The reception on campus: differences in students’ experiences deploying cultural capital in college

Cultural capital can play a critical role in facilitating success in higher education. Consequently, scholars and educators often focus on the possession of cultural capital, highlighting differences in the amount or type of capital that students bring with them to college as a source of class-stratified educational experiences and outcomes. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of attending to disparities in the recognition of cultural capital within educational institutions. We draw on interviews with low-income students of color who had acquired significant cultural knowledge in their pre-college environments. Despite similar backgrounds and shared exposure to a curriculum that deliberately cultivated cultural capital, participants reported markedly different institutional responses to their attempts to deploy that capital. These disparate experiences and outcomes also underscore the need for sociologists to attend more closely to the ‘small moments’ that may shape an individual’s trajectory.