Race,Age,and Identity Transformations in the Transition from High School to College for Black and First-generation White Men

Abstract

Race and class differences in academic and social integration matter for educational success, social mobility, and personal well-being. In this article, I use interview data with students attending predominantly white four-year research universities to investigate the integration experiences of black and first-generation white men. I examine each group’s accounts of both high school and college. Both groups of men reported having positive social experiences in high school. However, while first-generation white men were able to transport their identity strategies to college, the transition to college complicated integration and identities for black men. These processes supported white men’s collegiate goals but undermined black men’s, increasing the emotional costs of college for black men, undermining academic support, and blocking their ability to construct satisfying pathways to adulthood. I argue that identity experiences in high school matter for identity processes in college, where contextual intersectional identity expectations can change in unexpected ways for different groups. More attention is needed to the relationship between precollegiate and collegiate identities and to the ways intersectionality complicates identity processes.

Keywords

race first-generation age identities college high school men

Introduction

Social mobility through higher education involves more than academic success. It requires that students find a way to fit in, make friends, and gain the social and cultural capital needed for post-collegiate social mobility (Chambliss and Takacs 2014; Lee and Kramer 2012; Stuber 2011). At stake is not just whether differently situated students achieve social integration, but how they become integrated, as the pathways they find, the support networks they carve out, and the disruptions they face are consequential beyond whether or not they leave with a four-year degree (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013).

Race and class differences in academic and social integration matter for educational success, social mobility, and personal well-being. In this article, I investigate the integration experiences of black men and of white first-generation college men attending predominantly white, four-year, public, flagship research universities. I examine each group’s accounts of high school and college. Both groups of men reported having positive social experiences in high school. However, while the white first-generation college students were able to transport their identity strategies to college, the transition to college complicated integration and identities for black men.

Theoretical Framework

I use an intersectional lens to analyze black men’s and first-generation white men’s identities in high school and college (Shields 2008). Intersectionality holds that race, class, and gender (and other ascribed statuses) do not operate as distinct categories of experience but are lived conjointly (Collins 1991; Shields 2008). Intersectionality thus provides a framework for understanding how multiple dimensions of identities affect experiences, opportunities, and outcomes. Intersectionality is not an additive model (Collins 1991): It is not the idea that people’s experiences are shaped, for example, by being men and black, but that experiences are shaped by the specificity of black masculinity. Intersectional scholars argue that black boys and men experience different expectations and interpretations of their gendered behavior than do white boys and men (Ferguson 2000). Behavior seen as appropriate when conducted by white boys (“boys will be boys”) is often deemed unacceptable from black boys, leading black boys to be treated more punitively (Ferguson 2000; Yates and Marcelo 2014).

One problem with much intersectional research is that it often conceptualizes intersectional identities as static hybrids rather than as dynamic (Shields 2008; see also Wilkins 2012c). Identities and identity expectations change as people enter new contexts, but we know little about how people adapt their identities to new social environments and how life stage transitions might condition contextual expectations.

A second problem is that research on intersectional identities, like much research on identities more broadly, often focuses on agency to the exclusion of constraint, but cultural expectations associated with race, gender, and class limit choice in shaping identities (Bettie 2003). I build on these insights by asking how first-generation white men’s and black men’s intersectional identities change as they move from high school to college and examining how outsider identity expectations matter differently for each group.

Identities, Education, and Social Mobility

Research on K–12 educational settings demonstrates that identities and peer cultures shape youth experiences, practices, aspirations, and social pathways (e.g., Bettie 2003; Carter 2005; Crosnoe 2011; Eckert 1989; Fordham 1996). Students who feel academically marginalized by race or class develop contextually protective identity strategies that allow them to retain dignity but also contribute to social reproduction (Bettie 2003; Eckert 1989; Willis 1977). Some race- and class-disadvantaged students achieve upward mobility by “performing” middle-class identities, making friends with middle-class peers and adopting their practices, clothing, and orientations toward schooling (Bettie 2002). Other academically successful black and Latino students shift between “street” and “school” identities (Carter 2005). Some research finds that masculinity can be difficult to assimilate with a school orientation because it demands a tougher, more “street” kind of posturing than femininity (Carter 2005; Morris 2012). In suburban schools, however, the “coolness” associated with black masculinity can ease social integration for black boys (Holland 2012; Ispa-Landa 2013). Scholars, however, have not examined what happens after these students leave secondary educational settings.

Another stream of research examines the transition to college, showing that race and class affect college cultures and student integration. Young people from class- and race-disadvantaged backgrounds often face formidable hurdles to social integration (Aries and Seider 2005; Feagin, Vera, and Imani 1996; Lehmann 2007; Stuber 2011). At residential, flagship campuses, collegiate practices and educational goals reflect those of white, class-privileged students (Mullen 2011; Stuber 2011). Class-linked cultural knowledge and expectations shape how students participate in social aspects of college life, helping class-advantaged students make friends and stockpile social and cultural capital (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Stuber 2011). Student friendships are critical to student retention (Chambliss and Takacs 2014). Who students befriend also matters: friends are critical sources of information about the educational opportunity structure (Stuber 2011). It thus matters not just whether one fits in, but also how. Researchers have not closely examined the relationship between pre-collegiate identity strategies and collegiate identities, patterns of student integration, and experiences of college life. How do the identity strategies developed before college affect students once they enter college?

Pathways to Adulthood

Demographic transitions—such as exiting school and entering work, marriage, or parenthood—have become delayed, reversible, or untenable indicators of adulthood. In their place, subjective markers, such as autonomy and self-fulfillment, have taken on new significance (Arnett 2000; Shanahan 2000; Silva 2012). For many young adults, college is one stop on a long path of self-exploration and development (Hamilton and Armstrong 2009). Not all young people adhere to this pathway and its expectations, however, as it requires class-linked cultural expectations and economic resources (Silva 2012). Mullen (2011) finds that working-class students do not enter college focused on personal development but on acquiring job-specific skills and credentials. In Mullen’s study, students’ approach to college matched the goals of the lower-tier commuter institution they attended. Because adulthood is a relational identity, individuals do not feel like adults unless an audience confirms their adult status (Silva 2012). To what degree are differently situated students able to find confirmation for their adult orientations in the context of predominantly white, affluent, flagship universities?

This article builds on these literatures to ask: First, how do first-generation white men and black men recall the identity strategies they used in high school? Second, how do race, class, and gender constrain or facilitate first-generation white men’s and black men’s identity strategies in college, as they explain them, and what is the relationship between the identity strategies they used in high school and the ones they used in college? Third, what are the implications of their identity strategies for their ability to construct satisfactory pathways to adult roles?

