Strategically Unequal: How Class, Culture, and Institutional Context Shape Academic Strategies

Abstract

When facing common setbacks like a missed due date or low assignment grade, some students take action to change the outcome while others do not. This study compares academic strategies by social class and across institutional context through interviews with working- and upper-middle-class students at a public regional and flagship university. Academic strategies are based on parentally-transmitted skills and knowledge as well as class-cultural norms of selfhood and the meaning of being a student. At the flagship, class-privileged students negotiated grades and deadlines using strategies rooted in a sense of entitlement and norms of individualism and self-exceptionalism, whereas working-class students’ norms of interdependence and compliance inhibited negotiation, reproducing existing inequalities. Institutional context mediated this effect: at the regional, both groups requested flexibility but did not (successfully) contest grades, minimizing class-privileged students’ advantage. Organizational habitus explains why academic strategies differed and were more or less likely to reproduce inequality at each university.

1. Introduction

Research into the “experiential core of college life” (Stevens et al. 2008, p. 131) shows that despite increased enrollment from across the socioeconomic spectrum, students’ everyday experiences are imbued with inequality (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Benson and Lee 2020; Collier and Morgan 2008; Hurst 2020; Jack 2019; Mullen 2010; Stich 2012; Stephens et al. 2012; Stuber 2011; Yee 2016). In addition to simple financial inequality, the cultural resources students bring to college are unequally rewarded, enabling class-privileged students to derive more advantages from their college experiences. These studies provide clues as to how higher education participation can perpetuate social inequality even among students who earn credential from the same institution (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). The present study identifies academic strategies as a cultural mechanism that may contribute to social reproduction through college academics, with particular attention paid to the role of institutional context.

It is well-known that college access and completion are unequal by class background, but the academic performance gap has received comparatively little attention. One nationwide study found that first-generation students’ average GPA was 3.0 compared to their continuing-generation peers’ 3.3 (Arum and Roksa 2011), while another found that higher-SES students were twice as likely as their lower-SES peers to report a GPA of 3.3 or above (Walpole 2003). This performance gap is commonly attributed to structural factors such as uneven high school preparation and wide variation in time spent on paid employment versus studying (Kinsley and Goldrick-Rab 2015). I take a different approach, conceiving of academic performance as a process in which students can intervene to some extent. After all, college professors often have autonomy over policies and performance evaluation in their courses and can make any number of changes. Thus, when facing common setbacks like missed due dates or an unexpected low grade, some students find ways to get late assignment accepted or negotiate for a higher grade. Such interventions are informed by what I call academic strategies: logics of action for navigating the hidden curriculum, based on parentally-transmitted skills and knowledge and rooted in a class-conditioned sense of self and classed norms for being a student. In this paper, I compare the academic strategies of working- and upper-middle-class students at the same university as well as across two types of institutions.

It stands to reason that if colleges and universities vary by type (in terms of specific organizational practices and cultural characteristics), so too would the academic strategies most useful in navigating them. I compare two non-elite public universities, a large flagship and a small regional, which together represent the kinds of postsecondary institutions attended by the majority of college-bound high school seniors. This sample is unique among qualitative studies of higher education, which tend to study elite or highly selective institutions (for exceptions, see Armstrong and Hamilton 2013 and Stich 2012; for studies comparing elite institutions with non-elite institutions, see Aries and Seider 2005 and Mullen 2010). The two universities in this study are not selectivity contrasts (neither is elite nor broad-access), but they represent very different foci in higher education—research intensiveness on the one hand, and undergraduate teaching on the other. In each case, their size and orientation shape their organizational practices and cultural characteristics, which together produce the organizational habitus.1 As I will show, the organizational habitus is critical in determining which academic strategies are possible, how they should be deployed, and to what end.

2. Placing Academic Strategies in Theoretical Context

Sociologists have demonstrated that students from middle- and upper- middle-class families are primed to outperform their less-privileged peers from the start. Their “home advantage” provides the cultural capital expected and rewarded in schools, enabling them to appear meritorious relative to their less-privileged peers (Bourdieu 1977, 1984; Dumais 2002; Lareau 2000, 2003; Lareau and Horvat 1999). However, cultural capital is more than skills and knowledge that cast class-privileged students as de facto insiders to educational institutions. Following Lareau and Weininger (2003), I emphasize a different component of cultural capital: the ability to influence institutional standards of evaluation through micro-interactional processes. This marks a critical distinction between knowing “the rules of the game” (Bourdieu 1984), and knowing how to change the rules in one’s favor.

Understood this way, academic strategies can be understood as a particular form of cultural capital. However, I do not fully rely on this framework as it cannot account for the critical role of class-cultural norms in my analysis. Children’s activation of cultural capital in school is often presented as automatic (Anderson and Hansen 2012; Lareau et al. 2016; Johnson et al. 2009); on the other hand, it is generally acknowledged that cultural norms guide behavior and decisions, and vary by social class. presumably because I will argue that class-cultural norms are a key differentiator in how students navigated college academics, guiding decisions as to which strategies to use, in what contexts, when, and with whom. As Streib et al. (2021, p. 13) find in their study of class-cultural matching in job applications, “even if individuals raised in different origins came to interpret gatekeepers’ preferences in the same way and to acquire the same cultural styles, they would not select them in the same moments,” which they attribute to deeply internalized aspects of culture.

Calarco’s (2018, 2008) research on help-seeking behaviors is a clear example of how class-cultural norms shape students’ academic strategies. She found that while most fifth-graders struggled at some point in the classroom—with project instructions, math homework, etc.—middle-class students deployed “strategies of influence” to receive teachers’ help, including disregarding classroom rules by calling out and approaching their teacher’s desk, persisting until their requests were met. Middle-class students often possess the interactional skills to assert themselves with authority figures, but how they go about it in this context suggests a cultural norm of personal exceptionalism. As Calarco (2008, p. 875) explains, “They recognized…that getting help sometimes required a willingness to put their needs before the needs of others.” In contrast, working-class students used “strategies of deference”, avoiding asking teachers for help and only doing so when expectations for requesting assistance were made clear, which was rare (Calarco 2008). Instead, they relied on peers, which was usually less effective, and thus often fell behind their middle-class peers, who completed assignments quickly and accurately, widening the gap between them.

