Across the United States, historically marginalized students are enrolling in college at unprecedented rates.
Yet far fewer than half earn degrees — and many spend a great deal of time and money on higher education.
What happens after these young adults exit college, with or without a degree? And how do they make sense of these experiences?
My empirical work focuses on higher education and its aftermaths as sites for investigating equalizing and reproductive social forces and their relationship to racial inequality.
In one line of research, I study the ideological resources Pell-eligible young adults draw upon to make sense of lived experiences of precarity after exiting higher education, and how these ideologies shape mobility processes and pathways.
In a second, I study the financial consequences of attending but not completing higher education, including the role of educational debt, and the implications of these consequences for equalization and reproduction theories of higher education.
Throughout, I am interested in the social reproduction of racial inequality, and in the relationships between subjective experience (identity, self, affect, and emotion), socioeconomic structure, and inequality. I am especially interested in the intersections of race, class, and gender inequality.
Drawing on my applied work in college access and college persistence, my dissertation uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate the ideological resources that first-generation, Pell-eligible, young Black adults in New Orleans, LA, draw upon to understand the post-college precarity they experience.
Despite similar backgrounds and precarious presents, my participants make sense of their experiences in three starkly different ways.
Gardeners believe their selves are wounded or flawed and must heal or grow in order to achieve mobility. They view society’s opportunity structure as relatively open, and value other people as aides toward internal development. Climbers believe the self is capable and whole, a vehicle made to navigate opportunity’s possibilities and barriers. They focus on engaging their social networks to help them take the right external risks. And seekers believe the self is whole, but trapped in a relatively closed opportunity structure. They orient action and relationships around personal liberation.
I term these worldviews about the self, social action, and social context mobility ideologies, explore their social origins, and show how they interact with social means (like social and cultural capital) and ends (like goals) to shape unequal mobility pathways.
Read my dissertation abstract here. I am developing this project into a book framed around the aftermath of the college-for-all agenda that has predominated in K-12, non-profit, and philanthropic fields in recent decades.
Mobility Ideologies
In this project, I apply tools of causal inference to a nationally-representative data set (the NLSY97) to study how starting but not completing a post-secondary degree — what social science surveys often call ‘some college’ — reproduces inequality.
Much research on educational attainment has focused on the consequences of earning post-secondary credentials. By contrast, I focus on the large proportion of undergraduates (in the U.S., just under 50%) who begin higher education but do not graduate, exploring the relationship between ‘some college’ and race, class, and gender inequality.
I show, for instance, that the financial consequences of ‘some college’ vary considerably by socioeconomic status, and that while more-disadvantaged groups earn more income on average, they also experience more financial hardship following ‘some college’ as a result of educational debt.
The U.S. case of ‘some college’ demonstrates higher education’s simultaneous equalizing and reproductive effects, and I call for theory and policy to grapple with this.
‘Some College’ and Social Reproduction
Affect & Emotion
How do emotion and affect relate to race and racial inequality?
I engage this question in three nascent lines of inquiry.
First, I explore how mobility ideologies relate to emotion work and emotional labor. Do certain worldviews about the self require more emotion work? Why? How does this relate to socioeconomic status, and what is its relationship to inequality?
Second, I am developing a study of the racial history of student debt in the United States, including its racialized moral and affective economies (e.g., surrounding shame, dignity, and worthiness).
Third, an exploratory theoretical project asks: what is the relationship between culture and affect? Sociologists tend to think about affects as epiphenomenal of other social forces or domains (namely, culture and political economy). In contrast, cultural scholar Sara Ahmed posits that affects circulate, “sticking to” and constituting both objects and subjects, and forming affective economies. What if social scientists (and society) instead constituted affect, long subordinated through racialization and feminization, as a foundational social object or system, as we constitute polity, economy, and culture? Is there an empirical basis for an “affect system”?
Payne, Sarah. 2022. “Equalization or Reproduction? ‘Some College’ and the Social Function of Higher Education.” Sociology of Education. Online first: https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407221134809.
ABSTRACT: What are the economic consequences of college non-completion? Given escalating student debt, is ‘some college’ still worth it? This paper applies Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting to the NLSY97 to estimate the causal effect of college non-completion on income and financial hardship. Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt. However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated. Such contradictions complicate equalization and reproduction theories of higher education, because higher education appears to have both equalizing (in the case of completion) and reproductive (in the case of non-completion) effects. I argue this ambiguity is substantively meaningful, suggesting future research should examine whether the production of ambiguity constitutes a key social function of higher education.
Payne, Sarah. “Mobility and Ideology.” Manuscript in preparation.
Payne, Sarah. “What Happens After ‘Some College’: Qualitative Evidence from New Orleans.” Manuscript in preparation.
Payne, Sarah. “The Affect System.” Working paper.