Adult undergraduates are motivated to attend college for more than just economic reasons. They see a college degree as providing social and symbolic benefits like increased respectability and status. Some students feel the need to disaffiliate from their backgrounds and "join" the group of college-educated people who are perceived to have more opportunities and life choices. Completing a degree helps these students feel like they belong to this different social class.

1. Cultural Motivations for
College-going among Adult
Undergraduates
David Monaghan, Ph.D
Senior Researcher
Wisconsin HOPE Lab
University of Wisconsin-Madison

2. Mass college-going and diversification of
higher education
 66% of recent high school graduates transition to college (NCES
2014)
 75% of recent American cohorts will attend postsecondary
education in their lifetimes (OECD 2014)
 Today’s college-goers are the most diverse ever in terms of SES,
race/ethnicity, and academic preparation
 40% of degree-seeking undergraduates are at least 25 years of age

3. Adult undergraduates: Some basics
 Two-thirds of adult undergraduates first enrolled in “traditional” ages (18-23)
 Compared with younger students, adult undergraduates:
Are disproportionately female, African-American, and from lower-SES
backgrounds
Have less rigorous academic preparation on average
Are disproportionately enrolled at community colleges, for-profit colleges,
and non-selective four-year colleges
Are much more likely to combine college-going with full-time work and child-
rearing

4. Why do people go to college?
1) Rational actor model
◦ Individuals act rationally to maximize utility
◦ College-going increases earning potential substantially
◦ People who stand to earn more by going to college will do so
2) “College-going habitus” (Bourdieu)
◦ The orientation to college as the “next step” after high school is inculcated
(or not) in the family
◦ Privileged youth are both selected for college-going and are disposed to
see the symbolic games of academia as “worth the candle” (“illusio”)
◦ College-going habitus is class-graded

5. Class and college motivations
 Working-class students are expected to be more likely to attend college for
narrowly economic reasons (Clark & Trow 1966; Horowitz 1987; Goldthorpe
1996)
 College-going is presumed to be valued as a means of “securing a good job”,
thereby attaining upward mobility

6. Presumed motivations of older
undergraduates
Adult undergraduates are generally expected to enroll for near-exclusive
reasons because:
1) From lower-SES backgrounds
2) Have prior labor market experience
3) Have external obligations (work and children) which make college-going
more costly

7. Why do adults go to college?
 Common-sense answer: money
 While economic motivations are certainly apparent, adult college-goers’
motivations for attendance are far richer and more complex than this
 Reflections on motivations for college-going tell us much about the broader
cultural meaning of college and college-going in contemporary society
 Adult students are uniquely positioned to have a nuanced perspective on
college-going
 Have lived and worked as an adult without a college degree
 College-going is being chosen in the face of difficult circumstances and is not
simply “the next step”

8. An alternative approach
 Inductive rather than deductive investigation: what motivates college-going is
an open question
 Verstehen method: Social action as meaningful, and task of social science is to
understand it as such
 My approach to this question is informed by a theory of action sketched by
both Bourdieu (1972) and Giddens (1984)

9. Framework for interpreting meaningful
action
1) Actors are knowledgeable agents who actively interpret the world and
whose actions are made (and must be understood) in reference to these
interpretations
2) Actors encounter the social world as given, and dominant interpretations of
the social world are also experienced as given.
3) Dominant interpretations of social phenomena constitute real structural
conditions structuring agents’ understandings and behavior.
4) The meanings of complex social phenomena are indeterminate, and as such
are only understood in approximate, indeterminate

10. Sample & Methods
 36 subjects
 Eligibility: age 25+; enrolled in postsecondary education; intending to earn a BA
 Recruited from public 2- and 4-year colleges in a major Northeast city
 Purposive non-random recruitment to obtain gender and racial/ethnic diversity
 Recruited in 2013-14; paid $20 for hour-long interview
 Semi-structured life-history interviews focused on schooling
 Interviews transcribed and hand-coded according to iteratively modified coding
scheme

