Sociology James Scholar Project PDF

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SOC 100 Fall 2018 December 13, 2018 Matthew Peach Sociology James Scholar Project Schools are social institutions that provide students with an equal education in an opportunity structure based upon a meritocracy. Education is something that each student receives and no form of prejudice, discrimination, or bias should influence the type of instruction certain students obtain. While many regulations and policies have been put in order to ensure equality in education for all students, the disparity cannot be diminished. Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton delve into the inequality present within educational institutions through their ethnography, “Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality.”

Passage 1: Class Reproduction through Social Closure – Class Reproduction through Achievement (pages 10-14; Introduction) Students of accomplished academic standing from privileged families are recruited by ivy-league schools while students of less-privileged families who earn the same high academic standing are recruited to public universities within the state they reside. Within these universities, the social class of the enrolled students plays a role in their retention rate throughout the years and the amount of success they accumulate post-graduation. Focusing on 4 year public universities, there were distinct trends within the pathway of students and their familial social classes. Students that are members of the working and middle classes believe education is a motivator towards positive social mobility but the data collected from the research shows that this is not exactly true. College was typically associated with affluent individuals in the early 1900’s but the recent shift towards policies that promote equal opportunities in education individuals of almost all social classes to attend universities. The expenditures for college begin with tuition and continue with sorority/fraternity fees, dining on campus, purchasing appropriate clothing and educational materials, study abroad, and expenses for enjoyment like partying, cars, or fashion. Typically, full immersion into the atmosphere within a campus leaves little time for paid employment and these expenditures are looked upon parental funding to be fulfilled. This parental support is researched further and it is recognized that affluent students use their familial

guidance to graduate and attain successful occupations in the future. This leads to the conclusion that the US educational system is biased heavily by economic class. For low and middle-class families, education is a large investment requiring a multitude of loans. The large amount of expenses associated with college puts strain on kids from lower social classes and results in a lower percentage those kids from graduating college. This decrease in retention causes the students to become subordinate and receive lower paying jobs. These factors cause social mobility to remain horizontal and minimizes vertical shifts in class mobility. Within Sociology 100, Sandefur focuses on the topics of education and gender extensively. This study combines these major concepts to acknowledge a unique perspective on women in college. As stated in the ethnography, women are a greater majority of the population that enter college, achieve higher GPAs and are said to be more likely to graduate then their peers who are males. Despite all of this, women are the minority population in STEM professions and continuously experience the largest amount of gender discrimination and sexual disrespect. By setting up an informative study focused on women and their paths, sociologists attempt to uncover the intention behind these statistics. The concept of circulation mobility is illustrated as the authors discuss the student’s aspirations to attain occupations for the sake of climbing the social ladder. All of the lower and middle-class students attend college with the goal of movement between social classes but less than 5% are able to fulfil this aspiration. The ideology of meritocratic individualism can also be identified. Due to minimal parental funding, these students must rely on their merit to achieve success but various distractions impede them from focusing on themselves and applying maximum effort to their academics. A major concept that can be identified within this passage is what constitutes the social institution of a college and how it differs from other social institutions. Overall, this short passage was able to encompass a large portion of the themes covered in unit 2 and 3 of sociology 100, proving that this book would be a great incorporation into the curriculum for future students.

Passage 2: College Pathways – Organizational Imperatives (pages 15-19) The authors introduce three pathways students adhere to when they enter college. The first path is the party pathway, in which student place the most importance on socializing and having fun. Students in this path are generally from affluent families and they undertake easy majors (associated with low coursework and high majors) and consider social ties to be essential.

