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Amplified Advantage investigates the value and impact of today's small liberal arts colleges on the students who attend them. It adds to our understanding of how class works, the impact of parents and families on social reproduction, and the consequences of attending a "good college" in an era of inequality.

AbstractThis article will explore the shifting use of class language in party platforms during theLochnerera, a period of increased class polarization, social unrest, andlaissez fairejudicial philosophy. It explores the ways in which political parties responded to the growing inequality of wealth and the judicial distaste for "class legislation." Using as a dataset all available party platforms of the presidential elections years during this period, I analyze the impact of class identity and class consciousness on politics and social movements during this time, finding that (1) class language increased during this period, with its sharpest images and depictions found in third party platforms; (2) the use of class language was directly connected to calls for an end to "government by injunction" and very specific proposals for workers; (3) the two major parties often took on some of these specific recommendations in the following presidential cycle or cycles, but without the attendant class language; leading to (4) a general muting of explanations for the cause of industrial conflict (irrecoof industrialncilable interests of labor and capital) in favor of specific reforms leading to government as mediator, picked up primarily by the Democratic Party.

I compare experiences and class identity formation of working-class college students in college. I find that all working-class students experience college as culturally different from their home cultures and have different understandings and interpretations of this difference based on race, class, and gender positions. I find that students develop fundamentally different strategies for navigating these cultural differences based on the strength or weakness of their structural understandings of class and inequality in US society. Students with strong structural understandings develop Loyalist strategies by which they retain close ties to their home culture. Students with more individual understandings of poverty and inequality develop Renegade strategies by which they actively seek immersion in the middleclass culture of the college. These strategic orientations are logical responses to the classed nature of our educational system and have very significant implications for the value and experience of social mobility in an allegedly meritocratic society.

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze graduate school pipeline divergences for first-generation and working-class students and the implications for inequalities in tangible resources, advising and support, and a sense of isolation. Our results point to an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students. We conclude by discussing the unequal pathways revealed and their implications for merit and mobility, graduate training, and opportunity within our and other disciplines.