11. Sample characteristics (N=36)
Female 55%
Latino 33%
Black 25%
White 25%
Multiracial/other 17%
Foreign-born 22%
Married 25%
Has children 36%
Older than 34 39%
Employed full-time 48%
Need-based aid 58%
Attending community college 39%
Attended multiple institutions 75%

12. Sample Descriptive Findings (N=36)
It is difficult to get a good job without bachelor’s 83%
Struggled to make ends meet recently 50%
My desired job requires a bachelor’s 64%
Expect more money after degree 78%
Expect different job after degree 86%
Reason for enrollment: better job 94%
Reason for enrollment: interest in learning 71%
Reason for enrollment: pride in accomplishment 77%

13. Results:
“It’s a whole different type of people”

14. How are people without a college degree
perceived?
 Most, but not all respondents, agreed that people without a degree were
seen as somehow “lesser” than those with a degree: not as intelligent,
lazier, not as ambitious.
 They (mostly) disavowed feeling this way themselves, said it depended
on who you asked, and said that this sort of a judgment was wrong, both
factually and morally
 But still, the general social stigmatization was acknowledged and
understood

15. “People look at you like you are smarter (when you have a degree), which is not
necessarily the case. They look at you like you are more serious… It just gives you a
level of respect from people.”
Justine, White female, 30s
“I think people without a college education are looked upon as less. I want to say
stupid, but I don’t believe that they are stupid, but I think people do believe that. Or
they’re going to think that the person with the college education is smarter.”
Samaria, Latin female, 40s
“For me, personally, to be honest I do think that if I have a bachelor’s degree or
master’s degree that I am better than you, because I put in more work than you have. I
deserve to be smarter than you.”
Coryn, Black female, 40s

16. How are educated people different?
 A number of respondents discussed behavioral differences they
perceived between college-educated people and others.
 Their comments reveal notions of education effecting arbitrary changes
in codes of expression, as well as changes in how people perceive the
world and the knowledge they have of it
 The educated are people who speak differently about different things,
and learning to do this allows one to effectively become one of them

17. How are the educated different?
“Education is like another language. You can’t talk
to intellectual people and join their conversations
unless you are exposed to certain ideas and
knowledge yourself, unless you learn to speak the
way they do.”
James, White male, late 20s

18. “Sometimes it’s etiquette. Sometimes it’s just the way you speak
that you can tell…somebody has a degree. The way they speak, the
way they carry themselves. Most people who don’t have a degree,
they have an attitude, they talk a certain way and they act in [a]
certain [way]; they don’t know certain things. Like you ask
someone about something… somebody who actually has a little bit
of an education, they will tell you, ‘You know, I don’t know about
that, but I will find out for you.’ To me, I feel like [if] you don’t have
a degree, you be like, ‘No, that’s not how it is, that’s not how it
goes, and that didn’t happen in my way.’”
Joselyn, Latin female, late 20s

19. Joining the group
 For some respondents, going to college was explicitly motivated by a
desire to join the class of the college educated
 The desire was sparked by social contact with specific people who
seemed to be exciting, more culturally savvy, who had more options and
more energy than people they grew up with

20. Describing a group of college-educated friends:
“They were just so smart and I would find myself getting just so jealous of how smart they were, and I
would also feel a little dumb around them. …And then around that time I started dating this guy who
graduated from [elite private college], and he was studying for his LSAT at the time. And I was also really
jealous of how smart he was and also feeling a little dumb in our conversations. …And then he would
also tell me, ‘Oh you’re smart, you should go back to school, you should go back to school.’ And then I all
of a sudden got the drive and I did it.”
Alena, White female, late 20s
“I think it’s all age, growing up. Your mind starts to develop, you start looking toward the future, like,
‘Damn, this is not it, this is not what I’m going to do.’ My friends started changing; I started getting new
friends, and well, those friends were in college. So I was like, ‘Wow, I want to do this too.”… Look at this.
You won’t find this in my neighborhood. You don’t see this, smart people talking to each other, finding
things out, you don’t get that. I mean, not to say that the people in my neighborhood are not smart, but
you’re in the institute trying to make yourself better. So I wanted to be in that group. I wanted to be part
of that.”
Chris, Black male, 30s

