Have college students become careerists rather than intellectuals? Are working-class students to blame for grade inflation, grade-grubbing, and the downscaling of the university’s noble mission of educating the whole person? These assertions, although somewhat buried in a mass of facts and findings, are present in almost every research study on college student ‘orientations’ produced since the 1970s. This article critically examines these assertions from a working-class perspective, pointing out the ways ‘intellectualism’ and ‘academicism’ have been culturally constructed to favor middle-class behavior and actions, arguing instead that anxiety over the economic value of a college degree reflects awareness of intense changes in the occupational structure and has little to do with increased materialism or anti-intellectualism.
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