What We Know:

Colleges, seemingly meritocratic institutions, often reproduce inequalities related to class and socioeconomic status. This is because class background not only shapes students' economic capital, but their social and cultural capital--the networks they belong, "common sense" knowledge they wield, and more. This significantly impacts how well students adjust and integrate into campus, shaping not only their success within college but trajectories long after. 

See: Bourdieu 1984; Stuber 2011; Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Jack 2019; Khan 2021.

What We Don't Know:

How do these processes translate to the online sphere? 

Data and Methods:

To study this, I conducted 40+ interviews with undergraduates at a large public university to explore how social class background, among other demographic identifiers, informed students' social media presence in the college transition and beyond. 

Findings:

I find that class and cultural capital shape the platforms students use, how, and to what ends. While higher-income students shared cultural expectations that Instagram is just "what you use" to proactively network when transitioning to college, lower-income students faced barriers growing their online networks here. Higher-income students circulated their profiles as publicly available social resumes, displaying their social and cultural capital to their advantage, while lower-income students were uncomfortable with this visibility and preferred private modes of communication with pre-existing ties. 

Why This Matters:

These findings shed light on online processes through which higher-income students further accumulate social/cultural capital in college, while lower-income students felt they couldn't access this dominant social arena of the college campus. This work pushes both theoretical and empirical boundaries in sociology and digital studies by unpacking how existing inequalities offline translate to online space, exacerbated by platform design and social context.

This work was funded by the CEW+ and National Science Foundation.

This work has led to 2 forthcoming papers.