The Burdens of Social Mobility

Colleges promise social mobility and "polish" to first-gen students — but what's lost in the process?

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I get a lot of publicist pitches for new books that fall in the Culture Study wheelhouse. I get recommendations from other newsletter writers, and from former colleagues, and periodically interview Culture Study readers about their own forthcoming work. But I especially love it when people send recommendations for non-fiction books they’ve read and want to discuss with other Culture Study readers — which is how I found out about Melissa Osborne’s Polished: College, Class, and Social Mobility.

“I’ve never met Melissa Osborne, but my husband received the same scholarship that she did for high-achieving, low-income students,” a reader named Julia emailed me. “They both transferred from community colleges to four-year schools before going on to grad school, and parts of her work feel like a retrospective roadmap to periods of our relationship that I didn’t fully understand until now. Yes, it’s a book about education, but it’s also about culture — about what we expect our strivers and success stories to look like, what we’ve decided to exact as the cost for getting ahead, and how we might reimagine mobility in our society.”

I read that email and immediately started looking for Osborne’s publicist contact info. You’ll note that this interview is a little longer than usual — in part because I just couldn’t stop asking questions! I love this sort of nuanced and challenging work on class and education and social capital, and I think you will too.

You can find more about Melissa Osborne’s work here — and buy Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Mobility here.

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There are some ways in which you can attempt to describe the “typical” first-generation college student, but I think it might be more interesting to instead start by describing the typical higher-ed orientation toward first-generation students. How does higher ed imagine this student, how does it attempt to serve them, and how does it different between selective colleges and universities where first-gen students are the exception and where they are the norm (or much more common)? 

I know, huge question, but I feel like it can do some table-setting for us as we think about higher ed as a “people changing” institution. 

First-generation students are often framed as individuals who have "beaten the odds," particularly at more elite institutions. Schools and scholarship organizations often try to highlight that these students are high achieving and have earned their place, countering any narratives that might suggest they do not belong. This narrative applies across both public and elite private institutions, though the experiences of these students can differ significantly depending on the type of school. At elite private schools, first-generation students often form a small minority, and their socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be vastly different from their peers.

For example, attending the University of Chicago in 2019 might mean sharing classes with Rory Gates, or the children of some of the most elite people in the world. This disparity is less pronounced at public institutions, where students tend to come from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds, even at elite public universities like Berkeley.

Regardless of where they go to school, first-generation students are frequently viewed through a "deficit model," meaning they are perceived as lacking the knowledge, skills, and resources that their more affluent, continuing-generation peers possess. This perception leads to universities creating programming to help these students "catch up" academically and socially. In more selective schools, the perceived gap between first-generation students and their peers is often more pronounced because the gap between these students’ pre-college experiences and the campus environments they are entering are more pronounced. 

For instance, a student from my hometown, a small rural logging town in Oregon, may certainly need academic and social support as they transition to the unfamiliar academic expectations and new social spaces at Oregon State University, but not nearly as much as they would need if they were attending Stanford. Although both schools may be unfamiliar and challenging for first-generation students, the rigorous academic expectations and the socially and culturally elite environment at Stanford is significantly further removed from small-town rural Oregon than Oregon State.

Universities respond to these gaps and the perceived “deficits” of first-generation students by providing programming aimed at equipping them with the necessary forms of capital—cultural, social, and academic—that they have identified will ensure they thrive both in their degree programs and in their post graduation trajectories. And, while a lot of the responses across schools are similar, the type and amount of programming and resources available varies depending on the school’s culture and resources. So, although Harvard, Berkeley, Kansas State, and Western Washington University will all have programming and resources designed to reduce perceived “deficits” and “level the playing field” for students, their approaches differ.

At elite institutions, the extensive funding available allows for financial resources like specialized aid and stipends as well as comprehensive programming aimed at “leveling the playing field” for first-generation students. These programs not only offer academic support but also provide opportunities to develop the social and cultural capital that their peers from more affluent families come to college already equipped with. This can include bridge and peer mentoring programs, networking events, internships, and exposure to elite cultural experiences like attending modern dance showcases, going to chocolate tastings, or visiting museums. And, in many ways, these schools actively leverage this programming to mold and shape students into the kinds of alumni that will reflect the prestige of the institution.  

