Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Transition to College Experience of Low-Income Students

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This study examines the experiences of low-income Americans who enroll in college, identifying reasons so many of them drop out. Most low-income Americans now enroll in college, but only 11% earn a bachelor's degree within six years. The project documents the many challenges low-income college students face and observes how they deal with these challenges. This research will provide new insights for sociology on why the American Dream can be so elusive. It will also identify ways that high schools, colleges, and federally funded financial aid programs can better support low-income students. The researcher is spending two years with a small group of students from New Orleans, following them through their senior year of high school and their freshman year of college. As an ethnography of attempted upward mobility focused on the period of the life course when upwardly mobile trajectories are most often derailed, this study will document the most proximate causes of class reproduction for low-income Americans. The study asks two questions: First, what challenges do low-income students face during the transition to college, both in school and out of school, that affect their academic progress? Second, how do students cope with these challenges and make sense of them? Answers to these questions will have important implications for the sociological study of poverty, higher education, and class reproduction. Previous ethnographic work on poverty in America focuses primarily on how low-income people survive poverty and make meaning within it, so this new focus on the experience of trying to escape poverty could shed light on why so few succeed. Moreover, qualitative sociology research to date on the experiences of low-income college students has focused almost exclusively on the small portion of these students who attend selective residential colleges. By studying the experiences of students who live at home while attending community colleges and lower-tier public four-year colleges, this study will provide a needed glimpse of the contexts in which upward mobility most often falters.