This is a CC Book Club for Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Everyone interested is invited to participate in this discussion, including people who haven’t read the book yet and people who don’t intend to read it.
In Paying for the Party the authors present a longitudinal ethnographic study of 53 women who started out as freshmen or sophomores on a “party floor” in a dorm at Indiana University. The authors lived with them on the dorm floor for the first year, then followed them through college and to their post-college life. Paying for the Partyis a snappy read, but disturbing.
Hardcover $30, Kindle $23, library free, download a sample for free
Some questions to consider:
How much support does a flagship university owe to students whose parents are not savvy about college?
Should a flagship university consider itself a force for social mobility?
How much should parents intervene in their children’s college career?
How much academic learning should colleges expect from graduates? Should flagship colleges even offer questionable majors like Tourism and Apparel Merchandising?
Should we advise parents of limited means to send their children to directional universities instead of instate flagships?
I just down loaded this onto my nook. Read the intro and first chapter already. Intriguing.
Is it really Indiana U? Even more interesting, if so, it is my alma mater. I lived in the dorms, but in a language house, so I escaped much of “party central” although I was witness to it many times. Greek life was huge there, and it divided the student body, somewhat… You were greek, or you weren’t. But the place was so big that there were many niches for any kind of student, I think. So, it’s not like the Greeks were this constant ominous presence. You could ignore them easily, if you weren’t inclined to join.
And of course, this was long ago, back in the late 1980’s, and the economy was still good.
I was a first-gen. college student btw, from a low-income family. I paid for my college myself. I worked full-time jobs every summer - and took two semesters off in the middle of my junior year, because I ran out of money. Worked at the factory my Dad worked at, took the money and ran back to IU, and completed my degree two semesters later (and only one semester over 8.) I also took out about 8k in loans. I majored in Comparative Literature, because my parents always told us we were just as good as all of the other Liberal Arts majors at any given college, and we should major in what we were interested in studying. So I did. No regrets. I got a white-collar job in Chicago right after graduating because I absolutely refused to go back to southern Indiana, where I grew up. I knew if I did, I’d get stuck there.
So, reading the part about the “strivers” was interesting, because that was pretty much my situation, more or less. Looking back, I wonder if it accounts for my tendency to date older grad students instead of boys my own age, :). Or maybe I just liked older guys…
So, it’s not like the Greeks were this constant ominous presence. You could ignore them easily, if you weren’t inclined to join.
That didn’t turn out to be true for the women who lived in the party dorms in the book. It was impossible for them to ignore the Greek set. The working class and lower middle class students who ended up on the party floor weren’t savvy enough to know not to get in those dorms in the first place, nor were they savvy, connected or aware enough to know to try to leave.
I’m interested to hear your take on the whole book, BeeDAre. It seems like the experience of the lower income women on the party floor was so based on luck. If they’d ended up in different dorms, would they have been better off? It seems like it.
One difference between the late 1980s and now is the presence of extremely wealthy out of state kids at Indiana. I gather that is a change since when you went to college, BeeDAre.
We know that the various states have different answers to this question. CA leans more toward “yes” while PA leans more toward “no”, for example (based on in-state financial aid policies).
@ucbalumnus, PSU is essentially semi-private now (it’s arrangement with PA is very much like Cornell’s contract colleges’ arrangement with NYS) as PA (and PSU) long ago decided to move them from being state-supported. PA provides something like 2-3% of PSU’s budget.
More publics are moving to the PSU model, BTW. At UVa, some of the professional schools are now not state-supported (which is why they charge in-state students almost as much as OOS). Likewise, a Haas MBA costs in-state students almost as much as OOS students now.
