When Heather Berg arrived at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2011, she was struck by the seemingly posh lifestyle many of her fellow students enjoyed. Dressing up for football games, going out to dinner on a whim, paying the steep admission for a day at the races: To Ms. Berg, a first-generation college student, the sheen of privilege was unsettling.
Now finishing her second year, she has friends who also felt that culture shock at first. But it’s been hard to find them, and to speak candidly with anyone about the impact of money—or lack of it.
“We talk about race, gender, politics, but we never talk about class,” says Ms. Berg, who grew up in South Florida, where her single mother worked for minimum wage. Through high school, Ms. Berg always had a job to help her family make ends meet. Today she is at UVa on a full scholarship, studying leadership and public policy.
And she is trying to fight the silence around socioeconomic class on a campus where the unofficial motto is still “guys in ties, girls in pearls.”
Last fall, Ms. Berg and two classmates started a group to raise awareness of class and to advocate for more support for low-income students. So far, the group has put on several events, including a well-attended panel: “How Public Is Our Public University?” Next academic year, organizers want to reach out to new students especially, as they try to get their peers talking more openly about the social and economic forces that shape their lives.
Virginia’s flagship isn’t the only place such a dialogue is emerging. Spurred by growing income disparities, the aftereffects of the recession, and debates over admissions policies that consider students’ ability to pay, students on many campuses are trying to ignite frank—and sometimes uncomfortable—conversations about class. They are running flash seminars, financial-literacy workshops, and surveys. They’re big on “dialoguing.” And like those here at Virginia, many students are pushing their administrations for more support—stepped-up recruitment, more-egalitarian admissions policies, mentoring networks, resource guides—to help underprivileged students thrive.
Over the past decade, some selective colleges have sought to boost socioeconomic diversity with generous financial-aid policies. But research has shown that many talented low-income students still don’t apply to selective colleges, and first-generation students in particular tend to drop out at higher rates than their peers.
At the forefront of the student-led effort to acknowledge such issues is United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity, or U/Fused. Started in 2010 by students at Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis University, and Duke University, the group has spread to 13 other, mostly private institutions, with student members from varying income brackets.
Chase Sackett, who helped found U/Fused at Wash U, says students have an obligation to talk about the role of class in determining a person’s education and opportunities. Mr. Sackett, who grew up in an upper-middle class family in suburban Cincinnati, doesn’t espouse a utopian vision of class harmony. And he doesn’t want any finger-pointing. But he thinks breaking taboos and expanding resources are goals worth pursuing.
“Life can’t be fair,” says Mr. Sackett, now a law student at Yale University, where he has continued his quest. “But we should do what we can to make it more fair,” he says, especially when class disparities are “in our communities and right in front of us.”
Moving Past Stereotypes
On a recent evening here, two dozen or so students gather in a classroom near the center of campus. They are a mixed lot: Men and women, white, black, Asian, preppy, artsy, chatty, reserved. They are here to stereotype each other.
The event, run jointly by Virginia’s U/Fused group and University Mediation Services, is called “Understanding Your Misunderstandings.” After a brief exercise in which participants jot down first impressions of one another, the group breaks into two smaller circles.
In her circle, Ms. Berg speaks first. She’s wearing a long green skirt and isn’t surprised by descriptions of her as a hippie. A fellow student, in a T-shirt and shorts, is baffled that people think he looks like a fraternity brother (he isn’t). “I saw the sandals and wrote that,” another student says to him, pointing at the man’s brown leather flip-flops.
Ms. Berg relishes this kind of dialogue. She presses students to speak honestly, guiding and prodding them. “What do you look for?” she asks about their impressions of others. “How do you react to what people say?”
Her hope is that getting students to talk will help them understand how and why they judge one another. She wants to turn quick assumptions about class and identity to thoughtful openmindedness.
This evening, the students talk about religion, ethnicity, and race. They bring up clothes and shoes, accents and eye contact. A student from rural Virginia, near the Tennessee border, says she recently found herself defending the charge that Appalachia was “uncivilized.”
Elizabeth Stapleton, a sophomore from a small town in Southwest Virginia, shares her classmate’s dismay. Ms. Stapleton’s father left a family with deep roots in coal country, she says, to go to Virginia on a scholarship.
