College, the great unequalizer

Such party-pathway students aren’t particularly motivated academically, but because they have well-off parents and clear-enough career goals they don’t necessarily need to be, and because they don’t require much financial aid they’re crucial to the university’s bottom line. (Their college careers, the authors write, depend on “an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.”)

The party pathway’s influence, though, is potentially devastating for less well-heeled students. Some, dubbed “wannabes” in the book, are pulled into a social whirl that undercuts their practical aspirations — encouraging them to change majors (from elementary education to sports broadcasting, say) to imitate their cooler peers, pushing them into sexual situations they don’t know how to navigate, forcing their parents “to dig deep” for “sorority fees, spring break trips and bar tabs” and saddling them with large postcollegiate debts.

Others, who can’t keep up socially or fit in at all, simply end up isolated and persistently unhappy. (Over all, the most successful working-class students were those who transferred to less-prestigious schools instead of staying at the State U.)