The elephant in the (class) room: cultural capital as personal differences and college segregation

Abstract

This article presents the results of two projects exploring the experiences of working-class students in elite colleges. The first project is a nation-wide study that included 19 focus groups with 183 program participants of a condonable loan program, and additional interviews and focus groups with non-scholarship students, professors and administrators. The second project is an in-depth ethnographic project including 61 interviews with beneficiaries of the same condonable loan program and multiple ethnographic observations over 4 years. Two main consistent related themes appeared in the data. First, cultural capital and, more generally, social class differences are perceived as the result of personal preferences and individual choice. Second, this perception helps making social class invisible and allows the interpretation of college segregation as independent of the class structure. Both themes are related with the lack of open conversations about class in elite colleges and to the frames of abstract liberalism previously identified for the case of racism.