The Cost of Inclusion: How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses

The Cost of Inclusion

The Cost of Inclusion:

How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses

Blake R. Silver

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70386-2 (cloth)

isbn-13: 978-0-226-70405-0 (paper)

isbn-13: 978-0-226-70419-7 (e-book)

doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226704197.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Silver, Blake R., author.

Title: The cost of inclusion : how student conformity leads to inequality on college campuses / Blake R. Silver.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019050516 | isbn 9780226703862 (cloth) | isbn 9780226704050 (paperback) | isbn 9780226704197 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: College integration—United States. | Social integration—United States. | College students—United States—Social conditions. | Equality—United States. | Educational equalization—United States.

Classification: LCC LC205 .S55 2020 | DDC 378.1/98—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050516

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Nader

Contents

1   In Search of Inclusion

Part One: The Cookie-Cutter Self

2   Caregivers and the Landscape of Need

3   Managers, Educators, and the Dividends of Authority

4   Entertainers, Associates, and the Struggle for Liminal Connections

Part Two: The Physics of Social Inclusion

5   Role Inertia

6   Centrifugal Pressure and Centripetal Elevation

7   Learning from the Exceptions

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Study Participants

Appendix B: A Note on Methods

Notes

References

Index

1

In Search of Inclusion

After months of coordination and anticipation, the morning of August 29 arrived. On that day, the gears of East State University, which had clicked along at a steady pace throughout the summer months, began to grind with surprising force. The start of the fall semester coincided with the return of familiar faces—faculty, staff, administrators, sophomores, juniors, and seniors—as well as the arrival of several thousand new students. Walking across campus, I was greeted by the trappings of ESU’s Welcome Week. Multicolored flyers adorned bulletin boards lining the hallways of academic buildings and the campus student unions. Each one communicated an opportunity to become immersed in campus life. Large posters featuring smiling groups of young people instructed students to get connected, be involved, and make some friends.¹ Faculty and staff stationed at kiosks around campus told students about residence hall cookouts and intramural sports registration. Even the sidewalk, peppered with chalk graffiti, invited students to participate in dozens of recreational events. Scheduled at frequent intervals, these events included music, games, food, free T-shirts, and inflatable bounce houses.

As it turned out, Welcome Week was a bit of a misnomer. Nine days later, the festivities were still in full swing as the university kicked off its annual student organization fair. A hundred banner-adorned tables lined the campus quad and three adjoining sidewalks. There were stations for the debate team, sororities, an art club, and community service groups. Someone had even deposited a stationary rowing machine on a grassy square claimed for the Crew Club. Meanwhile, the university’s student activities office circulated a series of videos on social media encouraging new students to become socially engaged at East State. Clips set to music showed young people careening down a water slide, dancing in the campus quad, throwing Frisbees near the dormitories, and playing trumpets at a pep rally. These events and artifacts formed the backdrop for a university-sanctioned social landscape filled with new people and new opportunities.

Throughout this protracted greeting, ESU underscored the importance of becoming socially involved in college. Students were assured that social experiences would enrich you, make you a better person, and enhance your college experience and the rest of your life.² Many of these claims linked social involvement to ambiguously defined markers of success. A campus website featuring hundreds of student-led organizations noted vaguely that campus engagement would help you succeed as a student. An ESU instructor told her class that extracurricular groups were great places to belong away from home. While the exact formula for successful involvement was unclear, university personnel drew causal connections between social engagement, feelings of belonging, student retention, and self-actualization.

Over the course of those first days of the fall semester, I met dozens of students. With few exceptions, the messages about the importance of social involvement resonated with them. They described searching for a fit, a social niche, or—perhaps most frequently—connections in a community of their peers. A student named Andre talked about looking for a foundational group of friends, while Chase proclaimed that social involvement was a way to gain a sense of belonging, a sense of commonality. These students responded enthusiastically to ESU’s call for involvement. Inclusion and its emotional byproduct, a sense of belonging, became deeply meaningful as they began to weave the fabric of their new social world. But as many soon realized, finding inclusion in this context would come at a significant cost. Though they were earnest in their pursuit of social involvement, these students were ill prepared for the challenges ahead. As this journey began, they found little guidance for navigating the trials of social engagement.

