about things like hookup culture, blood shaming, and sexual assault on campus. Her recent book with her co-author Laura Hamilton and the one that she will talk about today is called Paying for the Party How College Maintains Inequality published by Harvard University Press. The book has been very well received both as a scholarly work and as a work of significant import for higher education. It's received multiple awards and mentions. Most notably it received the American Geological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2015. That means it's the best book of all sociology books written. And it was also commended by other associations and sections due to the breadth of its contribution to things like cultural sociology, educational sociology, stratification in organizations, gender, and sexuality. Sociologists have long recognized that social class is reproduced and that many although not all individuals end up in the same social class as their parents and one very important question is the role of education in this dynamic. Parts of the process are well understood. That schools in affluent neighborhoods prepare students to apply to elite colleges that SAT prep courses help, that highly educated parents are very good at helping students. Not to mention the cash that allows participation in high status campus activities. Paying for the party brings home the importance of all this with rich descriptions of how the economic, cultural, and social capital of the women in a party dorm at a large Midwestern university contributes to their success. But it doesn't stop there. For sociologists, individual characteristics and actions are crucially important but only part of the story. The other part is about the ways in which societal arrangements within which individuals function, what we call structure, shape, and constrain our lives. This is an enormous contribution to our understanding of social class reproduction, this book. One of the things that it does very well is as an ethnography really speak to these social structural processes, which a lot of ethnographies do less well. Hold on, what did I do? So in full disclosure, I have known Elizabeth since our days together in graduate school at UC Berkeley where we both got our PhDs. And I want to say three important things about her. Number one, Elizabeth was the person who late at night after a beer or two, when we'd be chatting which is why grad school is the best, would virtually analyze everything, anything late into the night. She would enthusiastically dissect popular culture, campus life, cohort dynamics, feminist pornography, anything, and everything was ripe for deconstruction. In short, she is one of the most intellectually curious people I know, which makes her a delight to be around, at least for another sociologist. She was known then and is known now as an intellectual force. Number two, her work demonstrates beautifully the extended case method promoted by Michael Borovoy from Berkeley which advocates using field data to test and revise macro level theory. Paying for the party is a careful example of using ethnographic data to make structural arguments effectively. And it's one of the best illustrations of Bourdieu's cultural capital that I have ever read. It has tremendous real world and policy implications. The book is very clearly written and accessible, but its implications are quite deep. Finally, number three, Elizabeth is a humble and lovely person whom I'm proud to call a friend and delighted to introduce you to. So please welcome Professor Elizabeth Armstrong. Okay, I hope I got the mic turned on. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thank you, Kathy, for that lovely introduction. It is one of the joys of academic life is that relationships extend over decades often. And so I very much appreciate that. And thank you very much, all of you, for inviting me here to join you today. And I look forward to sharing a little bit with you about paying for the party, how college maintains inequality. One of the things I want to start with here that's very important is pointing out that this is a collaborative book, that it's co-authored equally with Laura Hamilton. This is very important as will become increasingly evident, as I tell you a little bit about the process of doing the research, because Laura collected the vast majority of the data for this project. And in fact, my inability to collect the data for the project due to my age and social location, my inability to fit in to college life at the time that the project that we collected the data was actually a really huge tip-off in terms of the kind of argument that we ended up making. But as a consequence it was crucial to have an ethnographer who could fit in, in order to collect the data. And I'll tell a little bit more about that as I go along. But without Laura, no book. So, this is a case study of a mid-tier flagship university. This picture is of University of Nebraska. We didn't study University of Nebraska, but we probably co-authored. It was a big public Midwestern research university a school known as a party school. They have these lists like you can go Google and find out like what's the top ten party schools the school we studied was a school that frequently makes it onto this list. It's a school that people look to when they're thinking about quintessential college experience. So, we kind of wanted to study this in part because understanding college life in the US means studying these kinds of organizations and where we are now is also kind of a school very much like this in some ways. And actually in the Q&A it would be really, really interesting to have thoughts about ways in which there are similarities and differences. As I've talked about the book, that's been a kind of interesting ongoing conversation like where the, how universities vary. But this kind of experience is consequential for many, many, many people. So, we wanted to understand it better. So, what did we do? We got a room on the dorm floor. So, we got a room on a party dorm at a party school. And so this, there's also, you can go Google this too, you can find like the top ten party dorms USA and this particular dorm where we were in would definitely make that list. So, after we got the permissions and we got our dorm room and we moved in, we didn't have, our room kind of was a little pathetic compared to the rooms of other people on the floor. It was a women's floor and all these other rooms there was just like explosions of pink. Pink everything and all this brand new stuff and our room didn't look so good. But we had a room and we, and I was hanging out there too and then this comes back to Laura. It was about within the really the first day of moving onto the floor that the problem of me as an ethnographer became abundantly clear. When the parents started asking me like, are you moving a kid into the dorm? And at that point I was horrified. My own son now is 22. He's finishing college. But at that point I was like, no, this can't be, no, they can't think I'm a parent. But the parents clearly were identifying me and the students were like, they were, when we were like hanging out in our room there were some guys coming to visit the women who were living across the hall and they were like, there's an adult on the floor, adult on the floor. And I was like, uh-oh. But I was still kind of optimistic that I could kind of hang out there. And I kind of did manage to sort of find my way on the floor a little bit in the sense that I became friends with the kind of other pariah women on the floor. Kind