Modern-Day Mobility Journeys: How First-Generation College Students Navigate Social Class at Selective Universities and Find Professional Footholds in an Increasingly Unequal World

Erica Jaffe Redner

The narrative that college is a reliable pathway to white-collar jobs has enjoyed longstanding currency. Yet various labor market realities, including the role that affinity (or shared resemblance) plays in hiring managers' decisions, complicate that narrative and disproportionately impact lower socioeconomic status (lower-SES) graduates. While college degrees confer a crucial underlying qualification for white-collar positions, they may not reliably ensure attainment. Drawing on surveys and comprehensive interviews conducted with 100+ American-born first-generation college students, my book project illuminates the spectrum of professional trajectories and outcomes that have animated the longitudinal mobility journeys (10-20+ years post-college) of alumni from two well-resourced, brand-name schools. I focus particularly on working-class background graduates from 1990-2009 (years immediately succeeding critical economic recalibrations), and also include some 2017-2019 graduates who provide key complementary insights. My project is poised to offer an ethnographically nuanced portrait of lower-SES background first-gens' experiences of campus belonging amidst predominantly higher-SES background peers, the relationship between their integration experiences and decisions to embrace (or reject) core elements of upper-middle class culture, and how this latter decision (along with the quality of the career guidance they received from their universities) ultimately shaped their labor market experiences, the scope of their professional options, and their long-term workplace belonging experiences and professional success. This project ultimately highlights the variability of these first-gens' experiences on-campus and beyond, illuminates novel key moderators of those experiences, and offers evidence-based recommendations for practices and programs universities could adopt to improve their first-gens' campus experiences and professional prospects.

About Erica Jaffe Redner

Dr. Erica Jaffe Redner is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research addresses structural inequalities at the intersection of education and employment. She is especially interested in social class origins and how they impact Americans' access to economic opportunity and their experience of institutional belonging throughout their professional lives. In examining these experiences, Erica is particularly attentive to how they intersect with ongoing shifts in the nature of work and corporate strategy, the state of cross-class engagement in America, and changing trends in communal involvement more broadly. She employs mixed methods in her research, including interviews, participant observation, surveys, and archival work. Erica holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also received extensive secondary training in management at the Wharton School. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she served as a researcher alongside policy-oriented faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School and Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and remains deeply committed to both institutions' missions of mobilizing scholarship to address contemporary social challenges. Her work has been published in the Journal of Business Anthropology, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, and Cultural Survival Quarterly. Erica has served as a Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously served as a Teaching Assistant for MBA courses at Wharton and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.