Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cultural Capital and Students' Experiences in College: The Role of Parents in Facilitating Student Success

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SES-1602743Josipa RoksaDenise T DeutschlanderUniversity of VirginiaCollege is popularly considered a path to upward mobility. Often missing from this discourse is the recognition that even when students from socioeconomically disadvantaged families gain access to higher education they do not always graduate, and they are much less likely to graduate than their more advantaged peers. Prior research indicates that academic preparation and financial supports, while important, do not fully explain the social class gap in college completion. To understand social class inequality, sociologists have increasingly turned attention to the knowledge and practices that facilitate successful interaction with social institutions, such as schools. To date, most of this research has focused on K-12 education or the transition into college. Few studies examine students' experiences in college. Moreover, while parents are central to research on social class inequality in K-12 education and college entry, they are rarely considered after students enter college. The image of the helicopter parent, common in the popular discourse, does not depict the experience of less advantaged parents, who may struggle to support their children during college. This project investigates how parents from disadvantaged backgrounds can support their children on the path to college success. Through longitudinal, qualitative interviews, part one of this project explores how students and parents develop expectations about college experiences and how those change between high school and college. A goal of this portion of the project is to understand how parents support their children through college and whether and how their behaviors change over time. Part two implements and evaluates (through a randomized controlled trial) an intervention to help parents encourage their children to engage with faculty and other institutional resources. Surveys administered to students in both treatment and control conditions will illuminate the extent to which a lack of information and a lack of entitlement in seeking support and resources contribute to the challenges encountered by less advantaged students. The longitudinal interviews included in part one will also help explore whether parents change their behavior in response to the educational intervention. This research aims to illuminate specific practices of low-income families and student experiences during college that facilitate student success. Therefore, it may spur higher education practitioners to change the methods they use to engage parents and develop infrastructure that will more effectively support student success. Finally, the theoretical insights gained through this project will contribute to broader sociological understanding of how educational institutions may contribute to inequality through implicit barriers. By drawing attention to these barriers, this research can contribute to the broader societal goal, and expectation, that education provides equal opportunities as well as serves as a mechanism for upward mobility.