Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
SOC 160: Sociology of Culture, Jill Bakehorn, Ph.D.
May 2023
Introduction
Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) are two researchers exploring America’s higher education system and how class distinctions are maintained on multiple societal levels, all contributing to inequality. At the institutional level, colleges are guided by imperatives in their missions that depict what type of students they support. In the podcast “Food Fight,” Malcolm Gladwell (2016) presents the financial choices of two colleges and how they may have moral implications for educational accessibility. At the individual level, students are implicitly guided by conceptual frameworks that keep them divided, especially by class. Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) find striking similarities in the creation of peer hierarchies as in Julie Bettie’s book, Women Without Class (2014), especially with the use of symbolic boundaries and resulting hidden injuries of class.
Part 1: Paying for the Party, Armstrong & Hamilton ~ Revisionist History: “Food Fight”
To socioeconomically explain why people seek higher education, Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) coined the concept of a class project as an assemblage of students whose similar class-based resources lead them to share college orientations and agendas (10). Three class projects were established: class reproduction through social closure, class mobility, and class reproduction through achievement (10). Universities aim to invest their funds in ways that keep them competitive and lucrative, so students’ class projects remind universities to adequately serve their students. Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) argue that solvency, equity, and prestige maximization are crucial organizational imperatives that can guide universities’ financial goals while maintaining their educational mission (19-20).
To remain operational and possibly profitable, solvency examines the issue of where and how to make revenue. While institutions receive charitable donations, they still rely on student tuition. The value of equity reminds decision-makers of the public research universities’ central mission - to educate the diverse American population. Schools must also consider prestige maximization to position themselves highly against other educational institutions. (Amstrong and Hamilton 2013: 19-20). These three imperatives help universities determine how to entice the best students while maintaining financial and intellectual profits. This ultimately affects the sum of financial aid packets and, therefore, the amount of high- and low-income students.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s “Food Fight” podcast, he compares two seemingly similar private liberal arts colleges by examining the food served in both cafeterias. He explains that a college’s priorities can be inferred by the nutrition it provides and how it impacts its student population.
Gladwell describes Bowdoin College as preppy and putting its money into providing amenities such as Michelin-star-like food (Gladwell 2016). The university’s choice to cater locally sourced food that is made on-site and provide abundant options for dietary restrictions suggests its choice to support students from privileged families. These students’ class projects can be identified as either class reproduction through social closure or class reproduction through achievement. Bowdoin balances prestige maximization and solvency by allocating funds in a way that supports those two class projects, making a substantial profit. Prestige is a tempting imperative, granting reputation among high-income families, simplifying the imperative of solvency with funds from student tuition. This gives Bowdoin financial wiggle room but does not accommodate low-income students: only 13% of Bowdoin’s student population are Pell Grant recipients (Gladwell 2016).
As a stark contrast to Bowdoin’s fancy dining, Gladwell depicts Vassar College as having subpar food that lacks variety in taste and causes indigestion. He reveals Vassar’s choice to trade off amenities, like high-quality food, for larger financial aid packets aimed at low-income students. With a larger student population and twice as many Pell Grant recipients as Bowdoin (23%), Vassar chooses to support the class project known as class mobility. It comprises low- and middle-class students who perceive college as their path to social mobility and take out loans to attend. Emphasizing the imperative of equity, Vassar is committed to reducing financial stress by making its education affordable. To make this a reality, Vassar's approach to solvency is to use the state’s endowment to offer the most financial aid. While it hugely decreases tuition costs, it also reduces what Gladwell defines as financial wiggle room (Gladwell 2016).
Gladwell argues the difference in the food provided at Bowdoin and Vassar is a moral issue. He explains that having Bowdoin invest so much in quality food expresses a two-fold inequality: 1) it secures high-income students by appealing to their lavish expectations, and 2) it hinders money from being allotted to financial aid packages. The moral issue is that high-income students’ nonacademic desires are easily catered to, while low-income students’ desire to simply attend a postsecondary institution remains unattainable. Vassar uses all state endowments on financial aid, making tuition funds the only proceeds for amenities or financial wiggle room (Gladwell 2016). A slight decrease in students who pay the full price would cause schools like Vassar to go bankrupt. This highlights a moral issue of inequality because every time a high-income student chooses a school because of its amenities, like Bowdoin, it becomes harder for schools like Vassar to make education accessible to low-income students.
