College access among underserved youth in the United States has expanded dramatically in recent decades, due in part to “achievement ideology,” or institutional and cultural messages that equate hard work plus educational attainment with upward mobility. But, college completion rates for this group have remained low, and student loan volumes and defaults have soared, most of all for low-income, first-generation Black youth. What happens after these young adults exit college, with or without a degree? What sense do they make of their situations, why, and how does this matter to inequality?
This dissertation engages these questions with a qualitative study of the transition to adulthood among low-income young adults who attended high school in greater New Orleans, LA, and enrolled in college. The case of New Orleans, a majority-Black city, is useful because it exemplifies common U.S. dynamics regarding college access and offers a high density of my population of interest. In 2019, New Orleans became the first all-charter public school district in the nation. From 2006 until recently, most charter operators in the city explicitly emphasized college enrollment for all students, from early grades onward. Consequently, whole cohorts of young adults became the first in their families to go to college. And, like most American undergraduates, area public high school graduates who enroll in college mainly attend regional postsecondary institutions with low graduation rates. Through in-depth interviews with 40 Black young adults who grew up in New Orleans (as well as 17 additional young adults with other racial and ethnic identities, for comparison) and 9+ months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine what happens in the after-college lives of Pell-eligible college persisters, leavers, and completers.
Most of my participants experience precarity. Some are on upwardly mobile trajectories, while others are not – regardless of educational attainment. But, despite similar backgrounds and irrespective of their apparent mobility trajectories, they make sense of their experiences in three distinct ways. Gardeners believe their selves are wounded or flawed and must heal or grow in order to achieve mobility. They perceive open opportunity for advancement, and value other people as aides toward internal development. Climbers believe the self is capable and whole, a vehicle made to navigate opportunity’s possibilities and barriers. They focus on engaging their social networks to help them take the right external risks. And seekers believe the self is whole, but trapped in a relatively closed opportunity structure. They orient action and relationships around personal liberation.
I theorize these beliefs about the self, social action, and social context as transformational, agentic, and emancipatory mobility ideologies, and observe them across race and gender groups. I further show that these mobility ideologies are not separable from mobility means (strategies, capitals, tools) and ends (targets, goals, aspirations). Instead, they shape, constitute, and interact with each other in ongoing processes, or mobility projects, that influence mobility pathways or trajectories.
The dissertation makes three main contributions. First, it qualitatively traces and compares what happens to demographically similar college leavers and completers as they transition into adulthood. Second, it builds on existing literature concerning culture and inequality to demonstrate how ideologies about the self, social action, and social context vary among the members of an often-homogenized group, and shape their varying mobility pathways. At a broader level, a third contribution of this research is to complicate understandings of what ideologies undergird contemporary American striving in the face of widely recognized inequality. I show that what enables my participants’ simultaneous pursuit and rejection of the American Dream is not an ideology of merit but rather ideologies of the self. I argue that this finding is consequential to Bourdieusian and Gramscian theories of social domination because it constitutes a contradictory case in which power is both recognized at a social level and misrecognized at the level of the self.