“He stuck out like a sore thumb,” she says, recalling her father’s stories. On one occasion, administrators turned him away from a campus event, thinking his student ID was a fake. He didn’t look the part.
Until recently, Ms. Stapleton says, she’d talk about class only with her closest friends. Thanks to U/Fused, she says, that tacit avoidance with others is starting to lift. Some students have come up to her to say, “I’m so glad you’re doing this.”
The Virginia organizers hope to push for more conversation—and action—next year. They’d like to link incoming students on substantial, need-based financial aid with a mentor. Tutoring is also in the students’ sights—too expensive, they say, for many at UVa. And they hope resident advisers will include affordable alternatives—potluck dinners, perhaps—in the array of activities meant to cultivate camaraderie among freshmen.
Class Revival
A century ago, class was the primary lens through which students viewed inequality, says Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and an adviser to U/Fused. But during the civil-rights era, class receded from discussion as society confronted pressing issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In recent years, as students have witnessed gradual improvement in race relations and worsening income inequality, Mr. Kahlenberg says, he is not surprised that many are once again talking about class on campus. And soon they might have more reason. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule by July in a case that challenges race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas at Austin. If the court bans them, some experts, including Mr. Kahlenberg, see class as the way many colleges would try to build a diverse student population. (Mr. Kahlenberg wrote for The Chronicle in February about the emergence of class discussion on campuses.)
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, where nearly half of undergraduates are on Pell Grants, the main federal aid for needy students, discussions about class strike a different tone than at costlier colleges like Virginia and Washington University in St. Louis. The shares at those institutions are 13 percent and 7 percent, respectively.
Wendy Guo, who graduates this month with a degree in biology from the Chicago campus, has led efforts to raise awareness of class there. But she worries about traction. Students juggling classes and jobs aren’t inclined to take part in abstract discussions of money, however lively they may be. So Ms. Guo tries to keep things practical. With the university’s Student Money Management Center, she helps run workshops on financial literacy; some departments on campus have made the curriculum part of their freshman-orientation programs. As a U/Fused affiliate, she has arranged campus screenings of a documentary on class consciousness in health care, a popular area of study at the university.
Even with different types of events, Ms. Guo laments the same challenge as her counterparts at more elite institutions: Sometimes it’s a struggle to get people to care.
Efforts that started strong on some campuses have waned. At Smith College several years ago, students formed the Smith Association of Class Activists. The group published a guide of tips on, for example, how to make an unpaid internship work; it also produced a documentary, Class Is Never Dismissed, about socioeconomic issues at the college. But participation in the group got sparser each year, says Emily Huesman, who graduated from Smith in 2012. And conversations grew polarized, she says.
When the core members graduated with her last year, the group disbanded. Ms. Huesman, who had been the first in her family to go to college, was disappointed. She recalls her first year, when events designed as icebreakers required at least some money. In her house on campus, she says, she was one of two students who couldn’t afford to go out: “Not even two or three dollars at an ice-cream shop.”
Without the class activists, she says, “I would have been completely miserable. It was the one space I could go to and feel safe.”
The Value of Talk
At Virginia, students are just getting started. For now, they’re trying to find a balance between talk and action.
Katy Hutto, who began the group with Ms. Berg, says her goal is for students, faculty, and administrators to consider why certain stereotypes persist here. Honest conversation, says Ms. Hutto, who is majoring in English and political and social thought, will go a long way to make all students feel more comfortable.
Still, even the talkers can sometimes forget to really talk. A few weeks ago, Ms. Hutto, Ms. Berg, and the third organizer, Ashley Blackwell, sat down to discuss forthcoming events and potential partnerships for next year.
But Ms. Blackwell was uneasy. She wants the group to get UVa to bolster support for low-income students, but she needs it as a personal outlet, too. Class has shaped her life completely, says Ms. Blackwell, who is majoring in urban and environmental planning: Growing up, she moved so much she doesn’t have a place she calls home. She wants to keep sight of the emotional role the group plays, including for her.
That afternoon, the agenda, spreadsheets, bullet points—they all struck her as detached and clinical. She urged her collaborators to close their laptops for a few minutes. Her life had been a roller coaster lately, and she needed to talk about it. They listened. From then on, they decided, every meeting would start with a conversation.
