Did you read the book, barrons? The social situation for the isolates wasn’t slightly tough; it was bad. Whether a bad first year of college “should” break a student, the fact remains that it does break some students.
Returning to the case of Whitney, because she’s interesting, I observe that alh and PG are social people, so they naturally look at how individual people behave. I’m a software engineer and look at systems. Look at the system Whitney was embedded in-- she didn’t have the natural advantages of the richer girls, so she did what she had to do to get into a top sorority. It worked, and as far as we know she never got any kind of blowback. If we don’t like her tactics, we should ask ourselves why Indiana has a system where that’s what she had to do. We should wonder whether there was even another path to a top sorority for her, a middle class girl. And we should be sorry that the system she was in caused her to squander her considerable abilities.
The system ended up being bad for the people Whitney abused, but it didn’t do her any favors either. She would have been better off going for academic status than social status.
If we don’t like the way people have to act in order to win the game, we need to change the rules of the game so that their objectionable tactics don’t work any more.
I agree.
PG: Do you agree?
I know I haven’t read this book, but what did the authors say about why the isolates did not go to other social groups or activities off the floor? Did none of them make friends in their on-campus jobs? Join another activity? Did the socials stop them from doing this or make them so unhappy they couldn’t?
Those are good questions, @mom2and. The authors say that most freshmen at IU make friends first on their dorm floor, and once they have a social network, they branch out to campus activities. All the women on the floor say (this was in one of the articles; can’t remember if it was also in the book) that people don’t talk to other people around class time, so they weren’t meeting people in class. I don’t know how true these things are.
The isolates didn’t seem to know how to set up a social network. And this is remarkable, again, because there were so many social isolates. Something’s going wrong if half the women on the floor, including every single less privileged woman, fail to set up a social network for themselves. Maybe the isolates thought that everyone else at IU would snub them the way the social women snubbed them. At some point, it’s hard to nerve oneself up for yet another rejection, and that’s what they’d been conditioned to expect.
“Returning to the case of Whitney, because she’s interesting, I observe that alh and PG are social people, so they naturally look at how individual people behave.”
Alh is social. I’m not 
Seriously, I’m a major introvert and I could easily sit in a dorm room without interacting with others. Which was actually part of my reaction - the researchers defined a girl who didn’t have a friend on her floor to go do laundry or run errands with as a “social isolate.” I had and have friends, but I’m more internal and I didn’t necessarily need or want people with me for every little errand I did but that didn’t make me isolated.
"We should wonder whether there was even another path to a top sorority for her, a middle class girl. "
You keep coming around to “top sorority.” If the function of a sorority is to make a big university smaller, to have a social group to coalesce around, to have friends (especially if you don’t naturally have any EC’s that lend themselves to bonding and friendships, like being in theater), then it doesn’t matter if it’s a “top” sorority or not.
I don’t see any a priori reason why lower SES women should be less able to set up social networks than higher SES women. Friendly is friendly. They may not be able to do the same things (going out for pizza versus going out for a gourmet meal), but that’s a different topic
But they didn’t. That’s a fact we need to explain.
Maybe that is why I am not clear as well PG on how widely applicable this is. I am social but really was not very “cool” and my friends tend to be on the quirky side as well. I love to see my friends and go out, but I don’t need someone to run errands with me or to talk to friends multiple times a day like some I know (and didn’t even in college). I don’t quite get why, in general, those that were isolates on this floor (not all of whom were low SES) were unable to develop any social life outside of the floor. Which is why this seems to me to reflect this particular floor, not the entire university.
That is not to say that IU does not have some work to do in integrating groups to the campus or to do better advising. The book raises some good questions there.
I don’t think anyone is saying at this point that it reflects the entire university. But it may reflect the situation generally for women in party dorms. Think about it-- the researchers picked the floor without knowing anything about who was on it. We shouldn’t expect that they, by luck, ended up with a floor that was uniquely awful. Why would we believe this? Why would we believe that the dynamic on this floor wouldn’t be replicated on other party floors? The other floors would have high SES women trying for sororities, and low SES strivers who managed to wiggle out of their small towns to get to the big U. What reason do we have to think it would be any different?
So, coming from a lower-SES background, I can sympathize with the lower-SES girls having trouble forming social networks (what’s considered “rude”, “polite” or “normal” are really cultural norms and may differ quite a bit by social group).
