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    The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
    The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
    The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students

    Written by Anthony Abraham Jack

    Narrated by Mirron Willis

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Getting in is only half the battle. The Privileged Poor reveals how-and why-disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges, and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive.

    The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors-and their coffers-to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In The Privileged Poor, Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they've arrived on campus. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This bracing and necessary book documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others.

    If we truly want our top colleges to be engines of opportunity, university policies and campus cultures will have to change. Jack provides concrete advice to help schools reduce these hidden disadvantages-advice we cannot afford to ignore.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781977368799

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    • 5/5
      Really interesting and distressing study of students at elite colleges (think Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford) from poor families and communities. Even if they manage to get to an elite school (the percentage of students from families from the 0.1 percent who attend elite universities, 40%, is the same as the percentage of students from poor families who attend any college at all, including 2-year colleges; many elite colleges have more students from 1% families than from families in the bottom 60%), their struggles are far from over. Jack identifies two distinct subgroups: the Privileged Poor, who went to elite high schools through scholarships/outreach programs and are prepared for many of the social expectations of college like developing personal relationships with administrators to help with job searches and going to professors’ office hours, and the Doubly Disadvantaged, who came from non-elite high schools and don’t know what’s on the “hidden curriculum,” hampering their ability to succeed in college. One practical thing I learned for professors to do: “When professors mention office hours, often only on the first day of classes, they tell students when office hours are. They almost never say what they are.” Some DD students even think that “office hours” means “period when I expect to work undisturbed.” Some DD students reported anxiety about navigating a new style of engagement with professors—they’d been socialized not to make trouble or ask for things, and they could view discussing nonacademic matters with faculty and administrators as “sucking up.” (That’s not wrong, at least in some ways, but it’s not the entirety of it either.) PP students were better prepared for this, but they knew it was an aquired, “rather than innate or inherited,” skill. For mental health and other things the college could help with, PP students were also more socialized to ask, like their rich counterparts. As Jack says, “for better or for worse, [asking] is how students get access to institutional resources as well as social support. None of this is explicitly stated; it is assumed that students already know what to do.” Making this more explicit would help.Both groups can struggle to survive when schools close dorms and cafeterias during breaks, leaving poor students to go hungry or hustle in ways their peers don’t have to (including, for het women, going on dates they wouldn’t otherwise have agreed to in the expectation that a man would pay for dinner); both groups may feel compelled to take janitorial jobs that are more flexible and better-paying than other on-campus jobs, but that reinforce status hierarchies among students. As Jack points out, “[n]ot everyone is asked to explain themselves: poor students are often asked why they won’t go out for dinner or to a dance club, but no one is asking rich students to justify spending $30 for a lobster.” This could be very alienating, as DD students in particular felt both isolated and judged; PP students generally had more social resources but still faced the stresses of poverty both in terms of their own freedom to participate in campus life but also because they had to fear calls from home about needs for money or gang violence or the like. Jack suggests a number of incremental fixes, if we’re not going to fix high school for poor kids. He points to programs that coach students how to ask questions when they meet with a professor, extensions of cafeteria coverage for holidays, and de-segregation of discount tickets for scholarship students so that there’s no separate door or line for using them to take advantage of the many amazing campus opportunities that are offered—one program he discusses switched to offering the tickets electronically so they could be printed at home or shown on a phone. He also suggests including families/off-campus networks in orientation to make them aware of the available resources and to explain what college life is like. There was also one fascinating observation about poor whites: it was hard for him to find low-income whites who went to elite high schools. They apparently participate in the pipeline programs that funnel poor kids to elite high schools at a lower rate, because they’re not targeted by diversity initiatives at elite high schools in the way that black and Latino students are, and also perhaps because of geography—poor students in cities, relatively more likely to be black and Latino, may have more opportunity to attend private schools than poor students in rural areas.