Class Matters: Chapters 6–10

Going to college has become the norm throughout most of the United States, even in many places where college was once considered an exotic destination—places like Chilhowie, an Appalachian hamlet with a simple brick downtown.

For much of his fifteen years as Virginia’s president, Casteen has focused on raising money and expanding the university, the most prestigious in the state.

The university’s genteel nickname, the Cavaliers, and its aristocratic sword-crossed coat of arms seem appropriate today.

Today, Leanna, petite and high-energy, is helping to start a new college a few hours’ drive from Chilhowie for low-income students.

They say they want to make an effort to admit more low-income students, just as they now do for minorities and children of alumni.

“If we are blind to the educational disadvantages associated with need, we will simply replicate these disadvantages while appearing to make decisions based on merit.”

At a modest high school in the Tidewater city of Portsmouth, not far from John Casteen’s boyhood home, a guidance-office wall filled with college pennants does not include one from rarefied Virginia.

“We here in Virginia do a good job of getting them in,” said Glenn Dubois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System and himself a community college graduate.

In the long white van the group owns, they wend their way along mountain roads on their way to singing dates at local church functions, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes ribbing one another or talking about where to buy golf equipment.

To get into a good college, the sons and daughters of the upper middle class often talk of needing a higher SAT score than, say, an applicant who grew up on a farm, in a ghetto, or in a factory town.

The findings befuddled many administrators, who insist that admissions officers have tried to give poorer applicants a leg up.

But Casteen and his colleagues are going ahead, saying the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.

Blackburn thought of the trip as a reprise of the drives Casteen took twenty-five years earlier, when he was the admissions dean, traveling to churches and community centers to persuade black parents that the university was finally interested in their children.

Just the day before, Uma Thurman slipped in for a quiet lunch with her children, but the paparazzi found her and she left.

For an illiterate immigrant who came to New York years ago with nothing but $100 in his pocket and a willingness to work etched on his heart, could any words have been sweeter to say?

With its wealthy clientele, middle-class owners, and low-income workforce, 3 Guys is a template of the class divisions in America.

But the sheer size of the influx—over 400,000 a year, with no end in sight—creates a problem all its own.

Political scientists are divided over whether the twenty-five million people of Mexican ancestry in the United States represent an exception to the classic immigrant success story.

“It’s worrisome,” said Richard Alba, a sociologist at the State University of New York, Albany, who studies the assimilation and class mobility of contemporary immigrants, “and I don’t see much reason to believe this will change.”

He and his second wife, June, live in Wyckoff, a New Jersey suburb where he pampers fig trees and dutifully looks after a bird feeder shaped like the Parthenon.

Though he himself had no documents, the compatriots he encountered on his first days were here legally, like most other Greek immigrants, and could help him.

His greatest weakness is instant lottery tickets, what he calls “los scratch,” and he sheepishly confesses that he can squander as much as $75 a week on them.

Most others believe that recent Mexican immigrants will eventually take their place in society, and perhaps someday muster political clout commensurate with their numbers, though significant impediments are slowing their progress.

Rivera-Batiz studied what happened to illegal Mexican immigrants who became legal after the last national amnesty in 1986.

Tighter security on the border made it harder for Mexicans to move back and forth in the traditional way, so they tended to stay here, searching for low-paying unskilled jobs and concentrating in barrios where Spanish, constantly replenished, never loses its immediacy.

In the last thirty years or so, however, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups.

In this view, Americans care less about emulating the top tier than about simply having a fair share of the bounty and a chance to carve out a place for themselves in society.

The number has soared because prices have correspondingly plummeted, to about an eighth of what they cost in 1994.

Yet today’s cruise ships continue to trade on the vestiges of their upper-class mystique, even while offering new amenities like onboard ice skating and wall climbing.

Yet virtually no company that has built a reputation as a purveyor of luxury goods will want to lose its foothold in that territory, even as it lowers prices on some items and sells them to a wider audience.

But the company is also trying simultaneously to hold on to the true luxury market, which has increasingly been seduced away by small, expensive artisan chocolate makers, many from Europe, that are opening around the country.

In the country’s largest cities, otherwise prosaic services have been transformed into status symbols simply because of the price tag.

and Cary, North Carolina, which is outside Raleigh and, its resident nomads maintain, stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees

Converging on these towns, relos have segregated themselves, less by the old barriers of race, religion, and national origin than by age, family status, education, and, especially, income.

Isolated, segmented, and stratified, these families are cut off from the single, the gay and the gray, and, except for those tending them, anyone from lower classes.

Unlike their upper-middle-class kindred—the executives, doctors, and lawyers who settle down in one place—relos forgo the old community props of their class: pedigree and family ties; seats on the vestry and the hospital board; and the rituals, like charity balls.

Few Alpharetta lawns sprouted campaign signs during the last election season because the area’s four contenders for the state legislature and a new candidate for Congress were all Republicans and ran unopposed.

Kathy’s favorite place was Pittsford, an affluent apple-pie town outside Rochester with a congenial mix of transient families and long-settled ones.

Hardy, trim, and darker toned than his wife, in disposition still the affable bartender, Jim Link mans the beer cooler at holiday parties at the Medlock Bridge clubhouse.

But they did not count on the grueling traffic, on how far away everything seems, on how much is asked of volunteers to sustain the community, or on the stresses of a breadwinner’s travels.