Research Project

Eliza Adler

Writing Across Differences

5/15/02

Economic Class and Outlook on Life:

 What is the Connection?

            In an era where a college degree is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for employment in many areas, and the cost of matriculation at an elite college or university is upwards of one hundred thousand dollars over a period of four years, fewer and fewer students are able to complete an undergraduate education without some sort of financial aid or scholarship.  Many colleges and universities have increased the number of merit-based scholarships that are awarded to prospective students.  This alteration from a need-based scholarship to an achievement-based one leaves many students without sufficient funds to attend an elite institution for their undergraduate degree (Toch 1998).  As a result, there has been a widening in the gap in availability of higher education to minority and economically disadvantaged groups.  This has lead to a decline in the possibility of "equal access education" in spite of several current federal laws (Davis 2001).  Because of this transition in education, many people have been requesting federal support for public higher education in order to increase facilities and members of the faculty and staff (Desantis 2000).  In recognizing that this correlation exists between higher education and economic class, I became interested in how this condition affects college students today.  I wondered if there was a difference in how a person viewed life, whether more positively or negatively, based on their economic class.  In unraveling this issue further, I began to see how multi-dimensional a question it really is, and this piqued my interest even more.  Within the setting of an elite educational institution like Middlebury, I realized that I would have an ideal population of people to discuss this matter with.  From all this, sprung the idea for a research project that felt both important to understand and intriguing to study.

How does economic class affect a person's outlook on life?  This question is much more complex than it may at first seem.  When I decided to do my research project on this subject I had a previously formulated idea of what the answer might be.  I thought that people generally would be split into four groups.  The first group would include people on the higher end of the socio-economic scale whose economic class rarely entered their thought process and who maintained a generally positive outlook on life.  The second group would consist of people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale and would be people who were proud of their class background and believed, like group one, that in the future they would remain in their current class.  The third group would again be those people who came from the high end of the socio-economic scale, but who also felt a severe burden from those around them to behave in a certain way that conformed to standards of conduct regarding their economic class, which did not feel natural to them.  Thus, people from group three would be less satisfied with themselves, and with Middlebury, and would generally have a more negative outlook on life.  The fourth group of people would be those from the lower end of the socio-economic scale who were dissatisfied with their class position and desired to change economic classes in the future.  I believed that these people would either feel more negative about themselves and the world around them, like group three, or they would have a strong sense of drive and purpose and have a more positive outlook on life.  While some of my results confirmed my initial hypothesis, this issue is incredibly complex and is not as easily categorized into such clearly definable groups, as I once believed it to be.

In order to assess my hypothesis within an actual context, I decided to form a survey for Middlebury students to fill out.  In creating my survey, I included questions that were related to both economic class standing and perceptions and a person's general outlook on life.  However, I consciously made a choice not to connect these two areas of questioning within my survey, except on the last question.  I wanted my participants to fill out the survey without having an idea in their heads of what I was 'looking' for.  By not connecting the two ideas within the survey until the very end, I felt that my results would be more accurate and less biased.

The survey consisted of twenty-two questions.  Three were general information, eight were regarding economic class specifically, ten focused on a person's outlook on life, and the one final long answer question connected the two ideas and left room for people to go in depth into their ideas on this issue.  After having about twenty people fill out my survey I looked them over and decided that I would receive so much information from just the survey that that would make up the majority of my primary research.  Initially, I was going to supplement this data with a battery of one-on-one interviews, but after realizing what a huge amount of data would be generated by my surveys, I decided to stick to a few interviews instead.  This would give me time to focus on analyzing the data from my surveys, while also experiencing the difference in conducting a small number of one-on-one interviews, and also being able to utilize that data in my research as well.

            Overall, I found that the majority of the sixty-one people who filled out my survey had quite positive outlooks about their life in general.  Only fourteen people said something other than that both they themselves and other people are, at the core, good.  Of the people who answered something other than simply "good," only five gave negative answers and no one responded that, at the core, people are "evil."  I found this interesting because it demonstrated a level of positive outlook and a lack of overarching cynical attitudes that I was not expecting.  I believed I would find more of a balance within the reactions of my participants, and thus, that a larger number students would have a more negative outlook on life.  I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people with positive outlooks who filled out my survey.