of the individuals who gravitated to me were those who were also struggling to find a place and fit in. And this is of course what kind of tipped us off that status and fitting in was a really big deal. Laura, who was a graduate student substantially younger from a white woman from a class privileged background who kind of had already some social ties with kind of people on the floor was just infinitely better able to fit in. She was still wearing like, she could still shop at Abercrombie, I don't know if people still shop there, but she was still wearing like high school body clothes, which is what one of the other students referred to, like these 18 year olds as they had high school bodies. They're very, very young. So she could still kind of fit in and collect the data, which turned out to be crucial because we got there and we just got very, very interested in what was happening in these young women's lives. They called each other girls at that time. They did not identify as adult at all. But we got interested. We interviewed them all the first year and then again second, third, fourth year after they graduated and again at age 30. And we have up all the way through, we have of the 53, we have 45 of them. And that was all Laura, her relationships. And she figured out things that, such as like that first year when we were making the ties with them, that in order to persuade some of the very high status women on the floor to participate, that she needed to communicate three things to them in approximately one minute. One is that someone higher status than them on the floor had already participated in an interview, as it was an in thing to do, that participating in an interview meant that they could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, that they could just, that it wasn't going to be guided that they could sort of say whatever they wanted or not, or not disclose whatever they wanted. And that we were not going to lurk around them and essentially contaminate their status, that we were going to, that we were not going to kind of be intrusive in terms of hanging out with them. Because they were, they were, they were very much concerned about how, who they were seen with reflected on their status. And me, as Priya on the floor, one of the young women in particular, our mean girl on the floor, whom we called Whitney, she would actually book the other direction she saw me. She would literally turn around and like try to physically move as far away from me as, as, as she could get. And, and then on the opposite stand, we also had some undergraduates on the floor with us also collecting data as well. And one of them was this young woman who was in a very high status sorority on campus. And Whitney and some of the other women who wanted to rush would kind of just totally like glom onto her and sort of interrogate her about how to have a perfect rush and how to do rush and, and kind of just like pepper her with questions. So much so, we actually had to remove Whitney from the floor because it was becoming a problem for Whitney in terms of the way sororities on this campus understood appropriate relationships between women in sororities and women who were kind of potential new recruits that, that you were supposed to maintain a distance and it was posing in the, in the world of the Panhellenic Association kind of an ethical quandary because she was not supposed to have this much tie. So, so until rush was over this particular undergraduate was like pulled off the floor. So again, status, bidding in, popularity, really, really important. So, but then what we were also, so there's that and so some people might think that, okay, status, popularity, social life that that has, that that's its own thing that it has nothing to do with the academic side of college. One of the things we try to show in paying for the party is that the social side, popularity going out, hooking up, relationships, Greek life, and social class and academic success and what happens in college is these are all connected. It's not like there's this like social stuff over here and then there's the hard work of the academic side and again, but these things are connected. Those who had an easier time of it socially also kind of in some ways had fared well better academically and we argue in the book in general that how well the students did kind of on a really all dimension socially, academically, personally was a result of the fit between the, what they brought into the situation and what the university provided. And that at this school, the whole game and play, the organizational arrangements set up, everything from the classes, the majors, Greek life, residence life, all of it, was set up to really serve the most affluent students the best. So the students that ended up being like the high kind of status students on the floor were also not accidentally, not coincidentally, the wealthiest students on the floor as well. That there was this kind of fit between it's like who they were, what they expected of college, what they brought with them, kind of culturally and actually literally in terms of their clothes and their cars and all of that stuff and the university, what the university provided, it just was a really good fit and the other students were just ended up struggling. So another way that this book kind of challenges some other prior investigations of college life is that there's been a tendency to see like, oh yeah, Greek life might have some problems, maybe hazing or maybe sexual assault, maybe there's problems within Greek life. But those, it doesn't spill over to those students who don't participate. We argue it's all, it's a full picture that the excesses or problems of Greek life actually also have a consequence for the climate and experiences of those students who either can't or choose not to elect in these worlds that these can't be looked at in isolation. And this is in general also between, the experiences of students who with less class privilege are deeply informed by the ways in which they're treated and the interactions they have with more affluent students so that you can, that the kind of class dynamics are deeply relational as well and this of course would apply for gender and race as well that you can't understand marginalization on college campuses without understanding the behaviors of the people who have the power to engage in marginalization of others. Just looking at the experiences of those who have been marginalized and won't tell us how this marginalization occurs. So today in terms of to kind of show you a little bit about the book, I'll talk about a little bit more about the women on the floor where they came from. I'll talk about the kind of organizational arrangements, what we call the college pathways and then I'll talk a little bit about how these things come together how kind of these women intersect with the kind of the pathways that they found and then we'll open it up for questions. So these women, so when we moved on to the floor we're like okay okay 53 people we're going to figure them all out we're going to get to know them. It was really rough they were all white, they were all but too straight, they were all but one American born and even more than that they only had 37 fully distinct names. There were more than one room on the floor where there were two girls with the same name. So then there was this kind of practice of slight variations, it's like Katie, Kate, Catherine people would modify if there was two Allison's one with Ali so there was this pattern of modification of the name