Who’s the grown-up here?

I remember it vividly, like it was just yesterday.

I was a first-year PhD student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. It was March 2020. Like many students, I had been traveling for spring break—then, like many (privileged) students, I ended up spending the rest of the spring 2020 semester sheltering in place in my childhood bedroom.

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Why Bella went home (and why Lexie didn’t).

Interviews with undergraduates during COVID-19 lockdowns illuminate how social class shapes the most intimate dimensions of family life, including how we understand what we deserve from and owe to our parents.

“Once quarantine started in March, one of my first thoughts was, ‘Shit, I’m not going to see my parents for a long time,’” Lexie told me that November over Zoom. A college junior from a low-income family, Lexie was just finishing her second semester of remote instruction at an elite university in the northeastern United States.

Although many of her classmates had returned to their parents’ homes when students were ordered to vacate the dorms the previous March, Lexie had not. The risk of bringing COVID-19 to her parents was too great, she told me, explaining: “My parents are 75 and 63. They both have every single health condition you could think of: diabetes, asthma . . . they're both really overweight . . . which means that for COVID, if they get it, they will die.”

Lexie’s mom had begged her to come home. “I don't know what [my mom was thinking], because my mom knows that I'm a very stubborn person,” Lexie told me. “When I make a decision about something, especially when it regards her safety, I’m not going to budge on that.”

Crowdsourcing information from friends, Lexie found an apartment to sublet from a classmate who had returned home. Although Lexie felt fortunate to have found a place to stay, she struggled with the isolation of living alone in lockdown: “Everyone I knew went back home and lived with their parents,” Lexie said, describing the end of the spring 2020 semester. She told me, “I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was the worst time in my life.”

About a month later, I interviewed Lexie’s classmate, Bella. The daughter of two Ivy-educated professionals, Bella said she occupied two empty bedrooms in her parents’ spacious suburban home – one for sleep, the other for schoolwork. “My parents were willing to do whatever would make the spring more fun for me and for them,” Bella explained, recounting that they ordered a wine subscription and meal prep kits. Bella’s parents also ensured that she was set up with the technology she needed for remote classes: “they bought me a monitor and all these other accessories to help make studying easier,” Bella said.

Although Bella was already living in an off-campus apartment when the dorms closed that March, she explained that it was more appealing to move home because she knew her parents could take care of her there. “Because it was such a scary virus, I was like, ‘OK, I'll just come home and let you guys take care of me,’” Bella explained, adding, “It didn’t hurt that [my parents] were going to pay for all of my food and stuff for that time.”

At face value, Lexie’s and Bella’s pandemic housing trajectories may be surprising. Lexie’s mother wanted her to return home, and she could have saved money by doing so. Bella was already living in an off-campus apartment, and she could have stayed put. So what explains their housing decisions?

My research demonstrates that understanding why Bella moved home—and why Lexie did not—requires understanding their underlying relationships with their parents.

Privileged dependence, precarious autonomy

Lexie and Bella were two of the 48 undergraduates I interviewed to understand how students from different social class backgrounds navigated COVID-19 campus closings. These students all attended the same elite residential university, but half came from working-class families and the other half came from upper-middle-class families. As their disparate experiences suggest, I observed striking class divides.  

When I began this study in March 2020, I expected to see inequalities in the material resources parents would be able to provide—and I certainly did. Yet the class divides I observed went beyond immediate resource constraints. As I wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family, I found that students’ housing decisions also reflected dramatically different understandings of their relationships with their parents.

 My interviews revealed class divides in students’ understandings of (a) their parents’ authority, (b) their own entitlement to parents’ resources, and (c) their obligations to their families. Together, these understandings informed how students made decisions about where to live and how to interact with their families during remote instruction. Upper-middle-class students became more dependent on their parents—what I term privileged dependence—while working-class students took on more adult responsibility than ever—precarious autonomy.

Authority

Class divides in students’ understandings of intergenerational authority came through most clearly in their initial decisions about where to live when the dorms closed in March 2020. Upper-middle-class parents tended to be highly involved in students’ housing decisions and travel arrangements. Their children typically felt they had to live where their parents wanted them to. This reflected both students’ respect for their parents’ expertise about how to stay safe and students’ feeling that the people who pay the bills call the shots.

