The Privileged Poor

The most engaging element of this book are the interviews with students. Dr. Jack seems to have successfully created strong bonds with them and I get the sense that the ability to vent about their experiences at “Renowned” to someone who shared their experience was welcome.

But this book fell short for me personally for the following reasons...

1. The differences between the Doubly Disadvantaged (low-income students entering elite colleges from public schools and with limited exposure to wealth) and the Privileged Poor (low-income students entering elite colleges from prep schools) are relevant. But Dr. Jack does not persuade me that universities aren't aware of the heterogeneity among their minority/low-income students, and the bulk of his policy proposals at the end of the book are aimed at government, public high schools, and foundations, not the universities themselves. The elite university I worked at previously had a comprehensive program working with this student population that was founded back in 2004.

2. The most compelling part of the book for me was the last third, in which he talks about flaws in programs meant to aid low-income students that in actuality demean them, along with the issue of food insecurity. These issues are important, but it was strange to me he devoted 1/3 of the book to a subject irrelevant to his central thesis, as these issues affect the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor equally and he doesn't distinguish between them when describing their impact.

3. I have some questions about the methodology that I won't bother getting into (sorry).

4. And lastly, my biggest issue: the problem this book articulates is extremely narrow. Yes, low-income/first-gen/minority students struggle compared to their peers at these elite institutions. Their suffering is not worth disregarding, and universities like “Renowned” should do everything in their considerable power to work with these students to improve the experience of them and future cohorts.

But there's bitter irony in the fact that Dr. Jack writes this as he contemplates whether expanded admissions to private high schools is worth considering as a solution: “The use of federal dollars to place students in private schools, instead of improving public education, further disenfranchises public schools, removes funds from districts and schools that are already financially strapped, and sidesteps the problems plaguing the education system.” How does he address this issue, yet not spend a single moment talking about this same structural dynamic within higher education?

Harvard, for example (ahem), has a freshman retention rate of 99% and a 6-year graduation rate of 96%. Students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 58% of rising to the top 20%. Money is not everything. Going to these schools can come with significant social and emotional costs, and I do not want to be dismissive of that.

But this book takes our system of higher education as a given and casts making the most elite institutions more welcoming to low-income students as something urgent to address. Yet both the history and the present of these colleges and universities suggest that they exist to reproduce inequality, in particular class and wealth inequality, and that the students who attend them can already expect significantly better outcomes than their peers.

The book succeeds in being an interesting window into the experiences of students who are experiencing the culture shock of elite education. It has some good ideas to take away if you are an administrator at one of these top schools, which is probably why I was exposed to it in the first place (and why the school where I worked paid him an extremely hefty speaker's fee to come for a day). But it takes certain ideas about the structure of higher education and the desirability or possibility of making these institutions welcoming to low-income students as a given.