What you know, who you know, where you live: understanding how habitus influences career selections among urban students

Abstract

Despite increasing gains in the number of African Americans obtaining university degrees, they remain underrepresented in many career paths. This dissertation examines how low-income, urban, African American students, who attend university, discover and select careers. By examining this process, I attempt to make more explicit the reasoning behind their career choices. Using a phenomenological approach, I investigated the lived experiences of 12 students who were part of an auxiliary educational program and who were attending a large research university in their home city. Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, social capital, and practice, along with the concept of code-switching, provided the framework to examine the student's experiences and choices. Interviews were also conducted with 2 staff members from the auxiliary program and 2 staff members from the university career center. All twelve students exhibited a strong sense of self-efficacy and expressed confidence about the career choices they made. However, they appear to make career choices based on very limited and generic career exposure opportunities. Recommendations for how to expose and encourage low-income, urban, African American students towards fields in which African Americans are underrepresented include more concentrated efforts to generate alternative networking/social capital building relationships, increasing the number of career research projects students complete while in high school, and more resources and support for guidance staff/career counselors at urban high schools.