
Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools - how-about-this
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/privileged-poor-vs-doubly-disadvantaged-at-elite-schools/
======
torranceyang
I really enjoyed this article. I haven't read Anthony Jack's book on the issue
yet (I'll add it to my list!), but the framing of privileged poor and double
disadvantaged was a new way for me to think about education inequality.

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.

~~~
Spooky23
I felt similarly wrt office hours. I never understood what I was supposed to
do with office hours, and felt like an idiot when I tried used them.

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.

~~~
phkahler
>> trained how to work the system

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.

~~~
wdutch
It's funny how "working the system" has connotations of foul play but if
you're talking about software or a machine and you say "I don't know how to
work it" you're saying that you don't know how to make it do it's expected
function (at least in my dialect of English).

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.

------
Glyptodon
Some of these issues extend beyond such narrow groups. Office hours as a
concept are easily one of the weirdest and most confusing things ever because
they simultaneously encompass at least two entirely different disharmonious
concepts. Are they (a) time set aside so those who need significant help can
get it without disrupting class, or (b) time aside so students can chat and
schmooze with their professors?

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).

~~~
amalcon
I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received
-- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would
consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather
something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being
happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that
student had a superpower: if I asked for any kind of special treatment for
such a reason, I would surely just be lectured about personal responsibility.
Our other friends were split on this question: either agreeing with me
entirely, or not even understanding why one might think that.

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.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in characterizing those actions as
'just wanting to be helpful', but until I was a bit more world weary, i would
have expected what your professor did in that story to be grounds for instant
firing and utterly unacceptable (and would have expected everyone else to
share my opinion), as it strikes at the very core of the integrity of an
education system.

~~~
jlev1
The vehemence of this response surprises me. First, from the anecdote, there's
no particular reason to think this student was the only one who was given a
chance to take a make-up test.

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.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
You misunderstand (or perhaps I'm miscommunicating) if it comes across as
vehemence. I meant it purely as a statement of fact.

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...

~~~
jlev1
I see, that makes sense. Though the phrasing of "how the world works" still
makes it sound like you think it's shady and unethical, when I don't
(necessarily) think it is.

------
TBurette
I've been friends with people who had to mind the way they flushed the toilet
at home to save money as well as people whose parents' home front lawn I
mistook for some farmland.

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.

    
    
      vs
    

If this doesn't work out you could always try something else

University is there to get a diploma to get a job to set you in life

    
    
      vs
    

Entering higher education is one more step to further orient you towards your
future.

You approach some subjects for the first time. It is real work.

    
    
      vs
    

Higher education is not too hard. You had a good school that prepared you
well. You have the time to go out and have fun

You make friends

    
    
      vs
    

You make friend and network

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.

    
    
      vs
    

Your parents brought you to museums/theater/... shared their appreciation of
art, history, science,... Things that can come up among educated people / in
university

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.

    
    
      vs
    

You can see someone that's there to help you, you can get an extension on this
assignment.

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

    
    
      vs
    

Dad is a business owner that asks for a spot for his kid to his accounting
firm.

------
XPKBandMaidCzun
> Poor kids who don't get a crack at high performing programs before college
> end up floundering.

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.

~~~
jackcosgrove
My parents did everything you were supposed to do. The family was intact, we
kids always had to do our chores and homework, and all of us went to college.
I can't fault them anything.

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...

------
twic
One of the things about the Oxbridge system is that tutorials are compulsory.
They're traditionally the primary channel for teaching: you might go to a
lecture to hear some interesting things, but the real work is the reading and
writing you do in preparation for the tutorial, so you'd better go to them.

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!

------
rayiner
Is there any numerical analysis in here at all or just stories? Because the
anecdotes make no sense to me. What is the comparison between discussions of
traveling to Europe and being afraid to talk to the professor? (My first
reaction to discussions about travel to Europe is often to point out that I
don’t even like to leave the state. Is that a sign of lack of privilege or
maybe an excess of privilege?)

------
avs733
As anothet professor all I really feel I can add to the authors argument is
that anecdotes are not data and my anecdotes say differently about student
interactions...

------
droithomme
It seems to me that this group appellated the "Privileged Poor" \-
disadvantaged poor children who have graduated from the most elite private
preparatory institutions in the nation - are an incredibly small group,
perhaps 0.001% of students, and well below the noise floor of any sort of
meaningful statistical analysis.

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.