The Study

This article focuses on 18 interviews with black men and 8 interviews with first-generation white men. Data for this article come from a larger qualitative study investigating identity transformations in the transition to college for three groups of college students: black, first-generation, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) students. Details about the 92 interviews in the larger project can be found in Table 1. As I will describe, I use interviews from the larger study to interpret and inform the analysis. Details on the focal participants can be found in Table 2.

Table 1.

Characteristics of research participants.

	Project participants
	Women	Men	Total
Black	29	19^a	48
White first generation	11	8^a	19
Other first generation^b	2	3^a	5
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer	11	9^a	20

Several participants fit into multiple categories. For example, two men who entered the study as ‘‘gay’’ participants were also first generation. Three black men were also gay. In this table, I included them only once in the category through which they entered the study.

Asian American or Latino.

Table 2.

Educational details of focal participants.

	Type of high school	Year/major in college
Black men
Bryan	Affluent white small city (home neighborhood)	Junior, architecture
Corey	Affluent white suburban (bussed)	Senior, political science/ communication/sociology
Craig	Affluent white suburban (open enrolled)	Senior, ethnic studies/sociology
David	Private boys’ (scholarship)	Junior, ethnic studies/women’s studies
Dennis	Magnet (open enrolled)	Graduate student, engineering
Dominick	Middle-class white suburban (outside home neighborhood)	Senior, sociology
Ekon	Middle-class mixed-race suburban (home neighborhood)	Sophomore, psychology
Jackson	Middle-class white suburban (parents moved for schools)	Junior, marketing
Jesse	Affluent white suburban (bussed)	Senior, computer engineering
Jeffrey	Middle-class white suburban (home neighborhood)	Junior, business
Lance	Affluent white suburban (home neighborhood)	Sophomore, biomedical engineering/food science
Marcus	Affluent white suburban (parents moved for schools)	Junior, business
Nick	Middle-class white suburban (moved for better schools)	Sophomore, sociology
Phillip	Affluent white suburban (home neighborhood)	Senior, communication
Richard	Affluent white suburban (bussed)	Senior, integrated physiology
Taylor	Private boys’ (scholarship)	Junior, engineering
Timothy	Private co-educational	Junior, business
Vincent	Affluent white suburban (bussed)	Senior, sociology/psychology
White men
Ben	Low-performing predominantly black urban	First-year, environmental studies/geology
Brendan	Middle-performing suburban	Sophomore, e-bio
Danny	Middle-performing suburban	Sophomore, communications
Enzo	Middle-performing predominantly white rural	Junior, psychology
Patrick	Middle-performing mixed-race urban	Junior, engineering
Sam	Middle-performing predominantly white rural	Senior, engineering
K.J.	Middle-performing mixed-race urban	First-year, chemistry
Matt	Lower-performing mixed-race urban	First-year, computer science

Black Participants

Between 2006 and 2012, interviews were conducted with 19 black men attending one of two large, public, flagship universities (which I call Western and Midwestern). I excluded one interview from this article because the participant went to a predominantly black urban high school whereas the other participants attended predominantly white affluent high schools, as I discuss more in the following. Both universities are in college towns and have predominantly white, affluent student populations, revenue-generating athletic programs, and thriving party cultures. Black students make up 1 percent of Western’s population and 5 percent of Midwestern’s. Because I am not interested in the experiences of students in black fraternities, these universities were ideal sites. The vast majority of black students at Midwestern are not Greek, and Western has no black fraternities housed on campus. Both campuses have a “black community” that centers around campus spaces associated with black students and black organizations. To ensure I included students who were central to the “black community” and those who were marginal to or outside it, I used initial interviews and informal conversations to create a social map of black students, in which I located different clusters of black students, as well as black students who did not associate with other black students. From this social map, I developed targeted recruitment strategies. I started multiple small snowballs, but I also recruited through class announcements and word of mouth. Six black men who participated were intercollegiate athletes; 13 were not. The narrated experiences of the athletes and non-athletes were similar in high school but diverged in college, where athletic status created distinct (but related) identity dilemmas. For the sake of clarity, I focus primarily on the dilemmas of the non-athletes here, but I use interviews with the athletes for context and interpretation.

White, First-generation College Student Participants

In 2011, I expanded the project to include first-generation college students, with the aim of developing a more fine-grained understanding of specific and generic processes of social exclusion, inclusion, and identity transformation for nondominant social groups. Because initial data analysis uncovered more similarities than differences between universities, I did not pursue cross-university comparisons in this phase. Instead, I focused on understanding the complexity of identity experiences within Western itself. Among Western students, 14 percent are first generation. First-generation students are largely invisible to each other and to other students, despite some campus programming aimed at this population. Thus, they could not nominate each other for participation, as they typically did not know other first-generation students. I recruited first-generation students through in-class announcements by instructors in the colleges of engineering, business, and arts and sciences and through word of mouth.

I found it especially difficult to recruit first-generation white men, in part, I think, because they work to see themselves as indistinct from the overall campus population. These difficulties—combined with the fact that students often ignored the “white” part of recruitment materials—led me to modify my strategy, opening up recruitment to non-white first-generation students. This decision proved useful, as the experiences of non-white students shed additional light on the racial dimension of the white first-generation experience. I made a number of efforts to increase heterogeneity. For example, concerned that emergent patterns were specific to the College of Engineering, where my initial participants matriculated, I recruited in other colleges. I diversified majors and year in school, tried different kinds of recruitment tactics, and sought out participants who were not involved in first-generation programming. Nonetheless, I quickly reached saturation; by the fourth interview, I had stopped encountering new themes, despite my efforts to diversify participants and to push interviews in new directions. In all, I interviewed eight first-generation white men.

Data Collection

Recorded, transcribed interviews were semi-structured and open-ended, lasting one to three hours. Initial interviews with black participants took place in coffee shops and the campus center, but these venues proved to be too loud and public. Later interviews with black and all first-generation participants took place in my office. I was initially concerned that students would feel uncomfortable there, but they did not seem to, and the office provided a degree of privacy unavailable in local coffee shops or comparable venues.

