Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools
theamericanconservative.com
theamericanconservative.com
The transition into an "elite" college, even as a middle class Asian-American male, was incredibly difficult on me mentally. My background in public school system in North Carolina (not in the Triangle Area or Charlotte) was a stark contrast from the elite high school institutions that many of my peers had experienced.
The example of "office hours" in the article resonates particularly strongly with me - I had never treated my instructors as "allies" and struggled completing psets and utilizing my professors and TAs as resources. I didn't realize until reading this article now that I had been treating them like adversaries.
I went to an okish school but my house and school were very authoritarian environments that constrained creativity. It took me a while to overcome that bias.
It's not surprising that such disadvantaged (public school) students would so be in awe of what they perceive as the unquestionable authority of professors that they would not ask questions as that is what our public school systems (most not all) train students to do - remain silent and memorize the words of wisdom being imparted to you. There will be a test.
I would say the school system in general does that. The whole point of the school system is to turn you into a predictable automaton of economic utility. You want to be creative? Do that in your own time or pray you can control your creativity enough to only release it during the designated classes.
My slightly younger cousins went to fancy private schools growing up, and were sort of trained how to work the system. They are still in communication with multiple professors 20 years later.
Seeking help or advice is not "working the system", it's normal. I was not programmed with this understanding either, and it can take time to adjust once you see it. Life gets easier when you stop thinking you need to face it alone.
It's great that you overcame your initial difficulty. Personally, as a state-schooled white male I never did get comfortable using office hours while I was at university like other people in the comments have mentioned.
Some of the students mentioned in the article have it far worse than I did because they don't even know the meaning of the term "office hours". They can't use the system as it's expected to be used because they don't even know there's a system. Perhaps they don't even think to look for a system because they're accustomed to systems being stacked against them and they have no conception of a system that's there to help them.
Our training in K-12 in my experience was that most academic collaboration was cheating. It's difficult to unlearn that. My kids go to a private school, it's very different -- they are intensely collaborative in elementary school.
The reality is that they're portrayed as (a) while really being significantly (b).
And this can be very confusing, unless you come from a self-centered elite worldview where (a) and (b) aren't highly differentiated.
"Why does everyone both tell me to go to office hours like it's it club, but then make it sound like it's for people who don't understand the assignment? If I go and understand the assignment won't it just be awkward?"
You definitely don't have to come from a poor or disadvantaged background to find the whole thing difficult to figure out.
The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b).
I'm a white dude from a family that was totally fine financially (though more due to good money management than sky-high income) so I can't and wouldn't claim any disadvantage on those fronts, obviously, but socially there's just so much my upbringing didn't prepare me for in the world, or didn't expose me to. We 100% did not run in privileged social circles, even a bit. Rural poor, mostly, in my extended family and such. It's been wild learning how differently those with other social backgrounds see the world, and what's considered acceptable behavior.
It would never, ever have occurred to me to attend office hours just to get to know my professors. Woulda seemed pretty dickish, actually. But it's normal and expected and confers all kinds of advantages. Go figure.
I wouldn't necessarily say that people go to office hours just to get to know their professors, that would be presumptuous. What people do do is go when they are temporarily stuck on a concept, or want to work through a problem in the exercises, or when developing an idea for a paper. All temporary, normal steps in the process, that most students could get by on their own, or by working in a group with other students or the TA. Privileged students feel comfortable going all the way to the professor for help (even just a little help), in a way that less privileged students don't seem to.
This. I was a teacher's assistant in college for 3 years for the introductory programming courses, and most years there were only a handful of students who bothered coming to my office hours.
One semester in particular stands out, one student came in every single week, not directly for help, but because class was during her part-time job and as a single mother she had no free time at home. It was the only chance she had to get an overview of the lesson (she had a good mind for the topic and didn't need much instruction from me) and complete the assignments each week. Just being in the same room like that for extended periods, conversations tend to wander - or outside life intrudes through phone calls - hence how I know what her situation was.
I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.
