“Piling on the stress”: Low‐income students' experiences in a neoliberal majoritarian university

Abstract

The United States is experiencing state disinvestment from higher education and significant wealth inequality. This article documents how low‐income college students both experience and attempt to manage these contexts in their daily lives at a public flagship university in the American Midwest. We theorize these experiences as forms of precarity entailed by a culture and institutional form that we describe as the neoliberal majoritarian university (NMU). We argue that the concepts of precarity and of NMU provide a more robust framework for conceptualizing the consequences of college‐going for low‐income students than do conventional discourses of social mobility, college affordability, or student stress.