The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us

by Paul Tough

Upward mobility is not simply a question of earning more money than one’s parents. It is also, for many people, a process of cultural disruption: leaving behind one set of values and assumptions and plunging into a new and foreign one. It can be disorienting and emotionally wrenching, shattering family ties and challenging deeply held notions of identity and purpose.

And a system of economic mobility based on luck—whether it’s the luck of which family and which neighborhood you’re born into, or the luck of what a particular college-admissions officer happens to see in your application on a particular day—is a system that is hard to invest or believe in as deeply as Shannen had done.