This, “For many poor students, leap to college ends in a hard fall” is a very well-executed piece in The New York Times. It follows three talented, but terribly disadvantaged, girl students who make it into university but then manage to go no further, and it shows why education doesn’t always lead to social mobility; in fact, it very often holds poor people down while further elevating middle-class and upper-class people. How education systems can actively work against the poor is an area of injustice I find deeply concerning because it is frequently ignored.
By now, almost every policy-maker can acknowledge the returns to education as a social investment, but what they don’t always appreciate are the ways in which poor people find the path through education more difficult to navigate than do students from more wealthy families. Not because they’re somehow less canny, but because the institution is rigged against them. The concept of not being able to afford university fees is something most people can grasp, but the other kinds of barriers poor kids face in getting an education can easily look like disinterest, a lack of motivation, and mindless self-sabotage from the outside. This is dangerous when it comes to policy-making.
Reading that article by Jason DeParle I am struck by the number of times a lack of social capital (ie. inside knowledge and the prerogative to use it) disadvantages these three students as they try to succeed. Social capital is a type of capital that tends to get inherited and locked down by class. It can be difficult to observe because it won’t show up in a tax return. My own single-parent family lived below the poverty line while I was going through the tail end of primary school and then high school and university, but we had one big advantage – my mother had come from a well-to-do family and she had the social capital from those beginnings to know how to navigate the system and to feel entitled to do so when push came to shove. I don’t want to down-play how difficult I found my time growing up in poverty or how lasting its effects have been for me, but social capital is a type of advantage I’ve seen up close and been gifted.. and I will never under-estimate it.
Some of the big policy messages coming out of that article in the New York Times include:
- low-income kids lack social capital which would otherwise help them navigate educational institutions and their place in them;
- low-income kids need to earn money while also studying full-time;
- low-income kids often have to leave their community and family to go to a good university and therefore encounter emotional disadvantage;
- low-income kids often provide the unpaid care services their families require at the expense of their own education and needs (and low-income families are less able to pay for therapies they need and so rely more heavily on unpaid care work in their own families, plus, being poor is stressful and physically depleting);
- low-income kids try not to achieve too much academically in order to protect their families from further expenses and a sense of rejection;
- low-income kids are expected to adapt to the culture and lifestyle of high-income kids when they attend university;
- low-income kids are disadvantaged by not being able to afford the extra-curricula help that high-income kids receive with their education;
- low-income kids go into debt to pay off their education but with the risk of lower chances of graduating and consequently lower chances of gaining a high salary job to pay off their debt;
- low-income kids are more likely to see education as a ‘selfish’ pursuit on their part; and,
- low-income kids lack a safety net when things go wrong.
And here are some recent Australian examples where similar experiences are holding poor children back in education – “Children hide poverty to protect parents, study finds”:
”Their demands were incredibly modest,” the nation’s leading poverty researcher, Peter Saunders of the University of NSW, said.
The study is the first in Australia to hear children’s accounts of what it is like growing up poor. Almost 100 young people from 11 to 17 were interviewed, as well as teachers and parents.
The children’s tendency to deny wanting what other children ordinarily had was a way to ”protect themselves from the pain of missing out and their parents from the anguish of having to say no”, the report said…
… The children felt keenly that their parents were not respected by school staff. Many were bored by and disengaged from the curriculum, and they were frustrated with teachers who could not maintain discipline and didn’t seem to care. The children appreciated enthusiastic teachers and meaningful curriculum but ”this type of opportunity for learning was too often missing from young people’s accounts of school”.
The increasing trend for schools to impose ”user pays” levies for some activities was also detrimental. One parent reported her fury at the discovery, after four years, that the school had a fund to help. Professor Saunders said the schemes were not widely advertised for fear that demand would outstrip supply.
And, “Aussie school children left hungry report”:
Ms Chambers said some parents were keeping their children home from school on days they couldn’t afford to put food in their lunchbox, and often missed meals themselves to ensure their family was fed.
“but the other kinds of barriers poor kids face in getting an education can easily look like disinterest, a lack of motivation, and mindless self-sabotage from the outside. This is dangerous when it comes to policy-making.”