so people could sort it out but it was really hard to work out. And then we had a little bit initially of like a kind of sociological kind of downer moment and we were hoping to also study a living learning center, we wanted to compare two residence halls on the same campus but we got kicked out of that hall because that was actually the only time in the whole field work process that I cried I was really upset, I was just like this was horrible, we're like losing our access and the academic advisor for the living learning center, they kind of understood how objectifying it is to be part of research and so they were like no, our students in the living learning center, no we can't let them to be studied but the people were much the kind of residence life student affairs people were much more concerned about the misbehavior of the individuals living in the party dorm so they were like okay sure, move in, study these folks so we didn't have access and then we wanted a co-ed floor but we didn't get a co-ed floor, we wanted to look at men too, we weren't just only interested in women, it was just like this is what we could get and then we arrived and it looks like we have 53 applications of exactly the same person and we're like sociology is all about variation and we're like what are we going to do with this? Turns out there was one really big source of variation on the floor which I've already kind of hinted at which was social class. About half the women, 45% were from what we call less privileged backgrounds working lower middle and middle class backgrounds and slightly more than half were from more privileged backgrounds. To kind of give you an example of the extreme nature of the class diversity on this floor, those from working class backgrounds, their parents were doing things like being a checker at a grocery store child care, working as electric line person, I mean just really like working class jobs who have no higher education themselves. The people in upper class positions, these were women from families where their fathers owned things, owned like a construction company kind of operating in the entire southeast of the US where they were in Wall Street in extremely lucrative professions and finance, these were by upper class we meant individuals from where they from their parents received no notion whatsoever of financial constraint being an issue. Like the upper middle class with their parents being like doctors and lawyers, the women would sometimes get the sense of like we really might not be able to afford that. The women from upper class families, they weren't getting those messages. They were generally given a credit card and they never saw the statements they never had a sense that there was any moment where money would ever run out. This is the notion that 19% of the women fell in this group, I mean that's odd because we're talking here about people in the kind of 1-5% of the upper end of the American class distribution. Very, very wealthy individuals were very over represented in this space. They're over represented at this university in general, this is a place where wealthy children of the coastal elites send their kids to school, but they were also over represented in this dorm because this was in terms of the selection of the dorm, the out of state wealthy families knew that this was the right place to live. There was a process of selection into a particular residence halls and these individuals knew, and then that raises the question like how did the less privileged individuals get into this particular residence hall? It was because they were too clueless and didn't know any better. They said that right off the bat. They were just like I did not intend to be on a dorm floor with everyone I didn't like in high school, what some of them said. Where did all of these super rich people come from? This was not my plan, but one of the class differences we observed is that the privileged women, if there was something about their social life, their residential situation that they didn't like, they immediately appealed to student life and asked for a change. They felt entitled to a fun college experience, and the instant they thought that that was not being realized, they pushed and advocated for a change. I want a new roommate, I want to move to a different floor, I want to move to a different dorm, they would have their parents come and help them load up all their stuff and make the change, but the less privileged individuals, they felt like they had to take whatever it is they got. So they got stuck on this floor and so they just assumed that that was that. And they didn't necessarily have an expectation that college was supposed to be fun, or that they were entitled to have a good time in college. So they were like, okay, this kind of sucks, this college. So they didn't push, they didn't push to move. In fact, some of the individuals from less privileged backgrounds who had the worst experiences on the floor they made no friends, they were completely isolated and marginalized. They came back and lived in the same floor in the same dorm another year. They didn't even try in the next year to address their situation because they just felt, yeah, well, at least this I know. I know how to get to class from this dorm. I know, I get it. Although some of those individuals over the course of four or five years in college gradually made changes to move closer to groups of friends that they liked or kind of situations that worked better for them. But it was not an easy process at all. That was something that was so surprising to us, because we kind of from pretty much one of the defining characteristics of anyone who ends up in a faculty position or ends up in student affairs or ends up working for the university are these are adults who somehow managed to successfully navigate college. So it sort of selects on people who were able to kind of find a way, even if it was rather difficult to kind of find places on campus that were fits for them. And so it's hard for adults to kind of get it, like that some people when they arrive on campus just are not positioned to be able to kind of go, oh, I think that I'm going to fit in best over here and I will go and join that club or the dorm isn't a good fit, I'm going to move to that dorm. So this issue of like how difficult it is to kind of navigate around, particularly a very large university to find a good spot. People didn't. That's actually was a surprise for us. So here are the women. So the working class, people doing childcare, upper class, people who own like large companies, really different resources. And so that's what they're kind of bringing with them. But then the kind of notion of the college pathway. So we often show this slide to give a sense that colleges build out different ways through them. Like there's maybe a temptation to see every single student's movement through college as entirely unique. Like everyone, it's like they have their own particular set of courses, their own experiences and it's highly completely individual in particular. Actually, from the point of view of the university, it's much more efficient to kind of batch process people, to deal with people in groups. Like to deal with, like, oh, all students who are sort of conventional age, 18 years old who are living in the residence hall are going to have a certain set of needs and certain set of kind of they all need a meal plan. They all need this or that. And the more similar one is to the modal conventional traditional sort of a student. The student that the architecture is