Working-class students, by contrast, typically made decisions more independently. These students often felt they knew more than their parents. Further, working-class parents lacked financial leverage: students like Lexie were typically paying all or most of their own college expenses (here, it’s important to consider how institutional context shaped the dynamics I observed: at the highly-resourced university in my study, working-class students benefitted from unusually generous financial aid packages - this gave them financial leverage their socioeconomic peers at other colleges wouldn’t have possessed).  

Entitlement

Second, students’ narratives revealed class divides in the extent to which they felt entitled to parents’ resources. Upper middle-class students like Bella generally viewed parents’ homes as their homes and parents’ money as their money. They typically described child-centered relationships in which both parents and students prioritized the student’s comfort, health, and academic progress. Bella’s decision to return home illustrates this dynamic well—she wanted to be at home so that her parents could take care of her.

In contrast, working-class students like Lexie actively considered parents’ needs, vulnerabilities, and constraints when making decisions about where to live and how to interact with their families. They typically felt far less entitled to parents’ resources—which were, of course, far more limited. Many working-class students (including many who moved home) expressed fears of being a health risk, a financial burden, or an inconvenience to their families.

Obligation

Finally, there were class divides in students’ understandings of their obligations to their families. Whereas privileged students like Bella generally took it for granted that their parents would run the household while they focused on school, working-class students who went home typically had more responsibilities. These included running errands, driving parents to work, caring for elderly family members, and helping manage young siblings’ remote schooling. Some working-class students purposefully avoided returning home because they anticipated such responsibilities would interfere with schoolwork. Others who did return home often put academics to the side to tend to family members’ needs.

The uncertain future

My findings suggest implications for inequality, both during the immediate context of the pandemic and beyond. There were clear short-term benefits to privileged students’ greater dependence on parents during remote instruction. Privileged parents’ socioeconomic resources and the shared assumption that their young adult children would continue to rely on these resources protected upper-middle-class students like Bella from a variety of financial and academic disruptions. These protections—which were not available to less advantaged peers like Lexie—may yield longer-term payoffs, thus amplifying inequalities between students.

Comparing the experiences of Lexie, Bella, and their peers also offers a window into underlying differences in these young adults’ relationships with their parents. Students’ options for dealing with the campus closings were clearly constrained by their own and their parents’ immediate circumstances at the onset of the pandemic. But the class divides I observed extended beyond immediate resource constraints. The students I interviewed made decisions that reflected class-specific understandings of intergenerational authority, their entitlement to their parents’ resources, and their obligations to their families. My findings underscore the need to consider students’ relationships with their parents in understanding their educational decisions, experiences, and outcomes, both during the pandemic and beyond.

Read more:

van Stee, Elena G. In Press. “No place like home?” Contexts.

van Stee, Elena G. 2023. “Privileged Dependence, Precarious Autonomy: Parent/Young Adult Relationships through the Lens of COVID-19.” Journal of Marriage and Family 85(1):215–32. (here)

van Stee, Elena G. 2022. “Parenting Young Adults across Social Class: A Review and Synthesis.” Sociology Compass 16(9):1–16. (here)

Originally written for the Council on Contemporary Families.

3 things the pandemic taught us about inequality in college — and why they matter today

Elise, a nursing student at an elite U.S. university in the Northeast, found herself back home and sleeping on the floor of her parents’ one-bedroom apartment after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020.

It was tough to get a good night’s sleep as family members passed through to the kitchen or the front door. Such interruptions also made it difficult to concentrate during lectures and exams. Sometimes, limited internet bandwidth made it impossible for Elise to attend class at all. She couldn’t ask her parents to buy her a new computer to replace the one that was breaking down, she explained, because she knew they couldn’t afford it.

Meanwhile, Elise’s classmate, Bella, a business student and the daughter of two Ivy League-educated professionals, had two empty bedrooms at her parents’ home. She used one for sleep, the other for schoolwork. Her parents had purchased “a monitor and all these other accessories to help make studying easier.”

As a doctoral candidate in sociology, I study inequality among young adults. Elise and Bella are two of the 48 undergraduates I interviewed to understand how college students from different socioeconomic backgrounds dealt with COVID-19 campus closings. Although all attended the same elite university, upper-middle class students like Bella often enjoyed academic and financial benefits from parents that their less affluent peers like Elise did not.