This is an issue that is very close to my heart. I worked for the program that the three young ladies from this article attended, though in a different state (Upward Bound), and I think that it is an excellent opportunity for students to get prepared for college in a way that addresses many of these larger social issues. As a first-generation college student myself, I also know that these social issues are so very hard to address. It’s basically taking students from a culture where college isn’t the norm to a culture where it is, and that’s a hit or miss prospect.
I now work at a community college teaching developmental writing; there I see these barriers to college in very real ways every single day: students who see the long-term value in education, but can’t balance it with the short-term need for financial stability; students who don’t understand how to advocate for themselves in an academic environment; students whose families are unsupportive of their educational goals and see them as a waste of time.
I know there are a lot of people who are completely dedicated to helping these students succeed, but the student-by-student approach that so many of us are limited to doesn’t address these larger cultural problems. Until we figure out how to do that, our results will continue to be unfulfilling, I’m afraid.
I think I need a lie-down now. I was in that horrible position with working parents that earned just slightly too much for me to get Austudy (while I watched peers with high income parents sail in with Austudy and computers and cars because their parents could afford decent tax agents). I couldn’t get a job that would give me enough hours (I was a waitress and they would sometimes give me 2 hours in one week). I was incredibly fortunate that I lived with my brother, he’d been negotiating the system longer than me and since he got more work hours he helped me out with bills and food (I could manage rent as it was $150/wk between 3 of us and my mum gave me $50/week behind my stepdad’s back).
I’m also a first-generation uni grad, I got no financial assistance even though I was dirt poor. I managed to graduate because I think the Aus system is at least slightly better than the US but I don’t know if I’ll ever pay off my HECS debt and my degree is pretty much useless. But I don’t want to do another undergrad degree because I already have a debt, I don’t want to add to it. Ugh.
The worst thing about reading this is desperately not wanting my kids to feel that student poverty but right now in the midst of being poor I’m so scared that they will end up disadvantaged because we can’t afford xyz. The principal said DD1 needs lots of exposure to different things to capitalise on her high learning capacity and I wanted to cry because that usually means money. *sigh*
“The principal said DD1 needs lots of exposure to different things to capitalise on her high learning capacity…”
I really hope this doesn’t demoralise you in the long term, Stacey. In my experience, parents’ own intellectual curiosity and confidence, their interest in the outside world, and their willingness to do everday things with their children is far more effective at capitalising on children’s learning capacity than all the skiing trips and “study trips” that certain schools promote to parents.
For the last eight years I’ve lived in northern Spain, where there are a lot of teenagers being shuttled around western Europe on ski trips and “study trips”. Spend any time with these children (or get stuck in a carriage with them on the London underground) and you’ll notice their lack of interest in the world outside their family, their school and their friends. Their parents want to buy them the prestige of having travelled, of speaking other languages, and of being cosmopolitan, but only because they perceive them as bestowing status on their children in the much smaller world of the Basque Country. You can’t blame parents for that, but you can get money out of them for something that doesn’t really benefit their children.
Over Christmas dinner my sister-in-law spoke about being a teacher at a school where the priests (who run the school) make the effort to organise lots of skiing trips and study trips. The prestige of it attracts parents to the school, she said. It’s a business.
I’m pretty sure she means stuff closer to home, like art exhibitions, cultural events, but also classes I’d have to pay for. My daughter actually wanted to learn Spanish last term (I was homeschooling her so it was no problem) but I realise she probably would be better off learning from a person rather than the internet. Our school is little and under-resourced so unfortunately a lot of extra-curricular stuff has to be organised by the parents.
Also… one mistake that my mum made was that in trying to instil a work ethic in me she lost sight of the fact that, as a child, education is more important. When I was in grade 11 we had an assignment that was to review an art exhibition at the local gallery. My teacher was so impressed I got an A+ and sent it to the gallery… they invited me to the opening night of their next exhibition to write a review. But I was rostered on to work at Pizza Hut that night. The mistake my mum made was to say I would have to decline the opportunity to go to the exhibition. I’m still gobsmacked when I look back on that moment – but at the time I was looking to her for guidance and it seems crazy that I prioritised a shitty, dead-end fill-in job over something as amazing as being 16 and asked to come and review the opening night of an art exhibition! I will NEVER make that mistake with my kids.
