Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education by Jenny M. Stuber (review)

Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education provides a rich description of how social class mediates the social and extracurricular experiences of students attending two higher education institutions, a selective private liberal arts college and a large public research university. The book is based on data that the author, Jenny M. Stuber, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Florida, collected when she was a graduate student.

Using data collected primarily from interviews with 61 undergraduates attending the two institutions, the book challenges the assumption that higher education promotes equality across social classes. Framed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and other sociologists, she demonstrates that social and cultural processes often play out within a college or university in ways that perpetuate social stratification and contribute to the reproduction of social inequality.

The book begins by describing how a student's social class background influences decisions about which college to attend and where to live during the first year of college, as well as approaches to developing friends and social networks. Reflecting their cultural and social resource advantages, the upper-middle-class students in this study entered college better positioned than the working-class students to engage in activities that may lead to even greater social and cultural benefits and privileges in the future. Compared with the working-class students, the upper-middle-class students tended to have greater access to informal and insider sources of information, as well as a clearer understanding of the short-and long-term benefits associated with various extracurricular activities. The book also sheds light on how the "campus culture" (as manifest in part by particular institutional strategies) mediates the relationship between students' social class and their social and extracurricular experiences. The book also describes the "social class worldviews" of working-class students and upper-middle-class students, concluding that both groups have incomplete understandings of the experiences and perspectives of students of other social classes.

The design for the study appropriately recognizes the value of qualitative data for probing the complex relationship between students' social class backgrounds and their college experiences. Unlike quantitative data analyses, qualitative analyses can reveal the processes and forces that lead to these outcomes, as well as students' understandings of why various activities (e.g., study abroad) may or may not be appropriate or worthwhile. Stuber gives voice to the students, thereby producing rich insights into their perspectives and experiences.

Although she conceptualizes "education as a process," Stuber relies on a cross-sectional research design, with data collected only via one up-to-3-hour interview with each student at some point during the sophomore or junior year. As a result, the analyses reflect students' recollections and reflections of decisions (including processes for deciding which college to attend and where to live during the first year) that occurred 2 or 3 years earlier. As Stuber acknowledges, the credibility of data collected via this design also depends on her ability to solicit candid and complete perspectives from students during this one meeting, as well "students' energy levels, sociability, and verbal facility" (p. 28) during the one interview. Moreover, without longitudinal data, the book says nothing of the consequences of the class-based differences in students' social and extracurricular activities for post-baccalaureate economic and social status outcomes.

Nonetheless, the data and analyses enhance understanding of the social experiences of a particular group of undergraduates. Stuber purposively restricted the sample to White, traditional-age students who were enrolled full-time at these two institutions. While strengthening the conclusion that variations in students' experiences are attributable to social class, these restrictions also leave unanswered questions about how the relationship between social class and students' experiences may be different for other groups including racial/ethnic minorities, adult students, and part-time students. One might also expect different findings at other institutions, particularly colleges and universities with...