Low-Income Students Told Brown U. That Textbook Prices Limited Their Choices. Here’s What the University Is Doing About It.

Brown U.

At Brown University the open curriculum — which gives students wide latitude in choosing courses — is a point of pride because it allows them the freedom to explore their interests.

But some low-income students have felt hemmed in. They avoided courses that required expensive books and materials, or took such courses and made do without them. And that wasn’t the worst of it. “Some students,” said Richard M. Locke, the university’s provost, “felt they were trading off books for food.”

In response, Brown started a pilot program this year to buy required textbooks for some low-income students. In the fall the program will expand to cover all incoming freshmen whose financial aid includes university scholarship funds, as well as upperclassmen with a parent contribution of $0. Participating students will simply gather their required materials at the bookstore and pay with a swipe of their campus ID.

The books program is one of several moves Brown has made in recent years to better support its low-income students. Those changes were sparked by student activism.

Across the country, colleges face growing pressure to take care of students’ basic needs. The University of Kentucky is providing additional support, including a dedicated staff member, in the wake of a hunger strike. Students at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, recently released a long list of demands. Texas’ Amarillo College, meanwhile, has attracted national attention for its comprehensive approach to supporting students.

Unlike those colleges, Brown is among the country’s wealthiest. Colleges in its group have more economically diverse enrollments than they once did, but they still enroll small shares of low-income students, compared with most colleges. At Brown, 14 percent of students receive federal Pell Grants, an imperfect but widely used marker of low-income status. That representation is similar to many peer institutions, but quite low beyond them.

Elite colleges don’t educate huge numbers of low-income students, but they do provide significant financial aid to the ones they enroll. In theory, students at Brown should be able to pay for their books. The university meets students’ financial need, and the aid formula includes books and supplies.

But the figure is an estimate, and even if it’s accurate, plenty of students end up spending more. Even then, the idea that students can pay for books out of their summer earnings — an assumption that’s often baked into elite-college financial aid — might not work out in students’ real lives. They might not be able to earn enough money. They might need to spend it on something else.

“When we talk about how money works on campus, often we think about financial aid, and it stops there,” said Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Jack’s research reveals the limits of that approach. A theme of his recent book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, is that “access is not inclusion,” he said. Low-income students, Jack said, often feel a disconnect between the effort an elite college made to recruit them and the lack of support they face once they enroll. “You almost feel lied to,” he said.

Between scholarship like Jack’s and student advocacy, that disconnect is getting harder for colleges to ignore.

Structural Challenges

The recent changes at Brown have their roots in diversity and inclusion demands that students made in 2015, a year that saw similar activism at colleges around the country.

One of the university’s responses was to create a new position, assistant dean of the college for financial advising.

Among other things, Vernicia Elie, who holds the position, oversees an emergency grants program. Students’ requests, which they submit online, are confidential, but they have provided Elie with a detailed view of the financial frustrations of Brown’s most vulnerable students.

In Elie’s first year, students submitted 745 applications for emergency funding, many of which she was able to approve. But there were others she couldn’t, due to federal regulations that prevent colleges from providing students with more aid than calculations determine they need.

The requests formed a “rich data set” revealing what students still needed, Elie said. They coalesced around two issues: books and food.

Students’ stories, which Elie shared with other officials in a 2017 report, “helped us see what was happening structurally,” she said. Brown’s growing share of low-income students meant that there was now a critical mass of them on the campus. To Elie, their presence meant that Brown had to ask itself: “Have we created some policies and systems that don’t align with our values?”

Elite colleges enroll more low-income and first-generation students than they used to. Many students embrace those identities. As a result, the conversation on some campuses is starting to shift from one that expects low-income students to assimilate to one that listens to them and uses their insights to create a better educational environment for everyone.

Another result of 2015’s student activism was the creation of Brown’s Undocumented, First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center. The students who worked there were well aware that buying books continued to be a pain point for low-income students. They even started a lending library, a task that involved lots of planning and organizing, not to mention schlepping books across campus.

“It was so much hard work,” said Auriana Woods, a senior majoring in public policy and Africana studies who used to work at the center. “We were trying to do this thing on our own.”

In the fall of 2017, two of Woods’s friends were in student government. Along with a fourth student, they submitted a proposal asking the university to cover the cost of books for students on financial aid, and pointing to a similar program at Williams College.

Students, Woods said, are on a different timeline than administrators are. With only four years on a campus, they want to make change happen quickly. Still, this year’s pilot program, she said, “was an important start, a manageable start.”

And Woods is glad to see the books program expand. “I’m not going to be here,” she said, “but I know things will be better.”

Bills and Meals

Paying for students’ books is significant, Elie said. But that change alone wouldn’t be enough to resolve the problems students identified. Brown changed two other policies, related to students’ bills and meal plans.

The first concerns how aid works for students with a $0 parent contribution. At Brown, that applies to those whose parents earn $60,000 or less a year and have typical assets. Beforehand, some of those students got a bill from the university, even though it said their parents couldn’t afford to pay anything. That’s because the university, like its peers, expects students to pay something toward their education — $2,700 and a share of their assets, in Brown’s case.

The university raised its scholarships for those students enough that their bill for direct costs (tuition, fees, and room and board) would be $0. The students’ contributions would all go toward discretionary items, like travel.

The university also changed its meal-plan policy. Some freshmen opted for less-generous plans, like one that covered just seven meals a week. It could be a fine option for a student who planned to eat out much of the time, but some lower-income students were using it to get a refund, which, in some cases, they’d turn around and use to pay their university bill. Now all freshmen must stay on a full meal plan.

Brown was intentional in requiring all freshmen to be on a full plan. While some students can afford to eat off-campus with friends even though they’ve already paid for a dining-hall meal, the message Brown wants to send is that eating on campus is simply part of what a first-year student does. And it means that low-income students can eat three meals a day without paying out of pocket.

“It’s not us making exceptions for these students,” Elie said. “It’s us making sure our campus allows us to include everyone.”

Brown’s $3.6-billion endowment permits it to support low-income students creatively, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University, who studies food and housing insecurity among students. “If you’ve got that kind of money,” she said, “I’d like to see how far they can go.”

That might not mean covering more and more student expenses, Goldrick-Rab said. Instead, it could mean questioning or even reducing those expenses. Colleges could move toward providing open course materials. They could charge less for housing and dining. Attacking the price side, she said, would let students’ financial aid go further. It would also make college more affordable for students who don’t receive aid.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.