Abstract
Since the late 1980s, lower-income, first-generation college students have been a focal point of scholars of higher education. With three decades of research now accumulated, we have good insight into the experiences and outcomes of students who, on average, enter college with academic, financial, and social challenges. Whereas the earliest contributions generated quantitative insights into the factors that put these students at risk for attrition, more recent work has become more diverse, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, shedding light not just on this group’s academic outcomes but on their experiences in college. Sociologists, in particular, have shown how the experiential core of higher education (Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum 2008)—that is, the lived experiences students have as they are completing their degrees—plays a critical role in structuring students’ outcomes, shaping their identities, sense of belonging, and mobility trajectories. Additionally, more recent research has shifted from a deficit model, where lower-income first-generation students lack the skills and resources needed to succeed in school, to one that takes seriously the fact that colleges and universities are not neutral institutions but ones whose cultures, policies, and procedures systematically advantage some students and disadvantage others. It is to this tradition that Anthony Abraham Jack’s The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, a qualitative study of an elite institution, makes an important contribution.
Released just prior to the “varsity blues” college admissions scandal, in which affluent families illegally arranged their children’s acceptance to elite colleges and universities, Jack’s book serves as a potent, academically grounded reminder of just how far such institutions are from ensuring access and inclusion to lower-income students. Drawing on two years of observation and more than 100 interviews with a diverse group of undergraduates attending Renowned University (a pseudonym), Jack asks: What does it mean to be a poor student on a rich campus? This is a timely question, motivated by national efforts to expand access to elite institutions for lower-income students through outreach programs, need-blind admissions, and no-loan financial aid policies. Despite these efforts, Jack argues, “Elite universities are now a bundle of confusing contradictions: they bend over backward to admit disadvantaged students into their hallowed halls, but then, once the students are there, they maintain policies that not only remind those students of their disadvantage, but even serve to highlight it” (p. 23). Throughout, Jack illustrates the various ways that elite colleges fail disadvantaged students. In the end, he calls for sustained efforts from administrators in higher education to examine their policies and engage in new efforts to promote genuine class inclusion.
Working from a Bourdieusian perspective, but rarely naming it as such, Jack explores the ways that lower-income students’ cultural and economic capital intersect with the day-to-day functioning of higher education. While existing research has shown how lower-income students’ college experiences are hampered by their lack of appropriate forms of cultural capital, Jack offers new insight. He finds that the lack of higher-education-related cultural capital is not universal among economically disadvantaged students. Indeed, due to longer-running efforts to diversify elite secondary schools through programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance, some lower-income students arrive at elite institutions of higher education equipped to navigate the social and academic spaces of colleges like Renowned. These students, whom Jack calls the “Privileged Poor,” were first exposed to affluent students and institutions after being recruited into elite secondary schools. He contrasts these students to the “Doubly Disadvantaged,” a group that attended seemingly ordinary public schools. Upon arrival at Renowned, these students experience culture shock and struggle to decode the hidden curriculum. Their lack of cultural capital and exposure to elites creates a sense of isolation and limits these students’ engagement in college.
While the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged share economic origins, they differ in their timing of exposure to elite people and institutions; therefore, they differ in how they acclimate to college. While the Privileged Poor pursue mentoring relationships with professors and make inroads to social and extracurricular groups on campus, the Doubly Disadvantaged feel guilty asking professors for help and seek to prove themselves through hard work; they simultaneously retreat from widening their circle of friends or becoming involved on campus. Jack argues that feelings of belonging and the ability to navigate elite spaces set up the Privileged Poor for higher chances of mobility after graduation, where the Doubly Disadvantaged may experience constraint or distaste when considering graduate studies or recruitment into elite jobs like those with consulting firms that recruit almost exclusively from schools like Renowned. The exploration of the previously unrecognized heterogeneity among lower-income students constitutes one important contribution of this book.
The fact that these two sets of lower-income students share a sense of economic disadvantage allows Jack the opportunity to explore what they have in common. What they have in common is persistent marginalization due to university policies that effectively treat lower-income students as second-class citizens. Here, cultural capital cannot provide disadvantaged students with resources they did not receive at home; a lack of financial resources means that these students experience exclusion, hunger, and humiliation—even when attending schools that have pledged to level the economic playing field. Through well-intentioned programs like “Community Detail” and “Scholarship Plus,” Renowned has committed to providing lower-income students with well-paying campus jobs and access to cultural events on campus, respectively; but unfortunately, the lower-income students who work as custodians cleaning their peers’ rooms in the Community Detail program are not able to breathe a sigh of financial relief. Instead, being publicly marked as lower-income and placed in a subservient position causes some students to question whether they are full citizens at Renowned. Similar feelings emerge when lower-income students queue up in a separate line to pick up free tickets to attend music and dance performances through the Scholarship Plus program. For many students, these experiences were painful reminders of the struggles felt by their parents, many of whom worked custodial jobs or were accustomed to lining up to receive welfare benefits or food assistance.