Interviews covered family background, schooling, friendship, and dating both before and after the transition to college, but were conversational, accommodating emerging themes and participants’ concerns. I asked broad questions like, “Tell me about your experiences in high school”; “Why did you choose [college]?”; “What was the transition to [college] like for you?”; and “How did you make friends?” I sometimes probed for issues of race or class, but often did not, as it was already central to how participants organized their accounts. At the end of each interview, I specifically asked how they thought being black or a first-generation college student mattered for their experiences.

Aware of my position as a white professional woman in my late thirties, I used a number of techniques aimed to increase rapport. For example, I used plural and personal pronouns to ask participants about high school (see Adler and Adler 2002). For example, “What did you guys do for fun?” I destigmatized their accounts by not reacting negatively or demonstrating empathy to disclosures. I tried to connect with students’ experiences to increase their comfort. For example, if a student confessed to being a nerd, I admitted that I had been a nerd. If they said they had been popular, I noted that my son was popular. Indeed, I often used comments about my teenage son to raise depersonalized questions that allowed participants to serve as “experts” on adolescent life. For example, “My son tells me that the kids in his school . . . Have you ever noticed that?” or “What do you think of that?” These questions seemed to humanize me by blurring my role as a professional; this allowed me to ask questions that might otherwise have made participants uncomfortable. This strategy helped me bridge gender and age gaps. It did not make me seem young, but rather allowed me to exhibit empathy toward young people’s lives that facilitated rapport.

In interviews with black students, race added a layer of difference. On both campuses, I had “sponsors” (Adler and Adler 2002) who helped me gain access to different interview networks and campus spaces. My comfort discussing race seemed more important than having been sponsored. Additionally, black participants had grown up around white people and prided themselves on their ability to speak comfortably with them. Thus, my whiteness was not the barrier to trust that it might have been with other populations of black men. I also used my position as a “compassionate outsider” to encourage participants to elaborate on meanings that insiders might take for granted (Young 2004).

Analysis

I used an inductive, intersectional approach to data analysis. I developed case studies of each participant, focusing on the transition to college. I paid close attention to contradictions and to places where men struggled to find language. Both situations reveal places where identities are contested, unsure, or fluid and thus provide analytic insight on identities as they are lived and negotiated in everyday life (DeVault 1990; Pugh 2013). I used these case studies to create more focused codes (Charmaz 2006), including broad categories like “making friends,” “romantic relationships,” and “leisure activities.” After recoding, I developed four sets of analytic comparisons: (1) gender—black men and black women, (2) gender—white men and white women, (3) educational setting—high school and college, and (4) race—white men and black men. These sets of comparisons enabled me to focus on the different ways gender, race, and educational context mattered for men’s experiences.

After charting each comparative category, I examined how each additional component of the analysis nuanced, complicated, or extended understanding of other components to create a synthetic understanding of identity processes for differently situated groups (see Wilkins 2008). For example, I considered how black men’s experiences compared to both white men’s and black women’s to think holistically about the implications of black masculinity for their experiences. This approach yields information on why and how interpretations that focus only on one aspect of identity are insufficient for explaining some group members’ experiences (see e.g., Bettie 2003). While I concentrate on men’s voices in this article, my understanding of the campus and participants’ experiences is enriched by this multilayered data.

My goal here is not to generalize to all black college men or all first-generation white college men, but to treat each as a case (Small 2009). Each case provides an opportunity to develop a textured portrait of how contextually protective identity strategies in one setting matter as students transition to new educational settings and how race, class, and gender scripts constrain and enable these processes. Because the men in this study made successful transitions to college (that is, they not only enrolled but have also persisted toward degree attainment), my data do not contain cases where these identity strategies might fail. A discussion of these possibilities is beyond the scope of this article.

First-Generation White Men in High School

The first-generation white men in my sample had parents who worked in service or manual labor jobs, such as waitressing or flooring. Two had parents who were self-employed, leading to unevenness in their economic stability and long working hours. Two participants lived in trailer parks. Yet, these men did not recount childhoods characterized by economic hardship—perhaps because their parents were better off than many non–college educated adults. In addition, many of these participants recalled extended family providing extra resources.

First-generation white men described their parents as warmly supportive but not proactive about their education. They all reported going to neighborhood schools in the communities they could afford. Most of these schools were mixed-class, sending a portion of students to college. As Brendan recounted, their parents neither encouraged nor discouraged college: “They always told me you know whatever you end up wanting to do, we’ll support that. So it’s not like they were really trying to push me in any one way or the other.” Similarly, Sam recalled that his parents “wanted me to do what I thought was best.”

Finding College-bound Friends: Becoming Normal

First-generation white men developed their college aspirations in school by integrating socially with college-bound youth. They did not describe their high school experiences this way, however, but instead talked about themselves as regular, “normal” guys who did “normal” things. Although these men developed their ideas about being normal in their peer groups rather than in their homes, it is worth noting that they did not describe being seen as odd by their families or home communities. As Patrick said: “I have a lot of friends that say I’m just like normal. Like they just say, if they think of someone normal, it’s me.” Patrick described himself as “normal” 16 times in his interview, and going to college was part of being normal:

I wasn’t in a bunch of advanced classes like AP and stuff. I had one AP class, but then I had a lot of other classes that still counted for college. But at the same time, I wasn’t like nerdy or anything. But then I wasn’t like a jock or anything. (emphasis added)

To Patrick, taking classes that “counted for college” was part of what it meant to be normal. Men from a range of social positions portrayed themselves as normal, as long as they were also preparing to go to college. Danny, for example, was a jock. He positioned himself and his friends as normative when he described them as “just a bunch of guys.” Matt labeled himself “a nerd.” When I asked what he and his friends did for fun, he said: “Just not really anything special. Just normal things. . . . It’s not like we were looked down upon for—for like trying really hard in school, . . . it didn’t affect us like negatively.” It was important to him that I understand that being nerdy did not make him stand out. “It was kind of a good thing,” he added, “because we were all really competitive.” Matt located himself as a regular guy—competitive, but not highly visible, doing the things you need to do to head for college.

Managing Class Differences

Being normal was not, however, precisely a strategy for becoming middle class. These men acknowledged differences between themselves and their middle-class peers. By portraying themselves as “normal,” these men glossed over the work it took to fit in, masking the difficulties class disadvantages often caused them. Matt and Patrick, for example, remarked that their housing situations disrupted their friendships, but they minimized the degree to which this bothered them, saying it was “only a little bit” of a problem or “I still made plenty of friends.” Similarly, Matt recalled moving to “not one of the nicest areas” after his parents’ divorce, but said, “It didn’t make me less happy I would say.” Enzo explained that when his friends started to get cars, “you know you’d feel some like kinda some resentment towards the wealthier people.” But, he added,

I had an old truck. But at the same time you know it was like . . . we had grown up together. And we were all such good friends. And we saw each other for who we were you know. . . . And you know money was kind of in the background but it wasn’t, it wasn’t the biggest deal.

