Abstract
Emerging adulthood is a period that conglomerates expectations and responsibilities during the period between late adolescence and young adulthood—a time when youth are defining the edges of who they are (Arnett, 2004). This chapter of life can be rich with opportunities, with today’s young people freer than ever before to explore a multitude of possible paths. However, the range of path opportunities may not be the same for all emerging adults: Those less privileged are often severely limited in their chances to explore life options (Arnett, 2004).
The concession of inequality in emerging adulthood provides the backdrop for sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton’s powerful new book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. The authors chronicle their 5-year ethnographic study of a cohort of 53 freshmen women at an unnamed Midwestern public research university (MU). For the first year of the study, the researchers occupied a room on the same floor of an on-campus residence hall as the freshmen women. The authors ultimately expose a deep-rooted cycle of class reproduction at the heart of the university.
This book addresses a question central to the contemporary university experience: Why do some students find greater success in higher education than others? Focusing on college women, the authors conclude that success depends on the fit between a student’s individual characteristics—particularly their class backgrounds and orientations to college—and the organizational characteristics of a university. These organizational characteristics are isolated by Armstrong and Hamilton as three different “pathways” that the institution can offer to students and within which they classify their observed cohort. These include the party pathway, allowing affluent students to invest themselves in socializing and Greek life with minimal attention paid to academics; the mobility pathway, designed for pragmatic and socially oriented individuals who lack family support; and the professional pathway, serving competitive and ambitious students who require parental intervention to ensure success.
Armstrong and Hamilton deem these systems, in what they grant is a Weberian turn of phrase, “class reproduction through social closure” (p. 11). Thus, Paying for the Party uncovers the American education system’s failed promise to provide an equalizing context for learning. A parallel can be drawn to the American dream: The gilded sales pitch of class correction, born from the disappointment of investing in a system that rewards the already privileged. Indeed, the authors state, “the party pathway was a poor fit for anyone not advantaged in every possible way” (p. 217).
Within the context of MU, Armstrong and Hamilton deftly demonstrate how colleges maintain inequality, but it is less certain whether these results would be reproduced at dissimilar institutions. Other campus ecologies and institutional practices, and quite possibly other student bodies, may provide varied mobility or professional pathways absent from MU. The authors’ focus on a women-only sample is both a strength, given the unique disparities women face in many professional spheres (Whitmarsh, Brown, Cooper, Hawkins-Rodgers, & Wentworth, 2007), and a limitation to generalizability, given other work on development of masculinity among emerging adult men (Kimmel, 2008). It remains unknown whether men on college campuses experience similar mechanisms for perpetuating inequality. The analyses are also limited by a sample focus on Caucasian women; this lack of racial and ethnic diversity is, however, perhaps more indicative of enrollment patterns of elite universities rather than a methodological fault.
Paying for the Party provides an intriguing interpretation of the current state of America’s higher learning institutions—by seriously considering socioeconomic class, gender performance, structural hierarchies of privilege, and asking how much freedom young women truly have in the context of higher education’s pathways. We recommend this well-written and timely scholarly book to those working in higher education and student affairs, as well as researchers focusing on sociocultural and psychosocial aspects of women’s emerging adulthood.