These different classroom strategies likely have their origins in the home. In her study of parenting logics, Lareau (2003, p. 6) found that the middle-class style of childrearing (concerted cultivation) engendered a sense of entitlement in children: the assumption that institutional authorities are interested and invested in them personally, and thus not only approachable but influenceable: “[Middle-class children] acted as though they had the right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings.” As they ventured outside the home, Lareau observed how a sense of entitlement yielded initially modest, but immediate, rewards in other institutional settings (e.g., the doctor’s office). In contrast, the childrearing logic associated with the working class (accomplishment of natural growth) produces a sense of constraint: the deep-seated notion that authority figures should not be deferred to and obeyed regardless of the situation. In institutional settings outside the home, they were “…less likely to customize interactions to suit their own preferences…they accepted the actions of persons in authority” (Lareau 2003, p. 6). In the context of a doctor’s visit, for example, a sense of constraint could manifest as acquiescing to the doctor’s rushed pace, minimizing health concerns, or withholding questions.

A sense of entitlement or constraint represent the culmination of class-differentiated child socialization, and are thus essential to cultural reproduction. Lareau’s work builds on Kohn (1977) to explain how cultural norms are implicated in social reproduction. According to Kohn, class-cultural norms are rooted in experiences of the labor market: service sector workers know employers expect compliance and frown on exception-seeking and accordingly raise their children with norms of conformity and compliance. In contrast, middle-class families normalize self-expression and individuation, associated with successful careers in the professional and managerial sectors. Lareau (2002, p. 748) described the middle-class childrearing style as ultimately producing “a cult of individualism within the family, and an emphasis on children’s performance.”

At the college level, social psychologists Stephens et al. (2012, 2014) have suggested that institutions reproduce social inequality by recognizing and rewarding one cultural model of self over others: the middle-class norm of independence matches that of many postsecondary institutions, yielding tacit advantages”; meanwhile, the working-class norm of interdependence is of little use. Beyond the somewhat simpler matter of inclusion, Stephens et al. (2012) argue that this cultural mismatch has implications for academic performance and the college achievement gap.

Other researchers have drawn similar conclusions but focus on how class-cultural norms shape students’ interactions with institutional authorities. In her study of social background and help-seeking at a large public university, Yee (2016) finds that while norm of independence guided middle-class students’ academic strategies, they were also highly interactive and dependent on securing extra assistance or accommodation from professors. Significantly, Yee (2016, p. 843) suggests that this interactive independence was undergirded by sense of entitlement, yielding advantages: “middle-class students felt entitled to seek help from faculty and other instructional staff in ways that tangibly improved their grades.” In the context of an elite university, Jack (2019) made similar observations, emphasizing that by contrast, disadvantaged students found the prospect of asking professors for personal attention or exception highly discomfiting and avoided it. While he does not use the language of a ‘sense of constraint’, Jack links these students’ reticence to a class-cultural norm of respecting authorities by leaving them be, and by proving oneself through work rather than relationships.

Class-cultural norms like independence or interdependence and a sense of entitlement or constraint are one aspect of the habitus—Bourdieu’s highly influential conception of the individual as an amalgam of class-based disposition, beliefs, and life choices. However, individual habitus is a complex concept that extends beyond class-cultural norms and strategies, and is thus not used in this paper’s theoretical framework. Individual and organizational habitus are distinguished below.

Organizational Habitus: Theorizing the Effects of College Context

Organizational habitus refers to the particular configuration of an institution’s social, cultural and structural features, thought to affect individuals differently depending on their class habitus (McDonough 1997; Reay et al. 2001; Reay et al. 2010; Stuber 2011). Organizational habitus is similar to individual habitus in that it refers to a disposition and way of being that emerges from a particular social location (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). However, a school’s organizational habitus is not reducible to the social class composition of the student body alone (Byrd 2019). Rather, it reflects the “intrinsic, but not linear, relationship between a school’s social composition and the school’s organizational practices, structures, norms, and values” (Tarabini et al. 2016, p. 2). This is useful considering that many mid-tier public universities have socioeconomically diverse student bodies and vary widely in organizational practices, structures, norms, and values, like the two included in this study.

Interest in the effects of institutional context has grown beyond the once singular focus on elite colleges and universities. In her comparative college ethnography, Stuber (2011) finds that working-class students were more socially integrated at a small liberal arts college than at a large state university, which she attributes to the college’s robust bridge programs for first-generation students, as well as “a campus culture where working-class students were able to gain access to social and cultural resources…at Big State, by contrast, the organizational habitus either failed to pull working-class students in, or pushed them out” (Stuber 2011, p. 89). Armstrong and Hamilton (2013), authors of Paying for the Party, find that in some cases, being pushed out is the only way to move up: most working-class students languished at the renowned flagship, but those who transferred to smaller, teaching-focused regional campuses quickly improved their grades, received professional career counseling, and graduated with job offers or grad school admission letters in hand, their mobility projects rehabilitated. The authors conclude that “for most students, the probability of success depends on organizational context” (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013, p. 224) and call for more research on the subject.

3. Methods

3.1. The Universities

The two universities in this study were selected for their relatively comparable student body profiles, on the one hand, and contrasting organizational and cultural features on the other. Higher education research relies heavily on selectivity as a marker of institutional variation, and most comparisons are made on that basis. As a result, little is known about the effects of selectivity-unrelated characteristics. I chose two moderately selective public universities in a northeastern U.S. state which differ most clearly on the basis of size and orientation. One is a large state flagship (“Flagship”) with an undergraduate enrollment of approximately 21,000 at the time of this study and a strong research orientation. Twenty-five miles away is a regional state comprehensive university (“Regional”) of about 5500 undergraduates and a teaching orientation.2

Theoretical and practical considerations led me to select universities which could be compared in some respects (e.g., public 4-year), contrasted in others (e.g., size), and within easy driving distance of each other. This design did not require that the universities under study be ideal types, which may no longer exist in today’s increasing varied higher education landscape (Harris 2013). That said, both universities have a number of the features common among their institutional type.

