An unlikely comparison

My parents were white and middle class.  My dad is a physician, and my mom was a classics major who taught school from time to time.  When I was young they talked with all of us about many careers, from anthropologist, to army officer, to curator, to doctor, to engineer, to musician, to professor, to sociologist.  It was a large list.

Maya Beasley’s book, Opting Out: losing the potential of America’s black youth (University of Chicago Press, 2011) describes how the lack of social and cultural capital in African-American families with students in highly selective institutions leads these students towards limited career choices.   Beasley writes that “responses from the students who participated in this study suggest that differences in social capital enable white parents to offer career advice and other support that is more insightful and more effective than the support provided by black parents.”  This difference is an effect of the different educational and career histories of white and African-American families coming out of the civil-rights movement of the 1960’s.

One difference that Dr. Beasley notes between the white and African-American students who she studied regards the sense of financial obligation that many black students feel, and that many white students do not.  Based on interviews with a number of students at highly selective colleges similar to the University of Michigan, she notes that African-American students often shape their career aspirations around a need to provide financially not only for themselves, but also for their parents, their grandparents, and even for their brothers and sisters.  The black and white families were equally involved in raising their children and equally stable but the African-American families, while middle class, did have lower median income than the white families, and had less chance to build wealth for the long-term.  This led the African-American students to design their career aspirations around their perception of the financial return of the occupation. In one example Beasley describes a student named Jason whose middle class family could not invest adequately for retirement.  Not only could they not transfer wealth to him to launch his future, but Jason felt an obligation to support his parents in their future retirement.  “There was no safety net for Jason; rather, he was to provide the safety net for the rest of his family,” Beasley writes.

This passage struck me because I work frequently with Chinese students.  When I first started doing so, I was struck, and indeed puzzled (from my own cultural perspective) by the narrow way that Chinese students selected their major.  Many of these students seemed to me to be focused on financial success rather than on how they could best make the world better, or where they could develop their own interests; they were focused on a narrow set of majors that they considered popular and potentially lucrative.  Over time I came to understand some of the realities that gave them this view: they have grown up in a tight job market and volatile economy; they are only children, born under China’s one-child policy; they are obliged under Confucian ideals to respect their family and build their primary loyalty around it.  And they are their parents’ retirement plan.  Because the relatively weak social safety net of the People’s Republic of China may prove inadequate to support the parents, these Chinese students will have to provide the safety net for the rest of their family.

This is an unexpected parallel: African-American students and Chinese students share a desire for economic stability for not only their own but also their parents’ and family's futures, and this impacts the way they think about career options.  White students in Beasley's study did not feel this economic instability; their families had accumulated significantly more wealth, their parents' futures were secure, and their own career aspirations ranged over a wider more diverse set of choices.  The Chinese students' families, like those of African-American students in Beasley’s study, could provide only limited perspective on career options, and this is strongly reflected in the students' choices.

The reality, discussed in Beasley’s study, is that the greater diversity of career choices apparent to white students may actual lead to greater economic stability than the more narrow choices of the African-American students in her study.  I suspect this would be true for our Chinese students as well.  The challenge is in finding a way to provide the social capital that could empower these students to think more broadly.

Acknowledgement: Drs. Amy Conger and Cinda-Sue Davis brought Maya Beasley's monograph to my attention last week.  I recommend it.