In accordance with my finding that a majority of the participants had at least a fairly positive outlook on life, came my results about their satisfaction with their economic class.  Forty-eight people, out of sixty-one, said that they were satisfied with their economic class standing.  This result confirms, in part, my initial hypothesis regarding the connection between economic class and a positive outlook on life.  People who are satisfied with their socio-economic status, regardless of whether they wish to remain in that class or change classes, seemed to have a generally positive outlook on life.  Of those forty-eight people, only five said that they were less than 'mostly' happy at Middlebury College, and all of those five responded that they were at least 'sometimes' happy at Middlebury.  None of these forty-eight participants were unhappy at Middlebury College.  Only six of my sixty-one total participants said that they were unhappy with their economic class, while seven replied that they were sometimes satisfied with their socio-economic status.

Approximately half of the people who said that they were satisfied with their economic class identified as either an optimist or an idealist, whereas the other half identified themselves as realist or some combination of two categories.  There were only three people who identified as a pessimist or some combination of categories including pessimist.  Of these three people, none of them said that they were satisfied with their economic class.  One of these three participants said specifically that she felt that one≠s outlook on life could be negatively affected by one≠s economic class given an environment where there is a strong presence of upper class students (like at Middlebury, she stated).  Discovering that the portion of people who identified as pessimists were unsatisfied with their socio-economic status, also confirmed my original hypothesis.  A pessimist, by definition, is a person who has "a tendency to stress the negative or unfavorable or to take the gloomiest possible view" (www.dictionary.com).  Therefore, it follows that the people who were unsatisfied with their economic class, and who also identified as pessimists, would have a more negative outlook on life.

            One of the most interesting and surprising things that I found from my surveys is that many people did not know how much money their parents made annually.  Several people approached me and asked me what to answer for that question, and I told them to do their best and make an educated guess.  Some people did make a guess and others skipped the question all together.  I found this fact extremely intriguing because that means that people who did not know how much money their parents were making annually, even enough to make an educated guess, were basing all of their survey answers on a perceived economic class.  What, if not actual yearly earnings, made people associate with a certain socio-economic class?  While my project did not answer this question, it did raise this interesting issue from which I have been able to conjecture a hypothesis.  At this point, the most educated guess I have been able to formulate about this matter, from the other answers on the surveys, particularly from the long answer question, is that one's perceived economic class has a lot to do with the type of town or city one comes from, the history of a family's socio-economic status, and also the way one's parents (or other influential adults) deals with, and feels about, money in general.  If a person's parents are very tightfisted with money, then the person may perceive that they are from a lower socio-economic class than in reality, whereas people whose parents are more generous with their money may perceive themselves to be from a higher economic class than they are in actuality.

            In agreement with this discovery of a lack of knowledge about actual monetary income, I found a large discrepancy between the economic classes that people perceived themselves to be from and the amount of money their parents made annually.  Only three of my sixty-one participants identified as being part of the upper class, whereas thirteen people stated that their parents made more then two hundred thousand dollars annually.  This is a discrepancy of thirteen percent within my participant population (five percent identified as upper class whereas twenty-one percent stated a yearly income of over two hundred thousand dollars).  I found this result extremely curious because, in relation to the United States at large, families that make a collective annual income of over two hundred thousand dollars are considered objectively to be a part of the upper class.  What made these students feel that they were a part of the upper-middle class instead of the upper class?  Did it have to do with a certain amount of shame and embarrassment that is felt around an acknowledgement that one belongs to the highest class in a given society?  This has become a part of my hypothesis.  I have noticed from informal discussions regarding this issue with my friends and peers, that there is a dramatic stigmatization for both the upper class and lower class.  It seems to me that both extremes carry with them a certain burden, one of both personal and social responsibility.  One of my interviewees commented she felt like, "both extremes have a social responsibility inherent in their economic class standing."  By this she meant that people in the upper class have a duty to use their money wisely and help people who are less fortunate than they, and that people in the lower class have a responsibility to work hard and try to move up on the socio-economic ladder.

