Strategies for success: Parental funding, college achievement, and the transition to adulthood

In this dissertation, I ask whether or not parental financial investments during college translate into the educational and career gains predicted by sociologists. I use a combination of nationally representative survey data of students and longitudinal, ethnographic and interview data on students and their parents to address several key questions. I ask why parents take particular approaches to funding their children's college education, how these approaches shape performance and degree completion, why some approaches are more effective, and how these approaches support gender and class inequalities. I find that parental funding approaches are motivated by cultural logics of young adulthood. These logics suggest one of three primary "products" that parents hope to extract from higher education. The product parents select is shaped but not determined by their available resources. I show that the choice of what product to fund is consequential. The social product is the most expensive and seems to have the most deleterious effect: The quantitative results show that as parental investments increase, student grades decrease. In addition, while low levels of investment boost student degree completion, at high levels they can erase any gains that parental aid may purchase. I show that this is a result of parental monies being channeled to fun rather than human capital acquisition. However, I also discuss how difficult it is for students with low funds to persist in a world designed for young adults without any parental assistance. In the final chapters I also address the responsibility of the university in creating two trajectories through college---a social one and academic one---to exist. I detail the gender and class costs, and examine who are the likely winners and losers.