Elite Colleges Are More Diverse Than Ever. They’re Still Unequal.

Buzz. Ding. Buzz. Ding. The morning of March 10, 2020, was a cacophony of vibrations and beeps across campus, as the phone of every student brought life-altering news. “Students are asked not to return to campus after Spring Recess and to meet academic requirements remotely until further notice.” This message first came from Lawrence Bacow, then president of Harvard University. Various deans repeated versions of the same message throughout the day, as if the whole university were playing a harrowing game of telephone. The news dropped at 8:27 a.m. I read it as soon as it hit my inbox. I was on the faculty at the time. It was a Tuesday. Much of campus was still asleep. That quickly changed. The first burst of notifications spread across campus, followed by a second and third round, as students texted each other screenshots and snippets of the original email. Just over 7,000 students emerged into a new reality. Covid-19 closures had begun.

I read and reread President Bacow’s email. I fixated on that one line: “Students are asked not to return to campus after Spring Recess.” In my heart of hearts, I knew the president was right. Closing campus was the only safe option. Covid-19 was a killer, and we didn’t even know yet how deadly it would be. But each time I read the president’s words, a different set of questions surfaced. What about the students who weren’t going to leave for break? What are we doing for students who can’t leave? What are we sending students home to? There wasn’t clear messaging, no clear plan forward for those who “need to remain.” I discovered over and over, in the days and weeks to come, that students seeking support were met with blank stares, mixed messages, and bureaucratic hurdles. Some students were even chastised for not having an exit strategy at the ready.

Jerome, a bespectacled, soft-spoken junior with South Asian roots, had to reckon with the full gamut of these difficulties. I met him on Zoom as he sat in his dorm room almost a year to the day after campus closed. His blue plaid shirt, buttoned to the very top, complemented his brown-butter complexion. He sat next to an open window in his room, soaking in the early-spring sun. Although in his third year at Harvard, he had not made any “real connections” on campus with peers or professors. He felt disconnected from folks at Harvard from the beginning, a feeling that persisted. He tried to involve himself in different ways on campus, but the more he tried, the more, he said, “it dawns on me that I am alone in my situation.”

Jerome struggled with what to do a year before, when he read the president’s email. He felt unseen and unheard. “Reading that email, from the president of the university, followed by the dean, it had the assumption that students have a place to go back to … That is how I interpreted that email. I was uncertain. People are telling me, ‘Oh, that means everyone needs to go.’” Jerome paused for a second, collecting himself. He began again, voice softer yet sharper. “For me, I didn’t have plans to go back home for spring break, on the count that I don’t have a home to go back to,” he said; “2020 has just been a crazy time for my family. My mother and I, it’s just the two of us, we lost our place in the beginning of 2020, in January.”

For many low-income students like Jerome, going to college — let alone Harvard — was more than the exhilarating achievement of a life-long academic dream. Harvard was an escape. The pandemic-related hardships that millions felt in 2020 weren’t anything new for Jerome; those global disruptions were a different flavor of the same kinds he had been enduring for years. For half his life, Jerome and his mother bounced around the country, never staying anywhere for long. He characterized his disjointed housing history with a terrible bluntness: “I’ve lived where I cannot afford.” Evictions were all too familiar. During his three years at Harvard, his mother found herself living “in her car or, right now, in a motel” as she “looked for employment opportunities.” Jerome helped out whenever he could, picking up odd jobs when his class schedule permitted. His goals were as specific as they were dire: “trying to earn sufficient funds to get a place to stay for my mother that’s more stable than a motel and her car.” Things were beginning to look up. For the first time in a long while, even his mother was hopeful; she had just applied for her first batch of jobs after years of unemployment. She even made it past the first round of interviews for one of them.

When times were most dire, they sometimes stayed on the couches and floors of family members. But that arrangement never ended well. Jerome’s uncles dismissed his mother for having a child while unmarried and rebuked her for struggling to get, let alone keep, a job. But it went deeper than verbal admonitions: “My uncle almost killed my mother.” A fist-size hole in the wall of their old home, Jerome explains, remains as evidence of a deed long done. His mother wasn’t his uncle’s only target. They detested Jerome for his effeminate demeanor, forgiving neither the sin nor the son. “Their hate of my mother is also targeted at me,” Jerome explained. “I’m the abnormal one. I’m a bastard.”