The Elevation of Social Involvement

In her ethnographic account of the first year of college, anthropologist Rebekah Nathan observes that sociability is the driving force in student culture.³ This was certainly the case at ESU. A casual visitor to the campus may have been surprised by the degree to which social life occupied the physical and cognitive energy of students. Such an emphasis is not entirely new in higher education, but evidence suggests that over the past century, the amount of time college students allocate to social engagement has increased substantially, eclipsing academic effort.⁴ In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that college students devote a substantial portion of their time to social and recreational activities—more than three times as much as they spend in class and studying.⁵ Today, the majority of students perceive that their social lives are at least as important as their academic experiences, and in many cases more important.⁶

Notably, though, it’s not just students who emphasize extracurricular involvement in higher education. Postsecondary institutions themselves play a key role in framing college as a place to socialize.⁷ As federal and state funding of higher education declines, reliance on tuition—for public and private colleges alike—amplifies pressures to treat students as consumers.⁸ And institutions have become sensitive to the fact that their collegiate consumers expect to have a good time. Colleges thus provide a social context that caters to diversions with peers. Student activity centers and luxury athletic complexes, complete with climbing walls and lazy rivers, have become symbols of the amenities arms race engaged in by universities nationwide in their efforts to attract students.⁹ Likewise, higher education is home to myriad formal and informal extracurricular groups. Fraternities, sororities, intercollegiate athletics, and their corresponding party scenes are dominant forces in campus life.¹⁰ And yet, college involvement is not confined to Greek-letter organizations and game-day tailgating. Other extracurricular activities play an important role in generating opportunities for young people to engage socially. Student programs, interest-based organizations, intramural sports, and cultural events are just a few types of involvement that provide places to connect with peers. Although alcohol-fueled parties rarely receive explicit university endorsements, these other activities usually come with a clear stamp of approval from faculty, staff, and administrators.¹¹

Student affairs scholars and practitioners were among the first to illuminate the importance of social involvement in college, elevating extracurricular pursuits alongside academic engagement.¹² Sustained interest in students’ social experiences emerged in the early 1900s in response to high attrition rates and the difficulties many young people faced adjusting to college.¹³ Groups like the American College Personnel Association claimed that a focus on student experiences would both support retention and cultivate students who were prepared for the challenges of college and life more broadly.¹⁴ Eventually, a corresponding body of scholarly research and theory developed, demonstrating the benefits of extracurricular involvement in higher education.¹⁵

A key component of this work links social integration in college to quantitative measures of student success. It was sociologist Vincent Tinto who sparked the foundational research in this area. Tinto argued that just as academic integration was vital for student persistence in college, social integration was another key predictor of a student’s intention to remain enrolled.¹⁶ Expanding on his work, others have shown that young people who become socially integrated in college and perceive that they belong on campus tend to perform better academically and complete their degrees at higher rates. Conversely, students who struggle to adjust socially often become disengaged and are more likely to drop out before completing their studies.¹⁷ In line with this research, college students today are told that finding a place where they can connect with peers is crucial.¹⁸ Those who fit in with other students are expected to be retained, get good grades, and eventually complete their degrees.

Extracurricular activity is also framed as an avenue toward personal growth.¹⁹ According to this perspective, while academic engagement holds the promise of supporting critical thinking, complex reasoning, and other kinds of intellectual development, the growth that happens in tandem with social involvement is more personal, relating to how students fashion and refine their identity or sense of self.²⁰ Incoming students hear about the ways that being socially involved in college will provide outlets for their self-discovery and self-actualization.²¹ Phrases like find your passion, become a leader, and be a team player adorn college websites, bulletin boards, and brochures. These calls to action can often be found alongside pictures of students throwing a Frisbee or gathering on the campus quad.

In short, colleges have drawn from theories of social integration and student development to craft a simple message for students: social involvement isn’t just fun—it’s a crucial part of college success. As students enter higher education, they are encouraged to set out on a quest to find a social home among peers.

And yet, critical scholars have begun to problematize the simplicity of this wisdom. Many have critiqued the models articulated by Tinto and others, suggesting that they represent an assimilationist approach to inclusion that places the onus on individual students to conform in order to find belonging.²² Others have similarly noted that traditional models of student development fail to capture the complexity of identity or the diversity of contemporary college enrollments.²³

In responding to these critiques, scholars of higher education have worked to resuscitate theories of social integration and student development over the past two decades.²⁴ These scholars take classical theories and expand them to address more diverse student populations, incorporating the experiences of first-generation college students, women, racial/ethnic minorities, second-generation immigrants, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, to name a few. Some have advocated for reforming Tinto’s theory by "replacing the term integration with connection," based on the premise that the term connection conveys the importance of inclusion without implying a need to assimilate or to dissociate from one’s family or cultural identity.²⁵ These critiques and revisions underscore the need to pay closer attention to different models for, experiences with, and outcomes of social engagement on college campuses.