~~~
whymauri
They are a small group in the overall population but not at elite schools.

~~~
droithomme
Poor kids at elite prep schools is what do you think 2% of their enrollment?
So 2% is not small, fair enough.

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?

~~~
whymauri
Tony Jack makes this pretty clear. Schools are patting themselves on the back
for increasing low income and minority enrollment without considering the fact
that a large portion of these students is the "privileged poor". As a result,
entire school-wide policies are being misguided and failing poor students who
did not have an elite-level secondary education.

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.

~~~
droithomme
> a large portion of these students is the "privileged poor"

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.

~~~
cafard
> Why is this so given that private school teachers on average are paid less
> than public school 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.

------
sudosteph
Interesting that the author uses office hours as the determiner of likelihood
that someone attended an elite school before college.

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.

------
Animats
_In fact, we are told that one of his interviewees fainted from a lack of food
during spring break._

I had that happen to me once.

------
jarjoura
My take away from this is _privilege_ is just code for what they term in the
corporate world as "soft skills". Some students have access to programs, or
mentors that teach them how to maximize inter-personal relationships and build
good problem solving skills outside of the core course work they'll need to
study for.

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.

------
elamje
As a mid twenty year old, I have to say there are a lot of similarities
between professors/TA/office hours, and recruiting/working.

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.

------
Arbalest
Much of this article discusses the content of the books. The majority in the
top section is pretty neutral. Then the final 3 or 4 paragraphs does some
token disagreement that I feel really should be discussed more, particularly
as I may (likely) side with the book author rather than the conservative post
author here.

------
throwaway010718
It can be difficult to predict the knowledge gaps in a high school kid, even
the "intelligent" ones.

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.

~~~
nudiustertian
> 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

------
metalliqaz
I like how the photo sets the tone for the piece. It really makes their
intentions clear.

------
adamnemecek
I feel like a lot of this is navel gazing. Idk is the advantage of even a good
school that much.

~~~
krastanov
The advantage of a counselor-like figure telling you to just apply to a fancy
college (i.e. that it is totally within reach) and the advantage of the
instructor having the time to teach (instead of just herd the students around)
is absolutely enormous from my observations (as both an academic and a K12
outreach volunteer).

------
frgtpsswrdlame
Probably we should just add class and/or socioeconomic status to the Title VII
list and mandate that colleges add it in the form of affirmative action. We
can talk around the problem & treat symptoms all we want but fundamentally the
Ivy League's purpose is to take the children of the rich and give them the
meritocratic legitimation that our society currently requires of its elites.
Allowing a small amount of poor kids in is just a part of that meritocratic
veneer. We should destroy the entire purpose and rebuild it w/ 20% of its
students from the bottom 20%, 20% of its students from the next 20%, and only
1% of its students from the top 1%.

~~~
krastanov
As a partial defense of the Ivies, a substantial part of their admins are
trying to do that, and there are signs of progress: admission at most of them
is now "need-blind" and they have fantastic financial aid.

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.

~~~
mjevans
The most fair solution would probably look a lot like what Harry Potter got at
Hogwarts.

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.

~~~
chongli
The only reason Harry got into Hogwarts was because he was born a wizard
(likely inherited from his parents). Based on the way he was treated by his
peers, I’d argue that he was one of the most privileged students at the
school, apart from Malfoy.

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.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Based on the way he was treated by his peers, I’d argue that he was one of
> the most privileged students at the school_

Wasn’t he also phenomenally rich in wizard money?

