Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 A couple of years ago, I gave a couple of talks at Harvard University, first at Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education, from which I had earned my doctorate back in the day. The second talk was to heads of houses. Having not been an undergrad at Harvard, I was not familiar with that scene; I suspected that bandwidth issues would not be relevant to students at a school where financial need was not supposed to be keep anyone from attending. Wrong. These student life professionals were very interested in the concepts around the depletion of cognitive capacity due to poverty, racism, classism, homophobia, etc. Just recently, I read Anthony Jack’s The Privileged Poor and now I have a better understanding of what those heads of houses were saying.

This book is about the struggles of students who come from low-income or poor families when they attend elite universities. A small proportion of students (about 15%) from the bottom half of the income distribution in the US go to one of these nearly 200 elite schools, so their minority status alone sets them up for some challenges. Through a series of interviews with students at one of these institutions – he uses the pseudonym of Renowned University – Jack describes in moving and authentic narrative the experiences of these students as they attempt to survive and thrive in this rarefied environment.

Jack makes a distinction between the Privileged Poor (PP) and the Doubly Disadvantaged (DD). The PP are students who grew up in poverty but had gone to college-prep/elite high schools with mostly white and wealthy classmates, where the emphasis was on close relationships with teachers and the kind of independent learning that is expected in college. The DD students grew up in poor families as well but they went to public high schools with equally poor and often majority non-white classmates where they excelled but where the educational expectations were very different than those in college. One of Jack’s major points is that we often consider students coming from poor families (who are often black or brown) to be a monolithic group, and he asserts that ignoring the fact that they come from very different experiences, “…limits our understanding of the ways in which poverty and inequality shape the lives of today’s undergraduates” (p. 21).

Whereas lack of ready money formed significant barriers for most of these students, the DD’s also suffered from lack of social and cultural capital; they didn’t know the rules and didn’t know to ask about them. One student described an environment that was toxic. He quoted a DD classmate who had had to take some time off school because, “I couldn’t breathe here. This place totally destroyed me!” He said, “You feel like you don’t fit in. You feel like you’re alone, like there’s no one that can relate.” The sense of not being able to breathe is, of course, very disturbing in light of the social protest in response to state violence against black people, emphasizing to me how institutions of higher education mostly reflect the society at large.

 In addition to the rich analysis of the contrasts in experience between the PP and DD students, Jack relates, through the students, powerful examples of the ways in which money is a critical factor in being a student and that the lack of it can be debilitating and humiliating. He examines how programs that are designed to offer opportunities to earn money come at a severe price, like some students cleaning the bathrooms of other students. A program that provided free tickets to musical and cultural events for poor students included policies and procedures that grossly and publicly outed those students as poor, serious eroding the benefit. The practice of closing all the dining halls during Spring Break and other campus holidays left poor students without food, causing them to go without food or get by on a diet of low-cost, low-quality fare. These are just examples of the ways that both the PP and DD students realized that money was a requirement for full citizenship at the university.

We know the bandwidth costs of not feeling a sense of belonging, and added to that is the cost of poverty, exacerbated by both university programs, policies, and practices that assume a level of wealth that singles out those who don’t have it. One of the most powerful messages I took from Jack’s research is that we need to not lump all students together because they fit our preconceived notions of students based on one aspect of their identities or backgrounds. We need to talk with and listen deeply to students and respond to what they say they need, not to a formula we have devised based on our assumptions. Even those of us who don’t work at elite institutions (most of us!) can use the valuable wisdom that Jack has presented in The Privileged Poor.