Socioeconomic Status

Growing up, I came from a very privileged suburban family. When I was born, my mother and father were not married. In society, having a child before marriage was very unacceptable. A family that is married with children has more social hierarchy, than a family that parents are legally married. When my parents got married, they gained socioeconomic status. Marriage is an achieved status, so it can be earned with effort. An ascribed status is something that is given because of the situations you are born into, like my race. If my family was compared to an African-American family that is married, has the same income, and in the same city, my family would still have a social hierarchy though, because we are white.

Just how you can earn achieved

I am the first person in my family to move away for college. My mother was the only person who went to college and it was a community college that she attended for only one semester then dropped out. I feel I have a lot of pressure to get a degree and a job that makes “good” money. When I decided to take a gap year, most of my friends and family looked at me with this disappointed face, then proceed to lecture me on why that was such a bad idea. The stigma behind a gap year is you will never go back to school and work at a minimum wage job the rest of your life. My mother and grandmother were the only people who knew I was going to go back and didn’t doubt me for one second. I think that sometimes the idea of college can be an iron cage because after high school you are expected to go straight to college. If you do not people consider you to be lazy. I do not regret my decision at all to take time off. I had a year to be free and do what I wanted, with hardly any stress. Now I am in college and I am able to focus on school, because this is not my first time with freedom like other freshmen. A gap year may not be for everyone but it is a key factor in my success at school