I am in no way lower class, but I was brought up with a distinctly meritorious mindset (and one that I'm generally thankful for on the whole). But it places one at a huge disadvantage in our education system.
Office hours were for people who didn't understand the assignment or the material. To go otherwise would be borderline offensive and waste important people's time. What else could they possibly be for?
Similarly, what is there to discuss about a grade? It makes as much sense as 'I'm going to talk to my lecturer about the number 7'.
The idea of running drafts or queries about assignments past a lecturer or tutor beforehand still strikes me emotionally as, well, cheating. It's not fair, people wouldn't give individual students unique insights into the assessment. How absurd! They'd have the integrity to resign from such a clearly corrupt system before something like that took hold! No one would stand for it!
Kissing arse? Getting your face known? But assessment is objective so it would be pointless at best, unethical towards both self and society at worst...
Of course now, older and wiser, I know better. But at the time, every message most children receive is to explicitly hide how the social system actually works and reinforce the divisions that are actually there and pretend that systems are objective measurements of ranking ability.
My theory is this: If you're smart enough to think that merit should matter, it's easy to fall into the trap of meritocracy. If you look around and realize, obviously, that this is not a meritocracy, then value must be derived from something that isn't merit.
Spoiler: It's relationships that matter, not merit.
Until one day, when a professor invited me to his office. It turned out, he wanted to discuss an uncharacteristically poor grade on a particular exam. I was honest, that I simply wasn't feeling myself that day, and I'd been up late for a social engagement the night before. I expected it to just end there. He offered to let me take the exam again, right then in an unoccupied room, and advised me that next time I should just say something.
In some ways, that was the most valuable thing I learned in college: that authority figures are just people, and while some are jerks, some legitimately just want to be helpful.
Second, re: the 'integrity of an education system', there are already all kinds of problems with using tests and exams to evaluate student skill, and one serious flaw is how sensitive they are to random fluctuations -- like being tired or sick the day of the test. Many educators hold this view, and professors often have a lot of flexibility in how they structure their tests (and classes more generally), compared to say, high school teachers.
I am curious about the circumstances of the parent post. In a 600-person Psych 101 class, I would agree it would be inappropriate to offer makeup tests (unless they were available to all students). But in a 15-person upper-level class? There's no grading curve, the whole process is basically individualized.
I'm well aware of the problems of testing and assessment and standard education structures.
But the point I was trying to convey was that the way I was brought up, and the popular image of testing and grades and meritocracy I was indoctrinated with, would frame what your teacher did as cheating/academic dishonesty.
The idea that such an activity would be done (and not be seen by everyone else as an immediately fireable offence) would have literally an almost unthinkable thought until my late 20s/early 30s and I got a bit more exposure to the world and how academia/ society/ humanity actually works.
I think that's a highly relevant point/peice of context when responding to a story about how young students enter these institutions with different assumptions, experience and worldviews...
On the other hand, when working as an undergrad teaching a Calc II recitation, I had a student miss a quiz I was supposed to administer, because for no reason, he just didn’t show up, so I let him meet me later that week and take it in front of me. My goal was to help him succeed, because getting a zero would really suck. I don’t think it violated the integrity of anything. He wasn’t falsely getting certified as having learned calc II.
I think most teachers are willing to do things like this if it’ll make the grade a more accurate representation of the student.
The institution in question is a small private university. Not one of the ones you've heard of, but they are at least somewhat comparable to that tier in an academic sense. E.g. I know people who turned down an MIT or equivalent to attend, and they often compete with that tier for grants. The class in question was normally a third- or fourth-year class (the school was pretty flexible with that sort of thing), with fewer than a dozen students and a professor I did not previously know.
The social engagement was not a frat party or something. I would not have gone to something like that the night before an exam. Further, I didn't drink in those years anyway, despite being of legal age. It was (I know I'm dating myself) an old friend's last night at home before being deployed in the Iraq war. I drove home, and a bunch of us got together to send him off. I drank soda.
