The Great Divide: A Review of Paying for the Party

Go to college, get a high paying job, buy a house and raise a family. From the viewpoint of the "American Dream," a college education leads to a life full of purpose and success. On a daily basis, we are inundated with mass media hailing the value of higher education. The pro-con list is short: if you attend a four-year university, you will receive a higher salary, gain a job that you would not be able to get without a college degree, and you will have the best years of your life through the "college experience." However, these social sentiments fail to acknowledge the complexity of contextual factors that influence the outcomes of college educated young adults.The impact of my background on my decision to attend college and graduate school became immediately clear when reading Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. As an "achiever," I was raised with "achiever" parents encouraging me to engage in "self-discovery" from a young age, assisting me in identifying a field of study that fit my interests and abilities. As trite as it may sound, the words describing the "achievers" felt as though they were written about my college experience, with stories of achievers attending study abroad, not having to work through the school year, and receiving academic guidance and financial support from parents. As Armstrong and Hamilton write, "Achievers were the products of successful social reproduction: Parental resources- time, money, social connections, and familiarity with college and the professional world- helped them to extract the credentials and experiences they needed from the university's professional pathway" (p. 197). I was, similarly to the 7 achievers, primed and well positioned to move into the middle to upper class. Given a willingness to meet my potential in the university setting, the road had been paved for me, and as I stepped onto my college campus on the first day, I had little doubt of my ability to accomplish my goals.The personal stories of the "achievers" forced me to contemplate the fact that success for achievers is not the result of independent efforts. As I realized the extent of my background's influence on my success in college, I could not tear myself away from the stories captured by Armstrong and Hamilton. Using an ethnographic and longitudinal approach, these researchers were able to engage in an in-depth exploration of 53 women beginning their first year at a large Midwestern University. However, the authors were able to transform a research study into a bold and addicting read, offering raw material from the young women, sparing no details.Indeed, the researchers reveal eye-opening personal reactions to the women, in a way rarely captured by academic literature regarding the college experience. Through this five-year ethnographic and interview study, the researchers lived on the same residence hall as the women for the first year of the study, "hanging out, watching television, eating pizza, studying, and providing company as they got dressed for parties or other social events" (p. 6). Five years, 202 interviews, and over 2,000 pages of field notes later, the researchers were able to gather rich data, attempting to bridge the gap between educational stratification and college cultures.Moreover, the analysis of the data was intertwined with the data collection, as analysis shaped the questions to be asked. Armstrong and Hamilton comment on the influence of analysis on data collection when they write, "as we developed a deeper understanding of student life, we grew more sophisticated in our questioning" (p. 270). Data analysis began as soon as the researchers interacted with a participant for the first time. As interviews were conducted, transcripts were created and encoded by the team, memos were written, and text was drafted, shaping the next questions to be asked. …