Considered among its peers nationally, Flagship hovers around the median on enrollment size, selectivity, cost of attendance, graduation rate, and student body demographics (see

Table A1. Institutional characteristics (AY 16–17 data).

Type (Carnegie Classification)	Flagship University Public Flagship; Large Doctoral Granting	Regional University Public University; Medium Master’s Granting
Undergraduate enrollment	20,712	5524
Annual tuition and fees	$13,258	$8681
(in-state)
Receive need-based	56%	64%
Financial aid Receive Pell grant	26%	35%
Acceptance rate	58.6% (more selective)	74.2% (selective)
Six-year graduation rate	77%	66%
Percent residential	61%	55%
White	78.1%	79%
Black	4.2%	4%
Hispanic	5.6%	7%
Asian	9.0%	1%
Two or more races	2.7%	4%
Women	49%	53%
Men	51%	47%
In-state	77.2%	94%

); it also has a fairly standard variety of academic and athletic programs. While it is ranked in the top 30 public universities by the U.S. World and News Report, its status derives more from research prestige than its undergraduate acceptance rate: at 58%, Flagship is considered ‘more selective’ but a far cry from elite flagships like UC Berkeley (17%). However, it should be noted that the so-called “public Ivies” are not representative of flagships either: for instance, well-known institutions like University of Oregon accept 84% of applicants, and several are even less selective. Flagship student bodies, including the one in this study, tend to be largely traditional (18–24 years, residential, and employed fewer than 15 h per week), predominantly white, and half or fewer are from households who qualify for need-based financial aid.

Despite low visibility in the public and media discourse on higher education, regional comprehensive universities are more numerous than flagships and serve 40% of the country’s four-year college students (Schneider and Deane 2015). Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges classifies most as ‘selective’, accepting between 75 percent and 85 percent of their applicants. Their access-based mission has meant greater enrollment among first-generation and working-class students, students of color, and older students, leading others to dub regionals “the peoples’ university” (Orphan and Broom 2021). In addition to teaching, faculty are tasked with advising, mentoring, and preparing students for careers through practicums and internships, civic engagement projects, conference attendance, and more. These profile characteristics, along with their leaner budgets, have led some to call regional comprehensives “the workhorses of public higher education” (Gardner 2016) or, in terms that more accurately capture the sector’s distinctive role, mission-centered, or student-centered institutions (see Orphan 2020).

Despite these nationwide commonalities, it is nevertheless difficult to typify regional universities due to geographic and economic variations as well as state-by-state differences in funding and higher education policy. One way to gauge this particular regional university’s typicality is to consider it alongside other members of the same state university system. Out of the six, Regional has the highest percentage of residential students, but has no other outlier characteristics. It falls in the middle for enrollment size, which ranges from approximately 3800–9500, and is average as far as selectivity, graduation rates, cost of attendance, student body demographics, and types of programs offered (see Table A1). This suggests that Regional is more-or-less typical within its state system, and thus not likely to be anomalous among its national peers. Regional is nevertheless embedded in its sociocultural and political context—in this case, a socially progressive U.S. state with well-funded K-12 schools and above-average education levels, factors which may themselves somewhat mediate the effect of class background on college experiences. For this reason, I caution against facile generalizability of my findings.

I now describe how core features of each university’s profile can be understood as part of their organizational habitus. For both, their orientation—research at Flagship, teaching at Regional—is the basis of the organizational habitus, with most characteristics corresponding to it in some way. I highlight two significant differences in practice, beginning with average class sizes at each university, which corresponds to their overall enrollment size difference. At Flagship, introductory and core courses range from 150 to 450, with only upper-level courses capped at 40. In contrast, Regional, classes are small: 80% are capped at 20 students, and the remainder hover around 40, with an occasional large lecture course. This is significant as research has shown that class size greatly impacts opportunities for student-professor interaction. (Astin 1993; Hurtado 2007; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005). Another significant difference in practice is course-load (the number the courses per semester that permanent faculty are expected to teach). Flagship faculty have heavy research obligations and thus teach fewer courses (1–2 per semester) whereas in Regional’s smaller departments, professors teach more classes and more frequently (3–4 each semester), increasing their likelihood of getting to know individual students over time.

Each university’s orientation (research or teaching) corresponds to particular cultural characteristics, many of which can be discerned from their respective websites. Flagship falls under the Carnegie classification “R1”, shorthand for “research-intensive—very high research activity.” Such institutions are heavily prestige-driven, and therefore great emphasis is placed on status indicators such as federal grant dollars, faculty research impact, number of doctoral programs, etc. A list titled “Points of Pride” includes the previous year’s research expenditure of 213 million, classifying it as a “research powerhouse.” Although the undergraduate program is not directly linked to research prestige, the ethos spills over: the website boasts its rank in the top 30 public 4-year colleges and universities, detailing the incoming class’s SAT and GPA average, which has increased steadily over the past five years. On the website’s “About” page, faculty are described as “internationally-recognized”, students as “leaders” and “innovators”, and the words “academic excellence” and “exceptional” appear in multiple places throughout. Together, these expressions reflect upper-middle-class values of exceptionality and individual achievement.

Regional’s website includes a similar page of accolades, but the items highlighted are of a different nature, emphasizing service to the region and cultivation of local community relationships. The “Rankings” list includes top scores on several “Best value” lists, including the designation by one college guide of “Most affordable college in the state.” The “Awards and Distinctions” list includes: largest producer of new teachers among the state’s public universities, top military-friendly college, largest employer in the city, and enrollment of students from every county in the state. Among its values are “collaboration with each other”, “accessible education”, and “building community.” These cultural expressions are concordant with working-class values of interdependence and fairness.

