Moving Up without Losing Your Way, Jennifer Morton
Moving Up without Losing Your Way, Jennifer Morton
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Moving Up without Losing Your Way
The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility

Author: Jennifer Morton

Narrator: Chloe Cannon

Unabridged: 5 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/17/2019


Synopsis

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society.

Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves.


About Jennifer Morton

Jennifer M. Morton is associate professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY and senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Holli

No one tells first generation students that aspiring in school to better their lives comes with ethical tradeoffs in the form of losing community, relationships and identity. The narrative of using education to better oneself and move up the social ladder completely leaves out the social costs these......more

Goodreads review by Grant

I was always taught that if I wanted to succeed, I would have to sacrifice. And there was never any question that such sacrifices would be viewed positively. After all, it was almost always a question of discipline. --To succeed academically, you sacrifice TV time, video game time, non-productive so......more

Goodreads review by Heather

Everyone in higher ed should read this book. Morton’s perspective as a philosopher (as well as being an immigrant and first gen) provides a compelling focus for her exploration of the hard choices students navigate and ways faculty can support them with candor and compassion. Her suggestions about v......more

Goodreads review by Nuri

Morton writes an exceptionally compelling narrative about "strivers" that lose their connection to family, community, maybe even identity, as they move up the socio-economic ladder. She calls it the ethical costs, which should not be exacted as a condition for a better life. She also explained the p......more