Cardinal Fang, I just started the book, like I said, but there are already a couple of big differences between my experience at IU and the girls’ in the book - not just different decades. For one, I came in as a transfer from a small private in my junior year - two, I lived in the language houses, smaller buildings, coed, more upperclassmen (but some freshmen) and there was no emphasis on partying. We did “party”, but it was sporadic and usually in the dorm with small groups in our rooms. Occasionally, we went to a house party, but I only went to a couple of house parties during my time there. I also visited one of the high-rise dorms known for partying - don’t know if it was THE dorm in the book - because a friend of one of my dorm-mates lived there. It was a zoo. Chaotic, loud atmosphere, mostly freshmen and sophomores. The dorm was co-ed but the floor was huge, so I only saw girls. Our dorm was smaller, quiet and had a good mix of upper and lower classmen.
Finally, there were plenty of OOS students - and yes, they were mostly from more affluent families. A couple were amazed to learn that some of us actually paid our own tuition and expenses.
Yes, PSU has formally moved to a semi-private model, but people still think of it as PA’s flagship (as opposed to thinking of the PASSHE schools is PA’s flagship). But there are other states’ flagships that have not formally done that, but also have unaffordable net prices for low income in-state students, so those other states can be used as similar examples.
And yes, state universities’ professional schools’ tuition policies may be substantially different from those at the same undergraduate schools.
@ucbalumnus, even many of the state schools that are formally public also receive little of their funding from the state now. Both UMich and CU (Boulder) get less than 10% of their budget from their state. Given such state support, it’s difficult to expect those schools to provide an affordable education to their poorer students. I believe UIUC’s percentage is around 10% now and going down.
It obviously depends on what the state of residency is, and what the kid’s academic credentials are. College (inclusive of affordability considering financial aid and scholarships) options depend heavily on those two things.
Let’s say the kid is a good student from a bad school. Not Ivy-caliber, but 600/600 SATs. Let’s say they live in Indiana (because Paying for the Party takes place at Indiana University) or in California (because I live there, and I’m the one asking).
California public schools (CCs, commutable CSUs, and UCs) tend to be relatively affordable for low-income in-state students, and the CCs have good transfer pathways to the four year schools, so there should be options for in-state students of all levels of high school academic credentials. Still, there may be some issues if the student wants an uncommon major, the local CSU is too selective, or has additional constraints beyond admission and cost.
Indiana, don’t know offhand how its public schools are for low-income in-state students. (Should be findable on their net price calculators.)
That’s the whole point of the book: at Indiana at least, that sounds like a good idea but in practice, there are all sorts of institutional barriers that prevent the student from realizing the plan. Savvy parents who do a lot of monitoring and intervene when necessary help students get around the barriers, but our hypothetical student doesn’t have those savvy parents.
Paying for the Party followed a bunch of freshmen women in a “party dorm.” The women were of all classes, but the upper class and upper middle class women chose to be in the party dorm knowing it was a party dorm, whereas the lower middle and working class women ended up in the party dorm by chance. This is just one example where parents and social contacts help students navigate college. Other upper class and upper middle class parents of incoming Indiana freshmen, who didn’t want their kids in party dorms, would network (here at CC, for example, or with other parents at their kids’ schools) and be ready to direct their kids’ dorm choices, just one of the myriad interventions they would do to keep their kids on track. But the working class parents with kids in bad schools wouldn’t have those contacts.
There’s this assumption that upper middle class parents all are in the know about how college works nowadays. The college landscape has changed so dramatically since i was a college student in the 80s that I’m navigating by the seat of my pants.
That’s true, GMT, but you probably have a lot more cultural resources with respect to college success than the average working class parent. For example, if your high school child is at a school where most kids go away to college, you can ask around about issues that come up.
I can see being bothered by the students in my dorm if they were loud, or messy, or ran screaming through the halls. I’m not quite sure why they would bother me if they were out doing their own (Greek) thing and I was doing otherwise. Are they preventing me from taking my schoolwork seriously? Beats me how seriously the other people in my dorms took schoolwork. I was in the classroom or the library.
Or is this just resentment-of-the-rich, who should be wearing hair shirts?