Finally, on the question of fairness, the professor did acknowledge this. My score on the make-up was capped to a maximum still less than that earned by anyone else in the class.
Even with all of those caveats, it still was something I would not have thought to ask for. I apparently also taught the professor something that day, and he said that going forward he would tell his students up front that he's willing to work with them on that sort of thing.
Speaking from personal experience (I'm an academic in my late 20s / early 30s, and I know a lot of fellow academics, and we talk about things like teaching and office hours), office hours are for helping students. They're not some kind of country club -- I spend my office hours working on math problems with students, giving study advice, and sometimes talking about my students' academic plans (e.g. recommending other classes for them to take, or telling them about resources they can access on campus).
The injustice in this situation isn't that "rich students are getting unfair help", it's that poor students aren't accessing this appropriate help. Going to office hours, asking professors for help, asking for the occasional (well-justified) extension -- these are not "entitled", they are all perfectly appropriate things to do.
(To add, I see a weird vibe of resentment running through this and a handful of other posts. For what it's worth, I will say that academics basically universally loathe students who suck up to them and complain about their grades. So we're agreed in that...)
By your own words basically it's potentially kind of a social group where a subset of students get extra instruction, advice, and help, while maybe making a personal connection with their professor. I'm not saying that's evil. But it's definitely a resource that some are better able to leverage than others for numerous reasons. (Which also isn't inherently a bad thing, either.)
So while going to see your prof and asking for help is reasonable, it's not that simple, and viewing that as the extent of what office hours are is very reductive.
During my own time in college many profs emphasized that they absolutely don't give extensions, that you're all adults now, take responsibility, etc. I even had one math professor give the entire class a lecture (I quote) about "In computing we have RtFM, while here we have RtFT: Read the Fucking Textbook," because some the questions he was getting during class were a bit rough. And of course the textbook students were supposed to "RtFT" was also a bit rough and written by his own department so they could make money of forcing students to buy it. I think pretty much everyone in the class was terrified of going to his office hours after that lecture.
This isn't to say there aren't plenty of very decent professors. I once accidentally swapped two things on my calendar and missed a final. It was terrifying. I thought it was going to be a life altering disaster, but the prof let me take the final in their office. But up until the moment they did that and said it was okay, I pretty much thought the rest of my life was going to be severely complicated by a calendar screw-up.
But everything is really just a morass of YMMV, cross your fingers.
Maybe more to the point, I tend to remember an open door policy of some sort always being much more comfortable than office hours. It didn't feel like you'd have to reschedule work hours to make office hours, and it didn't feel like you were reaching by asking a prof to meet outside of office hours because you had another class during that time, etc.
And yes, many professors are happy to do things in a more ad-hoc way. It's just that a system that was supposed to be a simple way to make it easy to get help really isn't as straightforward or as helpful as it looks at first glance, and many students have a great deal of uncertainty about professor interactions since they can be extremely variable.
But no matter how things are done, there's a big ambiguity zone.
Is spending 40 minutes with your prof discussing a potential paper topic fine, or is it taking away from another student who is struggling with with something more foundational? What would happen if every student in the whole class tried to go to the same office hours for that? Are office hours only a thing that even "works" at all because only a select minority of students feel casual enough about them to take advantage? If a student thinks it's not right to get special help on something that's only ambiguously a problem are they at fault or not? If you want to learn more about something that was only mentioned in passing and not course related is going for that okay or not? If I'm at office hours trying to get help on a problem and the person in front of me is just arguing about why they should get 5 more points on the last exam is that alright?
I mean it's not like I hate office hours. I just think there one of many parts of college with good intentions that are in practice vastly more complicated, messy, and weird unless you come in very capable of being ...breezy.
There are several unspoken differences in the way the two population perceive education and defining your future:
If you fail that's it you're done, you'll have to find some low wage job.
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University is there to get a diploma to get a job to set you in life
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You approach some subjects for the first time. It is real work.
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You make friends
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School and your own curiosity will not prevent gaps. Other students seem to all possess 'cultural' references you don't. You sometime have to write down words you don't know to look them up later.
