Parents from different socioeconomic classes had different visions of what a college education should offer their children. Professional middle-class parents who make efforts to ensure that their children are headed for high-status educational institutions do not expect those institutions to be vocational training grounds.22 To the contrary: in lieu of job preparation, elite parents talk about the important opportunities colleges might provide for self-discovery and for gaining self-confidence. Rather than viewing college as a launching pad to independent adulthood, parents see it as a time for their children to acquire the necessary cultural and social capital to be able to seize any opportunities for status that might arise.
Susan Chase, the white mother of two who works as an attorney in Berkeley, assumes that her children will “at least” attend a liberal arts college. She also assumes that career planning will wait until her children have explored the full range of their potential and discovered their innermost desires:
[By the end of college they should] feel intellectually engaged with the world, through whatever path interests them, whether it’s literature or music or economics or politics, I don’t care what, but [they should find] some way of engaging with the world and have a certain sense of possibilities in dealing with the world. And hopefully [they would find] some kind of sense of direction and something that interests them and draws them that they care about.
Susan’s neighbor, Ron Giddings, a city planner whose household income exceeds $125,000 a year, also thinks that the purpose of college is to create self — awareness rather than to provide concrete job training. Eventually, of course, Ron wants his children (both of whom are still very young) to settle down, but he also anticipates that it may take time for each child to find the “right” path to a satisfying life: “I don’t have any particular career plans for [my kids]. If they don’t have a lot of direction coming out of [college], I don’t find that that concerning. I want them to eventually have direction—find what they want to do that makes them happy. My biggest concern is that they’re on track for some sort of happiness.”
The talk of these highly educated parents reflects the understanding that a college education can provide opportunities for student leadership, team participation, experience working with other people, internships, or simply, as one woman said, the possibility of “making good memories.” One professional middle-class mother expressed a common sentiment when she spoke about her willingness to wait a long time before her children settled on their career choices: “I would like them to have enough education to do what they want to do in life, and it’s looking now like undergraduate isn’t enough. . . . Tfiat’s where you muck around. … In grad school you finally decide what you want to do.” Ibis view that college should provide opportunities for self — discovery rests on the assumption that childhood can be lengthened.