The mobility pathway focuses on an experience in which students from less privileged backgrounds reach to access professional pathways (like nursing and accounting) through merit, not family support. The professional pathway is a highly competitive path that “facilitates conversion of class advantage into academic merit.” Students with top internships, highest GPAs and best test scores are recruited to take on “weed out” courses until a selective number of students are remaining to enter processional tracks (like pre-law and pre-medicine). This ethnography was also able to confirm many ideas about social classes and add justifications behind these various stereotypes. The authors argued that daughters from affluent households were able to flaunt their social advantages and coerce less privileged females into the party pathway, allowing the affluent women to get ahead themselves. This innocent form of power play led to wealthier female’s graduations and “wannabe” females being sunk into a hole of student debt and few career opportunities upon graduation. The authors take a step forward in acknowledging this issue by suggesting ideas to encourage vertical social mobility while diminishing the idea of class structure affecting education. Armstrong and Hamilton suggest the removal of Greek societies from campuses, the abolition of legacy admissions which allows children of wealthy alumni to be given priority admission, and the introduction of programs to better integrate less privileged students into college. They specified the integration programs to include offering financial aid, proving remedial courses, and assisting in attaining successful jobs after graduation. These integration programs are a necessity for students to prosper educationally and better adapt to the mobility pathway, rather than straying to the party pathway and contributing to the generations of horizontal social mobility. This research study allows readers, and future sociology students, to delve further into the gender differences within education. The social expectations between males and females in a college setting dictates the type of pathway they adapt and shapes the outcome of their life postgraduation. School is an agent of socialization that has the purpose of facilitating the transition into work. School functions to reduce unemployment, educate individuals and generate skilled labor. While the professional and mobility pathway encourage this meritocratic ideology of school, the party pathway proves to be an anomaly that strays away from these ideals. This irregularity will allow students to better incorporate concepts like social construction of gender systems and institutional arrangements through the novel and by relating it to their lives. The passage also discusses the stereotypes associated with students of inferior social classes and the

forms of discrimination they face in educational settings. Beginning with admission, statistical discrimination plays a factor in their acceptance and throughout their college career, institutional, individual and interpersonal discrimination is also identified. An example for individual would be negative treatment by wealthier peers based on a negative attitude towards people of lower affluence. The various agents of socialization, specifically peers, family, school and media are also elucidated. Family plays a role because they impact the amount of funding received by different classes of students and the impact they play on the pathway the student adopts. Peers have a direct correlation with the coercion in the party pathway and media influences the adoption of this pathway by strayed the student’s aspiration from academic success to social success. While school should be a class and gender-neutral agent of socialization, it unfortunately is not and this concept (as well as the reason behind class and race affecting education) should be well understood by all incoming sociology students.

So why is this information new and valuable to Sociology 100? Armstrong and Hamilton conducted a 5-year ethnographic and qualitative approach to study the multitude of pathways adapted by students during their college careers. Within the course of Sociology 100, professor Sandefur employed ethnographies like “Street Corner Society” and “Ain’t No Makin’ It” to teach students about different principals from real life sources. While the research was conducted on only 53 women in a single public educational institution, the finding from the study can be generalized over millions of universities worldwide. This specific ethnography delves into the sociological terms within the education institutional of a college, becoming more applicable to this UIUC course and its students. This idea of social classes influencing institutional arrangements is an old topic that is widely known by many. The reason behind its sudden rise in popularity is simple, technology. The recent technological advances have made it easier for people to access information about universities from anywhere in the world, and this isn’t always a good thing. UIUC has an infamous reputation as a Big Ten party school when being compared between all of the colleges in the US. This reputation serves as a derogatory label for the university but is regarded as irrelevant by the students within the campus. In “Paying for the Party”, Armstrong and Hamilton discuss the effect of this party dynamic on students of various social classes in a 4-year public university that is similar to UIUC. While teaching sociological concepts within the course, this

ethnography will aid students in understanding the importance of sociological concepts in their life. Various academic experiences, social experiences, and Greek life contribute to a college student’s life on campus and shape their lives to affect their near futures. The concepts of social mobility, class structure, discrimination, and education arrangements may not be easily defined by all but they are well acknowledged by millions of individuals, even by people who haven’t taken classes in sociology. This ethnography is able to easily identify these concepts in our daily lives and help readers understand their respective definitions as well as applications. Armstrong and Hamilton are able to fill the void to relevance through this study. Students take classes and memorize concepts for exams but rarely learn for the purpose of understanding and applying concepts to their lives. By introducing a research study about an environment that mirrors their own, more interest will be sparked and sociology students will ultimately be able to better learn their material.

Citations Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Laura T. Hamilton. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press, 2015....