In all these examples, participants described how they worked to minimize class-related social or emotional disruptions. Being normal was about being able to blend in without standing out.

Although these men portrayed their high school friendships as natural and “normal,” these disruptions suggest that making themselves fit— that making “normal” feel normal—required slow transformations of which they may have been only dimly aware. Brendan’s story is revealing. An older high school friend convinced Brendan, who had recently moved to his suburban community after his parents’ divorce, to try cross-country running. He remembered that his “parents didn’t really have money for all that stuff” so he had not participated in organized activities before:

I was like I don’t know. Like running a lot sounds terrible. And he’s like no. You’ll like it. Like all the guys are cool. . . . The longer I did it, the more I really liked it and the more I felt like it was just kind of . . . a second home. . . . I liked . . . just being in shape . . . and anything that’s competitive. I like to try to be the best.

Brendan’s recollection indicates he was pulled reluctantly into the middle-class activity of cross-country, which did not feel normal at first, but he learned to experience it as an emotionally and socially supportive environment—“a second home.” In this way, cross-country became normal to him. It was not incidental that a competitive sport provided a way to anchor his masculinity, replacing the “mischief” that had predominated in his old community. Brendan said he worried about avoiding the trouble that had derailed his own parents, and cross-country provided a clear alternative.

Accessing Information and Resources

These friendships had concrete benefits. As with other first-generation men, Brendan’s new friendships gave him access to critical resources and information about college that his parents did not have. When I asked about his sources of information, he said, “I don’t know. I didn’t . . . just around. Other people.” He absorbed middle-class expectations (Mullen 2011) about “the full college experience”: “I knew I wanted to go to like an actual college where I could . . . you know . . . live on site.” Similarly, Danny reported that he “knew” that if you went to a [lower-status school] “you weren’t going to like succeed too well, but I don’t know why. . . . That’s just kind of something I’ve always grown up with. Like I think in high school.” Danny had learned middle-class institutional distinctions, but not their logic.

Avoiding Trouble

Positioning themselves as “normal” helped first-generation white men in another important way. Unlike the parents of more affluent college-bound youth, the parents of first-generation men did not have resources to leverage if their sons got in trouble. Wealthier children also benefitted from the perception that they were just “all around good people,” in Enzo’s words, even when they did get in trouble. First-generation men did not have that benefit. To stay college bound, first-generation men needed to stay out of trouble on their own. Blending in was an important part of this strategy. But participants were also proactive about avoiding trouble. Cross-country provided Brendan with an alternative to “mischief.” Sam remembered that when he first moved to his rural town, his friends had been the “wild kids,” because they were easier to get to know, but he “realized that wasn’t the type of person that I was. And I started spending time with the kids that were more focused on school, and more mature, I guess you could say.” Danny told a cautionary tale about a “stoner” friend who had been headed to the state-level track competition and presumably college and then “just fell off the face of the earth.” In this story, his friend’s drug use simultaneously undercut his class future and his athletic (masculine) future; not smoking marijuana becomes the smarter masculine choice.

Given limited familial information about the process of getting to college, first-generation white men needed critical information and resources available from peers and teachers. To gain this information, they needed to be seen as college bound, which meant fitting in with other college-bound youth and being “normal”—they could not risk standing out. Participants thus minimized disruptions to their social and emotional participation while simultaneously sidestepping any troublemaking behavior that could derail their trajectories. The flatness of their stories, in which they emphasize how “normal,” “unexciting,” or “uninteresting” they were, is testimony to how successful they were at achieving this strategy.

White men’s strategies of being “normal” within their peer groups allowed them to fit in, make friends, and benefit from behavioral norms and information sources that supported college attendance. Despite a slight disruption with the transition to college, these strategies continued to work for them in college.

First-Generation White Men in College

These first-generation white men entered college imagining adult-oriented identities. Brendan said: “I was really excited to come to college, live on my own, you know. I mean I’d always been pretty independent.” Patrick portrayed himself as “focused more on working” while “other people have a lot more free-time stuff. So I feel like I want to do more productive stuff in my free time.” Danny prioritized school over a social life: “I obviously just kind of want to get through school,” he said, dreaming about how quickly he could finish to start full-time work. First-generation men depicted themselves as hard-working, goal-oriented, and independent.

Opting Out of Partying

The transition to college was not seamless. Brendan recalled, “I mean most of the schools I went to I fit in well right away. So it was weird for me to come here and really not fit in.” Having successfully distanced themselves from trouble in high school, participants were surprised to discover that partying was an important route to college friendships. They felt excluded, describing themselves as “isolated” and “lonely.” Danny said, “You know because that’s like how a lot of people get connected is when they smoke or drink together, and I just didn’t do that.”

Not partying was a choice. These men portrayed partying as antithetical to their collegiate goals. Ben anticipated that “some kids here probably won’t be here in the next couple years just ’cause like they do party a lot and they don’t study as much as they should.” Sam said, “Once you get started down that path [partying], it’s really easy to just kind of stick with it. And I figured I might as well, I’m here to learn and do my best.” Patrick recalled engineering dropouts, “’cause they partied too much I guess.” First-generation men portrayed avoiding partying as a safer academic strategy, but they also described it as consistent with being “mature” and “adult.”

Enzo’s high school strategy had been to manage, not avoid, bad boy behavior, but he did not manage it as well in college. Partying led him into “trouble” his first semester and he took a semester off. A junior, he had been back at Western for two years. He reflected, “I did not want college to be like that [partying]. . . . I wanted more like from life.” Partying interfered not just with Enzo’s academic progress but with his sense of himself as an adult. Enzo wanted college to be more than an extension of adolescent fun; not partying helped him achieve this adult identity: “Once I kinda cut the drinking and smoking . . . it was a lot easier to focus on what I wanted . . . just kinda wake up early and dress myself in appropriate attire . . . and eat good food. You know really like seize the day.”

Making Friends

Not partying temporarily destabilized the social neutrality first-generation men had achieved in high school, causing them to feel like they did not belong and disrupting established pathways for creating friendships. Nonetheless, these white men recalled finding alternative ways to make friends fairly easily, through shared academic interests and low-cost leisure activities such as hiking, Frisbee, and playing video games. Brendan recalled, “The more I was in classes that I liked and stuff, the more I found people who liked the same things.”