Looking at one final university policy, Jack shows that “Spring break was a luxury that Renowned forced students to purchase, even though many students could not afford it” (p. 166). Unable or unwilling to fly home during spring break, a substantial portion of lower-income students remained on campus. The university, however, closed its dining halls and failed to provide supplementary funds to these students. While some students cut back their intake, grew tired, and even fainted, others bridged this period by accepting invitations for dinner dates, utilizing food pantries, or loading up on contraband foodstuffs prior to the dining halls’ closure. Collectively, these examples illustrate the considerable blind spots that remain in administrators’ efforts to make elite institutions both accessible and inclusive, even as they have initiated some programs aimed at helping lower-income students.
In The Privileged Poor, Jack has given higher education administrators a lot to think about. His accessible writing style and ability to bring to life the voices of the students he interviewed pull the reader in, inviting us to see elite academic institutions from the standpoint of lower-income students. He shows that many things taken for granted by long-time inhabitants of higher education appear quite foreign to students lacking the cultural capital to decode its norms, traditions, invitations, and invocations. When a college professor makes an effort at inclusion by inviting students to attend office hours, accepting that invitation requires a student not only to know what office hours are, but also to recognize that interacting with a professor outside of class is not just helpful, but potentially enjoyable. “Students who are unfamiliar with or unaccustomed to this intimate style of engagement,” Jack writes, may “find the university’s ubiquitous solicitations to connect with faculty odd, intrusive, and sometimes even terrifying” (p. 81). Invoking a Bourdieusian logic of social reproduction, Jack concludes that the “expectation to be proactive in making connections with faculty often remains unsaid, thereby exacerbating preexisting inequalities that exist between those who have already learned that they should reach out and those who have not” (p. 83). One of this book’s most powerful take-aways for college instructors and administrators, then, is its revelation of the hidden curriculum—making explicit that which heretofore has been implicit. Jack recommends that instructors define terms like office hours, prerequisite, internship, and fellowship. Doing so will ensure, at minimum, that students have a common vocabulary they can use to navigate higher education. Once this foundation is set, colleges and universities can move forward with the harder work of making the case to students about why they should want to go to office hours and why study abroad may be a useful component of the college experience. After all, cultural capital is both a base of knowledge and a disposition—or habitus—that guides how one feels about and deploys said knowledge.
Higher education administrators can take from this book the notion that “diversity must be continuously cultivated” (p. 182), along with some suggestions for how to do so. Even if the specific policies critiqued by Jack in this book are unique to Renowned, the observation that institutions implement policies and procedures that systematically disadvantage some groups of students is likely to apply nearly universally. In developing a plan of action, administrators should first examine their policies—even those put in place to compensate for a lack of resources among lower-income students—to see if they impose hidden costs through exclusion or stigma. In many cases, policies like these can be amended in ways that do not incur additional costs; for example, restructuring the method by which lower-income students receive free tickets to campus events. Second, administrators should consider the expansion and reallocation of financial resources, such as those that provide direct cash transfers to students, so that students do not have to wait for financial aid to be dispersed in order to buy books or so that they can receive a per diem to cover food costs if they remain on campus over university breaks. These types of interventions are most relevant for institutions like Renowned that have large budgets and, ostensibly, some flexibility in how they generate and allocate their funding streams.
As engaging and timely as Jack’s work is, it is not without flaws. Some of the book’s weaknesses are the flip side of its strength: it has been written for a broad audience, not merely for fellow academics. It has become somewhat fashionable—and, presumably, profitable—for academic books to be slimmer and more digestible in recent years. Introductory chapters that frame and situate the research within a scholarly tradition have shrunk into breezy articulations of a gap in the literature and how the present work seeks to fill that gap. Dispensed with, in books fitting this model, is the scholarly vocabulary that exists within disciplinary debates, along with direct naming of the scholars who have developed these concepts. Certainly, end notes exist, which partially illuminate these silences, but they do not provide an intellectual genealogy that demonstrates a work’s lineage and significance. While some readers may welcome this change, seeing it as a move that showcases big ideas without bogging the reader down in the scholarly jargon, I worry that making work accessible to a broader audience causes us to miss out on the opportunity to aggregate knowledge and build conversations using a common vocabulary. In the case of Jack’s work, one does not need to know all of the subtleties of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and social reproduction to benefit from a work that directly invokes these concepts, but it would be beneficial to know that this a conversation to which Jack is making a contribution.
