ABSTRACT
Meet Troy 1 , a clean-cut, White, working-class, 11th-grade student. In his third year at Thompson High School, Troy already had one foot out the door into the “real world,” as he put it. Troy spoke candidly about the past three years: “For me, high school is dumb; it’s a waste of time.” For Troy, school was a temporary stepping-stone that served as a gateway to the larger world of opportunity. He did not participate in school activities and enrolled in as many college-credit courses as possible via the Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program to save money and to speed his college entrance.