Just because most college students have gone back to in-person classes doesn’t mean these disparities have gone away. Here are three lessons from the pandemic that can help colleges better address student inequality going forward:

1. The digital divide disrupts learning

Elise wasn’t the only student in my study who didn’t have the learning technology she needed. “It was a solid two and a half weeks where I didn’t have a laptop,” said Shelton, a social sciences major, describing how he wrote a four-page research paper on his phone. Although Shelton had secured a laptop by the time I interviewed him in June 2020, he still didn’t have Wi-Fi in his off-campus apartment.

Before the pandemic, college students could typically use their school’s computer labs and internet hot spots on campus. During remote instruction, however, many had to join classes from smartphones or park outside stores to access free Wi-Fi.

Although most undergraduates own a cellphone and laptop, the functionality of these devices and their ability to stay connected to the internet are not equal.

2. Living conditions are learning conditions

When residential universities sent undergraduates home in March 2020, some students did not have a home they could safely return to. Others, including some in my study, feared exposing parents to COVID-19 or being a financial burden. Still others had concerns about space, privacy, internet access or disruptions from family members.

“I didn’t even have a desk at home,” recalled Jennifer, a STEM major who stayed in a friend’s living room before moving to her grandparents’ house.

Even before the pandemic, students living in dormitories were in the minority. Far more undergraduates live off campus, many with their parents. In a fall 2019 survey, 35% of four-year college students and half of community college students reported housing challenges, which included being unable to pay rent and leaving a household because they felt unsafe.

The struggles of students like Jennifer call attention to socioeconomic divides among students who were living off campus all along. These include inequalities in space, quiet and furniture for studying.

3. Many students are family caregivers, too

Finally, the pandemic increased many students’ caregiving responsibilities, which sometimes limited the time they could spend on schoolwork.

For example, Ashley, a social sciences major, described how she shopped, cooked and managed her younger siblings’ remote schooling while her mom worked a retail job. “It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that I was [home] to help, but it definitely impaired my studies,” she told me.

Before the pandemic, Ashley had helped support her family financially from a distance. But her responsibilities grew when she returned home and was the only adult available to help her younger siblings.

Contrary to the popular idea of college as a time of self-focused exploration, recent studies describe ways that some students — often from low-income, minority or immigrant families — support their families. These include sending money home, helping siblings with homework, assisting parents with digital technology and chaperoning medical appointments. Such responsibilities are often invisible to university instructors and administrators.

Students are members of families and communities, and they enter the classroom with different resources and responsibilities. Inclusive classrooms require instructors to demonstrate awareness, empathy and flexibility around these differences.

 But empathy won’t fix students’ laptops or pay their rent. The pandemic highlighted inequalities that are reinforced by universities designed for so-called “traditional” college students — fresh out of high school, living on campus, financially supported by their parents, and having few caregiving responsibilities. Yet such students are a privileged minority.

Originally posted on The Conversation.

"Student" by CollegeDegrees360 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Social class matters at college. What happened when campuses shut down?

Relationships with parents are a powerful—yet often hidden—source of inequality among college students.

Sociologists have extensively studied parental support in college, demonstrating how parents’ unequal socioeconomic resources produce inequalities on campus. For example, recent studies describe affluent and educated parents paying for tuition, coaching students how to interact with faculty, providing and funding internships, and editing résumés—forms of assistance not typically available to students whose parents did not attend college. However, we know less about how young adults themselves expect, negotiate, or attach meaning to these forms of parental support or how this varies across social class.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic.

 As sociologists have long recognized, major disruptions—heat waves, hurricanes, and the like—can offer novel insight into social processes that are otherwise difficult to observe. The COVID-19 pandemic upended US higher education and thrust a generation of college students into a state of crisis. Thus it provided an ideal context to examine how students seek help from parents.

In a new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, I leverage the case of COVID-19 campus closings to examine social class differences in young adults’ understandings and experiences of parental support—as well as the implications for inequality.

Privileged dependence, precarious autonomy 

My interviews with 48 working-class and upper-middle-class college students during the early months of the pandemic revealed striking class differences in these students’ relationships with parents.

In this period of heightened fear and uncertainty, upper-middle-class students typically turned to parents for security and reassurance—a pattern that I call “privileged dependence.” In contrast, working-class students demonstrated “precarious autonomy” as they tried to figure things out on their own. Some even provided help to other family members along the way.

Two factors led to these differences. First, there were class differences in students’ understandings of parental authority. Second, there were class differences in the weight students gave to family members’ needs and interests. Together, these factors shaped students’ decisions about where to live and how to interact with their families.

