I recently spoke with Morton about the price of upward mobility, and what it illuminates about how opportunity is distributed on college campuses and throughout the country. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Pinsker: What is missing from the traditional American narrative of upward class mobility?

Jennifer Morton: Inherent in that narrative is the idea that you’re moving up in the world and getting more and more valuable things in your life, but there is little recognition of what you’re trading for it. Of course, we recognize that on the path of upward mobility, people invest a lot financially and expend a lot of effort. But there’s very little attention paid to the ways in which strivers end up paying in other areas of their lives that are meaningful and valuable—their relationships to friends, to family, and to their communities. We don’t really tell students that that will be difficult, and in ways that sometimes they don’t quite expect.

Read: Why college became so expensive

Pinsker: You write that the conventional American-immigrant narrative prepared you well for the reality of being upwardly mobile. How so?

Morton: I think that the immigrant narrative can prepare you for feeling out of place. For example, I came to the United States for college, and when I got to Princeton, I definitely felt like a fish out of water. But in a sense, I was prepared for that because I was coming to a foreign country—I knew that, as an immigrant, there would be some culture shock and some feelings of loneliness.

But I think what happens with some first-generation college students and others who come to college and experience that same sense of dislocation is that they might not have something to attribute it to—something that can frame their experience in a way where it’s clear that it’s not about them as individuals not belonging, but that they come from a different place, with perhaps different cultural norms. I, on the other hand, was ready to be an outsider.

Pinsker: What else would a more honest narrative of class mobility include?

Morton: I think one feature that we often don’t acknowledge is the effect on the people on the other end, the people who are in a striver’s original community. I mean, there are things to be gained: Of course friends and family feel proud when one of their own goes on and achieves a certain measure of success. And there might even be financial rewards—I interviewed a few people who would send money back home. But I think the potential effect on these relationships, and how they might fray with distance, is often something that we don’t talk about.

Pinsker: In the book, you argue that being upwardly mobile doesn’t in and of itself have to introduce trade-offs like this. What is it about the way American society is set up that makes this the case?