21. Moving on up: Disaffiliation and symbolic
violence
 For Bourdieu, symbolic violence is “the particular kind of constraint which can
only be implemented with the active complicity… of those who submit to it.”
(Bourdieu, 1989). It is the representation of a social group as inferior, when this
characterization is internalized by members of the group itself.
 British sociologist Diane Reay notes that for some working-class college-goers,
going to college involves disaffiliation from their own social origins through a
negative characterization of these origins. “Acts of symbolic violence, the
engagement in processes of disidentification, are pivotal to their thinking
themselves into other, more privileged spaces.” (Reay 2001)

22. Disaffiliation
“The people from my church, a lot of them still didn’t go to college... They
are kind of, like, stuck in the same box that they’ve always been, and I can
sit there and have conversation with them and feel weirdly back 8 years
ago and nobody has grown. …They are stuck in this little town [that] they
won’t get out of. They’ve been there, they go to church there…; this is
what they’ve always known. And you know what? There is nothing wrong
with that. …But I definitely see a difference in the way we interact in
different types of people that I surround myself with now.”
Alma, Latin female, late 20s

23. Self-transcendence
“When I go to school, David, and I hit the campus and I start to walk, I feel like,
‘Oh my god, look at what I’m doing, look at where I’m at, look at what I’m trying
to accomplish.’ I get this feeling that I belong to this secret society of college
students and that’s kept me in school.… To be a college student, you’re part of
this – I want to say smart people for a lack of a better term – but you’re just part
of a people that are learning new things, that are experiencing new things; you’re
just accomplishing something. You’re going to be part of the people with
diplomas on the walls, the master’s degrees. It’s a whole different type of people.
People who are in college versus people who are not. I experience that every day
here.”
Samaria, Latin female, 40s

24. Conclusions

25. The symbolic and psychic rewards of
college
 Older students do not simply attend college in order to get better jobs and earn more
money
 There are substantial rewards in terms of one’s conception of one’s own social status, a
moral feeling of self-betterment, self-regard, vindication and validation
 Such rewards do not exist apart from the complex and multi-faceted symbolic significance
of education, college and a college degree in contemporary society
 This symbolic import, in turn, must be understood in terms of higher education’s import in
social stratification, the inculcation of cultural capital, and knowledge generation
 This complex significance is grasped, albeit indistinctly, by social agents, and their
participation or non-participation is a meaningful action in reference to this understanding.

26. Thank you!

27. Belonging
 For others, exposure to the more highly educated only made them feel their
own lack, and they internalized a negative valuation of themselves:
“My two sisters, my brother, my dad, my stepmom, my cousins, they all have an
education…like two of [them] are lawyers…. So I wanted to do it for myself,
because I wanted to feel like I fit in…. Like when they all talk about it, ‘I have a
[bachelor’s ] in this,’ ‘So my degree is [in] this,’ ‘So my master’s [is] in this.’… Like I
always hear all [these] things, and I am like, ‘Oh me? I’m a case manager. I
haven’t completed my degree.’ Like I didn’t feel comfortable with myself.”
Vilana, Latin female, 30s

28. Desirability
 Completing a degree is seen as raising one’s position in the eyes of
others:
“I’m also going to feel comfortable as a person. When I meet my next
boyfriend, and he asks me what I do or what I went to school for, I can tell
him I have a degree in sociology…. But when you are 30-something and
you don’t have an education, I think society seems to judge you as lazy and
somebody that doesn’t have any goals.”
Vilana, Latin female, 30s