Misery Loves Company: Poverty,Mobility,and Higher Education in the Post-welfare State

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the relationship between poverty, mobility, and higher education in the contemporary United States. In contrast to quantitative analyses, which have found robust and positive outcomes associated with college attainment, I use ethnographic methods to tell a more complicated story about what college offers the poor. This story centers on a low-income woman of color named Angelica. Angelica’s story of drug-addict-turned college graduate suggests that college might be just as much a regulatory institution as a poverty solution. To this extent, it critically assesses my role as Angelica’s former professor, professional mentor, and life narrator. The article situates the expansion of higher education and Angelica’s pathway into college in late twentieth-century efforts to reform the welfare system and reduce state-sponsored social safety nets. It concludes by suggesting that college is no lifeline but a mechanism by which Angelica and others are brought into the fold of a “respectable” but often miserable middle-class life.