With multiple links to multiple studies, sociologist Jessi Streib writes in Forbes of the many ways that employers discriminate against first-generation college students in hiring.
Why, she asks, do employees favor lacrosse players over basketball players? Or over those who have "bootstrapped" themselves into academic success?
And why, we might ask, are such analyses of classism so rare?
Clearly, the relative silence about classism matters. Streib cites one recent study showing discrimination against first-generation students who reveal their status in job applications in the hopes that their success at "overcoming challenges" will be seen as a distinctive strength. Instead, employers evaluated their records less favorably than other applicants. The authors' intervention was not to coach the first-generation students about how to improve their applications. Instead, they worked with employers to see what they could not otherwise see in those students' applications.
So many campus support programs for poor and working-class students are centered on exactly these messages about the distinctive "resilience" that first-generation students develop, while talking very little about the power of others (grad school admissions committees, employers, those controlling access to professional networking) to decide how "resilience" will be valued within applicant pools filled with privileged college graduates who leverage volunteering and internships, strategic letters of recommendation, and insider knowledge of professional workplaces in their applications.
What if campuses took the responsibility for teaching about classism seriously? What if privileged students who will eventually have power over hiring were taught, throughout college, about the limitations of their understanding of others? What if poor and working-class students were taught to name and to organize against the classism that works against them in school and beyond?
Why, as campuses have grown so much better at producing scholarly analyses of structural bias against underrepresented intersectional identities (while still falling short of ending structural inequalities within their own institutions) are campuses still relatively quiet about classism?
Whose interests are served by that relative silence?
