Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [162]
Stacey and her high school boyfriend broke up; she has not replaced him. She tells me she has no immediate plans for marriage or kids. She wants to get her career established first. She hopes I will be able to come to one of her college team’s games to see her play basketball.
Garrett Tallinger (white, middle-class) and I meet in his cramped dorm room at Villanova University (a small Catholic school in the northeast). Now 6 feet 5 inches, Garrett towers over me, but the quiet, low-key manner that characterized him as a fourth-grader remains. Villanova awarded Garrett a four-year basketball scholarship that fully covers the annual private-school tuition, room and board, books, and miscellaneous fees.
Soccer and basketball dominated much of Garrett’s childhood. When he was in eighth grade, the Tallingers moved several hundred miles away from the town where he had grown up. Soccer was a relatively underdeveloped sport in the new location. That, plus a series of mishaps and conflicts (including that the soccer playoffs conflicted with other commitments and high school basketball and soccer were offered at the same time, forcing players to choose between the two) led to basketball being the preferred option for him. He made the high school varsity basketball team as a freshman. He recalls that when the coach told him he would be part of the starting line-up for the team’s first game of the season, the news made him feel “the most excited I’ve ever been.”
Garrett continued to excel academically as well. At his parents’ (particularly his mother’s) urging, he took Advanced Placement (English literature, calculus, and economics) and honors-level (physics and history) courses in high school. Garrett graduated with a “weighted” grade point average (i.e., one that balances course grades against course difficulty) of 4.2. His first round of SAT scores, which totaled around 1030–1060 [1550–1590], left him feeling “embarrassed.” “I know that I’m better than that,” he tells me. In the second round he did better with a “mix and match” of 1090 [1640], but he was not able to “crack” 1100 [1670].
In high school, Garrett had dreamed of playing basketball at Stanford or Duke. Although Stanford’s coach did express interest, in the end, he did not make an offer. Garrett could have played basketball at Yale or Brown, but neither provides athletic scholarships, and the tuition alone would have been extremely expensive. The financial burden of attending an Ivy League school, and the drawbacks of playing for a weaker team, led Garrett to choose Villanova. He accumulated significant playing time during his freshman year, and his team advanced quite far in the NCAA “March Madness” tournaments. He also has done well academically (his GPA is 3.3). Garrett’s plans for the future are uncertain. He chose a business major, after briefly considering majoring in math and becoming a teacher. (He says he was dissuaded, in part, by his father’s warnings about dismal earnings prospects “for the rest of your life.”) He hopes to marry and raise a family. He sees that happening fairly far in the future, noting that even twenty-five would be “too early.” When he finishes college, Garrett wants to play basketball for several years, probably in Europe.
Alexander Williams (African American, middle-class) is now a tall, slender young man with a deep baritone voice. We meet at his parents’ house on a sweltering August afternoon. He is at home only by chance. When a health epidemic struck the city where he planned to do a medical internship, he decided to volunteer in the offices of two different local physicians; his mother helped with