Dr. Jack came to our campus a couple of weeks ago for our Critical Conversations series, sharing his research on how students who receive full financial aid cope with being at a highly selective, elitist university. The results are stunning, the research is eye-opening, and the book provides great ideas for how our higher education institutions need to rethink and act on inclusive access and what happens when it fails. Short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7w2Gv7ueOc. ( )

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. ( )

When Tony Jack started his freshman year at Amherst College in 2003, something seemed off. He looked around and saw a diverse group of students, but unlike him, none seemed poor. They talked about study abroad programs and boarding schools like Andover and Groton. Back at home, in Miami, summer was just a season. At Amherst, he quickly learned, it was also a verb...

“I kept asking myself, am I really the only poor black person here?”

The answer was no.

Some of his classmates had grown up the way he did — barely making ends meet, the first in their families to go to college — but they had taken part in programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance that pluck promising, low-income kids from struggling urban schools and give them funding to attend private high schools.

What Jack noticed about these students was that, unlike other poor kids who hadn’t gone to elite schools, they all seemed to be transitioning from high school to college without issue. They were already versed in college terms like “orientation” and “syllabus.” They didn’t hesitate to approach faculty members or raise their hands in class.

Jack didn’t know it at the time, but this observation would eventually help shape the research question that he is currently trying to answer as a junior fellow at the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows and as an incoming faculty member at the Ed School: Why do students from equally disadvantaged backgrounds experience the same college so differently?