In contrast, non-elite schools focus more heavily on addressing academic “deficits.” These schools are more likely to invest in tutoring, supplementary courses, and academic scaffolding, particularly in areas like first-year writing and mathematics. The focus at these schools is more on helping students pass their introductory courses than on providing the kinds of social and cultural capital development that elite schools emphasize. Although some of that programming is also available at public colleges and universities, it is far more limited and constraints on resources often prevent these schools from offering tailored or experimental programming specifically for first-generation students.

We should also talk about the understanding of higher ed as a sort of magic social mobility machine: like you’ll get in to college, particularly a “good” college, and then emerge on the other side already seven rungs up the class ladder. What does this understanding elide? 

One of the more meta-arguments I tried to make in Polished is about reconsidering how we talk about and think about social mobility, both in the broader American cultural imaginary and within higher education. We tend to talk about social mobility as though it is an item or a thing to achieve, rather than a process people experience. We often frame it in terms of a degree, a career, or a salary, and we are hyper-focused on how to achieve those things, constantly aspiring toward them. I often joke that we have a "Pokémon approach" to social mobility in the United States — like we’ve got to catch them all. One key aspect of this is that we tend to pursue social mobility in an unquestioning way, assuming it is a straightforward, unambiguous good. After all, who wouldn’t want a higher salary or a more stable career?

I try to complicate a few aspects of this understanding in the book. First, when you tell students that social mobility is what they should achieve, it creates a dilemma. You’re implying that what they are striving for is better than or more important than what their grandparents or communities have achieved. Second, it means-to-an-end approach to higher education overlooks the process people go through when experiencing social mobility. It’s not just a thing that you do; it’s something you go through. When we examine student’s experiences of this process, it complicates the notion of social mobility as an unquestionable good and prompts us to consider the non-economic costs of social mobility.

Higher education is widely understood as one of the most reliable pathways to social mobility in the United States — but not always. The outcomes depend on where a student goes to college, how much debt they incur, what major they choose, and what the job market looks like when they graduate. Many students now go to college, incur debt, and graduate only to find themselves in a socioeconomic position that isn’t much different from their family of origin. The economist Raj Chetty has done great work trying to measure how schools produce social mobility and examining which schools do or do not foster social mobility from an economic perspective. His work helps us see that even when thinking about social mobility in purely economic terms, it’s more complicated than simply "go to a good school, get a good job" — a narrative that many Millennials and members of GenZ grew up with and are now questioning.

There is also the assumption that all students, especially first-generation and low-income students, actually finish college. In reality, only 24% of first-generations students complete their bachelor’s degree within 6 years (compared to 59% of continuing generation students). That’s telling. While the opportunity for social mobility exists for first-generation students, and we have opened up access to higher education, the outcomes tell a different story. Social mobility is not always happening. Many first-generation students are not graduating, and they are often leaving college without a degree and with student debt.

When we narrow our scope to students who do complete college—especially those who attend elite institutions like MIT or Williams College —the social mobility they experience can align with what we hope for: a degree, a career, and a salary that far surpasses anything their family has experienced. Many students I spoke to in the book achieved exactly that. They attended the most elite schools in the country on full-ride scholarships and now make impressive salaries or are pursuing advanced degrees in high earning areas like medicine or business. They are earning significant amounts of money by any standards, especially when compared to the working-class communities they came from.

However, Polished also delves into the non-economic costs, or the social and emotional costs, of this kind of social mobility. The changes that students experience, especially the unexpected ones, as they become socially mobile during college can create crises and conflicts. Their identities, perspectives, and positionality change. The work colleges do to "polish" students, getting them up to speed with their peers and preparing them for mobility and the futures they’re striving for, fundamentally changes the students. The opportunities and experiences they receive through college programming don’t just give them new knowledge; they rewrite the knowledge they already have. This process begins to reshape their identities and perspectives on the world.

But this transformation can be unsettling, shocking, and even painful, causing students to question who they are. It can also create conflicts within families, as students feel caught between the pressure to change and conform on campus while also fearing they will become unrecognizable to their families. There’s a real tension between pursuing upward mobility and maintaining authenticity, and students sometimes feel as though they have to choose between the two.