After President Bacow’s email, Jerome made the long, anxiety-inducing trek from campus to his uncle’s house on the West Coast. Remote learning was a distant thought. He had hoped the previous summer would be the last time he would ever step through his uncle’s front door. But then campus closed, and his mom was staying with her brother yet again. So Jerome didn’t really have a choice. And then, soon after he arrived, he was reminded all over again why he never wanted to come back. One day after running an errand, he entered the front door of his uncle’s house, and waiting for him was the barrel of a gun. Holding the grip was someone, his own flesh and blood, who made it clear how much Jerome was despised. “My cousin was aiming a pellet BB gun at me. It looks like a real gun, but it’s not. I was screaming; I was really terrified.” Jerome didn’t know it was a BB gun at the time. But that didn’t matter. His cousin took pleasure in watching Jerome cower in fear. His aunt mocked him. Instead of reprimanding her son for drawing a weapon on him, Jerome’s aunt, watching on from the living room, chastised Jerome for screaming “like a girl. Why are you screaming and yelling? Are you gay?” Jerome’s constant refrain was how living with his uncle “was a scary, scary time.”

Feeling safe — let alone rested — always eluded Jerome when he was away from campus. Covid-19 wasn’t his first time dealing with campus closures. Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks never gave what they promised: a respite. Breaks were the opposite for Jerome: “very much trauma-inducing; still something that gets me sick.” Making Jerome and his mother feel unsafe was a family affair. Campus closures, like every break in the calendar, meant not just loss of room and board, as disruptive as that always was, it meant a loss of security. After all, coming to Harvard, even with all of his misgivings, had been a great gift: It was the first time, Jerome said, he had “that stability of having a place, like a room with four walls and a roof.”

“We are not who we once were.” That is what elite colleges across the United States want you to believe about them. It’s true. They aren’t. Colleges are touting unprecedented diversity numbers, with respect to race and class. According to Princeton University, the Class of 2021 was its most diverse “in the modern era,” including more first-generation college students than ever before. Many other colleges are also making similar headlines — particularly notable is the rapidly growing number of colleges that have admitted their first majority-minority classes, meaning there are more students of color than white students. In 2017 Cornell University recorded its third consecutive year in which prospective students set a new record for the number of applicants who self-identify as an underrepresented racial minority. The glee is palpable: According to the university, these remarkable numbers signal that Cornell is “well on our way toward our goals to broaden and diversify the incoming class.”

Harvard University is no different. In 2017, after 380 years of existence, Harvard admitted its first majority-minority class with respect to race: 50.8 percent was not white. Economic diversity is another issue; that same class remains mostly wealthy. Still, as one spokesperson for the university noted, the Class of 2021 testifies to the fact that “Harvard remains committed to enrolling diverse classes of students.” Keeping its well-publicized word, the university delivered parallel performances in the years that followed.

Like proud parents sharing pictures of their newborn baby, colleges broadcast these “wins” everywhere they can: purported testament to the fact that they value diversity. From staged pictures in glossy view-books handed out at high-school open houses to (slightly) more organic “Student Takeover” days on Instagram, colleges don’t let you miss the fact that they look different. These carefully curated displays of color serve as blatant marketing, and as a shield from criticism — both from prospective students critical of longstanding patterns of exclusion and from critics who say colleges are raising tuition and hoarding resources. Everywhere you look, you are sure to find a smiling Black or brown face, along with a white student with a “First Gen” shirt, highlighted for all to see — what the sociologists Karly Ford and Megan Holland call “cosmetic diversity.”

But there are costs to being a member of an unprecedentedly diverse class. One of those costs is living in the university’s blind spots. Colleges make many, many assumptions: not just about the books that students have already read, and the academic jargon they are already familiar with, but about what students know about living on a campus, about what students can afford, and about the resources — both financial and relational — that students take for granted. This is no surprise for institutions that have served a painfully homogenous group of people — nearly all white and wealthy — for most of their history. We are only just becoming aware of the gaps in the services that these elite campuses offer. Administrators, deans, and therapists I have worked with are consistently dedicated to their work, but they are also largely ignorant of what it means to be a poor student on a rich campus, and ill-equipped to handle the many issues that emerge.

