Formin Identities in College

Research in Higher Education, Vol. 45, No. 5, August 2004 ( 2004)

FORMING IDENTITIES IN COLLEGE: A Sociological Approach
Peter Kaufman*,*** and Kenneth A. Feldman**

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Using data from 82 in-depth interviews with a randomly selected sample of college students, we explore how these students are forming felt identities in the following domains: intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism. We study the formation of students’ identities by considering college an arena of social interaction in which the individual comes in contact with a multitude of actors in various settings, emphasizing that through these social interactions the identities of individuals are, in part, constituted. In using a symbolic interactionist approach in our research in conjunction with consideration of the social structural location of colleges in the wider society, we demonstrate the sorts of information and insights that can be gained from a nondevelopmental approach to the study of college student change.

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KEY WORDS: identity; college effects; college environment; peer influence.

INTRODUCTION About three decades ago, Feldman (1972) pointed out that the large majority of studies examining change and stability in college students approached the subject more from a developmental and psychological framework than from a sociological one. Some years later, Pascarella and Terenzini (1991), in their comprehensive review of the research on college students and the effects on them of their college experiences, also noted the “overall dominance of the psychological paradigm for explaining student change” (pp. 15–16). Indeed, it might even be argued that some significant proportion of the literature comes close to committing what Dannefer (1984a, 1984b) termed the “ontogenetic fallacy”—the practice of treating socially produced and patterned phenomena as rooted in characteristics of the individual organism. Such an analysis ignores the underlying constitutive forces of the social environment, at best considering the environment as an important but essentially secondary influence that can
*Department of Sociology, State University of New York at New Paltz. **Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook. ***Address correspondence to: Peter Kaufman, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY 12561. E-mail: [email protected] 463
0361-0365/04/0800-0463/0  2004 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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either facilitate or hinder some natural and desirable psychological growth or “maturational unfolding” in persons. The dominance of the psychological paradigm in the study of college students is especially evident in one area of research in higher education—how students’ identities are affected by the college experience. Here the research is predominantly framed and interpreted in terms of the influence of the college experience on students’ progression in identity status, the further development of their ego, or changes in their self-esteem and academic or social worth (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, chap. 5). In contrast to the many sorts of studies reviewed by Pascarella and Terenzini, our own research offers a more sociological approach to the study of change in college students’ identities. We look at the role of college in the formation of self-perceived (or felt) identities (Goffman, 1963) by viewing the college as an arena of social interaction in which the individual comes in contact with a multitude of actors in a variety of settings, emphasizing that through these social interactions and other social influences the identities of individuals are, in part, constituted. We are not saying college (and wider) environments are never considered in the psychological approach, but rather that their consideration appears to be basically secondary. According to Feldman (1972), developmental and psychological theorists or researchers who analyze how students change in college may in part concern themselves with the social contexts and social forces for such change, but their systematic focus is on the psychological dynamics of change. Environments and social structural parameters tend to be considered only insofar as they impinge on personality development. More than one sociological approach might be used in studying the formation of college students’ identities in college. For example, the work of Tinto (1993) and Weidman (1989) is grounded in a sociological perspective (other examples are given in Feldman, 1972, pp. 17–19 and Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, pp. 50–58). Our own approach is based on the one that Feldman—after reviewing and classifying various extant approaches to the study of change and stability of college students—designated as “life-cycle movement (certification and labeling).” This approach is similar to (but not altogether coterminous with) the allocation/credentialing or legitimation theory associated with Meyer (1970, 1977; also see the discussion of socialization and sorting in Knox, Lindsay, and Kolb, 1993). As described by Feldman, this approach, which employs a socialstructural analysis, concentrates on the distinctive life-cycle and institutional context in which college students are located by emphasizing the societal functions of higher education. One aspect of this approach is concerned with the certification and presumed gatekeeping function of higher education. Here, the focus is on the ways in which college certifies students for certain social and occupation positions in the world (usually of the middle and upper-middle classes), channels them in these directions, and to some extent ensures them of entrance to such positions.

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In the words of Riesman and Jencks (1962), “college is an initiation rite for separating the upper-middle from the lower-middle class, and for changing the semi-amorphous adolescent into a semi-identified adult” (p. 78).1 Specific personality, attitudinal, and behavioral changes are not inevitably (or even routinely) discussed within a certification or gatekeeping context. When they are, it generally is done in terms of how colleges, wittingly or unwittingly, prepare students for their new adult roles in given social structures. Feldman (1972) went on to suggest that as students progress through college they are supplied with more than the specific skills, motives, and attitudes they may need in their future positions. In addition, students have attached to them “new and validated social statuses (in the positional rather than hierarchical sense) to which the new personal qualities are appropriate” (Meyer, 1972, p. 109). Feldman connects this line of reasoning to possible changes in identities of students, as:
[In college, the] individual student is incorporated into new social positions, after which he is routinely motivated and encouraged to take on the qualities appropriate to these [new and validated] positions. Moreover, as a student progresses through college, those around him—teachers, peers, parents, and the general community within and outside the college, etc.—define and label him according to the positions he hopes to occupy when he leaves college as well as by the new positions he occupies in college. Not only is he an upperclassman rather than a lowerclassman or a sociology major rather than a fine arts major, he is also a would-be lawyer rather than a would-be plumber, and so forth. In addition to (and as part of) others’ view of him, he is given opportunities to engage in behaviors that were previously either not open to him, not particularly feasible, or not easily do-able (given his previous positions). As new social identities are pressed and impressed upon him, and as he is given the structural opportunities to practice and enact their behavioral implications, the student may well begin to conceive of himself as being a different person from what he once was. (pp. 13–14)

The above excerpt implicitly suggests the interplay among three components of a person’s identity: the person’s felt identity (self-concept), the person’s presentation of his or her identity to others (presented self), and the identity attributed or imputed by others to the person (Goffman, 1959, 1963). Instances of all three components as well as certain examples of the interplay among them can be found in the present study. Of these three components, our primary focus is on the felt identity—in particular, how the felt identities of students are affected by their being in college. We are mainly interested in the extent to which there may be something particularly distinctive about the college experience that allows the individual to construct a particular sense of self. Thus, we are interested in the degree to which college as a particular structural location fosters the formation of particular felt identities as compared with the maintenance of prior or precollege identities. Forming “new” felt identities in college may sometimes overlap (or blend) with modifying prior felt identities, but as much as possible, we stress the former rather than the latter. A person’s sense of self may or may not be altogether consistent from one

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situation to another, even within a particular identity domain (say one’s sense of intelligence or knowledgeability). In any case, the more cumulative or enduring felt identities of persons are partially constructed on these situated felt identities, just as situated felt identities are influenced by the more enduring felt identities brought to a situation as well as by the situation itself. In our analysis, we consider both sorts of felt identities, although we pay particular attention to the more enduring felt identities that students are forming.2 We emphasize further that our use of felt identities includes personal traits or characteristics (e.g., “I am smart”) as well as status or positional identities (e.g., “I am a sociology major; see Hewitt, 1976).3 In essence, we use the term “felt identity” in the same way Goffman (1963) did, as the “subjective sense of . . . [one’s] own situation and . . . [one’s] own continuity and character that an individual comes to obtain as a result of . . . [the person’s] various social experiences” (p. 105). Others, such as Kinney (1993) and Snow and Anderson (1987), substitute the term “personal identity” for felt identity. We have not done so, since this alternative conflicts with Goffman’s own use of the term “personal identity” (Goffman, 1963, chap. 2). Our use of the concept of identity falls within the tradition of sociological social psychology rather than psychology (Weigert, Teitge, and Teitge, 1986). More specifically, in our analysis we rely heavily on the foundation provided by studies of symbolic interaction, especially as found in the work of Goffman (1959, 1963), Granfield (1991), Kinney (1993), Lofland (1969), Mead (1967), and Silver (1996). By using a symbolic interactionist approach to studying social interaction, our focus is not merely on “actual” interaction observable only from the “outside.” Rather, we study both direct and what might be called indirect interaction among individuals as well as the social context of these interactions. We do so in terms of what students tell us about these interactions and the settings in which they occur (including their interpretations of these interactions and settings). A symbolic interactionist framework lets us consider not only face-to-face interaction between students and teachers, students and students, and other such encounters (as described by students) but also the feelings, thoughts, and interpretations of students as they experience college—say, as they sit in lectures, perhaps silently admiring the teacher (or not), as they compare themselves to their student peers, as they study alone in their dorm rooms, as they reflect on what it means to be a college student, and the like. As we elaborate in this article, we found that the college students we studied were most likely to acquire (or significantly modify) their felt identities in three domains: intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism. In making sense of the data we collected, we did not limit our analysis to the explicit self-views and self-concerns expressed by these students. We also used as evidence the indirect expressions of their identities, as found in their descriptions of their thinking and analytic skills, their vocational preferences, their