built for, the kind of easier the experience is likely to be. Like on this, imagine navigating the set of highways on a moped or by foot. Not going to be very easy, right? These are highways built for automobiles on a bicycle wouldn't work so well. Having a bicycle is no better or worse and maybe we could argue better than having a car but it's not going to be effective for this situation. So that's kind of the notion of fit. It's like what the universities are sort of building out their whole residence life arrangements, the kind of classes, the majors, the whole social experience around thinking about a particular kind of student. And as it turns out the most sought after kind of student for cash starved public universities that need full paying tuition for students potentially from out of state is kind of an affluent white student. And that student often what they want when they're looking for college is they want a party experience. They want the conventional social experience. They often want a party pathway. So among the women as we interview them and we ask them what they were looking for in college they would tell us that like one woman in particular Hannah, she told us her father was a chief financial officer of a company. She was from the east coast she was very, very social in high school. She went and visited ten different party schools to find the absolute best party school. You know she didn't want, some were too cold, some were too urban, some were this, some were that, but she wanted the school with the best sports, the most school spirit, the most successful athletic teams, the best Greek life, the prettiest campus, all of those things. And so she systematically with her, it was not about academics or what majors were on offer, it was like what school provided the best party pathway. And yeah, so what provides a party pathway, Greek life, Waze Residence Life is organized, and the easy major. And so some, there's a tendency to think like oh, you know, universities, they don't really, they're not interested in the student partying, the student drinking and excess is something that isn't part of the institutional arrangements of the school, but it's something that just happens, that the adult administrators are always trying to figure out how to kind of nip in the bud basically. And part of it is very much true, I mean it had been meetings with folks in student affairs today and we had a very interesting conversations about what are strategies to reduce drinking on this campus and things like that. And so yes, there are definitely people who are very interested in kind of reducing the party pathway. And one of the kind of interesting features of universities as organizations is that their different component parts run at cross purposes with each other. They're not coherent, they're not consistent. And so the provision, particularly at this school where Greek life was huge, and Residence Life was designed in a way that meshed really tightly with Greek life. And where there were a ton of super easy majors, that definitely enabled the party pathway. Like one of the things, at University of Michigan where I'm at, which is not where this was done, the party pathway is somewhat constrained by the difficulty of the academics. It is also enabled by the big house, you know, go blue football, all of that. So there's things that kind of run at cross purposes. But at this school, there was a lot of stuff moving in the same direction in terms of supporting the party pathway. So this, the picture here is, this isn't from the campus that I studied, but this is an example of the sort of scale of and size of the fraternity and sorority houses at this university. And I mean, so this is a place where that there were almost two dozen fraternities and almost 20 sororities. So this is a big, big part of the college experience there. Mobility pathway, this is the notion that schools should help out individuals who are coming for disadvantaged background by leveling the playing field by kind of doing all kinds of things like while teaching well, making it affordable, kind of having kind of ramps to professional pathways through kind of making any kind of compensation in terms of education that has happened. And one of the things that was really striking for us in setting the school was like almost complete absence of mobility pathways. And in fact, it wasn't, we didn't even understand that a mobility pathway could really be a thing until like being at Michigan and seeing this scale and the kind of architecture built out in the Comprehensive Studies Program and Summer Bridge and things like that. It's like, oh, wow! Universities can provide scaffolding to try to help individuals from less privileged background kind of succeed, that this is something that universities do because it wasn't really happening at any scale at the school that we studied. And then a professional pathway is kind of sort of stereotypically what one might assume that college in general is about. It's about kind of providing routes into law, medicine, finance, academia, academically serious and the like. And one of the things we found here was that helicopter parents were essentially a requirement for success on the professional pathway. The party pathway was so distracting and engaging that without parents they were constantly going, so do you really think you should be going out? Maybe you need to think about like telling your roommate that you need to stay in tonight. So there were we found that parents who understood, who were very savvy, they understood that their student was at a school with a lot of distractions and they were paying a lot of attention. So there the picture is someone not just in the helicopter but kind of like really like literally in the car helping navigate the situation. So I'll tell you a little bit more about how this actually kind of worked out. But first the women from less privileged backgrounds, many of them were of course on the mobility pathway by necessity and some did try to participate in the party pathway and some did participate in the professional pathway. The privileged women were split between the party and the professional pathway and so we ended up in the book dividing them into these categories where the socialites were the ones who partied partied, partied, partied the whole way through with no negative consequence. They had enough class resources that it really didn't matter how much they partied. Everything was going to be fine. The wannabes were the ones who were party, party, party, but in fact they were wannabe socialites in the sense that they thought they could party hard and everything was going to work out just fine, but as it turns out that wasn't really true. As one of the wannabes told us after graduation, nobody told me that Disneyland was going to end as she was moving back home with her parents and realizing that her degree was not really adequate to get her the kind of job that she wanted after partying so hard. What the wannabes didn't understand was that the socialites had parents that were going to continue to fund essentially infinitely at high levels all the way through their 20s that there was no point at which the kind of support was going to end. So that's one way in which class is invisible in the sense that yes, you can kind of tell in college whether someone has enough money for the jewelry and the jeans and the spring break trips, but one of the things you can't tell is whether someone has parents with so much money that they are going to continue to pay to support at that level