Despite being surprised at not having automatically made friends, participants described effortlessly crafting social ties with others who supported the adult-oriented identities they hoped to create. Ben said, “You know we like outdoors and we want to learn. . . . I just . . . I just like fit right in, you know. . . . It seems like everyone out here is just so down to be your friend. You know?” Matt said, “I’ll just see if someone’s sitting alone . . . and you know make a new friend. . . . Sometimes we . . . get some lunch and talk for awhile. Or go to someone’s dorm and watch TV, play video games. Just pretty normal stuff.” These men used the things they had learned about “normal” guys in high school to create social integration, which in turn helped them feel normal again. Patrick recalled: “I hated coming that first semester . . . [now] it seems a lot more normal.”

These men’s friendships supported their collegiate goals. First-generation men all talked about the importance of getting up early, being “productive,” and establishing study routines. Their friendships supported these routines. More privileged, less academically focused students at Western often participate in expensive leisure activities, such as skiing, that these men could not afford. The activities through which first-generation men made friends embedded them in networks with other academically minded students. Danny explained, “A lot of my friends . . . they just don’t talk about drinking . . . they just do other stuff. They’re more productive I guess.” Ben’s friends “are pretty intellectually stimulated. And I can like talk to them about reading and stuff.” Because these men’s friends shared their academic interests, they helped them focus on their goals, provided study partners, and limited social distractions while ameliorating the loneliness participants felt when they first came to college.

Relationships with Girlfriends

Relationships with hometown girlfriends anchored these strategies for many men. Five of eight participants were still dating their high school girlfriends, none of whom attended the same college. Most of the girlfriends went to lower-status regional schools, lived at home, and majored in fields like nursing that would allow geographic mobility after college. Because most participants went to college in-state, girlfriends were typically only a short drive away. Long-term, off-campus girlfriends gave these men a way to opt out of the partying culture they worried would derail them. Partying culture often entails hooking up (Hamilton and Armstrong 2009), but their girlfriends provided an explanation for not participating while also “proving” their heterosexuality. These men were experienced in using this explanation. Patrick said, “I’ve been dating the same girl so I’m not really interested in [hooking up].” Ben explained that he had not hooked up with anyone because, “it sounds lame what I’m going to say . . . like I care about her a lot, you know.” Men typically saw their girlfriends on weekends, either traveling to see them or having them visit. These visits took place during the time when other men partied, further justifying not partying. Sam explained that he and his girlfriend spend the weekend going “on dates. Fun activities and we’re going camping this weekend, and [we] do some homework. . . . I means it’s exciting to me, but most people are like bummed if they don’t party hard three times in one weekend.” Similar to Ben’s comment that caring about his girlfriend “sounds lame,” Sam’s caveat recognizes that spending time with his girlfriend instead of partying misses one high-status script for collegiate masculinity, yet his relationship did explain away his non-partying.

Off-campus girlfriends did not interfere with friendships with other men. Sam played basketball with friends. Patrick explained that he found it easier to sustain friendships in college than in high school because his girlfriend was no longer always around: “In high school, my friend would want to hang out with me, but I hung out with [girlfriend] a lot more.” Now, Patrick’s girlfriend was not around every day, so he hung out with his friends. Brendan said, “All my friends really like her and stuff . . . she brings up cupcakes and cookies for them and stuff so they really can’t complain too much.” As Brendan’s example reveals, a girlfriend’s successful integration depends, in part, on her willingness to play a supportive role in her boyfriend’s life.

Girlfriends bestowed critical emotional support. Hometown girlfriends provided an identity bridge, anchoring men’s connections to their home communities while supporting their goals of social mobility. Participants told many stories about their girlfriends getting them through when they struggled academically or felt lonely. Patrick said, “I guess we both were having a hard time with school. Both I guess supporting each other with how bad we were doing at one point.” When I asked these men what they liked about their girlfriends, they all reported that they were “nice,” “caring,” and “listened to them.” Sam said, “Just it meant more to me I guess, to be more serious and . . . just to be with someone that cared about what you were doing and about the future, and wasn’t just worried about what they were doing that weekend and, I don’t know, it’s difficult to explain.” Participants explained that their parents were not equipped to provide them with emotional or practical support in college. Danny said: “People are like their parents are giving them advice on how to succeed in it, while my parents just say good luck.” Girlfriends compensated by providing these men with empathy and encouraging them to pursue their goals. Unlike for first-generation women, whose hometown boyfriends typically undermine their educational goals (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013), gendered scripts about heterosexual relationships, in which women support men, helped sustain these men’s goals.

Danny, popular in high school, did not have a college girlfriend. His affluent, popular, high school girlfriend was less likely than the women the other men dated to want to pursue the relationship in college (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013). And his high school leisure activity—lacrosse (supplemented financially by the coach)—did not translate well to his college experience. No longer able to afford to play, he coped by going to the gym: “Going to the gym for me really just releases a lot of the stress. . . . And I put my headphones in and I just work out.” Accordingly, although Danny had ridden out his initial desire to drop out, he continued to have a somewhat harder time than other first-generation men. Danny’s high school strategy of popularity, which relied on his ability to fit in with affluent peers, was less adaptable to the college context than were the other men’s strategies.

Despite an initial bump, most first-generation white men fairly smoothly turned “being normal” into a strategy for making college friends. Through common leisure and academic interests, they found a small circle of academically minded peers who supported their focus on studying, provided them with a social life, and, for some, accommodated their relationships with their hometown girlfriends. In turn, the lives they developed made them feel and seem like “normal,” if still somewhat boring, men. In multiple ways, these first-generation white men were able to draw on race, class, and gender cultural scripts about manhood that, while not as high status as the cultural scripts associated with fraternity men, were still supportive of college satisfaction, persistence, and future economic security. Indeed, being “normal” was itself one of those scripts.

Black Men in High School

Most of the black men I interviewed came from families in which one or both parents worked in professions such as electrical engineering, middle management, or education. A smaller number had parents who held labor jobs such as custodian. Many parents were upwardly mobile over the course of the participant’s childhood, finishing their education and moving from urban core neighborhoods to suburban neighborhoods. Unlike the white participants, black men perceived that their parents prioritized education—they moved to new neighborhoods with better schools, found desegregation programs, or secured scholarships to prestigious private schools. As a result of parental strategies, these black men attended predominantly white schools in which almost all students matriculated to a four-year college. Most of their parents had also instilled collegiate expectations. Participants sometimes bristled at these efforts. Richard reflected: “I hated it when my mom would say, ‘Black man. You’re intelligent.’ I know I’m intelligent, you don’t have to tell this to me.” Richard’s comment illustrates the degree to which many black men in my sample took their college trajectory for granted.