Young people like Andre and Chase frequently seek out commonality in social groups, looking for others with shared hobbies or interests. However, according to student development theory, much of the developmental potential of extracurricular involvement comes not from bonding over similarities but instead from sustained engagement with difference. Encountering difference—in terms of race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, ability, nationality, religion, political affiliation, and a whole host of other sociodemographic characteristics—represents an opportunity to break out of one’s usual social script, disrupting the cultural autopilot that guides day-to-day interactions in more homogeneous circles.²⁶ Accessible institutions enrolling students from a diverse range of backgrounds position themselves as providers of these kinds of experiences.

Over those first days of the fall semester, as I watched a sea of new students converging at ESU, I wondered about the weeks and months that lay ahead of them. I couldn’t help but notice that among the flyers, videos, and information kiosks was no primer on how inclusion would happen. While colleges convey clearly that students should become socially involved, they often fail to discuss the strategies by which they might do so. How would these students navigate a new social landscape? Would all of them find friends and feel like they belonged? Would they grow and develop in the process, as theory suggests? Coming from a range of backgrounds, possessing a range of identities, how would these young people build communities together? And what might they have to give up along the way?

Exploring the Social Landscape of College

The contours of this book are shaped by the students of East State University.²⁷ Many studies of higher education focus on a small fraction of the postsecondary educational landscape—highly selective and often elite institutions.²⁸ ESU is a different kind of place. Its status as a relatively affordable public university, and its acceptance rate of approximately 80 percent, places it among a group of broadly accessible institutions whose mission is to promote social mobility and educational access. Additionally, nearly 60 percent of the university’s twenty thousand undergraduate students identify with a racial or ethnic minority group.²⁹ In other words, unlike predominantly White institutions, ESU primarily serves racial/ethnic minority students. Some refer to colleges and universities with this type of profile as majority minority institutions.

East State is similarly diverse in terms of socioeconomic status. Low-income students comprise 30 percent of the student body, and 40 percent of the students are the first in their families to attend a four-year university.³⁰ Additionally, 51 percent identify as female. As undergraduate study increasingly becomes the assumed next step for broader populations of high school graduates, these types of institutions—large public institutions, not Ivies and elite liberal arts schools—represent the future of higher education. Four-year public colleges and universities already make up the largest sector of the higher education landscape.³¹ And most of these institutions, like ESU, are relatively accessible.

East State is situated in the suburbs of a large Mid-Atlantic city. The largest of the university’s three student union buildings, the ESU Student Center, sits at the heart of an expansive campus that is cut off from the surrounding town. Trees and student housing line the perimeter of State Circle, a one-and-a-half-mile loop that encloses most of the ninety campus buildings. In the ten years preceding my research, the university completed the construction of ten new luxury residence halls with capacity for nearly three thousand additional students, and added nineteen new dining options, including a Starbucks, a Panera, and a Steak ’n Shake. ESU also boasts four gymnasiums, three of which were built or renovated in recent years. These facilities offer an expansive landscape for students to socialize and have fun.

The argument laid out in the pages that follow is drawn from the findings of a year-long ethnographic study involving 158 ESU students. In the fall of 2016, I became a participant-observer in three groups: (1) a Learning Community composed of students interested in social justice who lived together on a residence hall floor and shared a class each semester; (2) the Cardio Club, a group of students focused on physical fitness and intercollegiate competition; and (3) the Volunteer Collective, a student organization with a mission of providing service to children in Central America.³² These groups became my window on campus life as I chronicled the day-to-day interactions of their members. In some ways, I became a college student again—a fairly involved one, in fact. I immersed myself in the campus dining halls, library, gymnasiums, student unions, and dormitories. I took part in eight o’clock morning workouts, ten o’clock movie nights, bake sales, and study groups. And at the end of each day, I returned home to an apartment I rented just a half mile from campus in a building occupied mostly by third- and fourth-year ESU students.

Situating myself within each of these groups, I watched intently as students sought to make connections with one another and develop a sense of belonging. Over the course of the year, I learned a great deal about how they drew from interactional strategies and cultural assumptions to create identities and connect with peers. My approach to understanding these elements of social life was facilitated in part by the work of Erving Goffman, who used metaphors of the theater to interpret face-to-face interaction. He imagined that the relationship of performers to their audience could be understood through the lens of social roles, which he described as parts [that] may be presented by the performer on a series of occasions that draw from pre-established pattern[s] of action.³³ Social actors engage in a process of impression management, through which understandings of the perceptions of one’s audience are used to calibrate and recalibrate performance. In doing so, they take part in what Goffman called strategic interaction, whereby the back-and-forth of an encounter is carefully managed to present oneself in a positive light.³⁴ Scholars studying youth and K–12 schools have drawn from Goffman’s work to shed light on the vast web of cultural meanings that are generated in social interaction.³⁵ In this endeavor, they have often paired Goffman’s approach to examining face-to-face encounters with a social-psychological attentiveness to identity and meaning-making. Rather than focusing on interactions as their unit of analysis, these scholars examine the experiences youth have and the identity work they accomplish in social encounters.³⁶ I expand on their work by using this theoretical approach to understand the production of identity and inequality in higher education.