The hurdles that made college so different, and so much more difficult, for students like Jerome existed long before the Covid-19 pandemic and continue to exist now. But the campus closures that started in March 2020 placed these often-invisible inequalities front and center. Our necessary response to Covid-19 exposed the university’s ongoing ignorance — about the entrenched problems that haunt our students, and the fact that many of us don’t know how we can, or should, support those students. Covid-19 was a stress test on higher education. It challenged all of us, in many different ways. So many colleges failed that test.

To be clear, this failure is not just about money, or the lack thereof. Race matters, and it often amplifies class differences in distinctive ways. As time passed, the daunting weight of the pandemic exposed how having money, and in some instances even a modicum of wealth, was an imperfect shield for students of color. It wasn’t just about getting off campus and gearing up for “Zoom school,” although that was an ordeal. The uneven toll the pandemic exacted from disenfranchised communities, already marred by segregation, joblessness, and concentrated poverty, rippled through the student body. After all, students from the most recent historically diverse classes call these neighborhoods home. These communities were already grappling with the generations-long struggles that accompanied students to college — the distracting worries, the distressed calls, and all the other debilitating burdens of poverty that make focusing on schoolwork nearly impossible.

As campuses closed and the virus spread, Asian, Black, Latino, and Native communities were hit the hardest, both in terms of Covid cases and fatalities. In these communities, the sharp spikes in Covid deaths were accompanied by the persistently high rates of other deaths — due to police brutality, vigilantism, domestic terrorism, and also the many systemic inequalities that define American life. Each of these manifestations of hate and inequity deepened how we all were being burdened, and also showed how this pain was unevenly dispensed. What’s more, the ways that members of the university community — especially white peers and administrators — responded to these moments often did more harm than good, adding salt to ever-fresh wounds.

Even after he was able to return to campus months later, Jerome found himself yet again in a no-man’s land. This time he grew increasingly fearful when just moving about the world. He obsessively tracked the rise in animosity toward communities of color, and especially Asian Americans. Jerome was not Chinese, but he knew that assailants bent on doing harm did not know the difference between Mandarin and Korean, Nepali, or Tagalog. As much as he wanted to not think about the very people who made his life hell, he couldn’t help it. “Every time that I see a headline, ‘Asian man gets, whatever, beaten or attacked in these communities,’ it always increases my heart rate. I want to read the headline. I want to see — is it my relatives who got attacked?” Each news item that crossed his desk or phone sharpened his loneliness and isolation. When he tried to reach out to classmates and other people at Harvard, he often met silence. “They just don’t want to speak or listen to me … people don’t bother spending the time to hear me out in that.”

The achievements in student diversity that colleges like Harvard have made, to be clear, are no small feat. They have brought about a profound shift in campus demographics, in just a few decades, which will have major effects on American society. Attending an elite college increases a student’s chances for entering elite occupations upon graduation, regardless of background. The more selective the college, the higher the odds of graduation. And this is especially true for students from underrepresented groups.

Yet so much happens in the interim, between matriculation and graduation, between the thrill of getting in and the slog of getting out. There is a lot of life to be lived in those intervening years. And for many students it is not easy living. I have found, again and again, that colleges are not paying enough attention to the everyday realities of those they let in. While elite colleges are content with recruiting “the most diverse class,” patting themselves on the back for a job well done, it is not enough just to get students to campus. It is not just about financial aid. Colleges remain woefully unprepared to support the students who make it in.

In an almost-twisted act of fate, the students admitted in 2017 who make up these unprecedented classes at elite colleges are those who were on campus in March 2020, when Covid-19 entered our world and shut so much of it down. Like many colleges across the country, members of Harvard’s first record-breaking class were juniors, settling into their spring semesters and progressing toward graduation. They were gearing up for the all-important junior summer, when many companies extend offers for employment after grueling yet revelatory summer internships. The next crop of students, now sophomores, and similarly record-breaking, had just declared their concentrations (Harvard-speak for academic majors), a big day on campus. Another group was gearing up for housing day, the annual celebration when first-year students get sorted into their houses, the dorms they will live in for the next three years. The seniors, of course, were mere weeks away from graduation.

Each of these groups of students was marching toward milestones and taking part in age-old traditions, almost as one. Then campus closed. That closure revealed just how different these students’ paths through college had been, and foreshadowed how much more divergent they would become. What happened when campus closed raises a crucial question: Do colleges know how to support a diverse class of students, or do they just know how to foot the bill for one?

This essay appears, in modified form, in Anthony Abraham Jack’s Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton University Press, 2024).