Making Friends: Negotiating Coolness

These black men all described being well liked by both white and black peers in high school. Vincent shrugged, “Everybody wanted to be with me.” These men engaged strategically with black masculine images, using them to maximize peer status without jeopardizing mobility. Taylor, for example, who attended a private school, was disgusted by the disregard for teachers displayed by some of the black youth who attended the school in his predominantly black, lower-class neighborhood: “They’re like, ‘Fuck you, Miss.’ . . . I was different, but I mean overall I didn’t really see any difference. Like I was on the basketball team and all that stuff.” Taylor distanced himself from the anti-school behaviors he associated with black masculinity while simultaneously using sports to claim black masculine authenticity. Participants did not all juggle these images the same way. Some capitalized on the idea that black boys are naturally athletic; others used the presumption of black masculine cool to engage in more stereotypically feminine behaviors.

Athletes

Athletics is a route to high school popularity for boys regardless of race; it intersects with cultural meanings about black masculinity to further bolster black boys’ status. Tim said, “All the black kids played basketball. We were like the cool group.” For David, football was part of a package of achievement-oriented, high-status characteristics, including student body president. Nick remembered how he traded more conventionally bad boy behavior for football when he started to get into legal trouble: “I was just getting in trouble, like, I guess, legal stuff, being a kid, bein’ stupid, makin’ bad decisions . . . so I needed to do something . . . and I started playing football.” Nick, and the adults around him, saw football as a safer way to be a black boy. Sports provide an adult-sanctioned way for boys to demonstrate masculine competitiveness, toughness, and physical prowess, without necessarily compromising academic commitment—and sports may be seen as an especially appropriate outlet for black boys.

Non-athletes

The seven men who were not high school athletes also remembered high school fondly. Ekon was on a step team and sang in the choir—activities often seen as feminine in high schools. He reflected, “I was . . . not popular, but I knew everybody. I mean I knew everybody.” Like other non-athlete black boys, Ekon was not conventionally “popular,” but he had a large circle of friends and was socially visible and comfortable. Phillip’s “friends were the drama students.” He played violin, although reported being terrible at it. He tried unsuccessfully to date, and later came out as queer. He laughed, “I know nothing from sports. I’m Jewish.” Yet, like Ekon, he reported that he was “fairly popular with the students and with the teachers”; at one point, he even claimed, “I was running that school.” Men like Ekon and Phillip—who were not athletes; who participated in uncool activities, such as drama, choir, or peer mediation; and who did not have girlfriends or who spent far more time hanging out with girls (but not pursuing them sexually) than was considered “normal” for high school boys—were not as popular as football stars, but they were not marginalized either. These men’s stories suggest they were able to trade on the image of cool black masculinity to gain space to behave in more feminine ways.

Youth culture values the characteristics associated with black masculinity: athleticism, toughness, heterosexual prowess, and cultural cool. In predominantly white schools, black masculinity makes a wide range of black boys cool enough (see also Ispa-Landa 2013). Because these schools have few black boys, black masculinity is rare and more valuable. These black men were cool because their coolness was assessed against non-black boys; they did not have to engage in risky or “hard” behaviors to benefit from presumptions of black masculine cool (Holland 2012). Instead, coolness was protective, channeling black masculinity into adult-sanctioned activities and away from troublemaking. First-generation white participants’ strategy of not standing out and black participants’ strategy of standing out both facilitated pathways to college, shielding boys from class- and race-linked risks.

In the context of predominantly white schools, being seen as cool enough—standing out—paved the social mobility of black men, helping them achieve social comfort and mixed-race network integration without compromising their commitment to school. Because they could be cool without engaging in risk-taking behaviors, they could capitalize on its benefits without accruing the potential costs associated with coolness in other contexts. Associated with youth culture, coolness was not, in adolescence, incompatible with participants’ sense of themselves as college bound.

The presumption of coolness that extended to both athletic and unathletic black men allowed a range of black men to fit in, make friends, and stay on track to college. Unlike first-generation white men, who were able to transport their strategies to college, however, black men’s strategies did not continue to work for them in college.

Black Men in College

Black men in my sample entered college with similar ideas about college as the white men. Richard explained, “My mom literally dropped me off in my dorm, gave me a kiss on the cheek, [said] ‘You’re a man,’ and left me. I was like, ‘What do I do?’ But again I felt relieved. Because I was like, ‘Wow, no one can control me now.’” Tim said, “It’s hard, it’s expensive to go to school, so when you have it, you have to take it serious. You can have fun, for sure, but you have to find that balance.” Offered both a track and an academic scholarship, Tyler took the academic scholarship, majoring in engineering. “Like that’s just not how life works,” he said about pursuing college athletics, “so I put myself in a position to succeed in . . . other areas.” Like the white first-generation men, these black men saw themselves as hard-working, goal-oriented, and independent.

Race and Adult Identities

Black participants often distinguished themselves from images of black men as fun, “street,” or unconcerned with goals. Jesse explained, “You’ve got the black people in college who are trying to do something with their life, and you’ve got the black people who really aren’t. . . . Unless you want to go down to the street culture, which you could, but it’s not promising.” Richard said, “I can talk ghetto too. . . . But I choose not to, because of course we’re in an environment where proper English is demanded.” And Jeffrey said, “I think there’s a real confusion and lack of education, representation of what true success is. Lots of people stereotype that as rap success or athletes.” In her ethnography of the black upper-middle class, Lacy (2007) finds similar boundary-marking processes, but she does not emphasize how these boundaries invoke not just class but age meanings, too. Because youth culture has racialized meanings, these men did not feel they could afford the extended adolescence characterized in popular culture as “the frat life.” Instead, they sought to distinguish themselves from cultural images of black youth as principally interested in fun. The aspects of black popular culture these men rejected are also elements of youth culture: rap, the street, sports. Claiming an interest in “true success”—defined through conventional careers—is a class strategy, but it is also a way to claim to be adult men.