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worldviews, and their cultural tastes and interests. By incorporating students’ emerging values, attitudes, and preferences into the holistic approach provided by the sociological identity framework, we hoped to understand better the effect of the college experience than if we merely analyzed the change and stability of disparate individual characteristics. Further, the identity framework we use has allowed us to preserve the insights of symbolic interactionists (and related sociological social psychologists), which are not all that frequently applied to the study of college impacts on students. DATA AND METHODS Our research is an outgrowth of a larger project examining the microanalytical processes through which college students engage in social reproduction and social transformation (Kaufman, 1999, 2003). This larger project is concerned with how individuals construct their identities and either reproduce or transform their ascribed social-class position into an achieved social-class position. The sample for this larger research, as well as for the current analysis, comprises 82 college seniors from a large northeastern public university (Carnegie Type I Research University) selected to be broadly representative of the wide population of seniors at that university. The university is situated in a suburban environment approximately 60 miles from a major metropolitan area. The university has approximately 12,000 undergraduate students and 5,000 graduate students. Ninety-five percent of all undergraduates come from within the state. Somewhat more than one third (37%) of all undergraduates come from the county within which the university is located, while approximately another third (36%) come from the nearby metropolitan area. A little over half of all undergraduates (56%) reside on campus. When the data were collected the mean high school grade point average of incoming freshman was 87.5, and a little over one quarter (27%) of freshman ranked in the top 10% of their graduating class (75% ranked in the top 30%). Most students had SAT scores between 400 and 600 for verbal (76%) and for math (70%). The undergraduate student body is rather diverse. According to self-reported data of all undergraduates, a third (34%) identify as white, a quarter (23%) identify as Asian American, almost 10% identify as African American, 7% identify as Hispanic, and 4% are foreign; the remaining 23% identify as other (or the racial/ethnic category is unknown). The population of undergraduates is almost evenly split between males (52%) and females (48%). Such diversity also characterizes the social class of the sample of students. The modal income category of their families (9.2%) was between $45,000 and $54,900, although 50% of the sample had family incomes below $39,000. Conversely, a little over 10% of the sample had family incomes over $85,000. A fair number of students attending this university are first-generation college students. Almost two-thirds

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of their mothers (65%) and slightly more than half of their fathers (52%) do not have college degrees. The students in our study were sampled systematically in two waves. The first wave of respondents was chosen in December 1997 and interviewed between January 1998 and April 1998. The second wave was chosen in September 1998 and interviewed between October 1998 and November 1998. We used two waves because we were unable to interview enough respondents between January 1998 and April 1998. Because college seniors selected in the first wave graduated in May 1998, a second wave of seniors was chosen in September 1998 to complete the sample. Students in both waves were selected randomly from a list provided by the Office of Institutional Research at the university of all undergraduate students aged 24 or under who were citizens of the United States and who listed English as their native language. To help ensure a reasonable response rate, all students were sent a letter informing them that they were selected randomly to participate in a study and that they could expect to be contacted by phone to schedule an interview. Although students were not given any monetary incentive to participate, the response rate was around 75%. Informal discussions with respondents at the end of the interview suggest that this relatively high response rate appears to be attributable in large part to the letter the students received. To establish the various direct and indirect social influences on the formation of felt identities, we used semistructured, open-ended interviews to collect detailed information from students in the sample. In-depth interviewing was particularly useful in providing a forum for these students to define the social world in their own terms (Denzin, 1970). We were particularly interested in students’ interpretation of their experience in college, how they saw themselves in comparison with other individuals, groups, and categories (social comparisons), and how they believed others viewed them (reflected appraisals; Rosenberg, 1986). In the context of a semistructured interview, respondents were able to be reflexive, to challenge their own taken-for-granted notions, and to elaborate on their newly constructed felt identities. Without allowing students to express their felt identities and place them in the appropriate context, researchers may overlook some of the nuances of the college experience and its consequences for the individual. Our interview exchanges provided an opportunity for respondents to consider retrospectively, through a reconstruction of events, how they came to embrace the new identities to which they now adhere (Seidman, 1991). The decision to use semistructured in-depth interviews also reflected a desire to analyze the experiences of students who were embedded within a specific institutional context and to allow for students to be studied individually in order to recognize the objective conditions of their subjective realities (Louis and Turner, 1991). Further, the use of in-depth interviews provided invaluable insight into the students’ self-awareness of their identity formation. This method-

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ology, however, is not without its own potential biases, since interviewing is an interactive process between researcher and respondent. Although our work is not a study of methodology—analyzing, for example, the potential interviewer effects or situational effects on respondents’ answers—it is still important to be aware of some of the idiosyncrasies that may arise when two strangers come together to talk in a semistructured format. In such a context, the interview process cannot be rigid; it is not like filling out a questionnaire where one proceeds methodically from one question to the next. In fact, such questionnairing would go against the richness of interviewing, which allows for an interaction, even a relationship, to develop between two people. As Silverman (1993) notes, we must think of interviews as interactionism—as individuals actively constructing their world. Thus, following Maxwell (1996) and Dey (1993), we attempted to limit potential interviewer bias while simultaneously allowing for the development of the interactive relationship. Each interview was conducted in an academic office, with the exception of one interview that took place at a public library because it was closer to the respondent’s home. The interviews lasted 90 minutes on average, although some were as long as 3 hours. All of the interviews were tape-recorded with the respondent’s consent and then transcribed. The interview schedule, which was pretested on eight students in November 1997, contained questions divided into seven sections: demographic variables, family background, indicators of social class, occupational expectations, friendships and leisure activities, experiences in school, and experiences in the workforce. The seven sections formed the basis for our data analysis, in which recurring themes were identified and classified into 26 categories. Through empirical induction of the content of these categories, it became clear that students, during college, either had formed or were in the process of forming identities in the following three domains: intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism. Clearly, there are other domains in which identities are formed within the college social structure, yet in the present study, these three domains were the ones that were the most strongly articulated by the students as being salient to their lives. In one sense, it is not necessarily surprising that these three domains were manifest because students were asked some general questions related to these areas. However, they were also asked about several other areas in their lives, which did not surface in the same way. Even in the three areas that turned out to be of particular relevance, students were only asked generally about how academically comfortable they were at the institution, what their occupational aspirations were, and what leisure activities they pursued. They were not asked to comment specifically on the effect of college on these three domains nor were they asked to comment on the effect of the college experience on their self-conceptions. Therefore, it was less obviously expected, and thus more noteworthy, that many of the students specifically identified their experiences and

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interactions in college as being important in forming their felt identities within these three domains. It is also significant that students spoke of these three domains throughout the interview and not just in the section of the interview related to a particular domain, thus further reinforcing the importance of these domains in the students’ own discourse. Although we initially focus on the three domains as though they were completely separate from one another, we later note in the discussion how they might overlap. In summarizing the emergence of these domains, we would say that while we introduced the topics in a broad way, it was the students who expressed the specific relevance of these domains for their felt identities and who recognized the importance of the college experience in forming their identities in these domains.