While firsthand observations were invaluable, it became clear that in addition to watching students interact with one another, I needed a way to understand their thoughts and perspectives. I needed to see what extracurricular groups looked like from their vantage points. I needed to hear how students described their behaviors and perceived those of others. I needed to understand what their friendships meant to them and how it felt to be in their shoes. So in the spring semester as I continued participant observation, I also began conducting interviews with first-year students.³⁷ Eventually, I would speak with eighty of them. Approximately a quarter of these students were members of one of the three groups I observed, but the rest were new to the study. Involved in over 150 different formal and informal campus groups, they offered insights that extended beyond the Cardio Club, the Learning Community, and the Volunteer Collective. Their perspectives provided a glimpse into a much broader swath of campus life as they described what it was like to join new social groups, try to make friends, and manage how others would perceive them. They candidly shared the pain and the elation that were woven throughout their experiences along the way.

Through the combination of participant observation and interviews, I came to interact with a diverse group of students (see appendix A), an unusual accomplishment for a study of this sort. Given its prevalent focus on elite institutions, existing qualitative research on higher education tends to rely on samples biased toward affluent students from upper-middle-class, often White families. Some of the studies that do explore class variation consider the experiences of women but not men.³⁸ Heeding calls for intersectional research on student experiences, I aimed to include individuals who would help me parse the overlapping of various sociodemographic characteristics.³⁹ Slightly more than half the participants identified as women. In terms of racial identity, 53 percent were racial/ethnic minorities (including 13 percent who identified as Asian, 21 percent as Black, 15 percent as Latino/a, and 4 percent as multiracial or as members of another ethnic minority group) and 47 percent were White.⁴⁰ Finally, based on a confluence of parental education, occupation, and family structure, I classified 48 percent of the students as less socioeconomically advantaged and 52 percent as more socioeconomically advantaged.

As sociologist Patricia Hill Collins notes, an intersectional lens allows us to understand how particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation, shape lived experiences.⁴¹ In other words, efforts to isolate a race effect or a gender effect miss how categories such as race and gender interact to shape experience in unique ways. After I entered social groups at ESU, it became clear to me that—just as theories of intersectionality would suggest—the distribution of power on campus, experiences of social involvement, and students’ construction of self were impacted by multiple axes that work together and influence each other.⁴² Specifically, the intersections of race and gender were highly influential in shaping students’ experiences in social groups. Having a diverse sample revealed how students’ approaches to social interaction were informed by intersectional meanings related to self-presentation. Notably, while I also explored the intersections of class with race and gender, it became apparent that once students found social groups, class was not central to shaping interaction and self-presentation.⁴³ Appendix B offers a more thorough account of my methodological approach to this research.

Inequality in Student Experiences

The dataset I collected over the course of this ethnographic study provides unique insights. Historically, educational disparities were studied by looking at rates of access to and completion of various levels of education.⁴⁴ More recently, scholars have begun to articulate a more complex relationship between education and inequality, focusing in particular on students’ experiences within institutions. This research highlights one of the most unsettling insights of social science: even when students from across racial/ethnic groups and class backgrounds attend the same schools, inequality persists. The goalposts of success move as another set of social forces stratify educational experiences within schools. Reflected in theories such as effectively maintained inequality, this phenomenon can be seen when educational disparities develop not just quantitatively (in terms of the numbers of years of education completed) but also qualitatively (in terms of differences in experiences at the same level of education and even within the same institutions).⁴⁵

Theories of within-school differentiation and the mechanisms that foster it were first advanced in studies of K–12 education. The prevalence of tracking, whereby some students are funneled into more rigorous and higher-status classes (i.e., honors or advanced) while others are pushed toward remedial or developmental coursework, means that students in the same schools frequently have divergent educational experiences. Propped up by parental efforts to hoard opportunities for their own children as well as the practices of teachers and administrators, these within-school inequities negatively impact working-class and racial/ethnic minority students alike.⁴⁶ Even in the very same classrooms, middle- and upper-middle-class children gain advantages by using cultural resources to monopolize the attention of teachers.⁴⁷

Social environments in K–12 schools are also highly stratified. Exclusive youth subcultures offer some students access to high-status social cliques conferring power and dominance, while others are subjected to harassment and exclusion.⁴⁸ With limited control over economic resources, students find meaning in behaviors, dress, speech patterns, and taste in popular culture in order to craft identity as part of distinct peer groups. In this way, they strategically build similarities and differences between themselves and others.⁴⁹ Expectations of gendered, raced, and classed behaviors shape peer approval and access to desirable social networks.⁵⁰ Gaining entry into a specific school thus does not end inequality. All too frequently, disparities simply move from existing between institutions to reemerging within them.

