The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Jack goes to great lengths to praise the steps universities like Renowned have taken toward being more inclusive. Creative “financial aid packages that replaced loans with grants and other forms of aid” have helped schools “recruit and then support gifted applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds” (6). Schools are correctly “celebrated and rewarded” for increasing diversity, but Jack notes the need to do more—a wildly disproportionate number of undergraduates at these schools still come from top economic brackets (8). The trouble is that schools have good intentions, but are slow to make major changes. They still, for example, recruit students in the same way and from the same schools they always have. Some administrators are annoyed by the services and aid already available to students, wondering “when is enough enough” (179). Moreover, the broader society sees disadvantaged students on scholarship at places like Renowned “as having already won” (189). This can stew resentment on both sides, as disadvantaged undergraduates cope with being expected which amplifies experience the largesse, as Elise puts it, as being “at someone else’s mercy” (44), angry that they are supposed to only feel lucky to simply be at Renowned.

Worse, some well-intentioned programs on campus actually hurt students. Renowned is not a classist institution intentionally hurting low-income students, but its staff has such limited knowledge of the differences between students that even good intentions lead to classist structures. Jack describes in great detail the flaws of Community Detail program, despite which, its directors still see the program as a net positive because it provides participants with money and prevents wealthy students from hiring private maids, a display “of affluence that would make poor students feel as if they did not belong at Renowned” (147). Rather than seeing the impact the actual experience of doing the cleaning dorm rooms has on disadvantaged students, Renowned insists Community Detail is a benevolent good. Scholarship Plus’s tiered ticketing system had similarly unintended consequences of exacerbating class divisions; Jack successfully lobbied to amend it.

While Jack generally is critical of university policies that lump people of the same class together, there are some similarities between groups. The experience of being hungry during spring break is universal: Poor students all pay the same price for school decisions that “effectively make money mandatory for full citizenship in the college community” (176). That is, the Privileged Poor are no more able to avoid needing money or food on campus than the Doubly Disadvantaged students. Policies that impact all students (regardless of the diversity of their high school experiences) can harm specific groups.

Jack is also critical of well-meaning programs like Prep for Prep, which offer individual solutions to the problem of underfunded education instead of collective ones. Such programs do not aim to change society at large, and they likely contribute to poorer students feeling the need to be thankful for the benevolence of the great university and thus barred from criticizing it.