3.2. Can Regional and Flagship Students Be Compared?

These universities were chosen for comparison on the basis of being 4-year publics in the same state with roughly comparable selectivity and student body demographic profiles, allowing me to analyze the effects of the institutions themselves. Yet some readers may wonder whether my findings on institutional differences can be attributed instead to preexisting characteristics, such as academic aptitude. I acknowledge the 16 percentage-point difference in the two universities’ acceptance rates and Flagship students’ somewhat higher standardized test scores, but argue that this does not equate with aptitude differences large enough to explain the variation in my data. Regional and Flagship students are hardly apples and oranges, considering that many of them had applied, been admitted, or even attended the same colleges. For instance, approximately a third of my Regional interviewees had been accepted at Flagship, and one had recently transferred from Flagship to Regional after an unhappy freshman year. Flagship’s somewhat stronger academic achievement profile may be attributable to its greater share of higher-SES students who tend to outperform lower-SES students on these measures, particularly standardized tests (Sirin 2005).

Like many college-bound young people, my interviewees chose a university by balancing practical considerations (e.g., majors offered, available resources) and personal preferences (e.g., size, attractiveness of the campus, sense of ‘fit’).

Students who chose Flagship preferred the variety of majors offered, the autonomy granted by large lecture classes, and the palpable ‘big school’ excitement they felt when they visited. For some, the fact that graduates of their high school often went to Flagship made it a natural choice. Flagship’s academic rank did not appear to be a major factor for upper-middle-class students, since it was a ‘reach’ school for some and a ‘safety’ school for others. Among working-class students, a few chose Flagship in accordance with a strong drive for academic achievement; however, most emphasized a desire to cultivate varied interests and earn a degree from a well-known university.

Working- and upper-middle-class Regional students alike were drawn to the university’s small classes, close connections between students and professors, and the beautiful campus. Working-class students’ decisions were also influenced by proximity to family and affordability, and some cited the practical appeal of the one-year teacher licensure program; however, these factors did not overshadow the importance of ‘fit.’. For upper-middle-class students, for whom the choice to attend a non-prestigious public university may seem unlikely, Regional has successfully marketed itself as providing an intimate liberal arts college experience for a fraction of the cost. In this way, Regional becomes a sensible compromise between the high admissions bar of local private universities and the mass-education connotation of a state flagship.

3.3. The Interviewees

In the Spring and Fall of 2017, I interviewed 68 working- and upper-middle-class students from Flagship and Regional. Numbers of interviewees at each university were comparable but somewhat uneven by class group (see

Table A2. Sample/comparison groups.

	Flagship University	Regional University	Total
Working-class students	14	22	36
Upper-middle-class students	19	13	32
Total	33	35	68

). In each case, the larger sample is likely a reflection of that group’s greater representation in the student body: the percentages of need-based financial aid and Pell grant recipients suggest that working-class students are more numerous at Regional than at Flagship (see Table A1). Importantly, though, they are not a clear majority of the student body, and I would not consider Regional a ‘working-class college’ (see Stich 2012). My interview sample was racially representative, but considering that Flagship and Regional are predominately white institutions (see Table A1), this ultimately meant too few interviewees of color (five at Flagship; seven at Regional) for rigorous intersectional analysis. I documented emergent themes around academic strategies as raced as well as classed, to be further explored in future research.

My conceptualization of class categories reflects those used by other sociologists of education studying class inequality qualitatively: parents’/guardians’ occupation and parents’/guardians’ level of education completed (see Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Calarco 2008, 2018; Lareau 2000, 2003; Stuber 2011). In terms of occupation, I define a working-class background as one in which parent(s)/guardian(s) make a living through wage labor at unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Often referred to as ‘blue-collar’ or ‘pink-collar’ jobs, these positions are located in the service or manual labor sectors of the economy, but can include supervisory roles (such as a manager at a fast food restaurant); nevertheless, working-class occupations are also characterized as those in which workers have little autonomy (Wright 1997). In an upper-middle-class family, parent(s)/guardian(s) work salaried positions that require specialized training or skill and have ample opportunities for advancement, often found in the professional and managerial sectors of the economy.

In terms of educational attainment, the upper-middle-class family includes at least one professional degree holder (e.g., JD, MD, PhD). The working-class family does not include a 4-year degree-holder, meaning 4-year college students from this background are considered first-generation. While I draw from the literature on first-generation students, parents’ education level alone did not fulfil my interviewee criteria for working-class background. Similarly, continuing-generation status did not fulfil my criteria for upper-middle-class background. Determining students’ generation status can be much simpler than determining their social class, and studies comparing students on this basis have contributed immeasurably to educational inequality research. However, including parents’ occupation paints a fuller portrait of class position as structured by labor market realities in addition to educational attainment.

I used several additional criteria to select participants. Interviewees needed to be of traditional college age (18–24) and be enrolled full-time. Students in this age bracket and enrollment status are a large majority at both institutions. I limited participation to students who had completed the majority of their education in the United States to ensure that interviewees shared a common frame of reference for educational institutions and social class structure.

I also limited participation to English, biology, psychology, and communication majors. These were selected for their comparable popularity at each university and their distribution across natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, intended to capture a range of student types and academic experiences. I excluded interviewees in vocational and pre-professional programs, given their qualitatively different program objectives. My data did not reveal patterns suggestive of meaningful differences across the four majors. Honors college students were also excluded due to the programmatic differences and selection criteria that could compromise comparability.3

Lastly, interviewees needed to meet my criterion for college credit status of a junior or senior. The rationale was that interviewees’ accounts would be more substantial if drawing on multiple years of college experience. This could be interpreted as a sample limitation, as it excludes students most at risk of failing out or dropping out: first-generation and lower-income student attrition in particular is most likely in the first year of college (NCES 2017; for a comprehensive discussion, see Engle and Tinto 2008). This meant my sample did not include those working-class students for whom a lack of advantageous academic strategies may have had the direst consequences. In this sense, the class differences I found can be considered conservative.

3.4. Data Collection and Analysis

The institutional research offices at each university provided me with a list of email addresses for students who met the study criteria for major, year, and age. The email explained the study in brief and offered a $15 cash incentive to interviewees. The email included a link to a screener with three questions. The first asked whether they had completed most of their schooling in the U.S. The second asked about parents’ education level, and the third about parents’ occupations. I sent the email in batches of 200 addresses until I had scheduled the desired number of interviews at each university (35). In total, 88 Flagship students completed the screener, and 33 ultimately completed an interview (two no-shows). At Regional, 118 students completed the screener, and 35 ultimately completed the interview. Interviews were scheduled at a time of the student’s convenience and held in library study rooms.

