Getting In: Status Stratification and the Pursuit of the Good College Party

How do social hierarchies emerge from symbolic boundaries? Based on an ethnography of a college party scene, we consider “Who parties with whom” as a way to trace the micro-interactional bases of status stratification. Based on field observations and 60 interviews with college women and men in Boston, USA, we identify two main modes of partying: “crawling” and “climbing.” Crawling is the search for a low-status house party to attend, often leading to subpar experiences in poorly-maintained frat houses. Climbing , in contrast, describes the aspirational movement into superior parties at elite institutions, an experience potentially marked with feelings of shame. Regardless of their frequently bad experiences, students continue to go out with the goal of “getting in,” which we analyze as an exchange of capitals—bodily, cultural, and social—for access to exclusive spaces. The pursuit of college parties, we discovered, forces students to position themselves in hierarchies of desirability, and through this process, they learn to connect wealth, status, and campus affiliation.