Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged

What happens when students of color from lower-income families and distressed neighborhoods arrive at an elite university? How do they navigate the university’s expectations and opportunities? One answer, sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack finds, is that it depends on what they learned in high school—not about STEM or literacy, but about forming relationships with faculty.

Jessica McCrory Calarco has shown how the class gap operated in a majority-white elementary school, where middle-class students were more likely to ask teachers for help than their working-class peers. Jack looks at how this process plays out among Black and Latino college students, and, in addition to looking at the gap between middle-class and low-income students, he divides the latter group according to their high school experience.

Middle-class students Jack interviewed reported a striking degree of comfort engaging with professors. Twenty-two of twenty-seven middle-class students reported positive relationships with professors, deans, and administrators.

Describing a relationship with a professor, one middle-class Black student told Jack, “I go to his office hours. I’m like his right-hand man; we’re pretty cool.”

Like the working-class elementary students Calarco studied, a group of low-income students Jack dubs the “doubly disadvantaged” are much less likely to reach out to faculty than middle-class students, even when they’re struggling.

Doubly disadvantaged students come from lower-income families and attend high school in their home neighborhoods. Schools in lower-income neighborhoods, Jack notes, “typically reinforce notions that teachers are distant authority figures.” Doubly disadvantaged students bring that orientation to college, with some expressing the view that their classmates who did go to office hours and engage with professors were “kiss-asses,” making it a point of pride not to ask for help.

Just fifteen of forty-two doubly disadvantaged students reported positive relationships with professors, deans, and administrators. But the third group Jack identifies, the “privileged poor,” show that this class gap can be bridged with intervention in high school: sixteen out of twenty privileged poor students reported positive relationships with faculty.

The privileged poor come from similar family backgrounds and neighborhoods to those of the doubly disadvantaged—but they attended private schools, where they learned to navigate relationships with faculty in the ways that elite educational institutions reward. One such student contrasted her own experience in college with that of a friend who was unwilling to contact a professor, saying, “I arguably have an advantage. I would have been meeting with my professor for a whole semester at this point and she would have been struggling.” This student credited the boarding school she attended with the fact that it was “intuitive” for her to reach out to a professor.

Sending lower-income kids from distressed neighborhoods to elite private schools is obviously not a scalable method of ensuring that they arrive in college ready to access the support available to them. Instead, Jack argues, public schools should learn from and try to replicate some of the ways the privileged poor benefit from their high school experiences, while colleges’ “[i]nvestment in diversity must expand from access to inclusion.”

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