I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews, consisting of mostly open-ended questions with probes for elaboration and specific examples (Rubin and Rubin 1995). Every effort was made to ask the same questions of each interviewee to maximize validity (Hatch 2002). Interviews lasted 75 min on average, and included questions on a range of subtopics of college academics. In this paper, I focus on questions about academic performance, navigating setbacks like a missed due date or low exam grade, and perceived impediments to academic success and/or strategies for ensuring it.

All interviews were fully transcribed by me and coded using the principles of analytic induction (Katz 2001). Specifically, I employed a three-stage approach to analysis, beginning with descriptive coding, followed by analytic categorization and memoing, and lastly interpretation (Rubin and Rubin 1995; Saldana 2013). I performed line-by-line descriptive coding in order to discern new concepts or meanings not anticipated by the research question or existing literature (Hatch 2002; Katz 2001). I then grouped the most salient descriptive codes into thematic categories which informed my preliminary analytic codes (e.g., “finessing the professor”). NVivo 11 was used to systematize codes and data excerpts as well as verify theme salience and check code frequency The analytic codes were continually refined in the second round of coding to reflect new ideas and connections I made while re-reading the transcripts. I organized the most salient analytic codes into new thematic categories (e.g., “working-class interdependent model of self”). For each, I wrote analytic memos exploring relationships within them and connections to existing concepts and theories (Saldana 2013). These analytic memos formed the basis of interpretation.

4. Findings

4.1. Academic Strategies at Flagship: Different and Unequal by Class Background

4.1.1. Upper-Middle-Class Students and Grades: “I Want to See Where I Missed Points”

Most Flagship students I spoke with could recall an instance of receiving a grade they were disappointed or surprised by. Describing these undesirable grades as unfair, however, was only common among upper-middle-class students. Since they conceived of themselves as A students, lower grades were blamed on the professor—either they had written a bad assignment or exam question, or misinterpreted or failed to appreciate the effort in the student’s work. For example, Jake described his disapproval of a chemistry professor: “He words questions so ambiguously…he’s just not a very efficient professor. I think I got like a B on his first test, and I’m an A student…so I don’t like getting that.” Anna attributed her lower paper grade to expressing opinions which deviated from the professor’s, but that she put great effort into articulating: “I stayed up really late, wrote so much for the assignment, and got really, really into it, and I felt like I didn’t receive the grade I deserved”.

In response, upper-middle-class students attempted to change the outcome by activating their cultural capital—specifically, skills for negotiating with authority figures. Referencing a lower-than-expected grade on a final exam, Sierra reported,

I emailed my TA and was like ‘I want to see where I missed points.’ And he showed me and I was like ‘I don’t think I should’ve missed points for this’ and he agreed… I did end up getting the grade changed.

Similarly, when Asher received a C on a final paper in a class he “had a perfect grade in,” he believed the professor had misread his thesis statement, and emailed him explaining his reasoning—after the semester had ended. He was given the chance to revise the paper for a better grade, and the professor submitted a final grade change form to the registrar.

Sierra’s and Asher’s bold self-assurance in contesting grades was effective, but not entirely typical of their peers, who seemed aware that professors vary in their receptivity to grade contestation and tread more lightly. While self-advocacy and confidence are generally approved of and even rewarded in schooling contexts, ‘grade-grubbing’ represents a line in the sand for some teachers and professors, especially when it takes the form of a direct challenge to their authority or competence. Thus, privileged students more often took an indirect approach to contesting grades.

For example, Anna used finesse and impression management for a more subtle challenge to a grade. Referring to a paper for a different class, she recounted:

I only got an 88 on [a paper], which isn’t bad, but I was like, ‘I really deserved an A.’ So I sent an email asking for more feedback and to see the rubric that I was graded off of.

When she received the rubric, which lacked specificity, she followed up again with further questions, reasoning that a grader might think, “if this girl is making a big deal out of an 88, she must be decently smart.” Her original 88 was not changed, but she earned an A on subsequent assignments and in the course. This strategy is empowered by a sense of entitlement, but importantly it is not expressed as a demand for a re-grade.

Upper-middle-class students also knew when to not pursue better grade outcomes. Cameron ultimately abandoned his plan to meet with a professor who gave him a grade he considered unfair. The professor indicated he would not discuss it over email, but was willing to meet in person after the winter break. Cameron decided he would not fight it, reasoning that “it might be justified to be half a letter grade higher, but in the end what is it really gonna matter to risk getting on this faculty’s bad side.” Cameron had conducted an informal cost-benefits analysis in which the risk of being on this particular professor’s bad side outweighed the benefit. By contacting the professor in the first place to challenge the grade, Cameron reveals a sense of entitlement, but his skill for gauging the potential success of a given negotiation led him to reconsider this strategy.

In some cases, no discernment or strategy at all is required for upper-middle-class students to secure advantages. Some professors openly promoted self-advocacy when it comes to grades (perhaps for pedagogical reasons). As Lara told me, “Some professors will actually have you argue for a question, like if you think the question is unfairly worded you can argue and get points back…I like that system a lot actually.” An invitation to negotiate may be uncommon, but it is telling that Lara relished the opportunity. She and her upper-middle-class peers are equipped to profit from this arrangement as they possess the skills to negotiate with their professors, but perhaps more importantly, a sense of entitlement assures them it is the right and smart thing to do, and thus likely to be rewarded.

4.1.2. Upper-Middle-Class Students and Due Dates: “I Just Email and Explain My Situation”

All students struggle with time management at some point in college, and due dates seem to always be looming. Upper-middle-class Flagship students were far more likely than working-class students to request extensions, whether due to a forgotten assignment, being overwhelmed with other work, or extenuating circumstances, such as illness. Similar to their management of undesirable grades, their strategies for securing extensions were interwoven with other ways they had activated their cultural capital (positive reputations from academic performance, and relationships—or at least familiarity—established with professors). All ten upper-middle-class students who requested extensions or alternative submission formats (e.g., via email after class rather than hard-copy in class) had them granted, suggesting that these strategies for securing advantageous accommodations are particularly successful.