Part 2: Paying for the Party, Armstrong and Hamilton ~ Women Without Class, Bettie
There is a strong similarity regarding the relationship between class and gender among high school and college level women. In her book Women Without Class, Bettie (2014) found that high school girls group themselves by class and race. This created hierarchical self-defined cliques: the wealthy white girls (the preps) at the top and the low-/middle-class girls of color (las chicas) at the bottom (12). The sociological concept of symbolic boundaries explains how these girls kept themselves divided. There were agreed-upon conceptual distinctions used to label who belonged and who did not (Castaneda 2019: 5). Amstrong and Hamilton (2013) bear witness to a similar establishment of peer hierarchy and symbolic boundaries on the MU campus through the use of the Greek system and who had access to it (39).
Cultural capital is tangible and embodied knowledge accumulated intergenerationally among wealthy families. On a societal level, it reproduces systemic class inequality (Bourdieu 1982: 16). For example, on a college campus, high-income students create a peer culture using their cultural capital and collective symbolic boundaries, both of which are learned earlier at home and school. This keeps similar students together and distant from those who don’t fit in. The peer culture at MU emphasized wealth, specifically via the university-sponsored Greek system (Amstrong and Hamilton 2013: 74).
To avoid suspicions of discrimination, Greek houses rely on the idea that people want to be in groups where they feel similar to others: self-selection (78). Among the girls studied by Amstrong and Hamilton (2013), this peer culture exacerbated class division since partaking in Greek life was expensive and forced low-income women to self-selected out of rushing (78). Those who did not adhere to MU’s normative femininity also self-selected out because they did not have the ideal combination of personality and appearance expected by and for sorority sisters. This includes being white, cute, thin, heterosexual, young, etc. (Bakehorn, 04/18/23). Those who did not have these features and still did not self-select out would be later ousted by leadership due to a lack of compatibility and relatability (Amstrong and Hamilton 2013: 79).
The high cost of joining a sorority is part of the reason low-/middle-class women experienced socio-psychological burdens related to their class status. Defined as hidden injuries, these emotional burdens represent the anxiety and inadequacy that low-/middle-income students feel when comparing themselves to high-income students (Bettie 2014: 43). At MU, these hidden injuries of class were visible regarding the need for social, cultural, and financial capital to be a part of the Greek system, a central campus activity. Without these forms of capital, however, low-/middle-class women were shut out from the social scene, both in and out of the dorms.
In Amstrong and Hamilton’s study (2013), the women readily accepted by established sorority members were considered socially ambitious and often separated themselves from those in lesser sororities or not in Greek life (99). To obtain membership within the Greek system, these socially ambitious women communicate popularity by refusing to associate with or even acknowledge those who did not fit their class, personality, or appearance (race, cuteness, size, etc.) (Amstrong and Hamilton 2013: 99-103). This dissociative treatment hindered inter-class connections and made lower-class women feel completely isolated, even from peers in the same situation. By the end of the year, Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) described nearly half of the girls as social isolates (96). The lack of interactional engagement made them rely heavily on family and hometown friends, which limited their social network (109). The isolation also negatively impacted academic performance and led to mental health issues like clinical depression and substance use (111-112).
Conclusion
In conclusion, both organizational and interactional dimensions of college contribute to inequality. Organizational factors are controlled by certified decision-makers at the macro level. This was explored through the application of Armstrong and Hamilton's (2013) theoretical framework of class projects and organizational imperatives on Gladwell’s (2016) analysis of two educational institutions’ tradeoff between financial aid and high-quality food. Interactional factors lay at the community level. Bettie’s (2014) conclusions on high school girls’ peer hierarchies and hidden injuries of class are comparable to Armstrong and Hamilton’s (2013) findings on how Greek life maintained class distinctions and caused isolation within the dorms. A sociological lens depicts how these class-based dimensions contribute to inequality at the organizational (macro) and interactional (micro) levels.
Bibliography:
Armstrong, E. A. and Hamilton, L. T. 2013. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Bakehorn, Jill. 2023. “The Party School + Party Scene.” April 18.
Bettie, Julie. 2014. Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education: 241-58. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Castañeda, Ernesto. 2019. “Boundary Formation: Nationalism, Immigration, and Categorical Inequality between Americans and Mexicans.” Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States: 47-71. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2016. “Food Fight”. Revisionist History.