Socially mobile students grapple with these challenges throughout their academic careers. It adds a heavy burden on top of studying for exams, applying for graduate schools, seeking internships, and all the other demands of college life. For those who can manage this long term, they graduate and attain the mobility they’ve worked so hard for — but often feel lonely and isolated into their careers. For some students, this process becomes too much over time and they end up making difficult choices like transferring, dropping out, or even cutting ties with their families, feeling as though they must choose between upward mobility and community and authenticity. And this begs the question: is that a fair thing to ask of anyone?

I was really struck by the prevalence of homesickness in student’s descriptions of navigating college as a first-gen student — for these students, it’s not just about being away from your parents, or your close friends, or the type of classes/grading/education….they’re also dealing a loss of cultural capital.

I remember feeling something similar in the depth of my homesickness when I was studying abroad in France — I felt like I had lost my ability to communicate my mastery or intelligence, and my dress and behavior were all wrong, and all the French college students seemed to understand all of these invisible ways of doing things and I understood *nothing.* It was very unmooring, and until reading Polished I’d never explicitly connected it to just how homesick I felt during those six months. (Also worth noting that I did eventually amass some French cultural capital — which then made re-entry into the United States surprisingly difficult. It was reverse culture-shock, but it was also this of liminality between two cultures).

I’d love to hear you talk a bit about the loss and homesickness that so many of the students you interviewed experience (or your own!) — but also how gaining certain cultural competencies then also makes it harder to return to the spaces that once felt most like home. 

Higher education is a "people-changing" institution — and the polishing process that emerges from it are highly efficient and effective at transforming students. This process not only provides students with the cultural, social, and economic capital they need (money, networks, access to opportunities and resources, skills, knowledge, and experiences) but it also changes them fundamentally. This process alters their capital, which in turn changes the way they see the world, the language they use, their tastes, and their preferences. For example, what they like to watch on TV, what they like to read, the kinds of cheese they know and like, and how they perceive the world shifts as a result of their exposure to new ideas and experiences. For many students, these changes are positive; they help them fit in more on campus, align with their peers, and even perform better in their courses. However, this transformation can also create a sense of loss. It’s not just that their taste in cheese is changing — it’s that their class identity, represented through something as simple as cheese, is changing.

This shift can leave students feeling unmoored and out of place — not only on campus but also when they return home. On campus, they might not feel entirely at ease, as they are adapting to new social norms and expectations. But when they go home, they often feel like they no longer fit in there either, because they have changed. The book discusses students coming home on breaks and realizing they have become different from their families and communities. This manifests in various ways: they may be studying for exams and pursuing internships while their friends are playing video games, working, or even starting families. Or perhaps their interests have shifted—they might now be drawn to French films while their family prefers watching Survivor. They may want to discuss global conflicts or environmental crises, but their family is either uninterested or focused on more immediate, everyday concerns.

This transformation relates to a concept from Pierre Bourdieu called "habitus," which refers to the embodiment of these forms of capital. It’s not just about having different tastes or new knowledge; it’s about how you carry yourself in the world, how you experience it, and how you hold yourself. Many students enter college with a habitus that doesn’t align with the dominant culture on campus, making them feel out of place. But when they return home after undergoing these changes, their habitus no longer fits there either. They find themselves trapped between two worlds, unable to fully belong to either. Instead of straddling both worlds, as we often advise students to do, they feel caught in between, belonging to neither.

I come from a rural, working-class community in southern Oregon, and going to elite undergraduate and graduate schools rapidly changed the way I see the world. My understanding of the world changed, but so did the way I live in it — the way I dress, what I eat, the media I consume, and the way I talk and hold myself are all different than before I went to college.

