Witnessing this transformation firsthand made an impression on Billy. When I asked him if there was anything he wished had been different in his childhood, he said, “I wish I lived in a different neighborhood. Up there [where his friend now lived] somewhere.” He then added:
They seem like better people than us a little bit. I think they have it a lot more easier. They have it a lot more easier in terms of life.
Billy’s comments show his awareness of middle-class pathways, and of the difference between his life and the lives of middle-class young adults. Working-class and poor young adults appeared to have absorbed some of the “hidden injuries of class,” including feelings of a lack of dignity and respect associated with their social position.33 (Note that Billy has internalized the idea that middle-class people are “better people than us.”) Put differently, while there is ample evidence that the rules of institutions are not neutral and that they create important advantages for some groups and not others, the ways in which cultural practices comply with institutional rules is often obscured. The ideology of individual accomplishment leads middle-class young adults to see their actions as tied to their own accomplishments. (As Alexander Williams put it, “I know that I worked really hard.”) Although they were vaguely aware of their resource-rich family backgrounds, the middle-class young adults in this study did not attribute any of their success to the pure luck of having been born into an advantaged class. Instead, they focused on their own hard work and individual achievement.34 They could not see the social class privileges that were facilitating their success, every step of the way. Not surprisingly, they mistakenly thought that what was hidden did not exist.
SECTION 4. HOW CLASS CONTINUED TO MATTER:
NEGOTIATING WITH INSTITUTIONS—SUPERFICIALLY
SIMILAR, DEEPLY DIVERGENT
At a superficial level there were similarities in the approaches the middle-class, working-class, and poor parents took as they tried to help their children. Like all parents, the working-class and poor parents wanted their children to be successful in life, which now often requires getting a college education. These parents saw themselves as being helpful and as providing their children with assistance and intervention, including in school affairs. They were affronted by any suggestion that they typically do not “fight for their children” with respect to education. Like the middle-class parents, they were concerned with their children’s progress and success in school.
At a deeper level, however, there was a class divergence in informal information about how institutions, including schools, function. For instance, what parents knew about the schedule and timing of institutional deadlines, what skills they had for achieving the goal of a given intervention, and what resources they could draw on to make sure their children’s interests were best served were all shaped by class position.35 These and other important class differences in how families negotiate with institutions have not been sufficiently examined in the social science literature.
Middle-class parents, especially the mothers, appeared to embrace the idea that it was their responsibility to carefully manage every step of their children’s transition to college. They gathered information, reminded their adolescents to sign up for tests, and watched for potential problems. By contrast, although working-class parents considered themselves as being involved and helpful, what they meant by being helpful seems different from what middle-class parents meant. Working-class and poor parents did not appear to see continuous monitoring as critically important. They gathered information, but they did so on an ad hoc basis. This is reasonable, given that they perceived their children’s fate as being tied much less to their actions as parents and much more to the expertise of the professionals who staff institutions such as schools. With the exception of the financial costs involved, these parents generally knew little about the transition from high school to college. Their awareness of their child’s SAT scores, the names of colleges the child visited, and the relative ranking of colleges was strikingly vague compared to that of middle-class parents. Finally, there were differences across the families in how the young people were perceived. Both parents and children in working-class and poor families considered post-adolescent children “grown.” By contrast, in middle-class families, the young adults seemed to still rely heavily on their parents and, in crucial ways, the parents often continued to treat them as children.36
Informal Knowledge: Middle-Class Families
High schools encourage college preparation, applications, and enrollment, yet they vary in how much help they provide students with these tasks. Private schools and elite suburban schools that enroll upper-middle-class youth often give intensive assistance with college applications; at large urban high schools, assistance is far more limited.37 Even at elite suburban schools with strong counseling programs, however, the information and assistance provided concerning higher education options is incomplete. Schools invite and expect parent involvement in many important areas of their children’s schooling. In this institutional context, parents who have more information and who presume that they should intervene in schooling are able to transmit important advantages to their children.
The follow-up interviews revealed that the families had very different levels of informal information about higher education systems. In the middle-class families, the college application process was a major life event for the youth and for the parents, a time filled with excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, and (often) conflict.38 The drama unfolded over many months and had many components: gathering information about colleges, visiting colleges, narrowing the list of schools to which the youth would apply, writing essays, submitting applications, waiting for the decisions, receiving the decisions, processing disappointments, and deciding where to go. Alexander, for instance, visited Brown, Columbia, Haverford, Washington University, Cornell, and Dartmouth before he settled on applying for an “early decision” at Columbia. Garrett had to adjust to the major disappointment of not being recruited for Stanford’s basketball team; Stacey struggled to accept her parents’ decision that she could not attend her first-choice college. In the follow-up interviews, middle-class parents and kids made it clear how intensively parents had been involved in helping their children find, apply to, and enroll in college. Parents were acutely aware of differences between community colleges and four-year schools, as well as the rankings of various colleges. By contrast, in the interviews with working-class and poor parents and young adults who considered but did not go to college, these details seemed elusive.
Middle-class parents’ informal knowledge also included a detailed awareness of how middle and secondary schools were supposed to work. For example, when Melanie was in middle school, her parents were aware of the expectation of regular communication for students with learning disabilities through the development of an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). Melanie’s father critically assessed the actions of educators in light of his detailed knowledge of middle-school functioning:
Her grades were getting worse and worse, she was struggling more and more. The harder the work got the more we saw her struggling. . . . First we got a letter in the mail that Melanie was going to be held back [after seventh grade]. I said wait a second, I haven’t heard anything on an IEP, I haven’t heard anything. We went through this whole song and dance. Why is this the first I’ve heard about anything? You are not going to devastate this girl. . . . You already broke her, you are not going to devastate her, [it is] not going to happen. . . . These folks are paid to be professionals . . . to recognize learning disabilities. Where the heck were they?