The Uneven Paths to University:
Review of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
“Many students,” writes Ivan Illich in his classic essay Deschooling Society, “especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.” In Anthony Abraham Jack’s recent book The Privileged Poor (2019), the message is the opposite of Illich’s pithy pronouncement. Whereas Illich believes that the poor know that institutions of formal education are designed to kept them oppressed, Jack endeavors to demonstrate that when the poor enter elite colleges, they struggle precisely because they fail to recognize the nature of the institution and their role within it. Many poor students can’t decipher the unwritten rules of college because they didn’t learn the secret code that successful students acquired in elite high schools.
Jack’s purview in The Privileged Poor is not new. Indeed there has been a steady stream of scholarly studies on how the supposed meritocracy of higher education papers over the mechanism through which colleges and universities tend to reproduce existing inequalities since (at least) Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Clause Passeron’s classic Reproduction in Society, Education, and Culture (1970) and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ foundational work, Schooling in Capitalist America (1971). Nevertheless, and in the absence of any meaningful progress or solutions, revisiting perduring problems in higher education has merit. Jack’s contribution is a welcome one.
Jack does shed new light on this long-standing conundrum. His major contribution is the introduction of the distinction between the “doubly disadvantaged” and the “privileged poor.” Not all poor students are the same, Jack informs us, and the differences between types of poor student determine the kind of problems they will confront and the sort of support they will need in order to thrive.
According to Jack, the privileged poor are students, often minorities, who are low-income and the first in their families to attend college, but who managed to gain scholarships to attend prestigious high schools. The doubly disadvantaged share the same economic and racial backgrounds as the privileged poor but attended public high schools of dubious quality.
With his distinction in place, Jack is able to demonstrate through compelling and insightful undergraduate interviews that student’s high school milieu, and the dispositions acquired there, will exert a massive influence on their odds of finding their way and feeling included at elite universities. In other words, the cultural capital (cultural wealth or know-how that is embodied in ways of anticipating, recognizing, speaking, thinking, talking, behaving, and so on) earned in fancy high schools by the privileged poor pay dividends when those students enter college, even if they lack financial means. The “privilege” of the privileged poor is cultural, not economic. On the other hand, the doubly disadvantaged lack both the cultural and economic capital needed to thrive at top schools. The twofold disadvantage of the doubly disadvantaged is both economic and cultural. In short, not all poor students are equally impoverished and if we only focus on money we lose sight of precisely how some poor students are set up for success or failure. Culture and money make a difference for success in college. Grit may help but cultural savoir-faire seems to make the biggest difference when it comes to students from modest means making the most of higher ed.
The doubly disadvantaged, who didn’t attend elite high schools prior to entering elite colleges, are totally unequipped to decipher the unwritten rules of college, rules they need to know and apply in order to integrate and succeed. The doubly disadvantaged have serious trouble finding their place in the college community and navigating their institution: they don’t know how to network with their gatekeepers (or that should), they seem to share a misguided overall approach to college academics (placing too much emphasis on “the work”), and they are taken aback and made to feel inadequate when confronted with the lifestyles of their rich-kid peers. College is for them a long, drawn-out period of culture-shock-induced misery. Some learn the ropes, but not until their junior or senior years, and even then, they still feel like strangers in a strange land.
Among other things, Jack shows that it is possible to be both privileged and poor; one can be rich in cultural capital yet poor in economic capital (i.e., money). Elite colleges need to be on the lookout for the doubly disadvantaged and find new and improved ways to help them. Without help, the doubly disadvantaged may be admitted to college but are unlikely to be or feel included.
The book takes this distinction between the privileged poor and the doubly disadvantaged and demonstrates how it plays out for students in relation to their peers as well as faculty and administrators. In the third and final chapter, Jack shows that both types of poor students are excluded and underserved on the basis of faulty assumptions baked into university policies and programs, programs that overlook the basic situation of poor students.