When I teach this concept, I often show my students a photo from the road trip I took moving back to the West Coast from graduate school at the University of Chicago. There’s a photo of me with my cousin Mitch. He’s a working-class guy dressed in jeans, a work shirt, a baseball cap, and work boots. Meanwhile, I’m in pressed jeans, a button-down shirt under a University of Chicago sweatshirt, and Birkenstocks. The juxtaposition of the two of us is stark. In my mind, I thought I had picked a casual outfit for a barbeque and night at the rodeo that would fit in with my very working-class, rural family. However, when I saw the picture for the first time, I cracked up at the visual difference between myself and Mitch. Even as a person that studies this exact phenomenon I hadn’t noticed how dramatically my habitus had shifted until it was put into a context where it was no longer aligned.

Like many of the students in my book, I have experienced the sense that "you can never go home again." We’re constantly changing as humans, which is true for everyone, but for low-income, first-generation, or working-class students going through higher education — especially elite higher education — the changes happen rapidly, and often go unnoticed until we are put into context with our past selves and communities. Sometimes, students (and myself) feel homesick for what was. Even now, as a tenured professor, I sometimes think about a life in my hometown or a town like it.  But there’s no place for me there anymore. It’s not that I am not welcome, it’s just that I don’t fit there anymore and that creates a feeling of being adrift and alone.

And yet, what often prompts me to daydream about going back are the moments where I continue to feel out of place in higher education spaces as a professor from a working-class background. Instead of living the both/and life that I think our culture tells us we can achieve through social mobility, it ends up being far more a neither/nor existence. This creates a feeling of inbetweenness that the students in Polished spent a lot of time reflecting on.

You spent significant time with the students you interviewed whenever possible — this was not people filling out a questionnaire, or even just a single Zoom interview. You hung out with them on campus, you went to their favorite hangout spots, you talked to them as first-year students and then again later in their college careers. These interviews were for an academic project — but they were also touching on something deeply personal and lived, for you and them.  I’m sure, as a sociologist, you had previously spent some time doing one of my favorite pastimes, which is performing sociology on your own past. But I’m curious if your conversations with this generation of students has reshaped or textured your understanding of your own experiences. 

Absolutely. I love qualitative research for a lot of reasons. It allows us to better understand human experiences, how we reflect on our actions, the intricate elements of communities and social processes, but also because it has a deeply connective quality to it for the researcher and the research participants. Folks have written about the therapeutic quality of interviews, both for the interviewer and the interviewee. An interviewer doesn’t simply record the story of the person they are interviewing. They also end up interpreting and reflecting on their own experiences and their understanding of self.

When doing ethnographic research you become deeply involved in community spaces to better understand them and as a result you end up changing through that experience. I believe this is particularly true when researchers have shared aspects of identity, experiences, and backgrounds with the communities they study.  And, that this is a huge strength to this methodology, because if you are critically aware of this then you are constantly revaluating your frameworks for understanding and analyzing your data.

In my case, I came into the project with the assumption that my experience of social mobility as a first-generation college student would be very different from that of the students I studied. In some ways I knew our experiences would be similar - I attended classes with wealthy peers, struggled through deciphering Aristotle, was part of a peer mentoring program, and dealt with the sense of being out of place due to a lack of cultural capital. But in other ways, I knew that we would have very different experiences – I was a non-traditional adult learner who transferred from community college to Reed College, a small elite liberal arts college and when I graduated, I was married and already into my 30s with school-aged children.

When I started interviewing and spending time with these students, I learned a lot about their diverse experiences and the challenges they face. It broadened my understanding of what being a first-generation student can mean across intersections of identity and campus contexts and really showed me that social mobility is a process that students go through – a process that they have to navigate at the individual and community level. At the beginning of this project, I had a vague idea that I was unsatisfied with the ways we talk about social mobility as a means to an end and that it didn’t align with my own perceptions of how social mobility works. It was only through witnessing these students’ lives and then reflecting on both their experiences and my own that I started to really develop the building blocks of my understanding of social mobility as an ongoing iterative process.

What this looked like in practice was at times, hilarious and full of personal lessons. For instance, there was a moment when I was doing field work, and a lot of students were talking about how they were struggling with the ways they’d changed and that they felt like they barely recognized themselves. This led me to begin reflecting on my own experience and life as a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Chicago. I remember looking at myself in the mirror in chinos and a button-down shirt, looking like a J.Crew ad, and asking myself where this person had come from. This internal conflict led me to show up at my department a week later in cut-off jean shorts and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt—a far cry from the polished image I had been projecting.