Pretty much what Stacy said. I have finally learned how to turn my degree into meaningful and reasonably financially rewarding work, but it took many years. I see so many people like me who go to university and do really well academically but have absolutely no idea what it gets them, they don’t know or imagine what work might be available, or what their labour is worth. I think they are all sessional academics, because their imaginations were never expanded beyond getting to university; getting to university was the aim in itself. The kids with social capital know that getting to university is just a step on the way.
Then there’s all the stuff that you need capital capital for – unpaid internships to other countries for example. Makes me want to scream at the barriers that are so real for the poorer kids, and so utterly invisible for the wealthy kids.
My husband teaches writing at a local private liberal arts school. I remember a story he told of a boy who was failing the class for failing to show up. He approached my husband regarding the final exam, saying that he was going to miss this class too because he had an interview with WalMart and really needed the job. He didn’t show up, failed the class, and got the job with WalMart.
“low-income kids go into debt to pay off their education but with the risk of lower chances of graduating and consequently lower chances of gaining a high salary job to pay off their debt;”
This seems to be a huge and growing problem in the US, where fees have risen considerably over a generation, and job opportunities are disappearing, so it’s no longer likely that your education will be a good investment, financially speaking.
I get the impression that the tertiary sector there is a ruthless industry doing everything it can to make the most of the government-backed debt available to eighteen-year-olds, who are often encouraged by their own parents to take out the loans.
Teenagers are repeatedly told that a tertiary education is essential to becoming well-rounded, respectable adults with a decent job, and even their parents, who fail to understand that the ratio of student debt to later-life earnings is much higher than it was in their own youth, encourage them to take on debt, not really understanding quite how big that debt is.
I’m sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs who would like to extend the US system to the rest of the world. They seem to be slowly getting their way.
When Australia’s HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) was introduced in late eighties, I remember my father, who was bitter about inheriting the family business in the sixties instead of being sent to boarding school, thought it was a great thing for students to have to pay for a part of their education. As he pointed out, the debt was interest free, it was only a partial contribution, and you didn’t have to pay it back until you started earning a certain amount.
Another relative sourly predicted that this would be the thin end of the wedge. She was right. When the Liberal government (that’s conservative to you US people) got into power in 1996 they made the system more like that in the US. Meanwhile, IIRC, Australia got its first private universities at about the same time that HECS was introduced.
In the NYT article an Emory college spokesman describes the college’s repeated inflation of Angelica Gonzalez’s family’s income without telling her as “very standard methodology” then says: ““I think that what’s unusual is that she really didn’t advocate for herself or ask for any kind of review.” That really gives the impression of an institution with a combative attitude towards its students, blaming them for not being wily, manipulative and pushy enough themselves when it succeeds in tricking them out of money. Surely there can’t be all that many families with the cultural capital to win against such a system.
Yes.
I feel like we like to examine all the cultural barriers for poorer kids, but in the US we are missing the glaringly obvious step of just lowering costs and letting people work out their own emotional and cultural stuff. We have the examples of state and city institutions that used to be free or very cheap – the California university system, City College of New York, etc – that turned out not just newly middle class people, but artists, poets, activists, physicists.
I read this post a few days ago and I’m still thinking about it! Thanks for the great post and links. This echoes my own experience growing up and going to uni but I’ve never really appreciated the systemic issues to do with poverty and education until now. Thanks blue milk, I’m sure I’ll be thinking this over a little more!
What a brilliant informative post. I live in rural NSW and have witnessed many of the things that you discuss in your blog post. I have actually seen the education system in my small country town treat people completely different.
I am not sure how this is all going to change but I think in Australia (what I think is the luckiest country in the world) in 2012 this is just not good enough. And by the changes in Tafe fees coming in within the next few years even an education in Tafe (which is often a stepping stone to university) will be out if some people reach. We should be making more accessible and not less so.
I personally don’t understand why teachers (or anyone for that matter) think it is okay to treat people different because they are in a lower socio economic position than they may be in. It doesn’t cost anything to be kind to another person or to encourage a child.
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