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At school If you hand an assignment late you'll get zero. No one will give you up extra time later in life young man.
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Finding an internship / someone in some industry to help on a project will be a time consuming task with many people no deigning to reply
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The number one factor I look at in a kids future is parental relationship. How attuned is it? Is it stable, or are they on the brink of foreclosure and moving place to place? Does the child have emotional support? Are their parents substance abusers? Do they fight each other and scream every night? (It can be hard to do homework!)
When we bring "poor" and other characteristics into this - man, I feel we're missing an iceberg. We're just getting further from "fixing" anything, we don't even acknowledge the most impactful thing that effects people regardless of some characteristic that's so often a facade masking the family system.
Home life can be a matter of maternal / paternal deprivation or abandonment, or over-controlling, or abuse. On the other hand, it could be the gift of having chill parents, a stable base.
When college comes up, I worry. Commenters speak of colleges as if they're an annuity that pays out. Financial outcomes are almost always implied, if not explicitly mentioned.
If you're not getting a license in some way, maybe it's just not needed. I see names at prestigious law firms, hospitals, business, gov at all levels that have gone to schools I never heard of. I've read academic papers and I have to tell you, very seldom do I ever see an "elite school" (whatever that means?) behind it.
I'm not against any of these, it's more important for certain people's goals than others, but man does having a supportive family mean a lot.
And yet... they still didn't know a lot. I remember in my sophomore year someone mentioned that they were trying to get an ibanking internship. I was like, "What is ibanking? A personal finance program for the Mac?" When I found out what it was, I was blown away. Like, doctors didn't make the most money? There was much to learn in the coming years...
The standard tutorial is one fellow and two students, so (unless your tutor is hopeless and your tutorial partner is a narcissist), you will get the attention you need. Even if you have a tutorial where there are four of you (where the tutor is a rare specialist who has a lot of students to get through!), if you get stuck listening, at least you're hearing the same information that the more vocal students are!
I never attended office hours, but that's because I tailored my class schedules every semester to maximize blocks of hours that I could use for part time work. I worked for the college and later for a tech company. I was lucky that my schedule could vary between semesters, but I was still limited to time blocks during a standard business week. Typically did 20 hours a week of work with a 15 hour course-load. So office hours almost never lined up with my work schedule. Sure it would have been nice to have enough of a rapport to ask for extensions on papers, but I passed my classes anyhow and the grades I got for particular classes have never once been in a factor in my career.
I don't regret my decision to prioritize work over college. The professional skills, especially the soft skills I learned from years of experience put me way ahead of my peers when it came to finding employment and moving through the ranks. The relative financial security work provided and being able to comfortably afford to live off-campus independently (low CoL area) was my initial motivator, but it was more than that eventually. I just felt respected and useful when working, and the opposite of that in almost every schooling environment.
I had that happen to me once.
I realize this is kind of off topic, but there's something else I notice when I tag along with recruiters to schools. Even though recruiters sometimes attempt to recruit at "non-elite" schools, or whatever you want to call them, they are always unable to successfully recruit candidates in the numbers they need to make it worthwhile. "Maybe it'll be be better next year, but doubtful" they say. I've seen it. The students are definitely hungry and passionate for landing a job in tech at these schools, even asking us what they need to do. Yet they just don't seem to know-how to prepare and be successful at the interviews. We try to coach them, but we also have other schools to visit and we only have so much time. I mostly lay the blame on these schools though and not the students.
When I was in undergraduate, I desperately needed to get help at office hours many times, but never felt comfortable doing it, sometimes feeling I would annoy the professor. Likewise, that’s how I treated recruiters for the most part. Like they were some robot that doesn’t understand my situation and are only helping because they have to.
Fast forward to the working world, suddenly your manager and peers are all trying to work together for the most part. Likewise recruiters are constantly hitting you up, some causally too. It changed my view of what school could have been once I realized that my bosses and recruiters were just peers at the end of the day.
