Can you go home again? The impact of social class mobility via graduate education on identity and family relationships

This study utilized a qualitative, grounded theory approach to explore how doctoral graduates raised in working class households experience the impact of academic, professional, and economic success on their identity and relationships with close family members. A semi-structured interview was administered to a heterogeneous sample of 13 participants whose parents were not college educated, who had completed their degree no more than three years prior and who were gainfully employed. The participants in this study each expressed the sense that social mobility via education is a unique experience that does not fully correspond with the usual and expected reactions to success in education and financial stability that persons raised in middle or upper social classes would experience. The participants overwhelmingly supported the idea that it is essentially difficult, but not impossible to integrate their dual class identities following the completion of their social mobility journey. Participants and family members were first faced with the reality that the process of becoming highly educated produced a change in the self encompassing morals, values, ideals, customs, attitudes, beliefs, speech patterns and thought processes. The next major change for the socially mobile intellectual and their family members was the financial and social class shift that placed them in the position to possess more and have more opportunities than their family. Participants who came from families that accepted and supported their education without seeing it as a threat or the process of obtaining it as a defection were able to integrate their dual class identities with relative success. Those participants who experienced their working class status as a burden, felt disadvantaged in childhood and had family members who had difficulty accepting their educated selves experienced a disintegration of their class identity accompanied by self-doubt resulting in painful feelings of alienation and the questioning of the legitimacy of their success.