in perpetuity. That's one of the kind of big differences. Some of the privileged women came from families where they were kind of what we called cultivated for success. They ended up performing academically really well. We called them achievers. Even some of the women from privileged backgrounds didn't actually become achievers. We called them underachievers in part because of the sort of distractions of the party pathway. And then those on the mobility pathway were split between those who graduated and those who left the university before graduation. One of the things which I won't have time to talk about is actually those who left did better than those who stayed. And that runs counter to all conventional wisdom and all quantitative social science stratification research which thinks that if you just stick it out, just stay, everything is going to be much better. In fact, the organizational arrangements were so poorly set up for less privileged students on the mobility pathway that the sooner they figured out that the game in play was not for them and got out, the better they did. They didn't leave college altogether but they moved to schools where they were going to be better served. And some of them were quite steely-eyed about it. They're just like, when they figured out they're like, wait, I see who this whole, what's happening here and that this is not for me. I need, this is too expensive, I'm acquiring too much debt. These majors are useless. I'm getting sucked into partying. I need to get out. And the sooner they did, the better they did. So, yeah. So that's kind of an overview. But then I'm going to go into like one particular case next. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Naomi and Karen. So this goes more into the socialite versus wannabe story. So, Naomi. Naomi was from an upper middle class, possibly upper class family. Her father owned a company. She wanted to come to this university to meet new people and to join a dance team because she thought her in-state school was too hard. Actually, she was from Michigan actually. But she thought it was, you know, no way you've found like, and Michigan State she thought she knew too many people. So she wanted to meet people just like herself, but different people. Different, like, wealthy white students, but not the same wealthy white students she already knew from her high school. So that was her motivation. Karen was from in-state and for a lot of middle-class in-state students attending the flagship school basically the fall. That's how she ended up at the school. In some ways their social lives their experiences of college were really similar. They both partied hard. Really hard. They both joined sororities and they both actually ended up majoring in sports communication. What is sports communication? It is an easy major. I mean there's like, I mean Naomi was, she was flat, she was, she was quite bright and she was like, yeah, there's no content here at all. And in fact Naomi, Naomi was very close to her parents and when her parents arrived for graduation they could not find Naomi on the graduation program because the graduation program was sort of separated by majors and her parents actually had no idea what she was majoring in so they couldn't find her. Yet she was talking with her parents every day and so from her parents' perspective what she was doing academically when she was in college was also utterly beside the point. Karen transferred to sports communication even though her family had wanted her to go. They felt that she would be a good teacher. They felt that was an appropriate career path for her. They thought she should do elementary ed but she learned about sports communication from a girl on the floor. They thought, yay, let's do that. Partially because she just liked boys a lot and thought particularly athlete boys and thought that being able to interview them in locker rooms was like awesome. I mean that was pretty much what her notion was about this. Then what she didn't figure out and I think what she didn't understand is that actually being in the field of sports is a really male dominated field. It's really hard work. You have to travel a lot. I mean that it's actually that you have to do tons of internships. She had no concrete notion of what that career path might actually look like or entail. It sounded really great and in fact there was a whole set of majors that we saw as being like soft skill network dependent majors. All these kind of glamour industries, sports kind of communication, media film kind of all of these kind of majors entirely possible to have wildly successful careers in these fields. Most of them you need to have some kind of network bridge. You need to have really really really good interpersonal skills. What sociologists refer to as social and cultural capital. You really need to have network ties and you need to be able to have the amount of kind of family financial resources that they can like set you up in big cities after graduation to help you get your career. A lot of these careers are really hard to do if you don't have a lot of resources and so a career in this field would be one of them. So they're going on in their part of their college career. They're parting hard. Naomi on her awesome 2.45 GPA, we were trying to kind of get some insight into this and Laura who interviewed her was trying to figure out what she was doing. She was like are you hooking up? It's not the boyfriend but just random guys. Yes going out a lot. Yes, you were hung over the next day and she's like yeah just being lazy and a bunch of classes that I didn't enjoy. So she's just like she is utterly unapologetic about this. She's just like the academic side is just kind of stupid. I don't know why I'm supposed to be doing this like academic thing. This is not something she feels like she has there's no apology here. Karen after having a pretty similar experience eventually realizes she needs to transfer. So she's like I need to get away from MU going out all the time and come here to the branch campus so I could focus on what my goal was for this part of my life. And her mom is like at this point totally annoyed and her mom thinks that basically she's been sold a bill of goods and she's like I know now it's going to take two more years because nothing transfers and I said the school knows that. They make it sound like no big deal to change that is your major but yeah they're making big bucks by the kids changing. So Karen's mom by this point feels like she's been betrayed by this university. She sent her daughter there to major in elementary education. Her daughter changes to this major that she thinks is just completely ridiculous. And as it turns out you know there was pretty much no way Karen was likely to make a career in this field. She's like that's sports that's a hobby from Karen's mom's perspective. She is not into this like go kind of be self-actualized be passionate about whatever you want. She's like you should major in education. Okay so in the meantime while they're still in the sports field Naomi does an unpaid internship in New York for the sports division of a major network through a connection from her sister and had opportunities over the course of her career for more internships what she turned down because she didn't feel like she needed them and wanted more leisure time. Then before she transferred back to elementary education looked for internships was unable to get any because she had no network ties to do that. Naomi graduated with a 2-9 GPA but she wasn't really sure about that just like there was not really much of a knowledge about what her major was but she graduated in four years. She fairly easily got a first job in New York as executive assistant for a media company through her social skills and network ties. She was able to easily live in New York even though she wasn't making very much money on this first job because her parents continued to support her along the way and she had a great social life. So Karen she transfers to the branch campus by this point her GPA is really low and at the time we left her she was on track to graduate in six years. But then we did the interviews at age 30. Anyone want to take that son on where Naomi and Karen are at age 30? What's that? That's a good guess because yeah that is a good guess. Now that Naomi was married that's a good guess. Anyone else want to like say the roughly same place another good guess? Well actually Naomi surprised us a little bit because Naomi was the single most successful financially of all of the women. She individually at age 30 is making $210,000 a year as account executive living in Los Angeles. She was one of the few socialized who didn't go the marriage path yet and she seemed to be utterly unconcerned about finding Mr. Right. She had no student loan debt and in fact she had just recently become financially independent because from her family's perspective she needed to get to about $200,000 a year before they thought she could really make it on her own. So she was now independent. She was loving her job. She loved life in Los Angeles and she made the most money. Karen was doing pretty well actually in a lot of ways. She was pretty happy. She was making $33,000 a year as a second grade teacher back in her smallest western town living with her boyfriend who didn't have a college degree. I think we realized that they broke up like very shortly after we did this interview and part of the reason she was sort of like having a lifestyle that was recognizably middle class was that she was from a middle class background and her parents were able to buy her house and pay off her student loans and in the town she was living in the houses were not that expensive and so forth. She was happy her life was fine but the difference in terms of the intellectual apparatus of sociology and stratification doesn't really have to account for how incredibly different their income is at age 30 given that they graduated with the same major. They graduated with different majors but at halfway through college they looked roughly identical in terms of their level of academic investments. But the differences are huge. One part of that is it's not all class background and it's not all necessarily what will argue the university arrangements. Part of it they are just really different people. Naomi as utterly blasé as she was about her academics it was really clear from the time we met her that this young woman could talk. She could sell anything. So she had a lot of kind of interactional interpersonal skill and smarts and she figured out how to leverage it exactly in the right world. But then being able to leverage it in the right world was required an enormous amount of network ties and to do that. So it ended up hugely differently. But to really kind of bring it back to kind of like Kathy pointed out this sort of structural piece of it that the university is not just kind of an empty kind of place where you know that's completely neutral where people are meritocratically competing to see who comes out in top in terms of talent and skill and with everybody having kind of a level playing field we argue and show in a variety of additional ways in the book that in fact that the university was in fact set up for Naomi. I mean she had a great time. The experience was easy and unproblematic. She had the college experience she expected and wanted and her parents purchase for her. It was all great. She didn't need the school to really do much in terms of any kind of academic anything and she felt that the school really offered her a lot. Naomi was like yeah my social skills got better. I met a lot more people. I couldn't have gone and started this kind of career in the field that she wanted to be in without the kind of additional polish and kind of interactional, social, cultural skills that she acquired in college. She didn't really need or want the academic part of it but she knew that the kind of the stuff that she got in Greek and the life and the friends that she made and that was all part of this kind of movement into this particular life that she wanted to go to. But for Karen the lure of the party pathway was a disaster. She ended up nearly looking at a school. The provision of that sports communication major was like did her no service at all. She got negligent basically advising. No help and there was no assistance in finding summer internships so that she could have been successful with that sports communication career had she wanted to stick with it. It was just like basically they just let her flounder and she finally got sorted out by transferring and kind of spending an additional two years. So that kind of I'll open it up for questions now but with this after just concluding here that our argument there is that the college experiences and the class trajectories out of college are shaped by this fit between the individual characteristics what students bring with them and the organizational characteristics particularly these college pathways. And in fact that we given the kind of relative scarcity now increasing but scarcity of kind of close ethnographic quantitative analysis of really what's happening to students with the perspective of kind of an organizational framework. We don't really know about what pathways are like at other schools like who's really served who isn't. And yeah so there I'll stop there and any questions that you have comments or sort of insights or thoughts on what's going on here would be great. One second I just want to make an announcement there is a reception upstairs in Waterman Manor following the question and answer so I know some people have to leave but if you can stay you can probably chat with Elizabeth a little bit more. So I will handle the Q&A so where is your hand up? Oh no go ahead go ahead and then alright thank you very much for still all this I learned a lot I commend you for living in a dorm I used to be a residential advisor and I'd never go back. I also think books like this really have the potential to change a student's college trajectory and I'm thinking of a specific book that I read when I was in between my sophomore and junior summer called Unhooked How Young Women Pursue Sex Delight Love and Lose It Both which was an undercover journalist who went on a campus and talked about the hookup culture and my mom pushed it on me and I was like super against reading it and it totally changed the way that I went back to college for the next two years and pursued just my experience so I'm kind of excited for the generation of students who get to then read this and reflect on their own college experience but I'm pretty interested in how you are defining your definition of success in this study because I'm just noticing we're calling $210,000 success we're not calling L.A. success we're not calling teacher success and while I think there's lots and lots of different definitions of success I'm wondering if you chose one particular interpretation for the purpose of this research. Yeah, so what we did and in fact we do consider Karen pretty successful but what we tried to do at the end of the book is we tried