We’ll start by previewing a refresh of pathways.stanford.edu — designed to better convey the network’s core task of specifying a new science of progress in school and at work. We welcome your input.
We’ll devote most of the hour to hearing from Network affiliate Blake Silver about his brand-new book, Degrees of Risk: Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education (Chicago 2024). Congratulations Blake!
More about the book: Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case. Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examines interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He identifies how the college experience plays out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions.