“Piling on the stress”: Low-income students' experiences in a neoliberal majoritarian university

Abstract

The United States is experiencing state disinvestment from higher education and significant wealth inequality. This article documents how low-income college students both experience and attempt to manage these contexts in their daily lives at a public flagship university in the American Midwest. We theorize these experiences as forms of precarity entailed by a culture and institutional form that we describe as the neoliberal majoritarian university (NMU). We argue that the concepts of precarity and of NMU provide a more robust framework for conceptualizing the consequences of college-going for low-income students than do conventional discourses of social mobility, college affordability, or student stress.