Navigating Social Class Transitions in Higher Education: Alienation, Belonging, and Identity in First-Generation, Working-Class College Students

Young adults — college students — tend to form relationships with similar peers, based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. This is called a <a href="https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.12068" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">homophilic relationship</a>. One of these micro-processes of social-class mobility is a sense of alienation, further exacerbated with the lack of places for students to connect with similar peers. Because of the larger socioeconomic gap in elite colleges compared to states schools, low-income students find a greater sense of alienation, which is coped with drawing <a href="https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.12068" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">“morally advantageous symbolic boundaries”</a>. In other words, some students, aware of the social disparities, deliberately use a strategy of focusing on what the downsides of being wealthy are, in a way to uplift their low social class status. They turn to the “morals” of the hard-working working-class to equate the wealth their middle and upper-class peers enjoy. <a href="https://pablozamorano.medium.com/navigating-social-class-transitions-in-higher-education-alienation-belonging-and-identity-in-dbe70f6bf45c">Click Here</a>