Mobility and Falling

I haven’t left town yet — another hour or two before I get on the road — so I thought I’d get in one last post, since what I wrote yesterday was rather unfocused. (Although I have to say I was mightily proud of that godawful pun.) A few days ago, I cited Wolff and Resnick’s distinctions about the foundational assumptions of neoclassical and Marxian economic theories. Chris’s insightful comments on that post indicate to me that I need to think a little more about how those foundational assumptions affect students’ reasons for going to college. On the one hand, the Marxian focus on exploitation would lead me to view college as preparing students to take their proper places within the exploitative hierarchy, with the vocational and liberal education models putting students into the same relative places because class hierarchies in the base and the superstructure are roughly isomorphic. (No, I have absolutely zero support for this assertion. Fire away.) This is an understanding of class that simply feels much too monolithic to me. On the other hand, the neoclassical understanding of the student who always acts rationally and in her own best interests, in order to maximize the utility she receives from her work and life, feels far too rationalist and idealistic for me. People don’t always act in their own best interests, or even think about what they’re doing all the time.

So why do people go to college?

Well, I think maybe I was drawing too hard a line: obviously most people know college is good for them in some way. (I wouldn’t want a PhD if I didn’t agree.) People are aware of the statistics concerning how much more college grads make than high school grads — and, in fact, most of the talk around reasons for going to college have to do with wealth and vocation in some way, whether it’s getting the proper disciplinary training at a big state school, or doing the right networking at a small exclusive private school. While there is the rhetoric of the perspective-widening utility of a broad-based liberal education in a lot of first-year entrance essays, the ways people talk about not going to college (reasons, consequences) almost always have to do with economics.

As Chris remarks in his comments, students “almost without exception identify an education as one leg up on the ladder to success. At the same time, most would call themselves middle class of one stratum or another.” Chris suggests that this sets up an interesting contradiction, in that students from middle-class backgrounds see college as being simultaneously a site of class mobility (“one leg up”) and class reproduction (his suggestion that college is itself a middle-class pursuit). I might extend the argument a little bit to suggest that many students might even aspire to being middle class. Where’s the class mobility?

The Happy Tutor has told us that it’s a long way down from the middle class. His point is well taken: let me suggest that perhaps a reason for going to college is not so much class mobility as it is fear of falling, the fear that Curtiss invokes when he suggests that “those among the laid off who can look employable and appear successful–or move within certain spheres of possible identifications and images, to avoid loathsome job-speak at the cost of falling into pedantry–will do better than others. But that’s not to criticize these people, either; on the contrary, why should these people have to keep up appearances at a time when they can ill afford to?” Curtiss’s comment is in the context of a discussion about economic versus other (“identifications and images”) definitions of class, and makes me realize that the fear of falling is economic: most people don’t have a fear of losing the taste to make distinctions between Pabst Blue Ribbon and Montrachet Grand Cru. However, the question Curtiss asks — “why should these people have to keep up appearances” — seems to neglect the fact that extraeconomic definitions of class are not soley reliant on the conscious act of keeping up appearances: there are elements of class signification that are beyond individuals’ control. I have the impulse to argue that this is why The Beverly Hillbillies functioned as a comedy — the mismatch between economic and cultural definitions of class — but to do so would be to imply that the Clampett clan could not control their acts of cultural signification, which would be a bit of class bigotry on my part. There is some choice involved in cultural signification: if we assume that public consumption of Montrachet Grand Cru will result in our being identified into a “higher” class than public consumption of Pabst Blue Ribbon (and thereby, according to neoclassical economists, maximize our utility), that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll all automatically start drinking Montrachet Grand Cru.

I think this tells me something about why many people seem simultaneously engaged and repulsed by narratives of class transformation. We want to hum J-Lo’s “Jenny from the Block” while reading Bound to Rise or Risen from the Ranks. (The conflicting narratives of cultural and economic class mobility in The Breakfast Club, those of Allison Reynolds and John Bender, are also worth examining.)