It was orientation week at a selective liberal-arts college for women that I’ll call Linden College. Students from many walks of life were welcomed into the community, celebrated for the kind of people they were and the dreams this college’s education would enable them to achieve. All of you, said the dean of admissions, have “résumés already bursting with high-school accomplishments,” and here, too, “you will become overcommitted.” The president of the college celebrated alumnae in high-status white-collar positions: elected politician, business executive, author. At a session on women and money, a professor enjoined students to start thinking about something called a budget; one example she gave of smart money management was saving for a spring-break trip to France. Warm welcomes and sage advice. But, combined with other routine remarks and practices on campus, they delivered an implicit message to low-income students: Even though “you’re all Lindies now,” you do not really belong.
Elite colleges are under increasing pressure to enroll low-income, first-generation students — and, with substantial resources for financial aid and student programming, those colleges may be good places for those students in many ways. Research shows that such students do better on those campuses than at less-selective colleges and universities — and stand to gain a great deal in economic stability.
On the other hand, it’s easy to see how they might feel out of place at an elite college, with its manicured lawns, impeccably maintained historic buildings, and dining-hall food that may be fancier and more plentiful than what’s served at home. Certainly low-income students remain a very small minority on these campuses. Recent figures show that a classroom of 30 at a college with high graduation rates will include perhaps five Pell Grant recipients. By contrast, around 22 students in that classroom will be from the highest income quartile.
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In 2008, I began two years of research at Linden, where Pell Grant recipients made up roughly 20 percent of those enrolled. I wanted to understand how these students experienced college. I interviewed students, administrators, and faculty members, and spent time on campus hanging out and going to parties, classes, breakfasts, campus orientations, workshops, and club meetings.
What I found is that although the institution explicitly welcomed low-income, first-generation students, as did individual faculty members and administrators, underlying messages about social class and belonging undercut those welcoming efforts. I call this the semiotics of class morality — simply put, the idea that our social standing is often associated with judgments about better or worse, more and less qualified, and that these connotations are communicated in a pervasive way. This semiotics shapes low-income, first-generation students’ relationships with their college and their friends, and their lives in the classroom and even as alumnae.
Although my observations were developed from research at one particular campus, they are not limited to that location. In talking with students and alumnae from other campuses, I have heard many similar examples, and I see echoes of these concerns in my current research with low-income, first-generation students who are organizing clubs to address these problems at colleges across the country.
Like American society more broadly, elite colleges tend to present affluence as the norm and, whether by implication, comparison, or simple omission, working-class and low-income lives as disadvantaged and culturally lacking — even unintelligent. Low-income, first-generation students get the message that they are not only less typical members of their college communities, but also less legitimate ones.
I saw this taking place in a number of ways. First, those orientation talks, and other public presentations describing typical students and alumnae, were centered on middle- and upper-income experiences and accomplishments. That message was reinforced over time. For example, a panel of alumnae spoke about the way that résumé building, multitasking, and professional work would bleed into personal time as familiar, inevitable parts of a successful life. In those ways, as one student said, students learned “what we are educated not to be.” In materials given out to graduating seniors one year, “bad” table manners were illustrated with a cartoon exchange between a woman in overalls speaking in a twang about hog farming and a man in a suit who looked uncomfortable. The relative values of the white-collar and blue-collar worlds was clear.
Second, the daily practices at the college, as at others like it, are deeply classed — not necessarily classist, but much more easily recognizable and acted upon by middle- and upper-income students. For example, students seeking advice at the career center were often asked in an expectant tone about parents or other relatives who might be able to connect them with summer internships or give insights about law school. Or they were presumed by peers to have expendable cash, like “only” $10 for social fees or lunch off campus. Such exchanges left some students feeling both misunderstood and excluded.
Moreover, faculty members and administrators often act on the understanding that their students feel entitled to ask for help and to be strong self-advocates. This is especially important when it comes to asking for exceptions. While more-affluent students have often grown up to understand rules to be somewhat flexible and to know how to ask for an extension, a second chance, or a reconsideration, low-income, first-generation students are often reluctant to ask for help or unaware that such behavior is common practice.
In both of those ways — the presentation of “typical” students as middle- or upper-class and the interactions based on the assumption of such backgrounds — students from low-income, first-generation backgrounds are delegitimized as college community members.
That is not to say that the existence of lower-income students on campus is not acknowledged — it is even celebrated as a mark of the college’s diversity. Its website proudly indicates the percent of students receiving aid and the average grant amount, and new students are reminded of their classmates’ widely varied backgrounds. But the very calling out of that diversity communicates implicitly which students are the norm and which are the Other, the exceptions. Such statements make some students feel that they are not deserving or should do something “extra” to earn their place. As one young woman told me, “I think people think the college wants more diversity, and so that’s why I got in, not because I’m smart.”
In talking about percentages of students receiving financial aid or who are first-generation, and in framing those students as diverse, administrators also treat class as an essentially abstract concept, removed from the actual circumstances and realities of students’ lives. Beyond these abstracted formal presentations, class is rarely talked about. Students told me that inequality is rarely discussed among peers or even close friends, except in an academic sense, as something that happens off campus to other people and is encountered, for example, through volunteer work or books. Moreover, few faculty members feel comfortable talking about class inequality among students, whether in class discussions or in advising. This creates a silence around class as a set of lived experiences and lets those college practices and messages communicate, if unintentionally, even more clearly that low-income, first-generation students are outsiders.
Elite colleges have high graduation rates, suggesting that the discomforts faced by low-income and first-generation students at elite colleges are not enough to derail them entirely. So what’s the big deal? First, the stress may foster mental, emotional, and even physical health problems with long-term effects. Second, students who feel less than welcome may make less use of resources, whether in college or the alumni network — losing out on exactly the advantages that these colleges are supposed to provide.
Moreover, a false understanding of their students may lead faculty members and administrators to miss the real issues and the crucial ways they can offer support. In a current interview project, I have spoken with students who are homeless when dorms are closed, hungry when they can’t make limited dining hours and can’t afford meals off campus, or struggling with trauma or other issues that result from growing up in poverty. They live in luxurious campus settings, but their families and “real lives” at home are not magically transformed by virtue of their student status. If faculty members and administrators do not perceive these issues as real problems affecting their students, they can hardly offer the practical or emotional support needed.
Low-income, first-generation students are already wrestling with questions about how their past, present, and future align — asking themselves who they are in their families, home communities, and college campuses. College administrators and faculty members should be having similar conversations with an eye toward how they can help students manage these transitions. Until the contradiction between welcoming and delegitimizing those students is removed, colleges will not be truly inclusive.
Elizabeth M. Lee is an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio University and author of Class and Campus Life: Managing and Experiencing Inequality at an Elite College (Cornell University Press, 2016).