The first chapter, “Come with Me to Italy,” is, as you can probably guess, an investigation into the complicated relationships that poor students have with their upper-middle-class and flat-out rich peers. We see how the class ceiling imposes itself at the undergraduate level. One is here reminded of the comment by Norbert Elias in his work of historical sociology, The Civilizing Process, that “The behavioral differences between different estates [classes] in the same region were often greater than those between regionally separate representatives of the same social stratum.” Elias has in mind early modern Europe, but it still applies today. For example, rich people from all over the country, or even the world, have more in common than two people who are both from Chicago if one of them is from the poor South Side and the other is from the tony northern neighborhood of Lincoln Park. For the doubly disadvantaged this economic and cultural difference means alienation and difficulty when it comes to adjusting to social life among their silver-spooned peers. Friendships are often born of affinities based on shared or similar experiences. Rich and poor share little when in this regard, and it makes a sense of belonging difficult to achieve. The privileged poor, on the other hand, have been already been exposed to rich, mostly white, people throughout their private high school experience. The privileged poor are unsurprised that their classmates are taking a trip to Santorini over Spring break, even if they can’t afford to join them. That’s all Greek to the doubly disadvantaged.
The next chapter, “Can you Sign Your Book for Me,” highlights the many ways in which the doubly disadvantaged misrecognize their academic role, institutional agency, and tacit opportunities. Jack shows that these extremely intelligent and conscientious “doubly disadvantaged” students who were able to gain admittance to an elite college often have a very different (and maladroit) understanding of their gatekeepers than their more well-adjusted peers do. In contrast, the privileged poor take to their academics like a fish to water. After all, their elite high school experience taught them that it was expected of them to participate in class, to know what a syllabus is, to understand what office hours are for, and to know that their professors are not their authoritarian enemies but their intellectual and social allies. This chapter represents a validation of decades of work from social scientists and education experts by clearly demonstrating that we must reckon with cultural capital, and not just economic capital, in order to adequately understand-let alone confront-educational inequality.
Chapters 1 and 2 flesh out the distinction between the privileged poor and the doubly disadvantaged. Chapter 3, entitled “I, Too, Am Hungry,” shows how all poor students at elite college campuses are put through the gauntlet in needless ways due to their poverty. We see how seemingly innocuous college policies and programs further marginalize poor students. Jack singles out three policies and programs at his own college. First, the decision to close dining halls during breaks when the rich kids leave for home while the poor students stay behind without any way to feed themselves, literally. Second, Jack looks at an events program at his institution that was meant to integrate poor students into the community by making the cost of admission-free, yet the way the program was pitched resulted in events which only the poor students attended thereby creating a quasi-apartheid social life at Jack’s school. Finally, Jack examines a program that gives poor students jobs on campus as janitors. This program clearly marks these student works as second-class and subservient in the eyes of their peers, exacerbating their exclusion. This chapter shows us that policies and programs intended to help can sometimes do more harm than good.
The Privileged Poor is an excellent book. I highly recommend it. It’s not about college and race and class in general, nor does it claim to be. Rather, it’s about how these social characteristics interact with each other and other factors at elite colleges. Jack’s interviews and analyses clearly and forcefully persuade us of the fact that to understand the social world and its institutions we cannot forget about the effects of time and culture. We cannot be oblivious to how social positions of origin produce profoundly durable dispositions that people carry with them. Jack reminds us that “Lower-income students’ divergent trajectories to college-and specifically the formative experiences they had in their drastically different high schools-shape their knowledge of and strategies for navigating elite academic institutions.” He shows that if you bracket the pathways that led poor students to college you will misunderstand your object of analysis and certainly underestimate what might be needed to truly help the doubly disadvantaged poor students. We must recognize, with Jack, that no magical tonic can quickly fix systematic issues of exclusion and alienation in higher education that were sown by experiences occurring much earlier.
If there is one thing I’d like to see in the future from Jack, it’s more research looking at how American high school systems set up most college students for relative failure, not just doubly disadvantaged poor students at elite colleges. Scholars such as Richard Arum and even Pierre Bourdieu have shown that when vast numbers of middle-class students enter college, they too are unequipped with the cultural know-how to flourish. They may be able to go away for spring break, but they don’t know how to approach their teachers or their studies. When coupled with increasing debt burdens and competitive pathways to maintaining middle-class status or even exceeding it, it’s little wonder that students are learning less yet having more mental breakdowns. The unwritten rules of college are not only opaque to the poor, they are unknown to the majority of students.
Buy the Book:
The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
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