{"id":5803,"date":"2013-04-09T19:36:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T00:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=5803"},"modified":"2014-01-28T13:10:23","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T19:10:23","slug":"nice-work-education-social-class-and-the-heteronormative-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2013\/04\/09\/nice-work-education-social-class-and-the-heteronormative-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"education, social class and the heteronormative dream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.tigers-world.com\/images\/Nice_Couple_of_Tigers_600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"175\" height=\"116\" \/>You heard about <em>the letter<\/em>: Princeton alumna Susan Patton <a href=\"http:\/\/thedailyprincetonian.wordpress.com\/2013\/03\/29\/opinion-letter-to-the-editor-march-29-2013\/\">worries that Princeton women<\/a> might not find husbands as smart as they are if they don\u2019t find \u2019em while still at college. Behind her anxiety is the view that: one, marriage is a partnership (between two different sexes) of intellectual equals\u2014and, two, college sorts people into roughly equal intellectual groups.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been listening to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2013\/04\/05\/opinion\/gerson-women-marriage\">lots<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2013\/04\/04\/176191335\/a-letter-on-finding-a-husband-before-graduation-spurs-debate\">fun commentary<\/a> about the Patton letter when I am not pondering other news about troubles in elite education. A week before the Patton letter, Carolyn Hoxby and Christopher Avery (Stanford and Harvard; they must be smart!) presented <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/03\/17\/education\/scholarly-poor-often-overlook-better-colleges.html?pagewanted=all\">new information<\/a> about how elite colleges are failing to recruit students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Hoxby and Avery <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/~\/media\/projects\/bpea\/spring%202013\/2013a_hoxby.pdf\">report<\/a> that among the high achieving high school students, only 34 percent of those from low-income families end up at the fancy colleges that their extremely high grades and high test scores would qualify them for. This is less than half the rate for \u201cachievers\u201d from high-income families, where 78 percent go to top-tier schools. The smart students in the bottom income quarter go, instead, to local universities or community colleges. These economically disadvantaged kids, Hoxby and Avery believe, are not aware of the elite educational options, and don\u2019t appear to have information about how much aid is available from the most elite schools.<\/p>\n<p>So for women who recognize that rushing into marriage really is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2013\/04\/05\/opinion\/gerson-women-marriage\">not a smart thing to do<\/a>, but are worried that they can\u2019t find smart partners if they aren\u2019t at Princeton or the like, they can relax, slow it down, and realize that there are a lot of smart potential partners who are not at elite schools. Not even counting all those smart <a href=\"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=5779\">men who don&#8217;t even start (or start but don&#8217;t finish) college<\/a>, given the growing gender gap in higher education. It turns out that there are lots of smarties who aren\u2019t at elite and selective colleges.<\/p>\n<p>But, Patton might still be worried. Part of me thinks that she might be saying \u201csmart\u201d kids but meaning kids from a \u201chigher social class.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Patton&#8217;s letter reminds me that the heteronormative dream (Girls! Find your ideal boy!)\u00a0 is still profoundly concerned about matching on social class as much as it is about finding an intellectual (or some other human quality) peer. But what do I know? My boyfriend went to Princeton.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?page_id=31\">-Virginia Rutter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You heard about the letter: Princeton alumna Susan Patton worries that Princeton women might not find husbands as smart as they are if they don\u2019t find \u2019em while still at college. Behind her anxiety is the view that: one, marriage is a partnership (between two different sexes) of intellectual equals\u2014and, two, college sorts people into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21108,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-work","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5803"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7035,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803\/revisions\/7035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}