My appearance was of course met with some questions and choice comments from some folks in the department. Eventually, I regained my balance, due in large part to the fact that I could contextualize my own experience through the experiences of the students I was interviewing and spending time with. And, while this makes for a funny story that I like to tell, it is telling that even as a person doing this research, I didn’t fully notice these changes tied to my own social mobility until I had something to understand them through.

Through these conversations with students, I learned that I could push back and challenge the institutions that had shaped me. There was far less discourse about first-generation students when I was in college, and the communicated expectation was to be grateful for the opportunity and not question the actions of the institutions that had given it to me. And even though this narrative is still pretty dominate in higher education, many of the students I interviewed were actively critiquing their institutions, protesting, and demanding better support.

This shift is partly due to how the conversation around first-generation students has evolved. There’s more research, more public discourse, and many universities now have dedicated programs and offices for first-generation students. When I was in college, I didn’t have access to the same language or frameworks. I knew I was a first-generation student, but that was about it. Spending time with students who were pushing back against the system helped me realize that I could do the same. I didn’t have to just "know my place" or accept things as they were. I remain deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, but I’ve also learned that it’s okay to be critical of the experience. That lesson has been very important to the development of the book, but also to my own understanding of what being a first-generation student means.

I love reading the Acknowledgements section of any book, but particularly first books, because they’re always much more expansive. In yours, you thank Anna Mueller for encouraging you to be more confident in your data and make bigger, bolder claims based on that data. What claims were you reticent to make, and what — including Mueller’s encouragement — ultimately persuaded you to make them? 

Oh, what a great question. I think there are two things here. First, there are the bigger, more meta arguments I make about rethinking social mobility. This was mostly about me being an early-career academic and questioning myself — who am I to be the voice on how we should think about social mobility? If I’m critiquing the dominant narrative, why should anyone listen to me? In addition to Anna and my other committee members support, I received a lot of positive feedback on this argument during the book drafting process from my editor and external reviewers and that gave me a lot of confidence.  In the end I agreed with the notion that, when you write a book, you get to be the person who says, “You should listen to me about how we think about social mobility.” Now if anyone will listen, that’s a whole different story.

Second, I was initially reluctant to dig deeply into the socio-emotional and mental health aspects of student experiences. I’m trained as a sociologist, not a psychologist. That’s what I kept telling Anna during our early conversations about what I was finding in the data. I wrote a number of drafts that had very weak or soft or vague arguments about the issues students were facing without really getting into the details or the effects because I was worried that I wasn’t an expert enough to write about the realities of the crises students were facing. But she kept reminding me, "You have the data. It’s not about what discipline you’re in; the data speaks for itself." As I was revising the book, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what the data was saying and how could I accurately do justice to and amplify the voices in the data?

As I sat with the data that detailed the lives of 150 students, I was eventually able to embrace what I already knew — I had the obligation to portray them as detailed and fully as I could because this data had the opportunity to shed light on the fact that navigating social mobility has real consequences for student mental health and that I couldn’t shy away from this because lives were literally at stake. That realization gave me the confidence to make the bigger, bolder claims based on the data I had. I had hundreds of stories detailing students' difficult journeys through college and the emotional pain they endured. These experiences weighed heavily on them as socially mobile, first-generation students, affecting their sense of self, their relationships with family and friends, their mental health, their academic trajectories, and ultimately, their lives.

Another reason I hesitated to make these bold claims is that, as a society—and particularly in higher education—we don’t talk about mental health in the way we should, and I think I had internalized that. The reassurance from my committee members, as well as my own reflection, helped me embrace the idea that, as a qualitative sociologist, part of my job is to bring forward the experiences and stories of the students I’ve studied. If that means talking loudly about mental health in higher education spaces, even though I’m not a psychologist and it likely stresses college administrators out when I do it, then so be it. It is time for higher education to collectively take responsibility and invest in comprehensive mental health services for their students and I hope that Polished can add to that conversation.