In Jack’s work, I particularly wish he had grounded his analyses in the notion of normative institutional arrangements. This concept, developed and illustrated by Rashawn Ray and Jason Rosow (2010); Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, Brian Sweeney (2006); and Jenny Stuber (2016), provides a useful framework for understanding how students experience higher education and the ways that meso-level policies and procedures structure these experiences. This term is a tool that educators and administrators can use to identify how structural arrangements produce exclusionary or problematic outcomes at their schools, even if they do not have policies that resemble Community Detail or Scholarship Plus. This shared vocabulary, then, can then be used to build a common understanding and shared strategies, rather than remaining rooted in isolated, seemingly disparate conversations.
A book this compact is likely to leave academics with a host of questions. Empirically, I would have liked more background on how the Doubly Disadvantaged managed to get to Renowned. Jack portrays them as having attended under-resourced schools and lacking higher-education-related cultural capital, which leads to difficulties at Renowned. How, then, were they able to apply and gain acceptance to such a selective college? More analysis could show what resources these students used to navigate high school and the college application process and how those resources may or may not have proven useful once in college.
Additionally, more attention could be paid throughout to the intersection of race and social class. Where Jack does examine this intersection, he does so successfully. This is the case when he reflects on how black and Latino students experience stigma while doing custodial work through Community Detail, given the historical associations between racial minorities and service work. Whiteness surely plays a role in shaping white students’ experiences at Renowned—perhaps alternately serving as an asset and a liability. I would have enjoyed more sustained attention to how race works for these students within academic and social settings.
I also wanted to see Jack spell out more explicitly what is gained by identifying the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged. Jack states that comparing these two groups can “give us new insights into how poverty and privilege shape students’” college experiences and can give us “new ideas about how to best support them” in college (p. 87). Alas, he does not provide any concrete suggestions of his own. Should elite colleges, for example, identify lower-income students who fit the profile of the Doubly Disadvantaged and provide them with a “College 101 Bootcamp” that attempts to impart the same kind of knowledge that the Privileged Poor learned in their elite secondary schools?
At times, I was also disappointed by the impressionistic treatment of the data. This is especially disappointing because it is clear that Jack is in possession of rich data, produced by his keen ability to be present in these students’ lives and develop rapport with them. It is frustrating, then, to see him dedicate an entire subsection of the text to how students respond to mental health concerns but basing these claims on just three cases. His point could have been made just as effectively by weaving these stories into other sections of the chapter, where he addresses how students seek out support from institutional authorities. Other cases similarly reflect a tendency to make claims without providing substantiating data. For example, Jack tells the reader that “60 percent of Community Detail participants came from just 15 percent of the student body: those on full financial aid” (p. 141). It is not clear, though, where these numbers come from or whether these numbers change between the preorientation and school year portion of Community Detail.
Elsewhere, we learn that “a fifth of the students I spoke with reported not being bothered by using the separate Scholarship Plus line” (p. 159). Here, it is not clear whether Jack arrived at this figure based on a question asked systematically in his interviews; nor does he state whether this means that 80 percent of the students he spoke to were bothered by this form of segregation or whether they felt neutral. Finally, there is considerable ambiguity in just who was included in the final sample of interviewees. I would have liked more concrete data on the education and income levels of the subjects’ families and whether the students were Pell-eligible or received free or reduced lunch in school. In a book called the Privileged Poor, it is not clear that all of the students he interviewed were poor. The incredible access that Jack had at Renowned permits him insight into a great variety of dynamics on campus; it is equally clear that he earned the trust of his respondents. At times, though, I was left wanting more insight into the evidentiary basis of the book’s claims.
Ultimately, Jack has written a rich and provocative book about the ways in which rich schools continue to fail poor students. While improving educational access, they have not significantly improved social or academic inclusion. Jack’s analysis shows how lower-income students sometimes experience marginalization and fall through the cracks—partially due to resources they do not possess and partially due to institutional policies. Ample opportunities exist to close these cracks and ensure better experiences and outcomes for lower-income students. Jack’s book provides an excellent jumping-off point for higher education administrators who are willing to look inward and accept the challenge of making their institutions more inclusive.