Although the literature on inequality within K–12 schools is well developed, just ten years ago sociologist Mitchell Stevens and his colleagues lamented a lack of comparable research in higher education.⁵¹ Studies documented important factors influencing inequality in college outcomes, including students’ majors, GPAs, enrollment status (full versus part time), and pathways through college.⁵² And yet, students’ lived experiences on campus were often neglected.⁵³ In recent years, however, sociologists of higher education have responded to the call for research on student experiences, moving beyond large quantitative studies of college entry and outcomes to talk with students directly.⁵⁴ In the process, valuable insights have been uncovered about how inequality is reproduced in higher education.⁵⁵

This expanding literature shows how notable disparities are generated as college students become part of the campus social scene. Sociologist Jenny Stuber illuminates the obstacles working-class students encounter in finding and joining extracurricular outlets. More affluent students enter college anticipating that they will be heavily involved in such outlets. Meanwhile, working-class students have less information about how to become involved and tend to focus on engagement in fewer groups, often devoting additional effort to maintaining friendship ties in their home communities.⁵⁶ Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton push this line of inquiry further, uncovering mechanisms that restrict students’ progress through college. They show how different pathways shape connections to campus social life and fraternity/sorority membership in particular. Class-based resources impact students’ abilities to gain entry into these extracurricular outlets and to balance social and academic commitments. Some students are embraced by the campus social scene, some struggle to keep up, and some are relegated to invisibility, cast out of the core of college life.⁵⁷

Researchers have likewise uncovered racial and gender disparities in college social involvement. Sociologist Janice McCabe finds notable variation in the structure of social networks by race and gender. By unpacking the consequences of these differences, she shows that not all social experiences are equally helpful for college success. Rather, the types of friendship networks students have on campus—tight-knit groups or individual friends extending across multiple social circles, for instance—shape inequality in feelings of social support as well as in academic outcomes.⁵⁸ Other survey- and interview-based studies have found significant disparities in perceptions of campus climate and feelings of belonging. In colleges around the country, female and racial/ethnic minority students report encounters with negative stereotypes, microaggressions, and harassment.⁵⁹ Racist attitudes and beliefs remain prevalent among White college students, and racial/ethnic minorities frequently feel isolated on campus.⁶⁰ Additionally, female students describe confronting rigid standards around the performance of sexuality that constrain their experiences in the campus party and hookup scenes.⁶¹ Marginalized by race and/or gender, these young people frequently feel less agency over their identities and how they are perceived by others.⁶²

Cumulatively, these insights underscore the need to take a closer look at students’ day-to-day experiences with extracurricular involvement, particularly their experiences within social groups. Such efforts have the potential to clarify how inequalities in college experiences are produced in interaction. To do this, I avoid the temptation to look in the obvious places. Several accounts of college life—some scholarly, some sensationalistic—focus on fraternities and sororities, organizations that have inequality written into their very existence.⁶³ Others analyze exclusive college subcultures like Division I athletics or elite social clubs.⁶⁴ In contrast, I look at broader segments of the college social scene, shining light on inequalities in students’ experiences across common activities, ranging from club sports to campus organizations and living-learning communities. How is inequality generated in a group of students who do community service? Are the most selfless members also the most valued? Who fits in with a Learning Community? Which members feel a sense of belonging? And who gets to be in charge? What about a Cardio Club? Does the fastest or the strongest take the lead? What if that student is a woman? Answering these questions took me into the heart of campus social life.

The Cost of Inclusion

When I arrived at ESU, I expected to find students who were socially engaged and having fun in group settings. I wasn’t disappointed. Heeding the messages conveyed by university personnel, the students sought inclusion and its emotive counterpart, a sense of belonging. In the process, they were living out their expectations of college involvement. Or so it seemed. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize that something was amiss. As I settled in, eager to observe how students interacted with one another, I noticed a pervasive and unsettling strategy. Students were presenting themselves in highly simplistic ways, as stereotypes rather than complex individuals. To fit in among new peers, they clung to raced and gendered meanings about behavior, becoming the cool guy, the nice girl, the funny one, the leader, the intellectual, or the mom of the group. In essence, they crafted and