Alison illustrates how comfort with seeking exception is what enables the deployment of negotiation skills in academic contexts:

Some professors, especially in these lecture classes, are really strict, like ‘there are so many of you, we can’t make exceptions’…But there have been times where I’ve just emailed professors and explained my situation…And I’ve gotten really positive responses.

Marni is similarly guided by a norm of self-exception, but relies on impression management, particularly her reputation as a strong student, and her relationship with professors. “Most professors are nice about it, but it really depends on if they know you, and they know you’re not the kind of student to flake.” Sylvie adds that it depends on “the connection you make with a professor, how trustworthy they think you are.” However, a preexisting relationship with the professor was not a pre-requisite for requesting an extension. Upper-middle-class students also tested the waters when a professor’s receptivity to extension requests was uncertain. Kate presents a specific scenario: “When there’s family stuff going on, or [my team sport] was really tough for those two weeks, I’ll reach out and see what they say and kind of gauge if I push for an extension or not.”

I argue that privileged students’ strategies for both contesting grades and requesting extensions were undergirded by a sense of entitlement; however, it is critical to note that their actions/interactions with professors were mostly gracious—not what most would characterize as entitled in the behavioral sense. Upper-class students’ strategies are often to simply finesse their professors rather than apply direct pressure. This is quite likely why their strategies were successful despite professors’ general disdain for entitled student behavior.

4.1.3. Working-Class Students and Grades: “I Never Argue” and “Maybe I Deserve It”

None of the working-class Flagship students I interviewed had challenged a grade. They tended to describe lower than expected grades as disappointing rather than unfair. Working-class students deferred to professors’ expertise, as demonstrated by Scott: “I don’t fight very often when that kind of stuff comes up. I understand you’re the professor and you’re the authority on this stuff… I’ve never tried to argue.” Tanya, a senior, told me that although she is somewhat more likely to question a professor as a senior, in the first three years she did not because “it was like, ‘this is the teacher.’ I figured I didn’t understand what they meant; it wasn’t their fault, it was my fault.” Scott and Tanya’s passivity around grades, rooted in their understanding of institutional authorities’ power as absolute, is indicative of a sense of constraint. However, this interpretive frame cannot be applied as easily to their peers’ accounts, given important nuances which I now describe.

Even when they were disappointed by a grade, working-class students ultimately believed that grades signaled a valid need for improvement. When I asked Kevin whether he had received a grade he felt was unfair, he replied: “Yeah, definitely. But then I look at it again and think ‘well, maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought.’ I can always see their argument for why I did bad.” Ben echoed Kevin: “If I get a bad grade, I usually take their comments to heart and think ‘maybe I really did deserve this grade…’ If you discuss with the professors, you can kind of see where they’re coming from.” Several working-class student had done just that: Kevin told me “if I get a bad grade on a test I’ll go to office hours and ask them to explain what I did wrong.” Similarly, Trina told me “I’ve gone to the TAs or emailed the professor before just to say, ‘oh I just wanted to see what areas I should focus on for the next test.”

Ben, Kevin and Trina are strong students, and their strategies, which reflect common knowledge for succeeding in college, likely give them a leg up over less proactive peers. Nevertheless, they are unlikely to secure advantages at the level of their upper-middle-class counterparts. Because they lack a sense of entitlement, they neither directly request regrades nor seek to influence their future grades with impression management and subtle challenges to graders’ authority.

4.1.4. Working-Class Students and Due Dates: “Power through” or “Accept Defeat”

The majority of working-class Flagship students indicated that in spite of situations in which they needed an extension on an assignment due date, they did not ask for one. Some working-class students, like Kristy, displayed a simple sense of constraint: “if [the professor] has already said no late anything I just accept defeat.” On two separate occasions, professors invited submissions of late work that she had completed, but because she did not have the assignment in hand, she did not pursue receiving credit.

Even as they acknowledged that such requests would likely be successful, they expressed discomfort at the prospect: Trina, who describes herself as a dedicated student, told me,

I don’t think I’d personally be able to [ask for an extension]. I know some people are like ‘oh I just won’t do it’ or ‘eh I’ll just pass it in late’, whatever, but for me, that would just bother me a lot. So, I’ve passed in everything on time.

Knowing that other students treat due dates as negotiable did not alter Trina’s adherence to them. Shawn, another serious student, shares Trina’s resistance: “I came close once [to asking for an extension], just because I had a lot of other assignments due… but I powered through. I try really hard not to have to ask for extensions.” Trina and Shawn are not constrained, but they pursue academic success within the bounds of the stated rules and expectations, in line with class-cultural norm of compliance.

4.2. Academic Strategies at Regional: Similar by Class Background

4.2.1. Grades: “Professors Don’t Change Your Grade but I Ask Them for Help”

Working- and upper-middle-class students at Regional were indistinguishable when it came to managing undesirable grades. On the whole, they were most similar to working-class Flagship students in describing grades as valid performance assessments and thus were unlikely to contest them. When I asked working-class student Jessie if she had received an unfair grade, she shook her head: “I would read through my test, and I would be like ‘Oh, I understand why [I lost points].’ Most of my grades are pretty reasonable. I agree with most of them.” Upper-middle-class student Becca gave a very similar response to the same question: “No. At first I think it’s unfair, but then I actually go over it.… as long as I get comments, it’s okay.” Regional students generally took grades in stride, as part of the learning process.

That said, Regional students were sometimes a bit hard on themselves when faced with disappointing grades. After describing the “killer” chemistry exam she recently scored low on, working-class student Haley shrugged and concluded “I guess I have to try harder on the next one.” Upper-middle-class Alisha reflected with a chuckle, “If I think it’s unfair, it’s probably because…want to be biased in myself [sic] [but] probably it’s because I didn’t put in the work.”

