JESSICA HALLIDAY HARDIE, 2022, Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times, California: University of California Press, 274 pp., ISBN 9780520970052

Keywords: Planning, Educational Attainment, Women, Student Debt, Higher Education

‘Work hard, and you will get there!’ This is something that we as young students hear so often. The undue stress that is put upon individuals to achieve their goals often tends to lose sight of structural constraints that discourage people from achieving their purpose. When people discuss tales of success or sob stories of failure, the constraining conditions rarely find mention. Jessica Halliday Hardie’s Best Laid Pans is a significant intervention into these discussions. Through this work, she questions the existing scholarship that considers planning for the future and goal attainment merely as a function of individual aspirations and hard work. She argues that we need to move beyond the ‘planning paradigm’ to see the multiple economic, social, and political factors that determine the chances of upward mobility and career achievement during the transition from adolescence to adulthood among school-going students, particularly those from underprivileged groups and disadvantaged social classes.  

The study is based in the United States and follows the trajectory of several young women who are on their journey to achieve their ‘American Dream.’ Through seven chapters, Hardie follows the career paths of young women from middle, poor, and working classes to find out how successful they have been in being able to achieve their adolescent dreams and plans. Interestingly, the book sustains a distinction between the three classes. Working class women are employed at low-paying jobs while poor women are coming from familial backgrounds in which everyone is struggling to get even a low-paying job. Middle class women come from familial backgrounds in which one or both the parents are in decent paying jobs and have a pretty reliable social circle. Despite having realistic and well-thought-out plans, her study reveals that young women – particularly from economically underprivileged backgrounds – find it difficult or sometimes impossible to realize their goals. Middle-class women fare slightly better. For Hardie, the underlying factors that generate this difference are the availability of economic resources, issues of accessibility, and the social connections that working-class and poor women often lack. The planning process and execution are embedded and shaped by the larger web of background socio-economic conditions and the reasons for non-fulfillment of the plans are more structural than are commonly understood.

Can Everyone Afford Education? Economy as a Structural Constraint

In the United States, the diverse higher education ‘market’ offers various kinds of institutions and courses for students. The students from poor and working-class backgrounds, because of lack of affordability, tend to miss out on the most ‘sellable’ and ‘asked for’ courses. For them, even the bare minimum of educational attainment would mean drowning in the sea of student debt. Ranging from financial to intimate relations, there are multiple costs that families across the United States have to pay, just to be able to send their younger members to higher educational institutions (Zaloom 2019). Attaining higher education in the United States is too costly an affair for certain groups of people which ultimately lands them in bad financial situations and