Questions about college costs, college value, and even what a college degree means for the earning potential of graduates have become a high-profile component of discourse about higher education in the public sphere, and the voices of parents, politicians, taxpayers, and even students have often been raised against the university itself--against…

This article draws from a three-year ethnographic study of girls and their mothers in a high-poverty, predominantly white community. Informed by critical and feminist theories of social class, I present four cases that highlight psychosocial tensions within the mother-daughter-teacher-researcher triangle and argue that white, middle-class female…