Social Invisibility

These black men anticipated they would have little trouble making white friends in college, as they had many white friends in high school. Like the white first-generation men, they were surprised to discover they did not easily fit in. Some participants experienced overt marginalization: Ekon recalled being kicked out of a party. Others described more subtle forms of exclusion. Vance explained that although he used to have white friends he called “brothers,” now he just has “associates,” a term that evokes a much greater level of emotional distance. Lance said, “I used to run things in high school, and now nobody will look in my direction.” All the participants described a change in social position that was dramatic and painful.

Black men also struggled to find socially comfortable spaces with other black students. Black students call other black students who do not play intercollegiate sports “regulars.” This term is misleading: Regular black men are not seen as “regular,” but are socially invisible as black men, even to other black students. Tim said, “The athletes don’t even want to talk to the regular [men].” Nick, an athlete, admitted, a little embarrassed, “They [regular black men] are kind of like the invisible ones to us.” He was not exaggerating. Many athletes could not name a single non-athlete black man, although they knew many black women. Craig, an athlete, mused, “I don’t know what it is, but we never really had you know the best relationship with all the black guys that aren’t athletes on campus.” Black women were often friends with regular black men, but when I asked questions about “black men,” they equated “black men” with black athletes. When I asked why, Janae answered, “Maybe they’re [non-athletes] just not my image of a strong black man.” Kayla, embarrassed, admitted, “I’m getting myself into trouble here, but [I don’t know any black men who are not athletes].” Social invisibility does not mean regular black men had no friends or acquaintances; rather, they were not socially visible as black men, and their social interactions did not support their conceptions of who they were.

Racial hostility is common on predominantly white campuses (Feagin et al. 1996 ), but regular black men are not marginalized simply because they are black; they are marginalized because they do not fulfill peer expectations of youthful black masculinity. Their bodies are smaller and less muscular than athletes’ bodies. They reject athletic apparel, choosing a preppier look. Indeed, these black men looked and dressed much more like the non-black men on campus. Failure to embody the norms of hip hop masculinity led to questions about their masculinity and heterosexuality, as Tim complained: “Like a lot of my friends are like ‘you’ve gotta be gay man, you’ve gotta be gay.’ . . . The girls, they assumed that I was gay because I dress well. I’m like how can you be gay because you dress well?” Tim’s style led to questions about his heterosexuality not because he breached general rules of masculine style but because he breached campus assumptions about black masculine style. Regular black men’s failure to conform to youthful expectations of black masculine comportment jeopardized their identities as black men.

Adolescent Expectations in Social Interaction

First-generation white students were able to repair their identities through everyday leisure activities with other students, in which social similarities helped forge quick social ties. But for black men, everyday leisure activities are often difficult arenas of interactions. Participants expressed frustration at interactive expectations linking them to adolescent identities they were trying to shed. Jeffrey, for example, sighed, “White people want you to be the life of the party. . . . I do not want to be that stereotype.” And Phillip said:

These are white males who say “wassup” to me. . . . Because I am black and . . . male, from some of the people I get “wassup” and this, that, the other, thinking, “Oh great, I’ve seen the Wayans brothers and everything else. . . . I know how to engage with you.”

Phillip added, “[I’m] 22 years old. This person who’s talking to you is maybe 19. You don’t talk to me like that.” In these examples, black men’s everyday interactions tethered them to the racialized adolescent interests they rejected. Their adult self-concepts and interests were not recognized, making it difficult for them to create the same kind of easy connections as white men.

Black men also found it difficult to make connections based on shared academic interests. White students regularly doubt black men’s academic credentials. While first-generation white men’s class differences are hidden in college, black men’s class similarities become invisible. The class-based affirmative action programs that supported first-generation students’ entrance into Western were unseen, whereas non-black students assumed that all black students benefitted from non–merit-based admissions programs, even though most did not. Richard shrugged, “[White people] usually bring it up: ‘Wow, most black people I know are here for scholarships.’” He bristled, “Why is it that I can’t get the same education? Why would you not want me to get the same education? Give us a chance to show that we can do things, and you’ll see.” Because staff from the athletic department wait outside classrooms to mark athletes’ attendance, and students do not easily differentiate between athletes and black non-athletes in the classroom, black men all suffered from the infantilizing assumption that they required more educational supervision than other students, which undercut their efforts to establish autonomous, goal-oriented academic identities. These assumptions have consequences. In classes, for example, non-black students avoided working in groups with black students. Dennis reported that peers ignored his repeated efforts to discuss engineering, instead only talking with him about football: “When I got here, my identity, it wasn’t as a football player, but I was 220, 230 pounds, and I’m, black.” This talk affected him, eventually pushing him to walk onto the football team.

Emotion Management

Because they had been socially successful in high school, these men were unprepared for the dilemmas they faced in college. Moreover, their aspirations to middle-class adult identities constrained their interpretations of their encounters. They did not want to be “angry black men” (Wilkins 2012b). Indeed, they prided themselves on being able to get along with white people. Jeffrey boasted, “I’m able to interact with white people in a more sincere way.” Corey proudly claimed, “I can interact with whites and blacks.” Jesse similarly said, “I know how to deal with the other races . . . [and] can communicate with anybody comfortably.” To avoid being angry and to sustain relationships with whites, they minimized racism. As Richard illustrated, “I just take everything with a grain of salt and flick it right off because there’s no point for me to have a grudge.” Managing relationships with other students required these men to manage bad feelings about their interactions (Wilkins 2012b). Unlike the white men who talked about how much they enjoyed the outdoors, black men talked frequently about how exhausted they were.

Intimate Relationships

Girlfriends provided many first-generation white men with emotional support, but most regular black men did not have girlfriends or boyfriends. Half had not had an intimate relationship since coming to college. This was unusual. In a study of 57 white, upper-middle-class white students at Western (Wilkins and Dalessandro 2013), every participant had been in multiple intimate relationships. Outsiders often assume that black college students regularly date white women, but this perception is based on stereotypes about black masculinity rather than men’s actual experiences (see Wilkins 2012c). Phillip explained, “I’m not seen as something attractive.” Jeffrey noted, “Among non-athletes, leave it [interracial dating] alone. It’s . . . more of an athlete thing.” Tyler said that white women “think black guys are hot, but they would never like date a black guy. . . . They wouldn’t even sleep with one. They just like . . . to look.” McClintock (2010) found that black men at Stanford hook up, but do not date, interracially; in my sample, non-athlete black men did not perceive their relationship or hook up options to be good.