to look at several different dimensions at the same time and qualitative research is more situated to do that than quantitative research. Their own satisfaction with their college experience, their ability to get a job requiring a college degree, their likelihood of, this was a subtle one, of kind of moving into a living in a place where they might conceivably meet somebody to marry, like in their moving back home to their parents or kind of moving it was potentially a problem so also being able to live independently issues about student loan debt so in terms of when we kind of classified the students at the end according to like we, I'll go on to this next slide in terms of the risk of downward mobility and the reproduction of privilege we kind of looked at this like where did they start from in terms of where they were going to be able to reproduce the kind of objective circumstances of their parents where did it look like they were ending up what was our sort of best guess at the time and then a number of these kind of more subjective parts of it too. So one of the things now we have to do with them at 30 is basically try to look at like were we right or not like how how much on target were we and we were wrong actually in pleasantly we were pleasantly surprised that being wrong in terms of a number of the individuals who we thought were at risk of downward mobility did a lot better than we expected and that was really nice particularly some of the individuals from less privileged backgrounds they were, the kind of grit and resilience and all of that actually really paid off in ways that we were like oh go! But yeah, I mean that in terms of the normative aspects of that, that's really, that's very important not to just equate financial success with success. Right, right there. Hi, so you said that in terms of like where they ended up the more like successful, not successful, but the person from the affluent background was in LA, the other person was in a small Midwestern town. I was just wondering if you found any other like geographical disparities or like spatial patterns of where they ended up as a result of their college process? Yeah, there were huge patterns in that, in that the individuals from out of state almost all went back to where they came from and the individuals from in state most of them didn't leave the state or didn't move very far and so part of that was, I mean part of that was just like everybody tends to go back where they come from kind of but also that people from more privileged backgrounds are more geographically mobile and so one of the things for example Karen her kind of class background was such that neither she nor her family thought it was a normal or appropriate thing to do to move very far away from where she grew up and one of the things she didn't understand about this career in sports was that generally people who are successful make like really lots and lots of moves like five or six moves over a period of ten years like really like big spatial moves and that was so that's another most as we know as I mean some of you may have read this is more and more in the news that we're having a kind of geographic kind of polarization happening in the US where more and more opportunity is concentrated in fewer and fewer big urban areas with less jobs less opportunity in small towns or kind of and so individuals who graduate from college if they will not or cannot move to opportunity which is basically exists in you know New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and or graduate school wherever graduate schools are if one stays in I don't know like some small tiny little town it's like you are out of good job markets you just you can't not stay in these places and kind of move into the sort of upper 20% really anymore which is bad I mean that's a problem so I'm going to let you call on people and then I'll just chase okay how about back there yeah right here hello I just have one question whatever this is an institution failure not be able to educate or like show the students how they could be able to understand their own intellectuals, disciplines there are eight different type of intelligence today like there's musical intelligence, engineering like mathematics intelligence, natural intelligence that is it because the failure of the institutions in the first year didn't really explain how the students shall use their own human capital to invest on the university be able to comprehend the essence of the educations leading today like such as since the material recognition is overwhelming represent the students the essence of the humanity like for instance like in the east in Hong Kong or like in Singapore Singapore is the best education system in the world the reason why they can do that because in the first year they teach philosophy teaching the student be able to understand what is the distance between the materials and individuals then in leading the today the student could be able to know what they really want and they can study so hard I wonder if this is the reason why that in the west in the first year does not really teach the student how they could be understand themselves in order to invest the education system in the first year yeah that would this school definitely failed completely in terms of what you're suggesting but the failure was like even more profound for students particularly individuals from kind of on the mobility pathway when we were on the dorm floor and they were talking about their experiences during the first couple weeks of their freshman year they were reporting things like so I went to this math class and it turns out it was a remedial math class not counting for college credit they're like the person was incredibly condescending and a terrible instructor and then my other instructor didn't show up the third instructor was so ancient I thought maybe that he was gonna like keel over and die like in the middle of like the class you know 18 I mean who knows that might have been someone who was 50 I don't know but the fact was they were coming back and reporting that not it wasn't just that they didn't have a great philosophy class like having them interrogate kind of human values and where they might fit in the world they were encountering the dregs of the instructional faculty because I mean as many of those who are faculty in this room know like one of the ways that the university works is that the more basically the more successful faculty are the more privileged they have to select whether they teach whom they teach the conditions under which they teach and so often the faculty that should be engaged in teaching the students that most need to really be pulled in and engaged and essentially are potentially struggling those are the individuals who are most likely to get the worst of the instructional staffing of the entire university they're going to get like just people who are not often I mean it depends universities can do it differently I mean universities can make a concerted effort to make sure that they're very very best instructors are teaching the students who are most at risk of not succeeding but very very often it's the opposite it's the other way around yeah another one in the back there thank you for your book I have two questions kind of piggybacking on that question or the first one kind of does I have a little brother who is currently 18 and in his first year at Midwest U from a like a lower middle class background and I'm wondering if you have any advice for like I don't I think the musicians storm okay good but yeah