            Within my sixty-one surveys, I discovered a trend for people to tend towards the middle and upper-middle classes when asked what economic class they would like to be a part of.  Fifty-four percent of my participants responded that they would ideally be part of the upper-middle class, sixteen percent said middle class, five percent said either upper-middle or middle class, and seven percent responded that they would be satisfied in any socio-economic class.  This leaves only eighteen percent of the participants who said something other than upper-middle, middle class, or don≠t care.  Of this eighteen percent, fifteen percent said that they would like to be part of the upper class, whereas three percent said that they would ideally belong to the lower-middle class.  These results seemed to indicate a strong preference for the median, or slightly above, within my participants.  While many people talk about wanting to have more money and be able to afford extra luxuries in life, I found that people generally had a negative attitude towards the upper class.  They described upper class people as self-centered, naïve, and entitled.  These views pose an opposition to the concept of "The American Dream."  It seemed as though my participants viewed an excess of money as a negative burden that would turn a person into someone else if they had it, and that this change would not be for the better.  However, as I said before, this feeling did not deter many of my participants from desiring to have more money themselves.

The stigmatization of the upper class is something that I have noticed to be taken less seriously than that of the lower class.  It is the classic example of the prince and the pauper, neither of who are happy with their position in life.  However, that story invariably ends with the message that it is better to be a pauper than a prince.  The prince is always snobby and overly-sheltered, whereas the pauper is less of a caricature and more of a real, down-to-earth, boy.  In the end, the prince realizes his naïveté and begins a self-transformation into a boy more like the pauper.  While the message may be intended to be that "money is not everything," in fact, the audience sees that the pauper has much better values than the prince, not to mention a more honorable type of lifestyle.  Therefore, the upper-class boy is seen as being in a less desirable position in relation to the pauper by the end of the story.  This common fairytale has become an ingrained narrative within our society, pegging many upper class people as insensitive and selfish.  Those people in the upper class, who do not have these negative qualities, are often seen as being outside the norm, and more like the rest of society (a.k.a the middle and lower classes).

In conducting a survey designed to determine the correlation between one's economic class and one's outlook on life within and elite college setting, I found a whole host of interesting results.  The discovery that majority of participants seemed, both satisfied with their socio-economic status and had a positive outlook on life, surprised me.  I had expected more people with negative attitudes all around.  However, I did find a slight correlation between those people who had negative attitudes and outlooks and who were dissatisfied with their economic class.  I found, what seemed to me, a strong aversion towards identifying with the upper class more than any other class.  From discussions and interviews I noticed a host of negative stereotypes that people associated with being from the upper class.  On the other hand, several people said that they wanted to move up in socio-economic status in their lives, a few of who wanted to be part of that upper class.  I also discovered that a number of my participants were basing their answers on a perceived economic class, which I found to be extremely interesting.  If economic class is supposed to correlate to a certain sum of money, made both annually and also inherited, how did these people "know" what their economic status was if they didn't have enough knowledge of their own money to even make an educated guess about annual earnings?  The three factors that seemed to be most influential in determining one's socio-economic status besides money were: one's parents and guardians conceptions of money, the type of place where a person was raised, and the historical lineage of one's family's economic status.

I believe that the correlation between one's economic class and one's outlook on life, particularly in a college setting, is important to study because we are living in a time where education is paramount in order to obtain a greater number of jobs and careers than ever before.  If a person has a negative outlook on life, then it may be very difficult for that person to achieve their highest goals.  However, if a person has a positive outlook on life, regardless of their economic class standing, then that person may be more likely to succeed in whatever s/he puts his/her mind to.  With an increasing gap in the availability of higher education to the public, the link between economic class and outlook on life is becoming increasingly important to understand.  In order to advance our society as a whole, we need to include all individuals and at least allow them an opportunity to do what they want in life.  If person is being held back twofold, by both their economic class and their outlook on life, then it may be extremely difficult for that person to attain his/her goals in life.  This issue is real and needs recognition within the public sphere in order to have any chance of changing and getting better.

Last update: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 at 4:00:19 PM
Copyright 2002 the short stuff

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