I could and should have been more confident going to as many office hours as needed, but you know, hindsight is 20/20.
A smart friend told me that a score of 800 is all it took to "pass the SAT". He said you could get into the best colleges with that score as long as your grades were good, etc. So we put no effort into studying for the exam. We regretfully, conflated the combined score with the individual section scores.
We also had another misconception that college was a waste of time. A place where rich kids go to join a frat and burn their family's money.
The irony is that this occurred at a private "prep" high school. In my late 20's I finally realized that "prep" was short for "college preparatory school".
The above was 30 years ago. Perhaps with social media and the internet it is unlikely any student would be this misinformed.
graduated a few years ago
how i wish that were true
The other groups the article contends with, being the elite and the not elite, are much larger groups and more worthy of attention. The Privileged Poor do not need to be specially accommodated any more than any other group that is a tiny fraction of one percent of the relevant population.
And private preparatory schools (much less elite prep schools) educate far less than 1% of the student population in the US. But let's go crazy over the top just to avoid nitpicking and claim it's as much as 1%.
1% * 2% = .02%
Explain again why they need special consideration and are statistically legitimate to analyze and make claims regarding?
Back-of-the-envelope math (which I don't believe is correct) is not going to invalidate this. Why is this research important? Because it's bringing attention to how universities are failing truly disadvantaged students. Tony is currently shaping discourse about class-relations on campuses around the US, and I don't think the gravity of these discussions should be trivialized simply because these students do not represent a huge population of students. By encouraging schools to fully grasp the extent of the difficulties that doubly disadvantaged students have to overcome, I think we can start moving in a productive direction that empowers poor students beyond elite institutions.
Yes I know that is my whole point. A large portion? What does that mean? The number of destitute minority kids going to top elite preparatory schools is an incredibly tiny number, vastly less than a tenth of a percent of students overall, and completely statistically insignificant. Very very few students in the US go to elite prep schools and only a tiny number of those are poor or minority. Claiming that's "a large portion" doesn't seem to be supported by data and is just a gross exaggeration focusing on irrelevant fictions and thus is very unhelpful, counterproductive and disingenuous. Such fictions harm people.
On a tangental topic, I do agree that destitute minority kids going to top elite preparatory schools gives them an advantage and that the quality of education at such schools is vastly superior to that of public schools in general. Why is this so given that private school teachers on average are paid less than public school teachers. How is it that public school teachers consistently fail to achieve good results, particularly with disadvantaged and minority students who are massively disadvantaged by public schools but achieve parity with rich white advantaged students both in elite private school and homeschool settings, including homeschool settings with low spending and unqualified parent teachers.
If you have the parents behind you, you have a tremendous advantage. If you have a lot of well-educated, prosperous parents behind you, still more, and the effect carries over to some degree to the students whose parents may be less prosperous or educated, but still organized enough to get their kids into the private school.
What level of filter bubble thinking is this?
The much bigger issue is that a student with rich parents would have gone to a better school, and would have had more "opportunities to shine" as a teen, and would not have to had to worry about food/shelter/health. This does make such a kid more prepared for college. There are no easy solutions to that type of inequality (the rich kid that got in is actually smart and deserving). I like the solution you are proposing, but the two of us are probably somewhat extreme.
A student dorm (housing), medical care, and proper meals; all provided by the educational institution (which as a whole was in competition with other institutions).
In the HP universe that happened to be paid for by the family estate; in our own reality properly caring for and ensuring that everyone is raised to be an outstanding citizen is both a form of civic infrastructure investment and an insurance policy that helps avoid creating criminals and other negatives for society.
Though thinking of it, a new new deal would also help the parents, and a structured environment that has 'secondary parents' to assist with raising a child to common standards for society would be good for everyone. That'd be more like schooling / social support without bounds, possibly a good use of human resources when automation finally eliminates the drudgery jobs.
The only real oppression Harry experienced was the abuse he suffered at the hands of his uncle and aunt. Plenty of rich kids suffer this sort of abuse from relatives. That doesn’t mean they didn’t still have an advantage in college admissions.