just like advice for like navigating resources successfully like without too much social capital going in and then my second question is like on the organizational side of things like do you think if you mentioned that like public universities are sort of money hungry for kids who can pay full tuition or out of state tuition I'm wondering if you think that if there were any changes in like funding structures to like channel more money into public institutions that they would like consider like you know that there is any possibility that like the structures would change to be more beneficial for everyone yeah no I do think I do think that more public investment in higher education makes it make more sense for universities to build out mobility pathways and to cap and potentially push back on party pathways and to the extent that universities are kind of highly highly dependent on tuition or on kind of the kind of corporate sector kind of on on making a kind of pleasant consumer experience I think it becomes really really hard to build out the supports and I mean I think specifically like in terms of advice for your brother I one of the things I would say is stay away from the party pathway find every other any other niche on campus hang out with the musicians hang out go live in the alternative dorm you know if someone's kind of become go work in the lab for a biology professor join the outdoor adventure club that one of if if if this kind of upper middle class white party oriented kind of world if it's if it's kind of segregated from everything else it can potentially contaminate everything else less but it's hard I mean so it's a lot of at Midwest University there was a lot of what I called protective segregation going on the honors students were in the honors door all like virtually all of the students of color were in some kind of living learning center devoted to ethnicity so there was just it was what was we had of the two lesbians on our floor they one left the university and the other left the residence hall I mean it was impossible we had there were no students of color on the floor all these women were white but it would have been really bad for anyone who was not white on this on this floor so it's it's if these cultures get really geared up and going the kind of the only thing to do is avoid them and it's possible it's possible up in the front my question is directed more towards Greek life and I wanted to know your opinion on basically how Greek like influenced your study but also eliminating Greek life altogether because in my undergrad I feel like that is what dictated the social culture and a lot of the negative things that you talked about yeah Greek life is a real challenge it's baked into the DNA of big time American colleges and universities it's really and it's bizarre it's bizarre particularly the kind of white kind of IFC Panhals like kind of specifically what I'm referring to not the kind of multicultural the African American sororities and fraternities but the notion that there are organizations that are exclusive by race class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability and like pretty much every other dimension and they are allowed to exist on college and university campuses that the profess to value diversity inclusion is just profoundly odd and of course the organizations are like oh we're very inclusive at Midwest University it's like we're really inclusive we allow brunette girls too yeah it was 99.5% white Greek life at Midwest University I mean it's so given all of that it's like well why are these organizations so hard to get rid of and it's money power, housing, alumni kind of all kinds of pressures and then they say well can they be reformed and I was just reading American Hookup which I would definitely recommend by Lisa Wade who kind of she draws on a lot of the themes of the work that I've done and then takes in another step further and it's really readable it's a trade book it's awesome she talks about how the founding moment of fraternities was to create socially class, race, gender, socially exclusive social organizations that was their point from the beginning so it's not like there, I mean yes there are all these kind of philanthropic claims that they make but I mean there's, but it's hard so I mean one thing I've thought about in terms of strategies like that I kind of whenever I kind of get in front of a university president one of the things I try to encourage is like come up with the action plan for the next crisis what happens when a fraternity burns down and 25 kids die it will happen, something like that, something bad it's inevitable, what is the plan have it lined up for 50 different universities to act all at once because you can't act one at a time, if it's just Ohio State that eliminates Greek life then the kids go to University of Illinois you have, there needs to be more coordination among high level academic leadership on this this is not necessarily a one year plan but a five year plan a 10 year plan, a 20 year plan, what is the long term collective game plan for pushing back on these organizations and thinking about like what to do when the next really really horrible thing happens and have that strategy ready to go because it's hard to make big moves without a crisis, but the crisis is inevitable right there, I'm sorry so this question might seem a little counterintuitive but I was thinking, do you think universities such as MU are actually doing a disservice to the students by offering majors such as sports communication or like by expanding their choices to let's say as applicable majors? Yes, I do think that that universities have a responsibility to make sure that all of the academic content provided is of high quality and I mean one I think of the reasons why affluent parents, particularly professional parents, particularly academic parents, go really far out of their way and spend a huge amount of money to send their children to the Swarthmars and the Overlands and the Reeds of the World is that the low quality majors are defined off the table it's like by the schools make it impossible to screw up beyond a certain point by setting the parameters and the contours and the parents may not fully be aware of that in terms of going like I'm sending my kid to Swarthmars so they can't major in sports communication but I think if you ask most parents who are engineers what their values are they would say yeah I would pay the additional money to send my kid to Swarthmars so that option isn't available so I think it's worth more so then the responsibility for public universities is to make sure that the educational offerings are of rigor and high quality and they're one of the kind of themes in the book is like how faculty are implicated in all of this and this is faculty are not off the hook I mean one of the things that we refer to in there is in borrowing the scholarship of the people to you know citing them is this kind of notion of a disengagement contract that this kind of like faculty who are really research oriented they can kind of basically make a deal with their students I won't ask anything of you I'll give you three multiple choice exams and let you take off for two weeks for spring break if you like let me do my research don't come the office hours and don't bother me and so faculty are not necessarily fulfilling their obligations to students by not demanding more intellectually so I was just told that it's time to wrap it up so that we can go upstairs for the reception so join me in applauding Elizabeth for her great talk and