However, the tendency for self-blame was not a sign of defeatism. Regional students frequently checked in with professors after receiving a disappointing grade. Like the proactive group of working-class Flagship students, they did so in an effort to improve their future work without the expectation that doing so would improve their current grade. Becca, a working-class student, reported that “Usually [professors] don’t genuinely change your grade, but I feel comfortable walking up to them, and asking them for help”—something she had done on several occasions. Upper-middle-class student Alisha told a similar story: for the research methods class she was currently struggling in, she told me “I’m always there, in [the professor’s] office.” But when asked if she had ever tried to get a grade changed, she shook her head vigorously.

In the case of grade management, Regional professors’ actions are an indication of how the organizational habitus manifests in the academic sphere. Regional students rarely argued for a better grade, but some professors encouraged students to revise and resubmit their work. Working-class student Reese told me “For my English class…we do draft, after draft, after draft. Most of my classes, if you don’t like your grade, you can do [the assignment] further and improve it.” Dan, a working-class student, had a similar experience in a biology class:

Most of the papers that she assigns…she lets you revise them for a second time to get a better grade. But not only just to get the better grade; she also likes for you to publish them and put them on the [Regional] news website.

In this way, Regional professors emphasized—whether intentionally or not— process over performance. As part of their development, students improve and find ways to give their work purchase beyond the classroom (e.g., publication).

A second case demonstrates how professors’ own actions can serve as examples of the organizational habitus. While upper-middle-class Regional students mostly did not complain about unfair grades, Wynn expressed a salient sense of entitlement when telling me about a professor from whom he had never received an A:

She is the first English teacher who has not given me all A’s. I go to her every single time and it comes back with B’s…it’s infuriating. The last paper I got a B on she said, “I recognize that you’re upset.” But…then nothing changed. So I’m not sure how to handle the situation. I’ve never tried and not gotten results. That has never happened to me.

Upper-middle-class Flagship students who used this strategy were generally successful, but Wynn, at Regional, was not. His advantage-seeking strategy may have had less traction here because of the particular location of Regional professors within the organizational habitus. with more time to devote to individual students, institutional emphasis on teaching excellence, and a cultural norm of learning as a process, Regional professors may feel less pressure to give in to students like Wynn.

4.2.2. Due Dates: “It’s Gonna Be Late…and The Professor Said That’s Fine”

For due date management strategies, I once again did not find substantial differences by class background among Regional students. Both working- and upper-middle-class students had negotiated deadlines on several occasions. Most approached formal extension requests gingerly, expecting to have points deducted, but professors often granted their requests without penalty. The most commonly used strategy at Regional was buying some time without requesting a formal extension. In both cases, students attributed the success of these strategies to prior experiences with professors which had shown them to be understanding and flexible within reason.

Similar to upper-middle-class Flagship students, Regional students often emailed to request a formal extension. Upper-middle-class student Cassie reported, “I’ll email the teacher…I usually just tell them, ‘I just need extra time. I didn’t plan this out well.’ And usually, they’re understanding.” Cassie evinces ease in being both candid and confident with her professors, a hallmark of a sense of entitlement. However, working-class Regional students sounded similarly comfortable in that situation, and invoked similar strategies. Due to a particularly busy semester, Liam had forgotten an assignment and emailed the professor to explain, which he believes helped him avoid the consequences: “she hasn’t even taken points off because I was honest, like ‘it’s gonna be late’ and she was like ‘that’s fine.’”

Regional students relied most commonly on workaround tactics to manage looming or missed deadlines, consisting of buying time and negotiating alternative submission formats. Dan evinces upper-middle-class student ease: “I didn’t know [the paper] was supposed to be due. I just went back to my room, fixed it real quick, and dropped it off at [the professor’s] office hours. He was fine with it.” Sam, a working-class student, described negotiated alternative submission formats for anticipated absences: “If I know I won’t be there or something, I’ll just say, ‘Can I e-mail it to you?’ and hopefully avoid a late penalty.” Working-class Regional students were much more strategic in these circumstances than their Flagship counterparts, but this does not suggest that they had accrued negotiation skills on par with upper-middle-class students, or developed a sense of entitlement or embraced exception-seeking. Rather, greater familiarity with their professors, and the sense that they would be understanding, put them at ease in this environment, enabling them to request flexibility as needed and avoid zeroes or late penalties on major assignments.

5. Discussion: Theorizing the Institutional Differences

Whether enrolled at Flagship or Regional, interviewees from the same class background likely acquired similar cultural capital in the home and were likely socialized with similar norms. Accordingly, we would expect them to develop similar strategies for navigating setbacks outside the home. If we accept Bourdieu’s conception of education as a unilateral field, these class-conditioned strategies should be unaffected by institutional context; yet, my interviewees’ academic strategies varied considerably between Flagship and Regional. To make sense of this, I discuss how each university’s organizational habitus interacts with students’ class-based skills and norms to create circumstances which are more or less favorable to social reproduction.

Flagship’s organizational practice of large classes, together with the low likelihood that a student will take more than one class with the same professor, leaves few opportunities for students to build rapport and comfort with faculty. While large classes are generally less conducive to student-professor interactions, studies indicate that the negative relationship is strongest for first-generation students (Beattie and Thiele 2016; Deil-Amen 2011). In the absence of familiarity established in the classroom, such students are unlikely to approach professors outside of class, especially for delicate matters like grades and accommodations. Beyond this structural impediment to student-professor interaction, working-class students are still unlikely to pursue re-grades or extensions since doing so in a class of 300+ students requires a norm of personal exceptionalism.

Upper-middle-class students, however, are adept at navigating universities. Despite large lecture classes, they build relationships with professors by distinguishing themselves and meeting outside of class (Jack 2019; Scherer 2020). They are comfortable seeking exception and possess the interactional skills to do so without offending or irritating their professors. Flagship’s cultural characteristics, which emphasize individual achievement and exceptionality, implicitly support upper-middle-class students’ take-charge academic success strategies.

At Regional, upper-middle-class students had fewer opportunities to use these same academic strategies to their advantage. In this smaller, teaching-focused university, access to professors was not a commodity which could be hoarded: interviewees described a campus culture of student-professor familiarity and knowing a few professors well. Most students were comfortable approaching faculty when faced with a setback, as doing so did not require polished skills for negotiating with authority figures or a sense of entitlement. On the other hand, grade negotiation was highly uncommon at Regional regardless of class background. Upper-middle-class students who likely were equipped with those resources rarely deployed them to fight a grade—in fact, the only attempt I heard of, from Wynn, was unsuccessful.