Wasn’t he also phenomenally rich in wizard money?
And it's feel-good. By the time you're at the point of applying, it's too late.
The damage was done with bad elementary schooling regarding the fundamentals.
The damage was perpetrated during middle school. At-home school projects was just a selector for how much the parents made.
The damage was revealed with "You're a bad student", or "You should consider vocational programs".
Schools like Michigan would have some students who are totally illiterate with SAT scores hovering around 800, and some students who've already done upper-division math courses in high school. Intelligent people could no longer be grouped together to help drive each other, and schools like Harvard would need to double their course offerings to accommodate the new, extremely large range of academic capabilities they now have to admit.
My opinion: it's not college's job to make up for 18 years of unequal resources building people. The fact is, it takes a miracle for someone raised in a stereotypical inner city life to ever overcome the educational head start a wealthy prep schooler gets. And oftentimes those wealthy parents will put six figures of educational experiences into their kids every year. I'm just not sure where poor people could ever get that kind of assistance to close the gap. That's $5.6T a year. The government doesn't even have the ability to make that happen.
Most of the social problems stemming from capitalism center around the fact that having money gives you and yours disproportionate opportunities for improving your socioeconomic position even more, ad infinitum. Cut out that circular effect wherever possible, and you approach a level playing field.
History has shown that the making of laws is the only way to curtail the negative side-effects of the free market.
I am not a congressman or even a lawyer, so no, as any sane person could infer, I am not proposing that "Private schools are illegal" be written on a piece of paper and submitted to the legislature as a new bill.
But I am proposing that weakening the circular mechanisms by which the powerful increase their own power could be a better - indeed, less "lazy and narrow-minded" - strategy for decreasing economic inequality than some other strategies that people propose and even enact.
The only two purposes I can think of for having private grade-schools are a) allowing the rich to isolate themselves from the public school system, and b) religious schools. And to be honest - as someone who went to a religious elementary school and learned in my "science class" that evolution is fake and dinosaurs walked alongside humans - the latter probably shouldn't be allowed either.
I will do some actual work and delve into said history.
(1) Taxing the rich and corporations excessively -> offshoring income and sheltering assets.
(2) Prohibition -> mass gang violence, marginal reduction in alcohol consumption and a repeal of it.
(3) Recreational drug laws -> overcrowded prisons, broken families and generations of damage.
You cannot just make a law and not consider all of the consequences. Especially one as flippant, unresearched, vindictive and pointless as banning the ability of people to pay to add intellect to their own children.
If the children of the wealthy were forced to remain in the public school system, then their parents would be forced to have a stake in it, and would therefore be forced to participate in its improvement - as voters, as donors, as volunteers - instead of jumping ship and leaving it to the people who don't have any choice. That would help intellect to be added to all children, not just the children of those who happen to have money.
How about a false equivalency? You're right that if people are forced to do things like you claim, some of the consequences would come about. But making a law is not the same thing as force.
This awful idea makes sense only if you think the state owns people's children. As a parent it is my right, within certain bounds, to decide how my children are educated.
If you ban physical after-schools, do you then ban online classes such as the math classes offered by the Art of Problem Solving?
It has gotten to the point where some students are sleeping during compulsory public school classes and doing most of their work at hagwon and then studying into the night.
There are essentially two kinds of people who enter elite schools: rich kids and very gifted kids.
Rich kids don't really need that degree, they already have a guaranteed position thanks to their network and family. They are, however, able to support the school financially and use their network to provide scholarships and good job opportunities to more modest fellow students.
You have a 3 part system supporting each other:
- The school offers high quality education, recognition, and a suitable environment.
- Rich kids and their families support the school financially and offer career opportunities.
- Gifted kids provide the raw talent needed for the important positions these schools open.
Removing rich kids from the equation won't do any good. They are not parasites, they bring more to the system than they cost. And it's not like they are morons, they don't get a free pass just because they are rich, they still need to pass the tests.