However, as a guy, I find the passivity of the “social isolate” girls to be hard to relate to. Maybe in Japan, where engaging in society (for a native Japanese) requires following so many unspoken social norms and codes that it may be paralyzing (so some young people withdraw and lock themselves in a room), but not in the US. At least for guys, where American society praises and almost demands guys to take the initiative in almost all settings even if it means trodding on feelings/toes, etc. Maybe it is different for girls? In which case, you have to wonder if the authors’ conclusions (that low-SES kids are better off attending a directional than a party-hard state flagship) only applies for low-SES girls and low-SES guys actually do as well or better at a flagship than a directional.
I don’t know that the authors go so far as to conclude that. They certainly observe, to their surprise, that only the low SES women to succeed were the one woman in the special program, and the women who transferred out. And they say that’s depressing, an assessment I’d agree with.
They don’t really seem to be concluding anything about men, other than the observations that the fraternity men treated high-status women better and lower status women worse.
If there are no conclusions, then what’s the purpose of this study?
CF - Now I’m curious about the book. Thanks, mom2and, for the summary and links.
In our neck of the woods, IU seems to be a destination school for occasional girls interested in apparel merchandising (or performing arts) and not intimidated by mean sorority girl behavior, and a safety for students interested in performing arts who keep their fingers crossed they will get into Oberlin or similar schools and not have to worry about dealing with the former type of person. Occasional students apply to the business school. I am wondering if OOS students at IU are concentrated in these few majors, the way engineering is a draw at Purdue?
OOS public universities with large Greek systems were a big turn-off for frazzled D, although she did join a sorority at her private university.
I think I am just going to have to read the book.
It’s an ethnographic study. I’m not a sociologist, but I gather that the purpose is just to deeply examine the situation, which they clearly do. It’s a story, really.
They make recommendations at the end of the book, but the recommendations are not conclusions.
@frazzled2thecore, I’ll be interested to hear your impression of the book, and how it jives with what you know about IU and the students who go there.
Less than 20% of IU even goes Greek. I doubt the rest feel that badly about school/life. And decent looking girl can get into just about any frat party or meet plenty of guys around school. These claims smell as about 80% of IU freshmen graduate. Most are not Greek.
Yes, and I agree about the dynamics. Is the book was about just women?
TV4caster, the authors followed a cohort of women from one particular party floor at Indiana. They started the year most of the women were freshmen on the floor, and followed them through the rest of their time at IU or elsewhere. They even traveled around to interview the women’s parents.
The book categorizes the women as socialites/wannabes on the party pathway, whose goal was to get social status; achievers/underachievers on the professional pathway, whose goal was to get an education to prepare them for a professional career; and strivers on the mobility pathway, less privileged women whose goal was to move up to a middle class life. The women are named (presumably pseudonymously), and we get direct quotes from many of them.
So at base, this is the story of one specific set of women on one specific party floor. To the extent that we can draw conclusions, it’s because the experiences and the trajectories of the women in the different social classes were so dramatically different that it’s impossible to believe class was not involved in the differences.
Men only come in to the story tangentially, as boyfriends and hookup partners. I wouldn’t say the book has much to say about the male experience, because how could it?
The book makes me wonder about low SES men at IU, though. First thing is, there aren’t as many of them. The men from our young women’s hometowns aren’t going to college.
But suppose one of the guys from one of these towns does make it to IU. Would he have as much trouble as the women did? The women all got terrible to nonexistent advising, but maybe he would be more aggressive about pursuing good advice. Would he end up in a practical major that would aid him in his career, or one of these easy majors that don’t impress employers?
I’d also like to know about the high SES fraternity guys. The high SES women on the floor thought they could take easy majors, because they were beautiful and charming, and their parents would support them after graduation until they married a rich guy. This strategy might work for the women, but it definitely won’t work for the guys. They’re supposed to BE the rich guy in this scenario. Will a degree in tourism or business-lite propel them to the high paying jobs that the women expect them to get? Will the men who have achieved professional success by their own hard work and smarts be interested in beautiful, charming, well-dressed, vacuous women, or will they want women who also have professional success?
Well, I can tell you that the low SES young men I know definitely realize that they have a responsibility to earn money while their sisters can with some luck marry a rich guy. And, generally they prefer women who are marrying up to their level whatever it is. The best quote I have heard on this went something like this…
“She is really cute, not too smart, and her car needs work. The perfect woman.” lol
It’s actually true.
Higher SES guys usually want equals but it gets tricky when the women is more successful or from a much higher status background then the guy or even if her career trajectory raises her far past his level.
That is from what I have observed. YMMV.
@Cardinal Fang I will have to read the book and then comment. Some of what I can say about women and whether these assumptions are true would be based on my DD’s experiences at UVA which might not be indicative of the average Flagship.