Regional—and regional comprehensives as an institutional type—are what Campbell (2020, p. 3) calls teaching-supportive institutions: “colleges and universities that deeply value undergraduate teaching and learning, as evidenced by their mission, reward structures, expenditures, hiring practices, and most importantly by their enacted cultures.” Indeed, at Regional, where teaching is faculty’s primary responsibility and student success is the goal, interacting with students is normalized and spending time with and on them is expected. Furthermore, professors’ pedagogical approaches seemed consistent with the university’s access mission and cultural expressions of interdependence. For instance, they were unlikely to change an individual grade in response to a complaint, but often gave all students in their class the opportunity to revise their work for a better grade.

In this way, Regional’s cultural characteristics may discourage upper-middle-class students from employing strategies predicated on norms of personal exceptionalism. I cannot speak directly to whether this is a conscious pedagogical approach or how common it is at Regional; however, research suggests that faculty at regional comprehensive universities are often committed to the access and equity missions of these institutions, and these commitments are reflected in their pedagogies to some extent (Orphan and Broom 2021; Orphan 2020).

6. Conclusions

Following Bourdieu (1977, 1990; see also Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), sociologists of higher education have studied schools as reproducing inequality in at least two ways: first, by sieving and sorting students into different tiers according to their material, social and cultural capital (Mullen 2010; Reay et al. 2005; Reay et al. 2010; Stevens et al. 2008), and second, by implicitly expecting and rewarding adherence to middle-class cultural norms (Collier and Morgan 2008; Lareau 2000, 2003; Stephens et al. 2012; Yee 2016). In the dominant theoretical paradigm, middle-class students’ strategies yield advantages by aligning with the norms and expectations dominating the educational ‘field’, which is assumed to be fixed. In this line of thinking, inequality is reproduced when educational institutions—framed as omnipotent and totalizing—confer advantages a priori on class-privileged students.

I make two interventions to this paradigm. First, by focusing on academic strategies, I show that class-privileged students’ success cannot be attributed to cultural matching alone. Knowing ‘the rules of the game’ provided a substantial head start, but advantages often accrued from being willing and able to bend the rules in their favor. I have suggested that the flagship university’s cultural expressions implicitly supported class-privileged students’ personal exceptionalism and individualism; however, I have also pointed out that professors are rarely keen to negotiate grades or offer extensions, even if they do generally acquiesce. In this way, my data support Calarco’s (2018, p. 22) central argument in Negotiated Advantages: “middle-class individuals secure advantages not just by complying with institutional expectations, or by being perceived as more deserving, but also by negotiating…and pressuring [authorities] to grant those requests, even when they might prefer to say ‘no.’”

Second, by comparing the effects of class background at two different yet not hierarchically polarized universities, I have shown that higher education is not a monolithic ‘field.’ In the dominant theoretical paradigm, status is the only institutional variable of interest, but this does not capture the complexity and dynamism of the contemporary higher education landscape. I have shown that students’ academic strategies differ by college context, and that some organizational features are more or less conducive to privileged students’ securing of academic advantages over their less-privileged peers. This lends support to the broader argument that educational institutions do not reproduce inequality uniformly or to the same degree (Celik 2017; Stuber 2011). The neutralizing effects of Regional’s organizational habitus suggest that some colleges may be positioned to do exactly what higher education claims but so often fails to do—reduce inequality.

There are several practical implications of this research. First, in oversimplified terms: if research-intensive universities like Flagship are committed to access and equity, they need to be more like Regional. Some scholarship suggests that the effects of class background on academic achievement could be minimized if, rather than insist on middle-class norms of independence, schools diversified their messaging and broadened their expectations for successful student behavior to include interdependence, a working-class norm (Stephens et al. 2012; Stephens et al. 2014). However, organic cultural change at this level may be unrealistic, as flagship universities focus increasingly on prestige in crafting their brand while issues of social class and inclusion are relegated to admission and financial aid.

Despite Flagships’s entrenched cultural habitus, individual professors can make some interventions at the level of practice. Several scholars have suggested that clear policies and explicit expectations can help demystify the hidden classroom curriculum (Calarco 2014; Collier and Morgan 2008; Jack 2019). Unclear expectations—e.g., no stated policy for late work, vague assignment instructions or exam question—create what Calarco (2014) calls “interpretive moments” in which students resort to class-based logics of action. Class-privileged students are at an advantage in such moments, with an extensive repertoire of strategies and the cultural capital to know which one to activate in a given situation. Professors can strive to eliminate interpretive moments through careful revision of their teaching style and content.

However, clear expectations alone will not solve the problem. As my data show, even when course rules were made explicit, class-privileged students gently tested them to see if they would bend. Most grade negotiation and granting of extensions plays out over private email communication or behind closed office doors, so a professor could shine a light on the issue through transparency, e.g., informing the class of extensions and re-grade requests s/he has received and granted. However, this would likely create more work and complication for professors, and given their large class sizes and heavy research requirements, Flagship professors may resist adopting such a practice. Alternately, they could be stringent in their adherence to stated rules and policies, and make no exceptions for any student, prohibiting any grade negotiation or extensions. This would effectively negate class-privileged students’ strategies, but also prevent professors from offering flexibility to working-class students who may be struggling to pass a class due to competing pressures from work and family.

The second practical implication is for the college choice discourse. As I have described, Regional’s organizational habitus appears to be better-suited to working-class students’ academic success. High school students are counseled to attend the best college they can get into, with “best” serving as a nebulous proxy for quality as measured by ranking. By rank, Flagship appears to be a better university than Regional, but the working-class students there were more constrained, and even those with more proactive strategies did not secure the same advantages as their upper-middle-class counterparts. In the context of Regional’s organizational habitus, working-class students navigated academic setbacks with greater ease, minimizing their disadvantages relative to class-privileged students. College choice rhetoric, as employed by high school guidance counselors, teachers, and families, must attend to the nuances in what counts as college quality, and for whom.