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By Root 1427 0

They gathered information, reminded their adolescents to sign up for tests, and watched for potential problems. By contrast, although working-class parents considered themselves as being involved and helpful, what they meant by being helpful seems different from what middle-class parents meant. Working-class and poor parents did not appear to see continuous monitoring as critically important. They gathered information, but they did so on an ad hoc basis. This is reasonable, given that they perceived their children’s fate as being tied much less to their actions as parents and much more to the expertise of the professionals who staff institutions such as schools. With the exception of the financial costs involved, these parents generally knew little about the transition from high school to college. Their awareness of their child’s SAT scores, the names of colleges the child visited, and the relative ranking of colleges was strikingly vague compared to that of middle-class parents. Finally, there were differences across the families in how the young people were perceived. Both parents and children in working-class and poor families considered post-adolescent children “grown.” By contrast, in middle-class families, the young adults seemed to still rely heavily on their parents and, in crucial ways, the parents often continued to treat them as children.36

Informal Knowledge: Middle-Class Families

High schools encourage college preparation, applications, and enrollment, yet they vary in how much help they provide students with these tasks. Private schools and elite suburban schools that enroll upper-middle-class youth often give intensive assistance with college applications; at large urban high schools, assistance is far more limited.37 Even at elite suburban schools with strong counseling programs, however, the information and assistance provided concerning higher education options is incomplete. Schools invite and expect parent involvement in many important areas of their children’s schooling. In this institutional context, parents who have more information and who presume that they should intervene in schooling are able to transmit important advantages to their children.

The follow-up interviews revealed that the families had very different levels of informal information about higher education systems. In the middle-class families, the college application process was a major life event for the youth and for the parents, a time filled with excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, and (often) conflict.38 The drama unfolded over many months and had many components: gathering information about colleges, visiting colleges, narrowing the list of schools to which the youth would apply, writing essays, submitting applications, waiting for the decisions, receiving the decisions, processing disappointments, and deciding where to go. Alexander, for instance, visited Brown, Columbia, Haverford, Washington University, Cornell, and Dartmouth before he settled on applying for an “early decision” at Columbia. Garrett had to adjust to the major disappointment of not being recruited for Stanford’s basketball team; Stacey struggled to accept her parents’ decision that she could not attend her first-choice college. In the follow-up interviews, middle-class parents and kids made it clear how intensively parents had been involved in helping their children find, apply to, and enroll in college. Parents were acutely aware of differences between community colleges and four-year schools, as well as the rankings of various colleges. By contrast, in the interviews with working-class and poor parents and young adults who considered but did not go to college, these details seemed elusive.

Middle-class parents’ informal knowledge also included a detailed awareness of how middle and secondary schools were supposed to work. For example, when Melanie was in middle school, her parents were aware of the expectation of regular communication for students with learning disabilities through the development of an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). Melanie’s father