We have a lot of people who read this newsletter and work in higher ed, and even though you outline this pretty clearly in the conclusion of the book, I’d love to give some space for you to speak directly to those in administration about how existing programs for first-generation students could be reconfigured (as you’re careful to note in the book, we don’t need MORE, we don’t need bloat, we just need them to do the work they’re already doing to better serve these students’ needs!) 

In my recommendations I really focus on proposing interventions that would work at schools with varying levels of resources and the idea that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. One of the important findings from the book is that all the support we provide to first-generation students around capital accumulation is actually very effective and efficient. We’re really good at developing knowledge, skills, and resources in students, and that dramatically changes them. The key question when thinking about interventions and where to go from here is thinking about how we respond to those changes.

I go in two directions with this idea. First, how do we respond to the findings from Polished and build scaffolding around existing programming to support students through social mobility during college? Some schools fundamentally lack the programming they need to support their first-generation students and others could shift things dramatically by enhancing what they already have in place. When I talk to campuses about Polished they often ask, “If you could do one intervention, what would it be?” My answer is that I would thread programming that addresses the socio-emotional impact of social mobility through existing programs. We don’t need to eliminate the robust programming around capital accumulation found on campuses nationwide, we need to supplement it with programming that addresses the effects of that capital accumulation. 

For example, when we bring first-generation students into bridge and peer mentor programs, we need to be upfront about the fact that they are entering a "people-changing" organization and that this change might be difficult. We need to provide them with resources for coping with these challenges and offer workshops on the challenges of social mobility and relating to your family and home communities as first-generation student alongside the existing office hours 101 and networking for professional development workshops already on tap. From what I’ve found, while some students go through very difficult challenges that are hard to plan for, most students are struggling in ways that we can address. It’s not that we can’t program for it—it’s that we need to slightly adjust and supplement what we’re already doing.

The second approach I take toward recommendations is identifying what programs are most critical to improving student experiences and outcomes and how can schools without those programs begin to develop them. There are some programs and resources that really seemed to make a positive impact on the students I talked to. They didn’t eliminate the difficult processes and experiences students were going through, but they certainly made them more manageable.  Schools that don’t already have them need to prioritize investing in bridge programs and peer mentor programs that are not just academically based.

When done right, these programs create a cohort of students that build a sense of community, belonging, and support that can sustain them through very difficult times. It’s important to include staff support in these programs, too, because putting the burden of support solely on older students (through peer mentoring) isn’t entirely fair. Those students are also dealing with their own challenges and trying to navigate school and find jobs.

I also encourage schools to consider how they might incorporate parents into orientation and other programming in a way that isn’t condescending or encroaching on student autonomy. What would a bridge program for parents look like? It could involve giving parents the information they need and helping them build a community with other parents. Some schools with significant resources fly parents out to campus, giving them a chance to see the environment and meet the community. Regardless of campus resources, better incorporating parents of first-gen students into the equation has a lot of potential to demystify higher education for these families and ease some of the tensions and conflicts that arise during college.

Finally, we need to start thinking holistically about how we support low-income and first-generation students. Students connected with external organizations, like the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation or the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA), did significantly better because they had a dedicated advisor who understood their lives. These advisors could help students with academic struggles but also with cultural, social, and family issues, connecting them to resources when necessary.

At the outset this sounds like a very costly endeavor, and it could be. Campuses could take a case manager approach toward advising where students have dedicated advisors that can work with them one on one and walk alongside them as they traverse the journey of social mobility via higher education.  I would love to see this happen across higher education, but until funding priorities shift dramatically this is only realistic at the most resourced schools in the nation.

But that doesn’t mean a holistic approach towards supporting and advising students is fully out of reach for schools with limited resources. We can reimagine advising to be more expansive than merely an academic resource and can explore models where advising, counseling, student support services, and academic affairs all work collaboratively to create a team of support for student experiences. We just have to start thinking outside of the box.

The first step is simply acknowledging that first-generation students experiencing social mobility often face crises and conflicts, and it’s the university’s responsibility to respond. By shifting our framework, we can start making small changes that will lead to significant improvements. Once we shift our mindset, we can adjust our programming, which will change the student experience and lead to better outcomes. In this way, we’ll start to see real, meaningful change on campuses. ●

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You can find more about Melissa Osborne’s work here — and buy Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Mobility here.