Paying for the Party

"This is an ethnography of dorms by two women who teach at University of Michigan and University of California, concerning their time at another Midwestern university. While a graduate research assistant, Laura Hamilton lived in a dorm. She observed how the system created ‘tracks’ which facilitated different modes of engaging with people. These tracks were very different depending on the student’s social class. They discovered that to participate in the social rites at university, you need a lot of money—for clothes, makeup, transportation, and so on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Because the university is so tolerant of partying culture, serious women students are marginalized. Girls are encouraged not to take their studies seriously. While working class girls were more likely to come to schools in relationships with guys who remain in their place of origin, they return home more often. As a result, their drop-out rate is much higher. They don’t move in with their whole social network, as is more often the case for upper middle-class women. Working-class kids have less money to socialize, and as a result, they don’t develop social networks as extensive as those developed by upper-class students. The argument of the book is that the university is oriented toward facilitating the objectives of the upper middle-class, and that student life is oriented around a path that working-class students don’t have the resources to pursue. Thus, the university is contributing to the reproduction of class inequality in the way that students experience college. Their book’s impact made clear to university administrators that parts of their institutional culture which they did not see as related to inequality, actually feed into inequality. They reveal that campus party culture not only reproduces economic inequality, but also gender inequality. Because this book won a number of top book awards and was quite widely discussed, those findings really were heard. Their findings have many applications. For instance, at Harvard, administrators have been trying to close the single-gender ‘finals clubs’ that aren’t a formal part of the university but nevertheless play a crucial role in creating the student culture. They have encountered major resistance for reasons that have to do with gender (‘frat boy’ culture) as much as class culture, as we discovered in the hearing around the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States."