Hypocrisy As Key To Class
Two examples of how a key to achieving higher social class is to learn the right kinds of hypocrisy:
Working-class students are more likely to enter college with the notion that the purpose of higher education is learning in the classroom and invest their time and energies accordingly. … This type of academically focused script clashes with the “party” and social cultures of many US colleges. It isolates working and lower middle-class students from peer networks that can provide them with valuable information about how to navigate the social landscape of college as well as future job opportunities. The resulting feelings of isolation and alienation adversely affect these students’ grades, levels of happiness, and likelihood of graduation. … [This] also adversely affects their job prospects. (p.13 Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs)
“There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor. … There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have.
Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. (more)
Further, I rather suspect that the author of the piece understood that full well, and was rather disingenuously trying to avoid copping to the most obvious reason for the "ceiling".
Of course it's "clever" in that it sort-of acknowledges the source of the discrimination but still makes it sound like the targets are primarily somehow victims of some sort of subtle deficiency in their upbringing, and if they'd only conformed to the 'superior' culture better they'd have no issues. IIRC the term of art for this sort of tack is "crackpot realism".
The upper-class students at a mid-rank school are downwardly mobile (otherwise they would be at a prestige school) and the lower-class students are upwardly mobile (otherwise they would not be in college).
If the upper-class students at a mid-rank school party and the lower-class students study, that does not mean partying is the way to get ahead.