Summary
Determined to go to law school, Vance wasn’t picky about which school he chose. That all changed, however, when his friend ran into a law school classmate of his waiting tables at a DC restaurant. Vance decided he’d apply to the “mythical ‘top three’ schools”: Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Although Vance never thought he’d be accepted, he received a call one day from the Yale Admissions Office informing him that he’d been accepted to the law school. Vance remembers being so excited on the call that when he called Aunt Wee to tell her the good news, he was breathing so hard she assumed he was in a car accident.
To his surprise, he found that it was cheaper for him to attend Yale for law school than anywhere else, as they offered a financial aid package so comprehensive it made his time at Yale almost free. He cites a New York Times report that although more selective colleges are cheaper for poor students to attend, but Vance notes that kids who grow up poor, like him, aren’t aware of this.
Vance saved enough money to move to New Haven by working at the tile distribution company he mentioned earlier in the book. He recalls the day he moved to New Haven as being different from the other times he’d left his hometown, as he knew he would never come back, even semi-permanently. Vance found he took to Yale, despite the fact that he was rare amongst his classmates; in his constitutional law class, for example, he found a “family” of people that included a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights attorney from New Haven, and an “extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor.”
Although he had been prepared to feel like an intellectual fraud, perhaps even for the Yale administration to admit they’d made a mistake by admitting him, that wasn’t the case. Even his writing, formerly his sloppiest skill, improved, and in doing so, Vance proved to a professor who once believed the school should only accept graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that kids from state schools could do good work.
Still, Vance felt out of place at Yale. All the fancy cocktail parties and networking events alienated him, as he was the first person in his family to attend college. Over 95 percent of Yale Law School’s students are considered upper-middle-class or higher, according to Vance, and though the school was careful to accept a racially and ethnically diverse class each year, they didn’t seem to care about accepting a socioeconomically diverse one. For a while, Vance believed he was reveling in his status as an anomaly: a marine from Ohio with a Southern twang, the first in his family to go to college. However, as time went on, Vance began to notice the small lies he was telling about his family—that his mother was a nurse, or that he kept in touch with his legal father. Eventually, Vance put an end to this. He wanted to tell his new friends about Mamaw and Papaw, giving them the credit they deserved posthumously.
He also began to take note of the inner conflict resulting from his new success: was he a Middletown kid or a Yale Law student? He recalls stopping at a gas station back home and seeing that the attendant had a Yale shirt on. Vance asked her if she went to Yale, and she replied that her nephew did. “Did you?” she asked Vance. He answered that he didn’t, but his girlfriend did. “I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor,” he admits. He realizes now that living in such an isolated community gives people the sense that success is “not just unattainable but...the property of people not like us.”
Vance notes that some of the outsider-ness he felt while at Yale doesn’t just come from his community back home, but from those at the top, like his professor who thought Yale should only accept candidates from Ivy League schools. Under this pressure, people from communities like Vance’s might feel they’re leaving their only identity behind, might feel unwelcome at places like Yale. “Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something,” Vance writes. Transitioning from working-class to professional-class, Vance explains, doesn’t just involve more money, it involves an entire lifestyle change (vacationing in exotic places, eating healthier, seeing orchestral concerts, etc.), which makes their old lifestyle look unfashionable or unhealthy.
Analysis
In some ways, this chapter completes the journey from rags to riches that Vance promises us at the start of the book, as his arrival at the prestigious Yale Law School has been foreshadowed from the very first page. Certainly, this accomplishment closes any remaining questions the reader has about whether Vance will transcend his circumstances and succeed on a national level (he did). But in many ways, this chapter also kickstarts a whole other struggle that Vance will confront his whole life: his sense that he is straddling two different worlds, at home in neither. This is a theme that will define the rest of the book, as he continues to feel as though his hillbilly roots make him stick out at Yale, and as though his Yale pedigree makes him stick out in Middletown. Just as the so-called hillbilly community is experiencing an identity crisis, so too does Vance, knowing that he now belongs to a more prestigious echelon.
In light of this revelation, Vance revisits the theme of the American Dream, once again proving that it is not as straightforward as Mamaw and Papaw once imagined. Attending Yale University would unquestionably have exceeded Mamaw and Papaw’s wildest dreams for Vance, and thus would likely have signaled to them the fulfillment of the Vance family’s American Dream. However, just as Vance documents the ways in which his family’s path to the American Dream was complicated by Mamaw and Papaw’s negative influences on their children, he also proves here that, even once one achieves the American Dream on paper, it may introduce new problems and anxieties. Vance’s new obstacle—albeit a more tolerable one—becomes his sense of fractured identity, caught between his working-class roots and his Ivy League credentials.
To help illustrate this problem, Vance tells the story of the time he ran into a woman wearing a Yale T-shirt at a gas station. Lying that his girlfriend went to Yale but he did not, Vance remembers this incident now as symbolic of his struggle with upward social mobility. Earlier in the book, Vance notes that the working-class people by whom he was raised have an expression for people who leave home in search of bigger, better opportunities: “too big for your britches.” No doubt, by answering that he did indeed attend Yale, Vance would have felt he was “too big for his britches,” so he chose to blend in with his fellow Middletown citizens. By drawing our attention to the trappings of upper-class living—he also lists shopping at Whole Foods and vacationing in Panama—Vance also draws attention to the ways in which socially mobile people code switch for the ways in which they seek to blend in.
Much of this chapter is written in the style of an “awestruck tourist,” as Vance approaches Yale much like Dorothy approaches Oz (Vance himself alludes to The Wizard of Oz to describe the otherworldly nature of Yale). “The buildings themselves were breathtakingly beautiful—towering masterpieces of neo-Gothic architecture,” he writes. Compared to the mournful tone in which Vance wrote about his hometown (fading lines on a tennis court, vacant shop windows, etc.), this tone feels dazzled and bubbly. Of course, underpinning this “awestruck” tone is his sense that he is a trespassing stranger in his own law school. Later in the chapter, his tone transitions back to analytical and sobering as he interrogates this feeling of otherness.
One image sums up Vance’s sense that he is alone (or nearly so) in having working-class roots while attending Yale. Anecdotally, Vance shares a story about his law school friends, to whom Vance refers as “family,” going out to dinner at a chicken joint. He remembers the mess of “dirty plates, chicken bones, ranch dressing and soda splattered on the tables.” Awestruck at the dirty mess his supposedly upper-crust colleagues had made, he cleaned it up so as to avoid leaving it for an employee. His friend, Jamil, who was also from a poor background, helped him, but the other, more middle or upper-class kids simply left the restaurant. Indeed, this image of two formerly poor Yale Law students cleaning up after their wealthy friends encapsulates Vance’s sense that he does not belong in the Ivy League due to his working-class roots.
