Lexington Books The Burden of Academic Success: Managing Working-Class Identities in College: Loyalists, Renegades, and Double Agents

The Burden of Academic Success: Loyalists, Renegades, and Double Agents explores class identity reconstructions among working-class students attending a public university. Rather than focus on working-class failure, this book takes a critical look at the psychological and social costs of academic success. Based on several hours of interviews with a diverse group of working-class students, this book describes how successful students respond to, react to, and manage their academic success. The book does for class what other theorists have done for race, examining the dynamic interplay of class identity and educational success/social mobility. The distinguishing features of the book are rich narrative detail; compelling stories of student success and struggle; intersectional analysis exploring the ways class, race, and gender inform each other in students' understandings and narratives with an interwoven theory throughout; and a new typology for understanding working-class student responses to the burden of academic success. The Burden of Academic Success is ideal for courses on sociology, education, and American studies as well as for use by college educators and administrators. Review Allison Hurst has produced a sharp, insightful, and moving account of strategies working-class college students devise to maneuver the gulf between their own class cultures, identities, and communities and the decidedly middle-class cultures, orientations, and preoccupations of the institution where they study. Solidly linked to her rich interview data with working-class students in a four-year, moderately selective university, Hurst's much appreciated conclusion, deserves special mention. In it she explores a number of concrete changes in colleges and universities that would improve and invigorate the education of both working-class and middle-class students, as well as the lives of the vast majority of people in the U.S. who do not graduate from college. This volume will fill a big hole on class apparent in the reading lists of courses in schools of education and in multiple social science departments.--Linda Fuller, University of Oregon This fascinating book is an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on working-class students in the academy. Hurst's in-depth study reveals the different motives they have for attending college and the various strategies they use to negotiate the differences between the cultures of home and school. The Burden of Academic Success is essential reading for anyone concerned about higher education and social class.--Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Goucher College About the Author Allison L. Hurst is assistant professor of sociology at Furman University.