The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

The Conclusion opens with an excerpt from Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus.” Jack wonders about the next generation of students who benefit from an education beyond what their families can afford, the schools they enter beacons of hope for those hoping to strive for better lives. Citizenship in any community requires people to feel a sense of belonging, so colleges need to do more than just remove economic barriers (a good thing colleges have done in recent years) for students: They also need to understand the diversity they’ve cultivated.

Researchers and college administrators have too long treated all low-income students as one group, but the transmission of cultural capital from parents to children does not tell the whole story, as there are great differences between students who go to elite high schools and those who do not, regardless of class. Low-income students who attend elite high schools before college carry some privilege, although they are still not entirely a part of the elite world. They have not known privilege since birth, and they still have to deal with the realities of the worlds their families still occupy.

To help both