SELECTED DOMAINS OF FELT IDENTITY Intelligence and Knowledgeability The students in our sample told us directly and indirectly that college helped them to form a sense of their own intelligence and knowledgeability. Since entering college, students now see these aspects as prominent parts of their felt identities. The formation of this self-identification may be attributable to the myriad of college experiences and interactions that reflect the acquisition of intelligence and knowledge. As we will detail, some of these experiences are direct and explicit; others are more indirect and less obvious. Yet in all instances, it is the students who have identified such experiences and interactions as contributing to the formation of their felt identity within this domain. Unlike research that uses “objective” or standardized tests of intelligence to determine if college makes students smarter or more knowledgeable, our research looks at how the college experience influences students to identify themselves by their intelligence or knowledgeability. In effect, we are not particularly concerned in our analysis about whether students are objectively smarter because they have attended college; rather, our concern is with the extent to which students see their college experience as largely responsible for making intelligence and knowledgeability salient components of their felt identities. Because college is invested with so much meaning in the larger society, to feel worthy of attending college is itself significant for how individuals identify themselves by these characteristics. Indeed, just being in college appears to bestow on some students a sense of being intelligent and knowledgeable. Attending (and for the students in our sample, nearly completing) college is a symbolic marker that suggests both to oneself and to others that one has a certain degree of intellectual competence and knowledge. As suggested by the following two examples, individuals in college generally come to identify themselves as being

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intelligent and knowledgeable, and such avowals are reflected in and validated by the imputations of others:
Yeah I definitely see myself as different. If my brother has trouble with school they [his parents] always tell him to come to me or to call me. They don’t tell him to go to my older brother [not college educated] when this is just simple stuff that he could do too. They tell him to come to me because I’m the one who’s in college. I definitely enjoy that role. I like being looked upon like that. (Louie)4 It’s funny when you meet up with a couple of old friends who didn’t go to college you just look at them and they’re like so what did you do with your life. “Well, I went to college and I actually got an engineering degree” and they’re like “Wow! How did you do that?” So it kind of makes me proud saying I’ll be a college graduate. (Ted)

In finding that students form some general identity of an intelligent and knowledgeable person, we further discovered more specific manifestations of this overall domain. Two of these manifestations, “thinking critically” and “talking smart,” reflect the formation of positive identities. A third, “feeling intellectually deficient,” suggests that although college certainly can affect individuals’ intellectual identities the result is not necessarily positive. Thinking Critically For some students, their interactions in college produce a mindfulness of the world around them, and they recognize that the world goes well beyond the local milieu to which they have been accustomed for so long. For many students, college expands the boundaries of their local existence and, significantly, offers them a more complex way of digesting their experiences intellectually. Such insights are not always comforting because they may challenge the student’s longstanding beliefs in such institutions as government, education, and science. As students move further away from what was their more unreflective and less reasoned way of thinking, they not only perceive the world differently but also may perceive themselves differently. The following example comes from a returning student who points out that college has allowed her to interpret reality from various perspectives. It has given her insight into a world beyond her realm of experience. This newfound knowledge translates into a new way of identifying herself as being intellectually different from her peers who chose not to attend college:
As I’m getting more educated, it’s been a gradual process. It’s not because I have a piece of paper, it just seems as I’ve gone back to school and I did start part-time, I’ve learned to be much more openminded. I used to argue with my friends who had finished college when I was in my little sabbatical. And I thought I knew all the answers because I went to work every day and they didn’t, and I used to get into a lot of

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heated arguments. Now I look back at how closedminded I was and how I didn’t know a lot of things. I didn’t know how to look at issues from two sides as I do now, so it’s been a gradual process. (Sheryl)

We also found that for many students in our sample college has fostered their perceived ability to think analytically and abstractly. One of the stated goals of college, in fact, is to encourage such critical thinking, and there are numerous studies that have determined the extent to which college succeeds or fails in developing students’ critical thinking skills as measured by various tests (McMillan, 1987; Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, chap. 4). Less common are studies of this intellectual transformation as seen by students themselves. When students are able to recognize their own change in thinking, when they can point to examples that suggest they no longer think like they used to, then such insights suggest the acquisition of a new felt identity. They see themselves as interacting in the world differently because they now digest the myriad of messages and choices from a more complex framework. In essence, these messages and choices must be handled differently because they take on new symbolic meaning. Subsequently, the individual sees himself or herself as thinking and reasoning more abstractly as can be seen clearly in the following comment: “I don’t think I have that attitude as much as everything is black and white. It’s either this way or that way. I think it [college] kind of opened me up to looking at things and thinking about things differently” (Susan). In the following excerpt, a student offers a more developed instance of such an identity formation, in which she demonstrates how her approach to thinking and reasoning currently differs from her parents who have elementary school educations. Because this student is a working-class female of Hispanic immigrant parents, the implied intersection between race, social class, and gender may be noted. Rosa: My parents make a decision because they have to, and then they just do it with whatever means they have. Whereas with me being in school you are taught to think a lot, and I think that making a decision is harder in that maybe I’ll want to take these courses whereas my father would see the direct path. Int: How would your father choose courses versus how you do it? Rosa: He would probably just say that if I’m going to be a doctor why would I bother taking this art class or this theater class. Whereas if I wanted to be a doctor I would say that maybe this theater class or this psychology class might help me to talk to my patients. It might help me become a better doctor. Sure I can pass the MCATs and be an excellent physician in being able to perform all the procedures correctly but then can I talk to my patients? So I would think of more of the abstract way of doing that. He would probably say that there is no need for me to take this, [he] would just take bio and chemistry and all that stuff, and the other

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things would be a waste of my time. His way of life, of dealing with life, is a very practical method. Whereas with me, sometimes I’m more creative, more imaginative, more the thought process before I would do something. So it’s hard for us to understand each other when we get to that level of the discussion. Int: Why do you think that’s developed in you? Rosa: I guess just from being in school. Not forced to major in something right now because I have to. Being able to have that flexibility of time. Through interactions inside and outside of the classroom, college encourages students to interpret the world from a broader base of knowledge and in a more abstract, multifaceted manner. Students are pushed to consider multiple angles, to bring in other facts and facets, and to demonstrate a depth and breadth of thought that is recognizably different from their precollege way of thinking. Moreover, as some of the preceding excerpts suggest, once this new felt identity takes hold, it is reinforced in subsequent interactions. As one student noted while discussing his parents:
I don’t say this to be snobby, but I do feel like I know more than them, a lot. Sometimes when I’ll talk to my mother or my father they’ll have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. It’s not even this complicated high-end stuff. Something will pop up on T.V. and my mom will have no idea what they’re talking about and I’ll know what they are talking about. (Bob)

For students such as these, college has provided the opportunity, as well as the environment, for the cultivation of a newly formed felt identity of intelligence and knowledgeability that is noticeably different from some of their relatives and peers. “Talking Smart” Social interactions play a significant role in a student’s identity formation not only from the information that is being exchanged but also through the medium of exchange. Language can serve as a powerful rhetorical device that individuals use to construct and negotiate identities (Antaki, Condor, and Levine, 1996; Howard, 2000). Students learn to use their language to convey to others who they are, how they want to be identified, and to which social group they belong. In this sense, while interacting with their peers and their professors, students are engaged simultaneously in two processes: impression management and the conversation of gestures. Impression management is the attempt of individuals to direct the interaction in such a way as to support and maintain the identity they hope to have imputed to themselves (Goffman, 1959, 1963). In order to achieve this imputed identity—and to manage one’s impressions successfully— the individual must learn the language and gestures of the significant others in

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order to be an accepted member of the pertinent social group (Mead, 1967). Through these two processes, the individual is likely to achieve a new felt identity, as suggested by the following: Louie: I’ve definitely learned how to carry myself better since coming here [to college]. I’ve expanded my vocabulary, “talk smart,” or whatever they say. Int: What do you mean that you came here and learned how to “talk smart?” Louie: You just hear how people talk. Coming from a high school it’s all like, “Yo, whas up?” Unlike growing up back home where I’m having these conversations with all Greek people and we basically have the same train of thought. And now I’ve got Irish, Chinese, and Italian [students] in my room [and] they’re all bringing something different. So if you’re talking philosophy or religion you’re just talking I guess smart, because you are learning stuff. When you’re learning philosophy and you’re repeating what they say and you’re actually giving your meaning to it and it’s using different words like you just expand your vocabulary instead of using regular terminology you might use a bigger word, a college word or what they call an SAT word just because you know it or whatever, you want to impress other people. You chose words more. Int: You find yourself doing that? Louie: Oh yeah. I chose my words differently. Definitely. Int: Do you find you chose your words differently when you are at college than when you are back home? Louie: [Even] if I’m talking with my other cousins about stuff and they are all at a college-educated level then I try to talk smart. I try to make them think I’m smart. Int: Why do you try to talk smart to your cousins? Louie: I don’t know. I guess it feels good; it does make me feel good. It feels good that they understand me. And they also talk smart also and it feels good to me that they understand what I’m saying. A couple of years ago if they were using those words I would be like what are you talking about? But now, I get what they are saying. I guess it feels like you actually learn something here. This excerpt provides insight into the transformation of this student’s felt identity. He recognizes that he is exchanging a different set of gestures with others than in the past. And the reason he is engaging in this new sort of exchange—besides college having provided him with the requisite tools and the situational (or interactive) contexts—is because he understands that such interactive strategies are necessary to manage how he presents himself to others. Of particular interest is that the felt identity of the student is not merely based on a spatial location; rather, the identity of being educated and intelligent is embedded in the individual’s concept of self. This new sense of being intelligent and

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knowledgeable crosses boundaries and, given the appropriate audience, can be brought into play outside of the college structure. In the context of identity theory, we may say that a self-perceived identity of being intelligent and knowledgeable can become a role identity that individuals bring with them into other structural locations, so long as they can enact the role that this felt identity reflects (McCall and Simmons, 1978). As certain speech patterns and verbal expressions become a regular part of the individual’s interactive repertoire, they may be less likely to be viewed as an explicitly and consciously constructed component of the individual’s identity. Conceivably, the deeper such speech patterns and expressions become embedded in the individual’s discourse, the more likely they are to be seen as an inherent quality of the individual. As the following example suggests, although the student identifies himself through his language, and although he does suggest that such identity reflects his college education, his race and his social class, he nevertheless attributes this to an instinctual element of his personality:
I think I do speak in a certain manner which somewhat identifies me. My speech patterns is a suburban white English in which my vocabulary indicates that I went to college because the vocabulary that I naturally use uses words which are multi-syllabic or very obscure words that very few people use. It’s part of my natural vocabulary. I’m not putting on words to make it more convoluted. (Albert, emphasis added)

Explaining speech patterns by suggesting they are inherent might have been anticipated, because individuals will often have little to say regarding matters they have long taken for granted (Goffman, 1967).

Feeling Intellectually Deficient In the examples given so far, the implications for the student’s felt identity are generally positive in that the students are accepting of the new identity they are constructing. True, some students may still be adjusting to their new identity, and some may still have to work consciously to negotiate the boundaries that this new identity incorporates. But on the whole, the students recognize that what is happening to them in terms of their identities is to be welcomed. However, the effect of college on an individual’s felt identity in the domain of intelligence is not invariably positive. For some students, college may have a negative effect on their self-identification within this realm. As noted earlier, performance in college is recognized symbolically by society as determining an individual’s intellectual competence and knowledge. Therefore, if a student does not do well academically, he or she may not share the sense of intellectual accomplishment suggested by some of the previous respondents. As one student noted, “this school definitely made me feel like I’m stupid. The classes here are really hard I think” (Sandra). Another student noted that he felt comfortable

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academically at community college, but when he transferred to the 4-year university his felt identity of intelligence changed: “Academically I felt a little bit on the bottom of the totem pole, you know. A lot of these kids in my classes are just like, it seems like they are a hell of a lot smarter than I am” (Maurice). Students who feel intellectually deficient do not necessarily identify themselves as failures, nor do they identify themselves as uneducated; however, they do recognize that they need to alter their conceptions of who they are. Aware that society bestows on those completing college some degree of intellectual prestige, the felt identity of these students in terms of their intelligence may be wanting. They realize that they do not fully measure up to their peers—at least on the academic yardstick of intelligence and knowledgeability—and subsequently they perceive themselves differently than do their college peers. Interestingly, students who find college difficult not only have had their own felt identities affected but they may also be affecting the identities of other students. Because students are in a social structure characterized by constant social interaction, the production of their identities in college is, to some degree, dependent on the supporting cast. As the following excerpt suggests, if the interactive environment falls short of preexisting expectations, then there may be adverse effects on one’s perceived identity:
I was probably pretty happy [at first] but as I got older I’ve become more pessimistic. I thought my experience would be different in college. College could have been more valuable if I’d gone to a school with a better academic ranking, not really for connections and things like that, but I think that if you are in a pool of people who are keeping me on my toes more than I think I would have picked up more and learned more. (Michelle)

We see from the preceding excerpts that although Sandra, Maurice, and Michelle are all on the verge of graduating from college, they do not readily invoke an identity of privileged intelligence and knowledgeability as one might expect or, more important, as societal norms would grant them. Instead, as Sandra and Maurice (and others like them) moved through college and found it increasingly difficult and onerous, even as the majority of their peers found it increasingly easy and enjoyable, they have come to identify themselves as academically inferior. Even in the case of Michelle, who had no trouble making it through college, her self-perceived identity of intelligence is still lacking because she bases her evaluation on the societal perceptions of the college-educated. As a product of her interactive environment, Michelle does not feel as intellectually strong as she assumes she would have had she attended a more academically challenging university. In such an environment, Michelle believes that her self-presentations and her exchange of gestures would occur at a more sophisticated level of intellect and knowledge, thereby producing a more satisfying felt identity of intelligence and knowledgeability.

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That some students come to feel intellectually deficient calls into question what seems to be the prevailing bias in our society—among researchers as well as the general public—of assuming positive, developmentally progressive outcomes in college (Feldman, 1972). Although college does attempt to instill in students some degree of intellectual self-worth, such outcomes are not mechanically ordered simply because the student moves from one grade level to the next. In fact, as some of these examples attest, progression through college and perceived intellectual identity may be inversely proportional for a certain group of students. Indeed, one population that may confirm such a claim would be individuals who dropped out of college because they could no longer keep up with the demands of academic rigor (Braxton, 2000; Tinto, 1993). For these students, their college experience may be damaging and may result in their being stigmatized by some parts of society. Occupation A second domain reflecting changes to an individual’s felt identity revolves around occupation and career. We ask here what it is about the college experience that encourages students to perceive themselves as fitting into certain occupational niches and not fitting into others. Similar to the discussion of the previous domain, the relationship between felt occupational identity and a college education is one that is permeated by societal assumptions. Most people expect, for example, that individuals who are college educated will more or less automatically not aspire to certain types of jobs—say, landscaper, beautician, or factory worker, to name a few. And, indeed, most college graduates do not aspire to such jobs. The acquisition of such an identity derives from the interactive context (college) in which the individual is situated. This section examines the interactions that make possible the links between college and occupation and that serve to establish individuals’ specific felt occupational identities. Peer Interactions and Felt Occupational Identity As with the formation of a felt identity of intelligence and knowledgeablility, a felt occupational identity is also formed during interactions with peers. Again, one of the distinctive qualities of the college experience is that students serve as resources for each other—in this case, trying out different types of occupational identities. As the following excerpt suggests, students may serve as role models for each other given one’s occupational strivings: Carmina: Taking these classes you start to meet people that are geared towards being a doctor so it just seemed like something I wanted to do. Most

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of my role models are my peers. Like one of my good friends here, she always knew she wanted to be a doctor from day one. When she was born she wanted to be a doctor. So I guess her motivation and ambition kind of inspired me a little bit to go into that direction. Int: When you say your role models are your peers do you mean peers from college or peers from back home? Carmina: Peers from college. Peers from college. Int: Why wouldn’t your role models be people from the retail store you worked at? Carmina: No one had motivation or wanted to do anything. Maybe if someone had that. Plus they just went to work every day and were older people. No, they were very cranky people, another day another dollar and they would just go back to work and back to work. They just didn’t seem happy about life. As opposed to when I come here and people have dreams and motivation, they want to go someplace with their life and that’s what I want to be, I want to be like that. When I came here I got that focus that I always knew was in me. In a somewhat similar vein, social interactions between students reflect the intersection between the exchange of gestures and impression management. In the following excerpt, the student points to the importance of her social group in reinforcing both her identity as a future professional and the self-presentations that will allow her to successfully enact and achieve such an identity. Through social interactions, this student and her friends have created a social reality of the occupations to which they aspire as well as constructed a corresponding felt identity that has already become somewhat embedded:
Like we [her friends] talked about this and we all kind of see ourselves having the same kind of lifestyle. Everyone kind of sees themselves as having a certain kind of outfit. Like we talk about this all the time. Once you get the outfit you can figure out the job that you’ll be okay at—which is probably backwards but they all kind of want the same level of success and security. Some want to be doctors, two of them, and another girl wants to be in advertising, marketing, law. So they are all professional jobs that they want to go into and we all want the outfit. (Amy)

For this student, interacting with her friends allows her to solidify her felt identity and, more important, have this felt identity imputed and confirmed by her significant others. Although these social interactions are not part of the standard college curriculum, they play a significant role in establishing who she sees herself to be on graduation. The college environment allows the student and her friends the opportunity to reflect on what they expect to achieve in the future and how they expect to be identified. For them, the boundaries of their identity are (or will be) established by their dress, their appearance (Stone,

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1970). Through these peer interactions, this student and her friends specify the social group with which they most identify and by which they expect to be embraced. The significance of the college experience in constructing a felt occupational identity not only occurs through direct social interactions with peers but may also occur through a student’s indirect interactions with fellow college students. At a large and diverse institution such as the one we studied, students interact indirectly with other students as they walk to class, wait in lines to register, attend events on campus, and study in the library. In all of these activities, students have the opportunity to observe their peers closely, eavesdrop on their conversations, and develop a general sense of who they are in relation to others. When these indirect interactions are buttressed by direct interactions with one’s friends, the effect on one’s felt identity may be of significance. These interactions, be they direct or indirect, contribute further to the social comparisons and reflected appraisals that help form an individual’s felt identity (Rosenberg, 1986). Consider the following example in which this student discusses why he decided to shift his occupational orientation from teacher to lawyer:
Like the people [in college], whether they are friends or acquaintances, I guess because this is a public institution more than a private one so you see a lot more people who are, income wise, who are on a lower level. So when I interact with them I see how they live, what they talk about, what they think, and what they complain about. Money becomes an issue that doesn’t blatantly come up, but it’s something that’s always in the back of the conversation somewhere whether they are talking about their part-time jobs, getting their stupid financial aid application out of the way, or complaining about the school bureaucracy. When it comes down to it, it comes down to money. So the more I hear this type of thing, the more I interact with them, and the more I hear these types of conversations the more I start thinking well, wow, I guess money is really, take it or leave it, it’s an important aspect of your life. And I guess it’s definitely a step, not the only one, but a key crucial step to achieve your happiness in the end. (Frank)

Finally, interacting with peers also may influence a student’s felt occupational identity to the extent that such interactions allow students to try out various roles that possibly coincide with specific occupations. For example, the following student identified himself as a teacher because of his interactions with other students. These other students placed him in the role of (competent) teacher and subsequently he embraced this imputed identity:
In study groups and talking with other people I could explain what it was we were studying. I don’t know if it came as a revelation to me but people would always say, “Wow, you’re so smart you really know what you’re talking about.” I would be like, “Well, I’m just working these ideas through my head and by helping you it’s helping me.” And I soon noticed that that’s what teaching is, more or less, that you are explaining to other people and in the process, you are learning along also. And it just

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seemed to me that I had kicked around all of the other possibilities and ideas of what it was I could be and could do and this one for me seemed to be the most, not developed, but it seemed tailor made for what I wanted to do. (Scott)

Social Networking and Felt Occupational Identity Another way in which the social interactions in college help form a student’s felt occupational identity is through the opportunity for social networking. Social networking is generally viewed as a way to make contacts that will allow for the successful achievement of occupational goals, as suggested by the following student: “I wanted to start getting involved in activities. College is the place where you meet people who can help you out in your future, and that’s what it would take to advance myself later on so I had to start with them. I had to get something out of my college education besides a college degree” (Meredith). Although we certainly do not refute this function of college, networking may also serve a latent function for individuals in terms of their felt identities. By making ties and contacts with peers and professors, students may not only advance their occupational standing but, additionally, they may form and reinforce their self-perceived occupational identity. When one is surrounded by significant others who share one’s professional aspirations, it becomes much easier to hold on firmly to those aspirations and to identify oneself accordingly. Networking coincides with the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships, allowing for the identities of students to be constructed, to be felt, and, ultimately, to be imputed by significant others. If a student’s felt identity is that of a businesswoman and she engages in networking with individuals in the field of business, the dividends she receives will be not only in the form of potential job offers but also in the form of an imputed social identity that she desires. A concrete example of this sort of identity imputation comes from Jimmy, who held an internship one summer on Wall Street. During this internship, Jimmy spent considerable time with his cousin and her peers and came to form a felt identity coinciding with the one imputed to him by others:
I had an internship over the summer, and she worked right across the street, and I would go to lunch with her and the people she worked with every day. And they were just normal people and I can see myself working with people like them, very easily. They treated me as an equal. They weren’t worried about what I knew or what status I held. I think that they liked me because of who I am and the way I was. If I was an asshole they wouldn’t like me. If I was a loudmouth always talking about this and that, you know, these people are 27 or 28, working where I want to work and in a way I looked up to them. I didn’t get a chance to talk to them about what they do, but I felt very comfortable around them and I’m sure they felt comfortable around me because even on Thursdays they asked me to go out and have drinks with them. This caught me offguard because I thought that maybe they saw me as the young kid, you know what I mean, and don’t do anything crazy in front of the young kid. But when they asked me

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to go out with them again at night, it just made me feel very comfortable with them. If that’s what these people do in that industry then I see myself there. (Jimmy)

Felt Occupational Identity and Participation in Distinctive Experiences Colleges often provide distinctive or one-of-a-kind experiences that help students form their self-perceived occupational identities. For some, one such distinctive experience is college-sponsored traveling and studying outside of one’s home school. Studying in a foreign country, for example, often provides individuals with an unsurpassed experience that not only opens their eyes about the world but plays a considerable role in fostering their incipient occupational identity. One of the most pronounced examples in our data of this type of formation of felt identity comes from a student who was accepted into an off-campus study program in Kenya. She became aware of the program in Kenya from a professor with whom she had just taken a course and who was a tremendous inspiration. Although her original intention for attending college was to become a nurse, she decided to pursue a career in ecological research after the program in Kenya:
I decided to just apply and see what happened and to my disbelief they accepted me to go. While I was there I pretty much had to come up with my own research project and do my own thing there and in the process of doing it I enjoyed it so much. I enjoyed everything that had to do with it. So that experience really drove me towards that direction, to really want to do research in the future. Three years ago that wasn’t for me. I think college has molded me and what to do with myself. (Debbie)

Later in the interview, this student refers back to the Kenya trip as not only having had a formative effect on her felt occupational identity but, equally important, having really solidified her sense of confidence and independence. This example is particularly illustrative of the larger themes of this article because few places other than college provide someone the opportunity to have an experience such as this one. College provides students with a number of other distinctive opportunities such as hearing distinguished speakers, serving on college-wide committees, holding office in student government, securing internships, and participating in academic conferences. Such activities may influence individuals’ “possible self” as they pertain to the future occupation of students by providing examples of what they might become, what they hope to become, and what they are afraid of becoming (Markus and Nurius, 1986). These activities provide the situational contexts within which a variety of identities may be negotiated, experienced, and ultimately constructed. For example, Scott (a student mentioned previously) attended an academic conference that had a significant effect on his felt occupational identity of being a professor:

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A few weeks ago I went to this New Millennium Postmodern Conference that was organized by the Institute for Postmodern Studies. And it did feel strange a little bit because I couldn’t even jive with, I couldn’t even comprehend most of what was going on but I like that feeling of kind of being in there. Of somehow being a participant in that. And that’s, I think, part of the initiation into it, I see myself as being in kind of that artistic, cultural community—you know, going to plays, going to museums, being involved in that kind of world, that kind of community. I don’t really see a lot of people I know as of now being into that. The people I see that are kind of connected to that are the professors or students of the university. They are within that circle, and that’s where I kind of want to be also, what I perceive to be rich and full of ideas and activity. I see that all within that world. I just think of it as great writers, even going to see them give a talk or a lecture. It’s that type of community that surrounds it that is appealing to me. When I tell people I am going to be a professor within that I also tell them I am going to be a writer. I tell them I’m going to be a professor/writer and I say it in one breath like that. (Scott)

College as Symbolic Entitlement for Certain Occupations and Careers The majority of students in our sample felt very strongly that they had the potential to work in an occupation that would provide them with financial success and social prestige. Most students pointed to their college education as “proof” of this potential. Because they are in college—very nearly finished with college in fact—many students felt deserving of a professional job. Taking a “menial” job, such as a secretary, was not acceptable to them because, as one student suggested, “I really didn’t come to college 4 years just to become a secretary. I really didn’t have to invest so much time in school just to become a secretary. I did that while I was in high school so I don’t really think you need an advanced degree to become a secretary” (Tamika). Or, as another student indicated, “now that I’m getting a college education I wouldn’t want to be working in like a post office because I’d say I wasted all my time here getting a college education for nothing” (Laurie). Such sentiments are manifestations of these students’ new felt identities. Because of their college experiences, they now identify solely with professional occupations; anything less would contradict the persons they currently see themselves to be. This opinion is especially clear in the response of the following student when he was asked about making his part-time summer job of working in a warehouse a full-time endeavor: “It really wouldn’t be what I was looking for in the sense that I made my way to college, graduated, and then have to do something where I could of gotten it coming out of high school. It wouldn’t make sense to me. I wouldn’t look at it as me doing my best. That’s the way I look at it. And anything less will be sort of a failure even if it isn’t” (Dwayne). Similar sentiments are held by others who also believe strongly that, because they are highly educated, they deserve or expect more than a job they did while in high school. For instance, one student rejected a career in retail because she felt that it would contradict all that she has worked for in college: “Yeah, but I

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wouldn’t want to do that. I would feel like I wasted my time in college. I’m getting a political science degree. That has nothing to do with retail really. It’s just not something I want to do. It wouldn’t make me happy for the rest of my life” (Ngozi). And, finally, consider this student who believes that he at least owes it to himself to try to put his education to work before he resorts to any fallback plans:
To me, if I have a college education I think that I deserve something better for myself. It’s not that I wouldn’t do that [flip burgers] to get by, but to me that’s like degrading myself. I’ve done a lot more work than to just come here and flip burgers or whatever. I’ve sat in a classroom and devoted some of my time to learning certain things that I should be out there relating to. I’ve got an education so let’s see what I could do with it, whether it be in engineering or not. (Ted)

To the extent that these individuals now feel membership in a particular social group and view the world from this group’s perspective, the preceding responses also point to the construction of a publicly recognized social identity as well as a felt identity (Hogg, Terry, and White, 1995; Jenkins, 1996; Stets and Burke, 2000). Because these students have accumulated several levels of education they do not identify with doing nonprofessional work; the rules of society tell them that they should, or at the very least are able to, pursue jobs more appropriate for their education. Subsequently, as they have embarked on their educational path, they are constructing an identity for themselves that locates them within a particular social-structural reality as well as within a particular social group. At the time they were interviewed, these students were close to obtaining their college degree. As suggested by the preceding excerpts, their felt identities were no longer merely self-avowals but were closer to imputed social identities that soon would be further legitimized by a college diploma, praise from family and friends, and, ultimately, a professional job. In all of these examples, college provides an environment in which the felt identity of the individual may be shaped. Through a variety of social interactions, college affords students the opportunity to see themselves in certain occupational roles and to adopt self-perceived identities corresponding to these roles. Whether it be by reflecting on the meaning of college, exchanging gestures with peers, or participating in distinctive experiences, students interact with the college environment and form felt identities that coincide with their career choices. Cosmopolitanism A third identity that students indicated was fostered by their college experiences has to do with cosmopolitanism. Although students in the sample did not explicitly refer to themselves as having become cosmopolitan, the extent to which their cultural tastes became more sophisticated was noteworthy. Moreover, the students were aware of these shifts themselves and said as much during

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the interviews. The thoughts and remarks of the students in our sample suggest that they are forming a sense of themselves as being “college-educated”— becoming individuals who are cultured rather than uncultured, cosmopolitan rather than provincial. The realm here is that of a loose conjunction of aesthetic appreciation, sophistication of tastes, and diversity of worldview. In a time when young adults are lambasted for their shallow, uncouth, and even vulgar tastes, we found evidence suggesting that college provides an environment for the cultivation of cultural discernment. Most students going to college are exposed to a wide array of cultural diversity. Through presentations in the fine and performing arts, days celebrating national and ethnic cultures, foreign film series, and especially the general education requirements that students sometimes bemoan, college offers the opportunity to broaden one’s cultural horizons. For many, these and various other cultural opportunities foster eye-opening social interactions that may form or even transform felt identity. From the diversity of social interactions, students may perceive themselves differently as they now embrace a new sense of a cultured or cosmopolitan self. Oftentimes, these new felt identities compel students to rethink their normative assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and social class. For example, one student noted his “culture shock” when entering the university because of the environment in which he was raised: “I was not used to the large minority population that is here. It’s huge. My high school had maybe 10 African Americans, maybe 15 Asians. It was predominantly white. My neighborhood is predominantly white” (Larry). While relating a story about one of his classes where he learned about the Haitian community from a classmate, Larry noted that “he loved the diversity here” and “that people who live here get such a broad range of cultures that they are living with that they actually learn more than they do in actual classes.” The diverse college environment that Larry finds attractive is not necessarily standard at institutes of higher learning. In fact, Larry transferred from a state college that “was all white.” Similarly, Shannon came to the university after a few semesters at local private college and found her experience with diversity enlightening:
I think I’ve developed because now I’ve met more people who are lesbians and gay people and at Brookfield no one was out. Here everyone is open, and I think I get along with people. Like I have a friend from South Africa. I don’t think I would have associated with him at Brookfield, I don’t even think they were there. Here it is so mixed and he is the nicest person. My family loves him. It’s weird, it’s weird in a good way. When I first came here I didn’t like it because there weren’t any minorities in my high school. I felt like a minority here. But I guess in the last two years here I started accepting people more.

In the examples of Larry and Shannon, it is important to recognize the significance of the college milieu for cultivating a new felt identity whereby diversity

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is embraced rather than eschewed. Because their previous environments were homogeneous, it was difficult for them to construct a sense of self that recognized the benefits of social interaction with “different” individuals. However, in their current college location, Larry and Shannon were compelled to interact with students who encompass very different social worlds. Through these social interactions, they subsequently were able to negotiate and sustain a sense of a more cosmopolitan identity. In addition to affecting the type of individuals with whom one interacts, college may also influence the types of activities undertaken by students. College presents students with an opportunity to engage in activities that shape their tastes and hobbies and, ultimately, their felt identities. Students embrace a new felt identity that is both produced and reproduced by the college environment. College gives students a breadth and depth of experiences that adolescents and young adults might be hard pressed to find elsewhere. By being offered many options, and by engaging in an array of new social activities, students may begin to form felt identities grounded in new social interactions:
I think college is a big influence. I don’t think that a college institution will educate you, but it’s a tool that you can use to educate yourself in a sense. I think that there are just so many different possibilities where you can go out and just explore different aspects of life. I mean, a year ago, I knew people that were putting together a crew team at the University. And I’ve never rowed crew, I never knew anybody that rowed crew, but it was an opportunity to go and do something different like that and I did and ended up truly enjoying it and loving it. It’s great, it’s so great. You know, college really provided that, the opportunity to do that. And it’s something that I want to continue doing throughout my life. Same thing with riding horses. My girlfriend, she rides horses for the equestrian team here at school. So she started coaxing me down to the barn, it’s like five minutes away, to learn how to ride. And I went down and started riding and again, I sort of like fell in love with it. I’d gone on one trail ride, like a western ride, once in my life, but college provided the opportunity to go and learn how to ride. (Joe)

Numerous other students in the sample also discussed the ways that college influenced their choice of leisure activities. Some students recognized their newly formed appreciation for art, literature, film, museums, and classical music. As one student noted, “That’s just an interest that I started getting up over the past two years [since being in college]. Like I want to go to the Museum of Natural History, I want to go the Museum of Television and Film. I want to do things like that. I just want to get into that” (Victoria). Another student noted, “I’m reading more than I used to in the past. Things I read in my English class if I like this novel then I’ll go read something else by the author. I also took one ’Themes in Films,’ class and I’m seeing films in different perspectives than I used to. I enjoy films more and I see them more than I used to in the past” (Steve). Others commented on how they no longer frequented fast-food restaurants, preferring instead restaurants “with a more complex fare, that serve things

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you couldn’t just slap on the grill yourself” (Shiva). Clearly, such cosmopolitan identifications were not characteristic of all students. Some students still prefer eating at fast-food restaurants and listening to the latest popular music. However, most students did experience some changes in how they identified themselves culturally since entering college. These students recognized that the cultural atmosphere in college is different from the one in which they were (or sometimes still are) entrenched; more important, they came to a self-understanding that they relate differently with their noncollege-educated peers. A good example of this self-reflection comes from one student’s discussion of the different social interactions between work and school:
[At work] you can’t really talk about Christopher Marlowe as a dramatist to someone who’s never heard of Christopher Marlowe. I’m here to learn, I like hearing this information, I like discussing these things with people. Even if it is just discussing potential layouts for the newspaper. I can’t do that with the people I’ve met at those jobs. I’m thinking specifically at the job I had over the summer at the deli. One guy was strictly interested in a sports team, and he plays on a couple of teams. Everyone else was making sure their car was getting better and that we could listen to the radio at work. Stuff like that. It’s not what I enjoy talking about. (Howard)

Even more common than comparing their newly formed sense of self with that of their co-workers, students in the sample revealed the extent to which they now defined themselves differently from their friends from high school. As far as constructing a new felt identity—especially one that reflects a more cosmopolitan orientation toward the social world—nowhere was this more evident than in the students’ articulations about broken friendships and new social directions. As individuals proceed through college and their felt identity as college-educated persons becomes more embedded, they may be confronted with decisions regarding the social group to which they feel an allegiance. Nearly inevitably, the group lacking a more cultured and educated sense of identity seems to be the one that is negated. The following sentiments were echoed by many students in the sample:
I think that makes us different, and I think maybe that’s because I’m in college now and my personality changed a little in that kind of way. School has an effect on me. It’s the environment, it’s the environment here. I used to like to party a lot and I don’t like that, I really don’t like to do that anymore. I’m more calm, more mellow now. I go to museums with my girlfriend. Or say I would go home in the summer and I would run into a couple of my friends [from college], and a lot of times we would go out to eat or go to a movie. If it was [friends] in the neighborhood it would be like let’s get a football game, or let’s play some basketball. Like I would never go around the neighborhood and say let’s go out for dinner [laughs]. It would be weird. Dinner to us is going to MacDonalds. (Stanley)

Students’ newly formed felt identities in the cultural realm are also inevitably compared with the cultural traditions of their families. For the relatively small percentage of students in the sample from upper-middle-class homes, the differ-

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ences between school and family environments was not too severe. For instance, Helene’s family ate only at “nice places” such as Indian, Japanese, and Italian restaurants, and they “never had fast food or diners.” Further, her family regularly went to major art exhibits and to vacations overseas. Being at college served to modify Helene’s already existing cosmopolitan identity to the extent that she no longer defined such activities as belonging only to the family realm but, rather, as also becoming a constitutive part of her peer interactions. However, at a state university like the one sampled here, most students did not share such a cosmopolitan upbringing. These students commonly noted how college introduced a new cultural world to them, about which some of them expressed ambivalence. Consider the following student’s discussion of his movement away from the traditions of his family, his religion, and his cultural background. As this student points out, he identifies himself differently than do his father and his brother, neither of whom attended college:
Yeah, I’d say I’m definitely different than them. I start to question a lot of the tradition they try to instill on me. I’ve even come up to them and questioned our religion. I’ve taken two religion classes and I’ve heard a lot about other religions and I’m still comfortable with mine. I’ve just had questions I’ve never had before. And it comes as a surprise when I ask them this stuff and they come up with good answers, or I’ve spoken to my priest, and I just want answers. I’ve questioned stuff that I’ve never questioned before. The fact that they want me to marry Greek, that goes through my head all the time ’cause it doesn’t matter to me. (Louie)

As we reviewed students’ comments about their high school friends and their families, it was evident that the students were forming a new sense of who they were in direct relation to their social location. As it turns out, many students were not overly distressed about distancing themselves from their old friends— although they were not nearly as comfortable distinguishing themselves from their family—because of the new way in which they identified themselves. In essence, the students’ new felt identity is responsible for their questioning, if not rejecting, the less cosmopolitan social group in favor of more cosmopolitan social group. At the same time, having the new felt identity allows the students to feel comfortable in their decision. Because their new felt identity is reinforced by the college environment, it is easier for them to feel that their actions are validated. The students find themselves in what Rosenberg (1986) calls a “consonant” environment—an environment that offers individuals a positive appraisal.5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Our study of the felt identities that students form in college differs from most studies in this area. In reviewing the research on the impact of college on students’ identities, Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) focus on student change in

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what they call the “self-system,” which encompasses sense of self, personal identity, ego development, self-concept, and self esteem (p. 201). With respect to overall student change in this area during the college years, their general finding is:
with the exception of the evidence relating to ego stage development (where the findings are mixed), the research on identity development, academic and social self-concept, and self-esteem consistently indicates that students, as a group, change during the college years. Students successfully resolve identity-related issues, become more positive about their academic and social competencies, and develop a greater sense of selfworth and value. (p. 202)

Although we, too, have studied the sense of selves that students form during their college years, we have not done so within the psychological or developmental point of view explicitly and implicitly suggested in this passage. Using a sociological perspective, our research has shown that the experience of college plays an important constitutive role in forming the felt identities of students. We looked at three domains—intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism—in which college students were especially likely to acquire (or significantly modify) felt identities. We explored how college helps students develop a sense of their own intelligence and knowledgeability, which includes the process of thinking critically and “talking smart.” College also affords students the opportunity to see themselves in certain occupational roles. Whether, for example, by reflecting on the meaning of college or exchanging gestures with peers, students interact with the college environment and form a felt identity that coincides with their career choices. Finally, because of the many opportunities to sample a diversity of events and activities, students have the opportunity to form a sense of who they are and what they like to do culturally that is different from their precollege days: they form a new cosmopolitan identity.6 That the domains in which felt identities were most likely to be affected in college were intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism is hardly surprising. These three domains are obviously among the areas that students, parents, college teachers and administrators, and others in the wider society believe will be affected by experiences in college. Indeed, these areas have received extensive attention in the research literature on college, albeit in terms somewhat different from the present study. The emphasis generally has been on the change (or stability) in various and disparate traits and characteristics of students rather than in the formation (and modification) of their felt identities in these areas. Thus, typical studies in the area of intelligence and knowledgeability have explored the extent to which students during their college years change in both their general and specific subject matter knowledge, in their oral and written communication skills, in their ability to reason abstractly, in their use of evidence to address ill-structured problems for which there are nonverifiably correct answers, in their intellectual flexibility in under-

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standing more than one side of an issue, and in their development of more sophisticated abstract frameworks to deal with complexity (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, chs. 3, 4). In the occupational area, studies typically have been concerned with the career choice and development of students in terms of colleges’ impact on their career maturity: “operationally defined . . . [in] reference to the extent to which the individual has accomplished career developmental tasks, preferred occupation (opportunities, financial returns, training requirements, and the like), and the degree of certainty about and planning for one’s career choice” (Pascarella and Terenzini, ch. 5, p. 425). Research on how college affects the degree of students’ cosmopolitanism are subsumed under the many studies of students’ changes in certain psychosocial characteristics and in their various cultural, aesthetic, social, political, educational, and religious attitudes and values (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, chs. 6, 7). Our study differs from much of this research. In these areas of change and stability, the focus of extant studies has generally been on the more objectively established characteristics of students (and change or stability therein) as determined through the use of standardized tests of abilities, knowledge and interests, psychometric assessments of psychological traits, multi-item scales and indicators of attitudes and values, single questionnaire items about opinions, or the like. Much less attention has been paid to the subjective sense of identity that students are forming of themselves in these domains, which has been our focus. Although the domains of change may be familiar, our research on the self-awareness, intentionality, and deliberateness of students in forming and modifying their felt identities in these domains as a result of being in college—and the ways they go about doing so—adds to our understanding of the college experience. Moreover, in having students talk about themselves and how being in college has affected them, elements that have heretofore been little noted in the college literature have emerged, such as “talking smart” and a sense of symbolic entitlement. Although not all respondents in our study evidenced the formation of identities in all three domains or, for that matter, in any one of them, these were the domains to which students most commonly referred. Further, although we have only limited data from transfer students who experienced multiple college milieus, we would not be surprised to find, for example, that students at a research university may have domains of newly formed self-perceived identity that differ from those of students, say, at a community college. And even within the same domain, significant differences might be found. In other words, students at a research university, for instance, may have different self-perceived occupational identities than do students at a community college (or some other category of college or university). If these situational effects do indeed exist, they would lend further support to the usefulness of taking a more sociological perspective in studying change in college students’ felt identities. As would be expected, we found that an important factor in studying how the

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college experience affects students’ felt identities was the background of the students, particularly their social class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Although it was not the intent of our research to study systematically the effect these three variables may have on the formation of students’ felt identities, it is clear that these variables are significant. Throughout our analysis, we did call attention to these background factors whenever doing so seemed important to understanding the particulars of students’ formation of their felt identities in the domains we studied. At a very basic sociological level, we must recognize that race, social class, and gender are constitutive forces of the social environment and consequently affect social interactions. Even if individuals themselves do not always acknowledge the effects of race, social class, and gender, these three variables are still relevant to the production of felt identities to the extent that such variables impact the microinteractions of daily life. Moreover, the process through which college affects an individual’s felt identity of race, social class, and gender—as well as the process through which these three variables themselves affect an individual’s college experience—is an important topic in its own right that has received considerable attention (Dews and Law, 1995; Ethier and Deaux, 1994; Feagin, Vera, and Imani, 1996; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Padilla, 1997; Stewart and Ostrove, 1993). As part of our sociological perspective, we have used a symbolic interactionist approach in studying college student change, although not exclusively so. Other studies, of course, have used this particular approach to study how students’ experiences in postsecondary education affect the various components of their identity, although the genre of such studies is not large. We might mention here two of the more interesting studies in the area, those by Silver (1996) and Granfield (1991). In exploring how physical objects play a central role in students’ construction of their identities, Silver showed how students at one university made strategic choices about which objects to leave at home as anchors of prior identities and which ones to bring to school as markers of new identities. Granfield studied upward mobility among working-class law students by examining their adjustment to an elite law school. He found that these students learned to hide their class background in order to manage their identity. He showed how these students had difficultly in transcending their previous identities and experienced “identity ambivalence,” which they resolved by employing particular types of strategies to help manage their identities. In using a symbolic interactionist approach in our research in conjunction with consideration of the social structural location of colleges in the wider society, we have not conceived our study nor interpreted its results in terms of how students do or do not “develop” in college. Rather, our focus has been on the extent to which the social environment impacts the formation of individual felt identity. We have not analyzed the process through which college students change as the result of some inherent developmental unfolding, which may (or

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may not) be influenced by the social environment. But neither have we viewed student change as a mechanical, unthinking response to the pressures of the external environment. Rather, we adopted an interactionist perspective and posited college student change as an active and constructed process. By doing so, two important themes have emerged. First, student change is neither scripted nor fixed. Among both individuals and institutions of higher learning, variability exists. Because the construction of new identities is dependent on the participants of social interaction and the environment where such interactions take place, it is fair to say that there will be some variance when it comes to college students’ formation of their felt identities. In our sample, it was clear—and not especially unexpected—that not all students demonstrated changes within all three domains; as noted, some formed new felt identities in one or more of these areas and some did not. Further, some students came to college with their felt identities in one or more of the domains already partially formed. Although our focus was on the subgroup of individuals who were forming new felt identities in these areas, for a fuller understanding of how colleges affect students’ identities future work might well examine students whose felt identities remain only partially formed or even unformed in these areas. Second, and somewhat related, it became clear through our research that some aspects of each domain may be found within the others. That is, the three domains partially overlap. Although the domains are thus not mutually exclusive, they have been presented here in distinct categories for the sake of analytical explication (but not theoretical reification). In practice, for example, certain students saying they wanted a career that uses their mind suggests both a particular occupational identity as well as their need for and identification with intelligence. Similarly, when some students commented on their new form of abstract, critical thought, this change was implicitly (if not explicitly) linked to embracing diversity—both in terms of social interactions and social activities. College is hardly a static milieu in which meaning is created and transmitted in compartmentalized locales. Rather, college is an arena of significant boundary crossing in which individuals are engaged constantly in the construction of their felt identities. As the interactive setting shifts from the classroom to the dorm room to the auditorium, it is to be expected that aspects of students’ identity domains will be produced and reproduced in each place. In studying the constitutive role of college experiences on students’ felt identities, we found that the sources of college effects varied. As we have noted throughout our analysis, a variety of processes and mechanisms are involved: face-to-face interactions in which imputed identities occur; reflected appraisal by the student him- or herself; social comparisons made by the students whether in the presence of others or not; and emulation of role models. Relevant here is another mechanism by which colleges and universities influence students (in-

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cluding their felt identities)—the existence or operation of the schools’ “charters” (Meyer, 1972). As Meyer (1970) has written, the “power of a socializing organization or class of organizations to transform students depends on the increase in social value and the type of social position which it is chartered to confer on them” (p. 568). Elsewhere, Meyer (1977) not only proposes that “students tend to adopt personal and social qualities appropriate to the positions to which schools are chartered to assign them” (p. 60), but further maintains that the mere chartering of an institution as a school itself produces effects on students (p. 61). In terms of the present research, we would say that the chartering effects typically expected at any college or university indeed were at play at the university we studied and were one source of effects on students’ felt identities. As an indicator of the existence of such effects were the students’ discussion of how they saw the university as being a place that would confer on them certain social benefits and lead to certain valued social positions once they graduated. A final comment about our research stems from Feldman’s (1972) contention that studies of the development of college students often seem to embrace a bias toward progress and betterment. The underlying assumption in many developmental studies (and arguably in the general populace as well) is that college makes the individual a better person, a more mature person, a more responsible person, and the like. Because much of the research based on a developmental theory of change is not neutral, evidence tends to be interpreted in developmental terms as reflecting movement toward a more advanced stage of growth, even when the changes are not in theoretically expected directions and the conclusion of advanced growth is not ineluctably warranted (examples are given in Feldman, 1972, as well as in Feldman and Newcomb, 1969, Appendix C). In addition to “psychologizing” student change, the developmental view runs the risk of ignoring a variety of changes that college students experience. That is, some of the imputed or actual changes in students—prompted by their social interactions in college and their moving into new social and preoccupational positions in college or by their anticipation of future roles—may imply little or nothing about psychological development. These changes may simply lie outside the developmental (growth) framework. An important goal, then, of the present research has been to demonstrate the type of information and insights that can be gained from a nondevelopmental approach to the study of college student change.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of several anonymous reviewers of this manuscript as it progressed through its various stages of completion.

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NOTES
1. For a more tempered and nuanced view of the gatekeeping function of higher education, see Jencks (1968, especially p. 284). 2. Although distinguishing between self-representations that are relatively enduring, cumulative, or trans-situational and those that are more transitory and situational is common, the names given to these two kinds of felt identities in the literature are anything but standard. Thus, (enduring) “self-images” are distinguished from (transitory or situational) “self-percepts” by Smith (1968), whereas, contradictorily, Turner (1968) calls the more cumulative sense of self, “self-conception,” and the more situational and transitory sense of self, “self-image.” Some other names for roughly the same distinction are “ideal self” versus “situational self” (McCall and Simmons, 1978) and “biographical self” versus “situated self” (Hewitt, 1976). 3. In addition, our approach simultaneously considers identity theory’s focus on roles (McCall and Simmons, 1978; Stryker and Burke, 2000; Stryker and Serpe, 1982) and social identity theory’s focus on group categorization (Hogg and Abrams, 1988; Jenkins, 1996; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, and Wetherell., 1987). Our analysis supports the suggestion by Stets and Burke that these two theories can be linked usefully in both empirical analysis and theoretical abstraction as part of a general theory of the self. 4. All names have been changed. 5. To the extent that our conception of a cosmopolitan identity incorporates the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of particular groups, our definition is akin to the notion of cultural capital as developed by Bourdieu and others (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; DiMaggio, 1982; Lamont and Lareau, 1988). Where we differ is not having explicitly applied the idea of cultural capital as a tool for social and cultural exclusion. Although we agree that the acquisition of cultural capital, as well as a cosmopolitan identity, may produce and maintain stratifying effects, our intent is not to explicate the process through which such social ordering occurs. Our focus is not on the extent to which individuals embrace these identities as a means to gaining access in higher status groups. Rather, as with our discussion of the two other identity domains, we have been interested in the degree to which students acknowledge that the college environment fosters the formation of a cosmopolitan identity through opportunities for social interaction. 6. Like the vast bulk of studies on college students, our research does not have a control group of individuals who did not attend college. Thus it is possible that the effects on felt identities that we found might also be found for persons not attending college, although it seems unlikely that they all would be (or to the same degree). This surmise is in keeping with the results of those studies that do use a control group of noncollege individuals to establish the net effect of attending college (see the reviews by Feldman and Newcomb, 1969, and Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991). Even so, we want to be cautious in our conclusions by pointing out that our study does not establish causality between the college experience and the formation (or modification) of felt identities in some watertight fashion.

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