Lower-class language, logics, and ways of being have been excluded from higher education, especially at selective universities. Fewer people from the lower classes enroll, and those who manage to matriculate do so as outsiders. To counter social reproduction perpetuated by educational inequality, this dissertation creates a program to restore…

This qualitative case study explored working class individuals' perceptions of social mobility in a changing the community. The explored community was traditionally a working class community. It was near a metropolitan area that was growing more prosperous. Many residents commuted to the metropolitan area and the community started turning into a…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the commitment of Catholic secondary schools to the poor, working, and middle class families of the New York City metropolitan area through the perception of the school president. This study sought to identify the socioeconomic class of students in the Catholic high school populations within…

This constructionist phenomenological dissertation study explored stories from nine working-class, first-generation college students, specifically how middle-class socialization on a four-year university campus located in the Mountain West region of the United States impacts the relationships with their parent(s)/guardian(s). My primary research…

Social class encompasses the preferences, lifestyles, and behaviors of people in various social class groups in conjunction with the structural privileges that accompany certain social locations (Smith, 2010). Class-privileged college students typically come to campus with greater amounts of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1980) that afford them the…

This study was designed to build on the existing research on teaching and learning in community college contexts and the literature of college writing in two-year schools. The work of Pierre Bourdieu formed the primary theoretical framework and composition theory was used to position this study in the literature of the college writing discipline.…

The United States Administration on Aging (2011) predicts that over the next forty years the number of people 65 and older will double and the number of people 85 and older will triple. Meanwhile, technology is becoming more and more important in our everyday lives. The ubiquitous presence of technology in our lives is evidenced in daily…

I set out to explore the question: How do middle-class, working-class and low-income mothers experience their children's out of school summer time? Using qualitative basic interpretive approach, study findings draw from interview data, journal entries and participant observations from a study completed with 22 mothers of varying socioeconomic…

This study investigated a little known topic: the experiences of working-class, white male, professors, who have attained tenure. Academics who have immigrated from working class backgrounds have reported experiences of navigating culturally confusing interactions within their professional settings, even years after their class migrations.…

Researchers have explored the issue of social class in higher education through the experiences of students and faculty, but have not yet analyzed the experiences of student affairs staff. Past researchers have conflated or ignored issues of race in studies on class, and rarely acknowledge gender as a variable in the classed experience. Student…

Despite popular beliefs about social mobility in American society, research consistently shows that inequalities are reproduced across generations. And yet, while social reproduction hinges on the transmission of advantages from parents to children, scholars take for granted children's role in this process. We do not know whether children…

The United States experienced a tremendous expansion of higher education after the Second World War. However, this expansion has not led to a substantial reduction to class inequalities at elite universities, where the admissions process is growing even more selective. In his classic studies of French education and society, Pierre Bourdieu…