Name: Paying for the Party
ISBN: 9780674049574

Laura T. Hamilton

Elizabeth A. Armstrong

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.

Paying for the Party

Bryan Alexander

Paying for the Party is a powerful, carefully researched, and ultimately furious work of social science. Its target is higher education - specifically, how female students make it through large public research universities. Armstrong and Hamilton conclude that these campuses are doing a bad job, and break this down meticulously.

The book is based on research conducted on a group of students attending "Midwestern University" (Ohio State, maybe?). The authors spent a great deal of time with 45 or so undergraduate women, living for part of a year on their shared dorm room floor. The resulting book is rich with conversations, analysis, and as much longitudinal followup as time permitted.

Armstrong and Hamilton identify a series of pathways students can take through the university experience. These include pathways based on partying, mobility (increasing class status), and professional attainment (getting skills for a specific job).

The Greek system plays a major and negative role in Paying for the Party. It grounds the "party pathway", a social environment that students can take which emphasizes fun, hooking up with wealthy people, and low academic achievement. This isn't news to many people, especially in academe, but it's rare to see it researched like this. "Greek organizations... [pair] like with like, or, in this case, affluent white women with affluent white men." (16)


Let me highlight some key points.

1a. These universities are biased in favor of the 1%. 
"We argue that how Midwest University and many other large state schools currently organize the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the most affluent" (3)
"[T]he party pathway was a viable route to success for only a small, highly affluent segment of the MU population." (147)
"It is damning that not one of the working-class students graduated from MU in five years. It is instructive that they had to leave in order to graduate..." (179)
1b. The party pathway requires serious financial resources to make it work (217).
1c. MU failed as an economic mobility engine. "With the exception of one case... women who stayed at MU were on track to land roughly in the same class location from which they started." (216)

2. A generational shift has occurred, whereby young women tend not to go to college for Mrs. degrees. Instead they tend to aim for a degree, then set up a career, and only then select a husband. What a major shift this is!

3a. Many of the women (96%!) in this population avoided STEM fields. (70)
3b. Related: being a nerd is a hugely different, very positive alternative path. And yet it's scarcely available to any of these young women. I wish we'd heard more about why not. (149-152)

4. "MU" supported party pathway students by sustaining many lighter academic fields. Ouch. (72)

5. The studied group ended up split in two. One half went Greek; the other had no comparative social affiliation. The researchers dubbed them "isolates" 96), while the Greeks called them "the Dark Side".

6. Leaving MU and downshifting to a less prestigious campus ended up being a great move for many of the study group's women (176ff). This flies in the face of most American thinking about higher ed as hierarchy. 

7. Parental roles are *hugely* influential. This reminds me of K-12, actually.
Those roles include extensive pre-college advice, guidance through majors and career choices while on campus (more effective than counselors!), providing financial support during college, ditto after college, helping the women with relationships. This isn't helicopter parenting, but something far more extensive.

8. As a large institution, MU didn't manage to integrate disparate populations into a single learning community. This was partly a matter of deliberate strategy: "The size and diversity of student bodies at MU and similar schools make [this] a challenge. We did not observe an effort on the part of MU to do so." (228)

I'd recommend Paying for the Party to anyone interested in higher education, especially on topics of gender, class, and access. It's a very important work to consider during our times, when we consider education reform.

Paying for the Party

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