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.

Failure and Guanxi

THERE is a broadly perpetrated fiction in modern society. . . The fiction is that society consists of a set of independent individuals, each of whom acts to achieve goals that are independently arrived at…

Roger D. Goddard

Imagine you are in China; you do not speak the language; you do not know how to behave; you don’t know what those around you consider important. But you have important business to do. You will likely fail, not because you are incapable, but because you do not understand the system. Your failure will seem unfair.

The UM is a very selective place. All of our students were amazingly accomplished in high school. But some fail when they come here. A few fail by choice, but more fail because they do not know how to succeed, and do not learn the tools necessary for success in a demanding, complex, foreign environment. For many students the transition to college is not just a shift to a new academic environment, but is rather a move into a foreign culture. This transition is all too often disguised by the apparently familiar language (English) and activities (going to class), and the feeling of alienation and isolation goes unrecognized for the culture shock that it is.

Back to China: What do you do? Change China? Not likely. You will need to make connections with those who can help you. The social network you will build gives you what the Chinese call guanxi. You can think of it as capital on which to build success. Just as you need financial capital on which to build your business, so you need social capital on which to build success in any complex community setting. The importance of such social capital is demonstrated in the business setting by GM’s entry into China, as deftly described by Michael Dunne in his book “American Wheels, Chinese Roads.” GM’s many failures, leading to eventual success, can be traced to a failure to understand China and a failure to understand the importance of guanxi. But the principle applies more widely; there is a considerable sociological literature on social capital and its utility in creating success in a social setting, and a branch of this literature focuses on the role of social capital in college success.*

To succeed you need connections within the existing power structure and you need to understand the norms of the community – in the university setting you need connections with faculty and staff and other students, and you need to understand what is expected and what works. Students who understand the university as a community of people and understand this community's expectations – especially its implicit, hidden, unarticulated expectations – can much more easily do what is needed and can more easily find the support that we all need to be successful. Students with good guanxi are more robustly positioned to deal with roadblocks and setbacks. Those for whom the university is unfamiliar, like a foreign country, need to build a store of social connections and understand to help navigate the place or else they will fail.

These human connections can share understanding of community expectations, knowledge of success strategies, and transmit the social norms that lead to success – what are the most productive study strategies? where can you reach out for help? what are good co-curricular activities? ... and so on.

Your social connections can share their own connections within the broader organization, and they can even take actions to your benefit. I’ve met many students who succeed, and many who fail: those who fail often feel they have little control over their situation; they feel buffeted by outside influences and lack a sense of agency. Your social network, your guanxi, will provide information, influence, and control over your fate. Your social capital provides confidence.

*Roger Goddard, “Relational Networks, Social Trust, and Norms: A Social Capital Perspective on Students’ Chances of Academic Success,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25, pp 59-74 (2003) is one example of this literature.