An illuminating look at the emotional costs of mobility faced by first-generation and low-income college students. -While college initiates a major transition in all students- lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to college, their emotional lives, too, undergo a transformation. Surrounded by peers from different classes and cultural backgrounds, they are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside. An ethnography that draws on in-depth interviews with one hundred and fifty first-generation and low-income students across eighteen elite institutions, Polished uncovers the hidden consequences of the promise of social mobility in today-s educational landscape. Sociologist Melissa Osborne reveals how the very support designed to propel first-generation students forward can une
