Guides to ‘Being Not-Rich’ Are Springing Up at Elite Colleges. Should Administrators Adopt Them?

Numerous alumni filled the guide to “Being Not-Rich” at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor with similar comments: I wish we had something like this when I was a student. Aarica Marsh, an alumna who graduated in 2016, didn’t know other low-income students, and didn’t think to call herself a first-generation college student. In short, it was a thing you didn’t talk about.

“I didn’t know anything about college before I went. I filled out Fafsa on my own, tried to figure out all of the financial stuff myself,” she said. “I never thought about it or called myself first gen until probably junior or senior year, when I realized there are specific issues associated with being the only person in your family to go to college.”

The guide, which students at Michigan launched out of “this assumption that everyone here is wealthy,” can be seen as the result of two emerging themes at elite colleges: a political climate in which students take matters into their own hands, and a growing population of first-generation and low-income students on college campuses.

Students’ identities as first-generation or low-income have become empowering instead of embarrassing, said Nimisha Barton, a higher-education consultant and former associate director of the Freshman Scholars Institute and Programs for Access and Inclusion at Princeton University.

“There is a huge generational divide,” Barton said. “Students go around saying it, they have posters and T-shirts, when an alum just 20 years ago would see that as crass and vulgar.”

Since the early 2000s, first-generation and low-income enrollment at elite colleges has increased as universities have adopted new financial-aid policies, started need-blind admissions, and sent their admissions staffs to places they hadn’t gone before to recruit. As a result, Barton said, within a decade students started recognizing one another and embracing that part of their identities.

“They’re in class, a person says something, and they look around, see each other, and say, ‘That was weird for you, too, right?’” Barton said. “You start to feel a really basic sense of identity and community formation happening on these college campuses. There are more of us and strength in numbers, so now you’re seeing these grass-roots movements.”

Guides for first-generation and low-income students, like Michigan’s, are an outgrowth of that. Princeton students created a similar guide four years ago, called Project Welcome Mat, aimed at offering advice to first-generation students — from other such students. Michigan’s “Not-Rich” guide has already inspired similar guides at the University of Texas at Austin and Michigan State University.

“This guide brings together all the things that are best about their millennial generation,” Barton said. “It’s got this bloggy vibe to it, it’s democratized, it’s for the people by the people, anyone can contribute, it’s lightly edited and meant to have as much personality as possible — and that’s what’s so exciting about it.”

Filling a Void

The guide sprung up against a backdrop of greater emphasis on low-income students by the university itself. Michigan has created an on-campus office for first-generation students, a symposium on the topic, and a website, too. Last year the university announced that it would give free tuition to students with a family income of $65,000 or lower.

And yet, the guide filled a void. “Being at this university, low-income students don’t really have a place to come together to talk about their shared experiences,” said Lauren Schandevel, a junior and co-creator of the guide. “This is a fraction of that kind of community that they needed and wanted to see.”

After Princeton students created their version of a guide for first-generation students, administrators established a paid student position to maintain and update it. While Project Welcome Mat included personal experiences from a few of the student organizers in its form online, it’s not open to edits or input from other students in the way the “Not-Rich” guide is. Most sections on the Project Welcome Mat guide haven’t been updated since 2015 or 2016.

Student organizers in Ann Arbor are just beginning to make decisions about what happens to the “Not-Rich” guide now. Schandevel and others attended meetings with administrators as recently as this week. With the Office of New Student Programs, they talked about ways to incorporate the guide into orientation materials. There has been talk of finding a place for the guide in some form on the university’s website, but no agreements have been reached, Schandevel said.

Whatever happens, she said, it’s a priority that they maintain it as open for additions and honest experiences. J. Ann Hower, director of the Office of New Student Programs at Michigan, agreed that the guide should stay community-based and maintain the authentic voices of students.

“Many of us were very impressed that these students took the initiative to make this document. It shows an incredible commitment to the students who might be challenged around affordability at U of M,” she said. “I know it’s a little unusual, but universities are changing, and it is something we support.”

Now they face this challenge, she said: “This group of students will graduate. How do we sustain it, keep it up to date, and make sure it’s accurate?”

Working with housing and financial-aid offices, administrators hope to find a home for the guide at the university in some format. While they are just starting to brainstorm options, Hower said, the guide will probably have to undergo some editing if the university is going to formally adopt it.

“There’s always a line around what’s appropriate and what’s not, but we haven’t crossed that line yet,” she said. “It has to be constantly monitored. Whatever we might put together for incoming students, it has to be something we feel very comfortable about.”

The ‘Oh Crap’ Moment

Often, Barton said, it takes an “oh crap” moment for administrators to realize students’ needs, particularly when those students’ identities aren’t always shared by the higher-ups at these elite universities. In reality, administrators gathering at annual conferences say they wish students got together to share their knowledge for other students’ benefit, but they’re already doing that online, she said.

The raw student experience is something administrators might feel the need to censor or modify to “not humiliate the university,” Barton said. Instead, said Yolanda Norman, a consultant on first-generation students and a program manager at the University of Houston, it’s a movement administrators should embrace.

“I always judged myself. My perspective was you have to have money and power to make change,” said Norman, who was a first-generation student herself. “That’s not always true. It’s about how you use your voice. And this is clearly a passion project and a purpose project for these students. Let students know their voice is just as powerful as anyone else. Walk them through the process.”