Who decides what to do?

Upper-middle-class students generally saw their parents as having the final say over major life decisions, whereas working-class students typically felt they could decide for themselves. These different perceptions of parents’ authority shaped how students responded to pandemic-related disruptions, especially decisions about where to live when their university suddenly instructed students to vacate the campus in March 2020.

Gladly or grudgingly, upper-middle-class students typically followed parents’ directions for travel, housing, and safety precautions. One reason was that these parents had financial leverage because they were paying all or most of their children’s college expenses. Many upper-middle-class students also thought their parents “knew more” than they did. For example, Margot told me:

I remember getting home and feeling such a weight taken off of my shoulders because I was like, “This is such a controlled space. I’m very happy weathering it out here because I feel like my parents know what’s up.”

In contrast, few working-class students expected their parents to tell them what was safe or thought it was necessary to gain parents’ approval for their housing choices. In working-class families, parents often had little to no financial leverage. As Taylor said about her dad:

It all just comes back to this incredible thing, which is: if you don’t give me money, then I don’t have to listen to you.

Some working-class students withheld information about their plans from parents, either to spare them worry or to avoid hearing their opinions. For example, Shelton told me that he did not consult his parents about housing decisions because:

I feel like I’ve become very autonomous. ... I don’t want to add more stress to [my parents] because they’re already very stressed out. ... I usually handle everything on my own, and I have done so pretty much since I started college.

 Thus, while for upper-middle-class students, it was clearly their parents’ decision where they would live during the pandemic, working-class students viewed the decision as their own, not their parents’.

Differences in decision factors

In addition to shaping the balance of power, social class shaped which factors students weighed when deciding where to live and how to interact with their parents. Whereas upper-middle-class students emphasized the comfort and protection that parents could provide for them, working-class students actively considered parents’ needs and vulnerabilities. 

Many working-class students expressed a sense of responsibility to protect their parents from exposure to COVID-19, to provide financial support, or to help care for other family members. For example, a working-class student named Ashley described how she ran the household—shopping, cooking, and managing her younger siblings’ remote schooling—while her mom worked retail. Ashley used her own money to supplement the grocery budget and purchase learning supplies and toys for her siblings. She told me,

 It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that I was [at home] to help, but it definitely impaired my studies.

Ashley was acutely aware of the contrast between her experience and that of her more privileged peers. She was shocked to see upper-middle-class parents clearly catering to students’ needs in the background of the Zoom screens.

 Ashley explained the difference she observed between her more affluent peers’ experiences and her own:

[My upper-middle-class peers are] still considered kids. ... It’s still very much a position of like, “I’m your parent, what can I do to help you?” ... There are other people [like me] who are like, “What can you do to help your parents?” Because they’re the ones experiencing the difficulty, and all you have to do is log onto this online class and do X amount of reading or whatever it is you have to do for your class.

 Indeed, many of the upper-middle-class students I spoke to described their parents cooking meals, doing laundry, ensuring that chores didn’t interfere with academics, providing academic advice and assistance, purchasing learning technology, upgrading the home WiFi, and, in one case, even hiring an in-person tutor.

These findings suggest mechanisms of inequality.

There were clear short-term benefits to upper-middle-class students’ dependence on parents during the pandemic. For example, whereas many upper-middle-class students told me that they were maintaining or even building savings while living with parents, many working-class students described struggling to make ends meet. And while upper-middle-class students typically enjoyed protected time and quiet workspaces, working-class students encountered more caregiving responsibilities and environmental distractions.

In sum, upper-middle-class parents’ greater socioeconomic resources and the shared assumption that students would continue to rely on these resources protected upper-middle-class students from a variety of financial and academic disruptions. These protections may yield longer-term payoffs, thus amplifying inequalities between students.

Overall, my findings add to growing evidence that COVID-19 exacerbated inequality in US society. They also highlight the need to consider students’ relationships with parents in understanding inequality among college students—both within and beyond the context of the pandemic.  

Read more:

van Stee, Elena G. 2022. “Privileged Dependence, Precarious Autonomy: Parent/Young Adult Relationships through the Lens of COVID-19.” Journal of Marriage and Family.

Click here to access the full article.

Photography: Adrian van Stee

This essay was originally posted on Work in Progress, a public sociology blog of the American Sociological Association.