Among the black participants, Tyler was the only one to have a significant ongoing relationship. Unlike the white men’s relationships, his relationship was costly. His ex-girlfriend, an affluent white woman, had sought a black boyfriend: “She said she had jungle fever,” he laughed. After a tumultuous nine months, she ended it because, “she said I had goals that stressed her out.” Tyler was bewildered, as he said several times that he saw his goals as desirable. I do not know for sure what prompted the breakup, but it is possible to imagine that Tyler’s ex-girlfriend, who chose him because he was black, tired of him because he failed to conform to her expectations that dating a black man meant dating someone who was cool, fun, and unconcerned with goals. This experience hurt Tyler. He became depressed and almost dropped out of school. The relationship was also expensive: He never let his ex know it was difficult for him to spend the kind of money she expected him to spend. Overall, Tyler’s relationship did not offer him the kind of support that first-generation white men received from girlfriends; instead, it undermined his collegiate goals.

Black men’s efforts to draw on scripts about middle-class adult masculinity were not recognized by outsiders, who instead insisted they conform to scripts associated with adolescence and the black lower class. These identity struggles complicated black men’s social integration, intensified their emotional dilemmas, and denied them some of the support systems the first-generation white men experienced. Their more fraught friendships and intimate relationships did not provide them with comparable emotional support to white men’s; instead, these relationships often undermined how they saw themselves. Black men and first-generation white men entered college with similar expectations and goals, but only white men were allowed to perform adult-like roles consistent with school success; black men were asked to perform adolescent roles that were anti-school and counterproductive. Because other students did not recognize their view of themselves as adult men, they were limited by race, class, and gender cultural scripts about black masculinity in ways that undermined their collegiate efforts, increasing the personal, identity, and emotional costs of higher education.

Discussion

Identities and identity transitions matter for academic success, social integration, and personal well-being. Past research has not examined how identities developed in high school affect identity processes in college; how these processes are influenced by the contextual intersections of race, class, and gender; and how identity processes and social integration affect the construction of satisfying pathways to adulthood. In this study, I used the cases of first-generation white men and black men to examine these questions, focusing on continuity and changes in their identity experiences in high school and college. I now discuss each of these points further.

First, high school identity strategies matter for college identity experiences. Studies of working-class college students find that adjusting to the upper-middle-class habitus and expectations of universities, like the ones in this study, is often prolonged and painful (e.g., Aries and Seider 2005; Lee and Kramer 2012). However, the first-generation white men in this study had already begun making identity transformations in high school. The identity strategies they developed in high school eased their transitions to college, where they readily converted their high school strategies of “being normal” into adult identities. Masculinity facilitated this strategy; for example, gendered relationship scripts supported the growth of their collegiate identities.

In contrast, identity strategies that worked for black men in high school unexpectedly no longer worked in college, increasing the difficulty of social integration and the emotional cost of their social struggles. The strategy of “being normal” —not standing out—was never available to black men. Black men always stood out in predominantly white schools. Black men in this study, like others in predominantly white schools (Holland 2012; Ispa-Landa 2013), used the meanings of black masculinity to craft various successful high school identities. The cultural meaning of black masculinity as cool allowed them to engage in a range of behaviors and still be seen as cool enough, even when they deviated from cultural images of black masculine cool. Expectations for the performance of black masculinity became narrower in college, however, and the costs of coolness increased. Because they had so much latitude over their images in high school, they were surprised that they could no longer manipulate images of black masculinity—they had been stripped of choice over their identities. Their positive social experiences in high school left black men unprepared for the social and emotional dilemmas they faced in college. Because black women’s experiences in suburban high schools are so different from black men’s (Holland 2012; Ispa-Landa 2013), their transition dilemmas are likely distinct (see Wilkins 2012a), underscoring the need for more intersectional research.

Second, identity strategies are contextually constrained and facilitated by intersectional identity locations. Cultural scripts about white masculinity, including the idea of the “normal guy,” constrain and enable first-generation white men, just as cultural scripts about black masculinity constrain and enable black men. The first-generation white men in my sample worked to fit the normal guy script in high school; once they accomplished this, knowing how to be a normal guy helped them make new friends and create stable lives in the context of college. For black men, in high school, being the cool black friend could mean doing almost anything they wanted, but in college, they were limited to a small set of stereotypical, adolescent behaviors. At the same time, their peers did not allow them to be anything but the cool black friend. The context, which was shaped in part by changing age expectations, altered the degree to which they could control the script. To black men’s surprise, they had much more latitude over scripts about black masculinity in high school than they did in college, where the audience’s expectations boxed them in in new ways.

Third, educational experiences matter for how differently situated students construct pathways to adulthood. Opportunity structures create divergent gender strategies as boys approach adulthood: according to Messner (1989), poor black boys assess the gendered opportunity structure and continue their investment in sports, whereas middle-class white boys reinvest in education. The men in this study, however, entered college with similar goals but could not create equally satisfying pathways to adulthood. First-generation white men were allowed to adopt adult-oriented identities, whereas black men were not. Like other achievement-oriented black college men (Harper 2004; Ray and Rosow 2009), they claimed hard-working identities as professionally oriented college students, but their peers constantly challenged how they saw themselves, making it difficult for them to craft emotionally and academically supportive personal relationships.

Structural opportunities and personal identity preferences were not the only things that mattered: the audience’s cultural expectations were also important. These expectations allowed first-generation white men to successfully tap into a class-linked script about white manhood and to find peers who confirmed and supported their views of themselves (Silva 2012). This script did not yield white men high-status peer positions in college, nor is it likely to land them the most lucrative post-collegiate careers, but it did allow them to successfully achieve identities as adult men. This path was closed to the black men in my sample, particularly if we take seriously Silva’s (2012) finding that adulthood is relational, requiring outsider confirmation. This difference has real consequences for black men’s experiences, affecting their ability to create supportive friendships and intimate relationships, and their sense of belonging at university.

While limited in scope, this research points to the leverage that can be gained from considering students’ identities as they move across educational settings, the use of an analytic lens that attends to the contextual dynamics of intersectional identities, and attention to the ways concerns about age facilitate or complicate identity strategies for differently situated students. More research is needed in each of these areas.

Footnotes

funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by funding from a Spencer Foundation Area of Inquiry Grant; a CARTSS Scholar Fund from the University of Colorado, and a Diversity grant from the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement at the University of Colorado.

Author Biography

Amy C. Wilkins is associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her current research focuses on identity transformations in the transition to college for first-generation, black, and LGBQ young adults. Her research on gender, sexuality, and racial inequalities and identities has been published in a number of articles and in book, Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status (Chicago).

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