Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility by Jennifer M. Morton (review)

In this short and stimulating study, the philosopher Jennifer Morton treats upward mobility as a normative commitment and evinces a deep ambivalence about it. Casting her attention on college students, she trains an empathetic eye upon "strivers," those working their way up from low-income or working-class families or people of color and first-generation college students who do not fit easily into what she identifies as "middle-class, often-majority-White, institutions—such as selective universities and corporations" (65). She argues that we do not acknowledge the often heavy "ethical costs of upward mobility," which are the damage done to "relationships with family and friends, our connection to our communities, and our sense of identity" (4). Morton calls for reflecting on the reality of these costs in an honest way primarily through discarding our current "fundamentally dishonest" (15) narrative of upward mobility and replacing it with a "clear-eyed ethical narrative" (121). We need a narrative "that is honest about the true costs as well as the benefits of this enterprise" (13). In short, she calls for a re-write, and her book is an attempt to do this.

Morton's unfailingly interesting study will engage most readers because of her conflation of different features of strivers' experience and the largely implicit critique of the individualistic narrative of American self-making that is woven throughout her analysis. After a brief introduction, Morton lays out in the first four chapters the ethical costs many students pay for upward mobility, the problems that strivers face due to sociological disadvantage and "cultural mismatch" (65) between themselves and their college peers, the way in which strivers engage in "code-switching" when moving between conflicting social environments, and the dangers of complicity in an ethically compromised system. Her final chapter suggests how to construct a new, more honest narrative of upward mobility and the brief conclusion lays out a surprisingly small-bore set of proposals to minimize and mitigate the ethical costs entailed, such as fewer prerequisites to help students manage costs and graduate earlier and pedagogical strategies that facilitate student community building.

Throughout her analysis, Morton lumps together three problems that various low-income, minority, and first-generation college students face under the single rubric of ethical costs: a lack of money (which requires many to work, sometimes many hours per week, or go into debt); the culture shock many people of color and low-income kids experience when they encounter a predominantly white and middle-class culture at some institutions; and the pain some strivers suffer when they feel the need to pull away from family responsibilities and "drama" (for example, the need to take care of an ill or addicted family member or to provide financial support) that hold them down. These are, in fact, distinct challenges, not all of which affect all student strivers, nor all in the same way. The different problems blend in a confusing way in Morton's analysis. It is not clear, moreover, that a student who must work many hours to pay tuition and support a child necessarily needs a new narrative so much as more scholarships and increased financial aid.

Morton's concern with narrative suffuses the book. Her methodology involved conducting twenty-eight interviews with strivers whom she has met or who found her as well as probing the experiences of the often working-class, first-generation students she teaches at the City College of New York in Harlem. She also draws on her own experience. Born in Peru to a teenage mother and largely raised by her grandmother, Morton defines herself through the immigrant narrative. Morton's mother and aunt migrated to Europe, eventually sending back money (made possible by her aunt's marriage to a wealthy man) that financed Morton's education at an "exclusive international school" in Lima. That experience led to her own...