Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality by Elizabeth A. Armstrong & Laura T. Hamilton (review)

In their sociological study of college pathways, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton detail the social formation of college outcomes, primarily career trajectories, for the residents of one women’s residence hall floor at a large public flagship research university. Armstrong and Hamilton’s volume, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, provides a depth and nuance to their analysis rarely found in large-scale studies of college outcomes. The authors draw on five years of data, including data from deep ethnographic engagement, over the course of the women’s first year of college living in a residence hall. Subsequent data primarily were collected through annual interviews. The book is at its most impressive when it combines analyses of precollege contexts, ethnographic data on women’s first-year experiences, and interview data from throughout their undergraduate years to explain how the institution’s social infrastructure helped shape differential outcomes and varied trajectories as they approached graduation. Armstrong and Hamilton delicately demonstrate three distinct pathways the women of their study might forge and/or follow: the professional pathway, the mobility pathway, and the party pathway. Each pathway has its own required predispositions, opportunities, consequences, and vulnerabilities, expertly described throughout the volume.

According to Armstrong and Hamilton, the professional pathway is designed for affluent high achievers and leads to high-powered trajectories like legal, medical, and scientific careers. The mobility pathway, meanwhile, affords very few students the chance to move from working or lower-middle class into solidly middle or upper-middle class careers. The party pathway exerts the strongest influence on students and garners the most institutional supports, funneling students into less demanding courses of study and preparing them to maximize their social networks. The party pathway attracts students from a wide range of backgrounds, but generally only those from dominant class and cultural backgrounds can succeed. Fundamental to Armstrong and Hamilton’s argument is recognition that institutional infrastructure, such as capitol projects, administrative structures, and even institutional policies, is designed to support students from socially dominant backgrounds better than and at the peril of nondominant students.

With a college credential more in-demand than ever for the global economies of late capitalism, Armstrong and Hamilton raise important questions about the real value of a college education, its costs, its benefits, and how those costs and benefits differ across social class and cultural backgrounds. They offer meaningful contributions to discussions about how college shapes students and their trajectories, highlighting ways that institutions benefit from the party pathway while meeting market demands and symbolically conveying commitments to the social contract between higher education and American democracy. Through their analysis, one might reach the conclusion that institutions like the state flagship public research university featured in their study are far less about social mobility or equity and far more about sustaining privilege—and privilege void of merit in many instances.

For example, in describing how the party pathway is cultivated by a triad of student, family, and institutional actions, Armstrong and Hamilton explain that some families prepare their daughters for a college experience focused on social activities and networking rather than academics. Some women who did not receive this preparation at home learned to maximize their potential success in these areas. All the while, the institution provided extensive support for social-oriented goals by directing students into majors that were more personality driven than intellectually rigorous. Armstrong and Hamilton offer majoring in Sports Management rather than Economics as an example. Women from wealthier backgrounds could succeed in these arenas and secure privileged trajectories, because their precollege experiences had primed them for such activity and their social networks ensured successful postcollege careers and/or marriages.

The illustrations of differential outcomes for students across the different pathways clearly contribute to broader conversations about college costs and benefits. Such analyses also can inform discussion of what students really learn and what students really need to...