Analysis Of Robert Granfield's Social Research: Making It By Faking It

In Robert Granfield’s social research, Making It by Faking It, he conducts a research on the working class students who attends an Ivy League law school. Majority of the students come from upper-class families that have cultural capital, whereas the working class does not. His interviews with the students gives a good reflection of how money and reputation can influence others. As these working-class students are thrown into the world of the upper-class, they hide their identities and are ashamed of their backgrounds. These students should not be guilty of their background because it has made an impact, good and bad, on who they are. When the students tried to fit themselves in, they forgot about their own morals. They forgot about honesty …show more content…
It makes them perceive the world in a different way, such as believing that they must wear suits to look acceptable to their peers. With that, comes the insecurities. The fear that maybe they weren’t talking or using the right words. It takes a lot of effort to put on a different mask and act like they are someone else. They will constantly stress over the different personalities of wanting to be true to who they are and acting as though they understand what feels like to live wealthy. Most students do it for upward mobility, but when they get hired into large law firms and are asked to help the less unfortunate, they feel uneasy about it. One male student said that the reason why he decided to stay away from law students who want to help the poor is because it reminded him of his own guilt. Higher stress levels were built from personal problems and resulted from the fear of academic insufficiency. When compared, about 62 percent of first-year working-class students felt deeply pressured to earn the best grades, while only 35 percent of upper-class students felt the same (Granfield). It comes from the notion that since the working-class students know that they do not have elite backgrounds, they must convert to being at top of their class to know that they are someone who is worth going to the prestigious law school. Granfield’s research states that stigma holds one back from being able to be a “complete citizen” because they cannot fully enjoy and participate in their social life. On the outside, these students may seem normal and look like a typical rich student, but it actually only adds on more psychological stress (Granfield). It’s one thing to hide about their background verbally, but it’s different when they must try to hide it outside of school. As in if a working-class student was with his or her parents had happened to come across an upper-class student at the grocery