The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Jack opens by asking the question he asked as a freshman at Amherst College: “Where are the other poor Black kids?” (1). All around him, he heard conversations about fancy parties at summer homes, vacations abroad, and other activities completely different from how he spent his summers. While most of the speakers were white, many were wealthy Black students too. In Gulliver, the Miami private school he had attended his senior year of high school, he had heard similar conversations, but only from white students.

At Amherst, he discovered the same thing he would learn years later as a sociology graduate student: The majority of Black students at Ivy League and similar universities come from upper-income families. Jack’s Amherst peers were no different. He was a Head Start student from Coconut Grove, a struggling community in Miami. Prior to going to Gulliver, the closest he got to wealth were the stories his grandmother told him about cleaning the homes of rich white families.

Higher education is unequally distributed: Most first-generation college students are relegated to lower-ranked, for-profit, or community colleges. In fact, just 14 percent of undergraduates at the most competitive tier of colleges come from the bottom 50% of income levels in the US. Worse, economists have found that students who grow up in the top 1% of income levels are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League school than are students from families who make $30,000 or less per year. This has been the norm for decades, and only recently have colleges begun to offer financial aid packages designed to rectify the situation and allow academically gifted students from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend without having to take out loans. This has resulted in more economically diverse student bodies, which encourages more upward mobility, since elite universities serve as mobility springboards. However, elite universities still serve as bastions of wealth, with cultures reflecting the tastes and habits of the richest Americans. Jack insists we make deeper inquiry into who the students admitted to colleges under the new financial aid packages are and what happens to them when they enter this new culture.

One afternoon at Amherst, Jack was amazed that the young Black woman next to him was also from a single-parent home and the first person in her family to enter college. She had come from a neighborhood in which she rarely saw white people who were not police officers or drug addicts, but she had attended a prestigious day school and had even studied abroad in Spain for a year. He found other students who had taken similarly elaborate trips often paid for by their wealthier high school friends. Jack recognized that his new friends were not so different, despite the fact that he had only been on an airplane once in his life. They were all poor and yet privileged.

College pamphlets always spotlight diversity visually and statistically, but statistics don’t always give the whole story. Top colleges still draw their student populations from the same sources they always have, with over half of the lower-income Black undergraduate students admitted from elite boarding, day, and preparatory schools. Lower-income students who come from such schools enter college already able to navigate the customs of the elite and the norms of high-level academics. Jack calls low-income students from these high schools the “Privileged Poor.” The remaining group of lower-income Black students admitted to the most elite colleges come from overcrowded, underfunded local neighborhood schools. These students are not used to elite academia and upper-class people; Jack calls students from those backgrounds the “Doubly Disadvantaged.” This distinction also applies to Asian, Latino, and some white students—just at smaller rates.

It was not until Jack began his graduate studies in sociology that he realized that he was not the only person who did not understand the complexity of life experiences on a college campus. To study this, he spent two years living at and observing a prestigious undergraduate school in the Northeastern United States; he calls the school “Renowned University” to ensure the anonymity of his subjects. He chose to study at an elite university because studying inequality should not always be about studying poor people in poor places. Our fates are connected, and it is important to understand whether elite universities are ready to help the increasingly diverse students they are actively recruiting.

During Jack’s first weeks at Renowned, he met two Latina students, Patrice and Alice (both pseudonyms—like the names of nearly everyone in the text). Both of them were the daughters of immigrants from the same part of New York City, and had grown up poor and on government assistance. However, while Alice attended her local public high school, in which nearly every student was poor and nearly half dropped out, Patrice had been accepted to Prep for Prep, a New York-based program that places lower-income, minority teenagers in elite high schools. Alice pushed herself to graduate, even traveling to other schools for science labs because her school didn’t have the necessary equipment. She applied to Renowned on a whim. Patrice, on the other hand, attended on scholarship a boarding school three states from New York. The school cost $50,000 a year and had a student-to-teacher ratio of six to one. There, she was given resources to pursue her own independent study and even received a check from the school to help with her grandfather’s funeral expenses. Patrice worked closely with a college advisor at the school on her applications, and even had her Renowned alumni interview on the high school campus. Renowned came to her, in other words.

Alice and Patrice met at Renowned and realized they had the same background, having even attended the same church. But Alice and Patrice had very different feelings about Renowned due to their divergent high school paths. Alice was uncomfortable there, but noticed that students like Patrice, who had attended boarding school, have already lived through much of the shock Alice was feeling. Alice felt that for poor students with prep school backgrounds, Renowned was just a continuation of high school.

Most social scientists do not acknowledge students like Patrice. They instead focus on the role families play in shaping a student’s understanding of “cultural capital,” a sociology term that refers to various accepted ways of being valued in a particular context. Researchers have failed to consider that some cultural capital may not come from the home but from elite high schools. For example, students at those schools learn the norm of feeling entitled to a teacher’s time and taking advantage of opportunities. Academic institutions have too long taken a monolithic approach to lower-income students and, even with good intentions, created undifferentiated programming for them.

In 2013, to understand the complexity of students, Jack initiated the project that became The Privileged Poor. He interviewed 76 lower-income Black, Latino, and white students at Renowned: 21 Privileged Poor and 55 Doubly Disadvantaged. He also interviewed 27 middle and upper-middle class Black students at the school. Additionally, Jack observed campus life, hosted discussions about social class on campus, and interviewed deans and other staff. While race and gender are also important components of college experiences, Jack focused his study on class. One of his book’s main goals is to introduce readers to the Privileged Poor, a group that has been largely overlooked. Another goal is to demonstrate that we hurt students when we assume poor students’ stories are the same. In fact, some policies seemingly designed to help can actually exacerbate class differences among students.

Elite universities offer a number of contradictions: They seek to admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but often highlight their disadvantages once they arrive. At Renowned, Jack was welcomed into the hearts and minds of his subjects and empathized with their journeys, seeing how students given access to such an impressive college only face additional hurdles on campus. His book gives voice to students whose stories have not been heard or have been misheard.