My art project depicts real examples of the privileged poor at Hamilton College. The background consists of Hamilton’s chapel and real statements made by students in The Privileged Poor and Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.
Admissions offices and colleges with performative equity missions claim that it is who you are that matters, not where you come from. When select groups of students are cleaning the toilets of their classmates, however, this idea begins to fall apart.
I am caught between the worlds of office hours and working three jobs. I am an alumna of the best K-12 school in New Jersey, whose tuition costs 49,000 dollars a year (Pingry 2022). I had access to study abroad opportunities, SAT/ACT prep, AP tutoring, and top-notch college counseling. As I walked through the halls of this hailed institution, I seemed no different than my peers. In reality, my family could not afford a quarter of that tuition if they tried. Although that school helped me get admitted to the elite college I now attend, my family can afford even less of the tuition here.
When most people think of disadvantaged college students, they think of those from low-income families with poor public education. In this assumption, a particular selection of undergraduates – a surprising 50% of underprivileged students – has been hidden from the public eye (Jack 2019). These are the privileged poor.
Oxymoronic, no? Despite the misleading title, a significant portion of low-income students attending elite colleges come from elite high schools on scholarship. Their US News ranked boarding schools and private day schools are pipelines to elite institutions, and these minorities have accustomed themselves to the elite educational sphere (Rivera 2016). Despite their privileges, this hidden majority faces many hardships that go unseen in the day-to-day life of collegiate rigor.
Access ≠ inclusion
The privileged poor’s experience on campus is a contradiction. In attempting to familiarize themselves with their high school’s culture, so many students explain that to adapt, they had to put on an act (Khan 2013). They learned the customs, the brands, and the teacher-student etiquette necessary to excel in an environment otherwise so foreign to them. They play a role, but they are not truly integrated. Although they are trained to navigate these spaces as well as their richer counterparts, universities maintain policies that reinforce their exclusion and remind students of their place in the collegiate hierarchy.
Exclusion on Campus
An almost universal experience for low-income students is the work-study requirement in their financial aid packages. To qualify for a portion of their financial scholarship, the student must have a job on campus. Where their classmates might choose to work for pocket money or to kill free time, low-income students must work should they want to attend the university at all. Sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack’s 2019 study of students at Harvard University, for example, revealed that many privileged poor students at the renowned institution worked in Community Detail. Though generally perceived to be the worst job on campus, many low-income students took the job for its generous pay compared to other positions. As eloquently put by student Marcia, “The higher pay says nobody wants to do that” (Jack 2019:144). One student recalls, “Community Detail hurt me. It was literally painful . . . cleaning these people’s rooms, cleaning these people’s bathrooms, literally cleaning up their shit, poop, feces. I don’t know how you wanna describe it but I couldn’t do it again. It hurt. My mom was still doing the same thing back home” (Jack 2019:146). Despite the surface-level benefits of this type of employment, students often find that it elicits feelings of humiliation and second-class student status.
The highlight of many undergraduate semesters are the breaks when exhausted students get to go home and see their loved ones. This is not a readily available option for out-of-state students, and many low-income students in particular are forced to stay on campus to avoid the cost of travel. To add insult to injury, dining halls are closed during these times, and regular off-campus transportation is paused. Students are left to fend for themselves, finding their own meals while wishing to be home.
Even in situations that are well-meaning on the part of the institution, exclusion all too often prevails. Harvard’s Scholarship Plus program, for instance, offers financial assistance to students by providing five free tickets to any campus event. When purchasing tickets, there are often separate lines for financial aid recipients and “normal” students. The caveat to these scholarship handouts is that low-income students must segregate themselves to the Scholarship Plus line and announce their name and financial aid status in front of affluent peers. Ogun, a student at Harvard recalls “There’s a bit of shaming. It’s the same at the food stamps office, welfare office, where I am vulnerable. Even though I go here just like you, I am vulnerable again” (Jack 2019:160). Though these programs intend to help these students, their implementation can unintentionally emphasize the fact that the privileged poor are different from their peers.
Why Does it Matter? – The Potential for Reform
Though they’ve learned to blend in with the masses, the privileged poor are dealing with struggles that their environment prevents them from outwardly expressing.
While companies claim to hire based on a candidate’s ability to execute the work required for the position, post-graduation, employers take signals of socioeconomic status and university prestige into account more than other facets of an application. A firm partner explains that “95 percent of our intake is from the top-five business schools . . . There may be really good candidates out there, but it’s not worth the investment on our part to spend a lot of resources looking for them when we have a very good pool that’s easy to reach” (Rivera 2016). The best business schools, medical schools, and law firms alike come with big price tags that are often out of reach for low-income students. Though these institutions have scholarships, these are often only offered to the exceptional students of elite colleges, thus perpetuating the problem. Because merit does not matter as much as pedigree, low-income students put themselves through the pipeline to reach those opportunities. Students recognize that their chance to “make it out” is attending these elite institutions, and yet the price tag and social isolation create a dangerous system where these students must go into debt, face discrimination, and even lose their sense of identity for a chance at a better life.
The privileged poor are caught in an in-between state where they don’t quite fit in with their disadvantaged peers or upper-class counterparts. It can be suffocating when they receive ostracization from both ends of the spectrum. In Jack’s Harvard Study, Hispanic student Patrice elaborates on this isolation. While she was grateful to find other students who looked like her on campus, she was shocked when her Hispanic friends told her “You’re elite. Shut up. You don’t understand. You’re Latina, but you’re elite. You think you’re from there but you’re not” (Jack 2019:62). Patrice is part of the privileged poor on scholarship, and although she was proud of the boarding school she attended for high school, she was ashamed and isolated from members of her own community.
Though it is certainly not the end all be all solution, people must be acquainted with the idea of the privileged poor. In the same way that poor students may need to acquaint themselves with the lifestyles of their upper-class counterparts, more well-off students should be aware of the experiences of their underprivileged classmates. Though seemingly trivial, this is the first step to making institutional changes and removing barriers for these types of students. In an educational environment that so often harps on the idea of inclusivity, true inclusion can not exist until the experiences of all underprivileged students are acknowledged.
References
Anon. n.d. “Affording Pingry.” Pingry School. Retrieved October 25, 2022 (https://www.pingry.org/admissions/affordingpingry).
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2019. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rivera, Lauren A. 2015. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
