{"content":[{"text":"Moving Out to Move Up: Higher Education as a Mobility Pathway in the \n Rural South","bbox":{"left":0.224412,"top":0.089258,"width":0.609882,"height":0.039772}},{"text":"Ryan Parsons, Doctoral Candidate \n Princeton University","bbox":{"left":0.394314,"top":0.145409,"width":0.27027399999999996,"height":0.03900000000000001}},{"text":"Note: This article is adapted from a dissertation chapter in which I explore how educational aspirations \n interact with low rates of economic mobility and economic stagnation. This draft has been preliminarily \n accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social \n Sciences.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.201992,"width":0.74725,"height":0.06637899999999997}},{"text":"Abstract","bbox":{"left":0.466567,"top":0.282041,"width":0.06676600000000005,"height":0.019201000000000024}},{"text":"Mobility in the United States has persistently become more constrained. As Chetty et al. (2018) \n demonstrate, patterns of immobility are spatially concentrated in certain parts of the country, particularly \n in rural areas. While recent literature in the social sciences and the popular press has explored the political \n consciousness and mobilization in rural America, the role of race and ethnicity in producing rural poverty \n has been largely overlooked (e.g., Hochschild 2015, Cramer 2016, Vance 2016). The regions of the \n United States with the greatest concentration of highly mobile residents include largely rural and \n predominantly White counties in the Midwest and Plains states. By contrast, highly immobile populations \n are concentrated in communities of color in the Deep South and Native American communities. \n This paper is part of a larger ethnographic project that explores social mobility, rural poverty, and \n race in the American South. The project is based in a central Mississippi Delta county with a legacy of \n persistent poverty and institutionalized racism. The county, which has a population of roughly 10,000 and \n is 80% Black, is one of the least upwardly mobile in the country. Children born there have less than a 5% \n chance of moving from the bottom quintile to the top and nearly half of children live in poverty. This \n paper focuses on the experiences of a cohort of young people, ages 16-22, each of whom is somewhere in \n the high education pathway. Some are in high school and identify as college-aspirants; others are enrolled \n in nearby community colleges or four-year institutions; yet others have completed some college but have \n had to withdraw for financial or personal reasons. \n This paper focuses on the role of college as a pathway out of this entrenched poverty. The effect \n of a college education on upward mobility, national patterns of stratification, and occupational sorting is \n well documented (e.g., Fischer and Hout 2006), and the effect is stronger for students who are prima facie \n least likely to go to college (Brand and Xie 2010). However, less is known about the experiences of rural, \n low income students who embark on this pathway and the reasons for their relative success or failure. The \n limited literature on rural Black students confirms that they are relatively less likely to want to attend \n college (Strayhorn 2009), but the challenges young people from these communities face once they buy \n into the promise higher education remain understudied. The paper argues that students from communities \n like this face unique social and spatial barriers related to the transition from the opportunity structures \n they inhabit to the opportunity structures in which they hope to embed themselves. \n The first barrier is a mismatch of social and cultural capital. Communities like Central Delta have \n seen persistent population decline since World War II. One consequence of this decline is that people who \n leave the area for higher education rarely return; as a result, local students have fewer role models who \n have college degrees and jobs that make use of those degrees. The result is that the perceived benefits of a \n college education are more abstract than they would be for students in more privileged suburban or urban \n communities. A second barrier is the cultural and emotional labor that students from Central Delta are \n expected to perform. A corollary consequence to the trends of outmigration referenced above is the \n expectation that enrolling in college will limit students’ ability to return to their home communities. \n These pressures are compounded by the pressure students feel to help support their families, both \n economically and emotionally. The final barrier explored in this study is feelings of marginalization that","bbox":{"left":0.117629,"top":0.313816,"width":0.764759,"height":0.593461}},{"text":"Parsons 1","bbox":{"left":0.819216,"top":0.93842,"width":0.06318599999999996,"height":0.01687700000000003}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}