Washington U. Is Fixing Its Economic-Diversity Problem. Its Next Challenge Is Parity.

Sid Hastings for The Chronicle

The experience can be transformative. Freshmen at Washington University in St. Louis can explore Venice, Florence, and Rome, eat black truffles, and tour museums. “It’s the greatest teaching experience I have,” says Rebecca Messbarger, a professor in the department of Romance languages and literatures who has led the trip.

But some students can’t go. They don’t have the money.

“I’m anguished when I have students who come to me and say they can’t afford this,” Ms. Messbarger says. “They have to sort of out themselves as being from a low-income background. If you only have 15 students in the class, and one kid isn’t going, the reason is going to be apparent.”

Perhaps no university has struggled as publicly over the last two years with its lack of socioeconomic diversity. Washington University had become, by one measure, the nation’s least economically diverse top college, even as it is one of the wealthiest, with an endowment of some $6.9 billion.

To change its reputation, university leaders last year announced they would spend $25 million annually toward the goal of doubling the university’s share of undergraduates eligible for Pell Grants, a gauge of financial need, from 6 percent in 2014 to 13 percent by 2020.

Does Higher Education Perpetuate Inequality?

Colleges are seen broadly as engines of opportunity, as economic equalizers. Is that reputation deserved?

Read stories from an occasional series exploring that question:

• Washington U. Is Fixing Its Economic-Diversity Problem. Its Next Challenge Is Parity.
• Can a City’s Compassion Remedy Educational Inequity?
• Should Everyone Go to College?
• 2 Keys to Success for Underprivileged Students: When to Start College, and Where to Go
• Engine of Inequality
• Poor Kids, Limited Horizons
• On the Path to Graduation, Life Intervenes

Washington University is on track to meet its goal; about 13 percent of the freshman class entering this fall appear to be Pell-eligible, officials say. But increasing the numbers was the easy part.

Now administrators and students are wrestling with how to do a better job of supporting low-income students once they enroll. Student activists who pressured the university to increase its share of Pell recipients are now turning their attention to making sure those students get the same opportunities as their affluent peers.

The students call this “experiential parity.” Not having money often prevents students from low-income backgrounds from joining fraternities and sororities, attending campus social events, and taking advantage of academic opportunities like study abroad — all of which come with fees usually not factored into financial aid.

Ms. Messbarger is pressing administrators to provide more financial aid for study abroad; leaders acknowledge that the university’s record of supporting students who struggle to afford the opportunity is “hit or miss,” as the provost puts it.

“The promise of inclusion and access,” Ms. Messbarger writes in an email, “must extend beyond the classroom door to all aspects of the education we offer.”

Structural Change

Improving parity of experiences matters, administrators agree.

“This is something we needed to do,” says Holden Thorp, Washington University’s provost, who has led the campus’s efforts on socioeconomic diversity. “All of private higher education has to take this very seriously because we can’t let the narrative be that we’re not a ladder of opportunity for everyone.”

Mr. Thorp says the university has already taken some actions, including giving low-income students summer financial aid for certain classes and scholarships for preorientation programs.

The university is also creating an Office of Student Success, which will consist of a new associate provost, an assistant dean, and a recent graduate, Scott Jacobs, who has advocated for more support for low-income students. Each year a pair of undergraduate representatives present a pressing issue to the Board of Trustees. The topic Mr. Jacobs and his classmate picked this year was creating experiential parity for low-income students.

“You need more than just a commitment to socioeconomic diversity, which we’ve made,” says the assistant dean, Harvey Fields, “You need a structure and a system to be put in place that can address it consistently. That’s what this new office is poised to begin to do.”

Alex Rutherford, a rising sophomore, says attending Washington University as a low-income student can be a “culture shock” — surrounded by peers whose parents are doctors and lawyers, and who can take frequent, extravagant vacations. She’s pleased with the direction the university is headed, but says it “hasn’t had enough eyes and ears on the ground to actually make programs for low-income students successful.”

Courtesy of Alex Rutherford

As an example of how good intentions aren’t always enough, she cites an effort that provides her and other low-income students with free tickets to cultural events like the university’s Lunar New Year Festival. But the tickets come with assigned seats, usually away from their friends. “If we’re trying to be inclusive and give students opportunities,” Ms. Rutherford says, “that doesn’t seem like a good way to do that.”

Ms. Rutherford also rushed to join a sorority but couldn’t afford the annual dues, which at some Greek organizations can amount to hundreds of dollars. The sorority had financial aid available, but only after she became a member, meaning she would have had to come up with the dues for the first semester herself.

Administrators say they are aware of some of those barriers, and want to learn more. Mr. Fields says one goal is to take inventory of all the academic and social experiences available to university students and how much they cost. “We then would want to look at ways to address them,” he says. “I don’t know all of those ways yet. Some might include dropping the fee altogether and the university absorbing it.”

Culture Change

The university’s interventions to create experiential parity may have limits. As long as students from low-income backgrounds remain a clear minority, they will confront cultural gaps on the campus.

Jonathan Williford, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, is ambivalent about his experience at Washington University. On the one hand, he was exposed to people and ideas he had never encountered before. On the other, the constant barrage of economic privilege, he says, was “tiring.” Students, for example, would often refer to his on-campus housing, Rubelmann Hall — an older dormitory — as “the projects.”

“The more I heard it,” says Mr. Williford, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in educational studies and applied linguistics, “it started to tick me off. There aren’t memory-foam mattresses in the projects. No one really stopped to consider that, for many students, Rubelmann may have been better than they were used to.”

Eventually, he says, the slights add up and create doubt: “One of the things that hurts academically the most is, as the little things pile up, you begin to wonder why there aren’t people like you around, and that maybe you don’t belong here.”

Ms. Rutherford says it’s the university’s responsibility to reduce the stigma of coming from a lower-income background. A good start, she and other students argue, would be for the university to create an on-campus center that could double as a one-stop shop for resources for low-income students and a central hub where students could hang out.

“We exist in the shadows,” she says. “People don’t know there are low-income students in their midst, which makes it harder to come forward. Increasing visibility will make it easier to be a low-income student on campus.”

Ms. Messbarger, the professor who has led the trips to Italy, says the university has the power to change the course of a student’s life.

Last year one of her best students could not afford the trip. Ms. Messbarger wrote Mr. Thorp, the provost, pleading for help to give her and another student the chance to see Italy.

Mr. Thorp found the money.

“In high school she had studied and loved Latin, and had never been abroad,” Ms. Messbarger says. “When we entered the Colosseum, she turned to me and said, ‘This is the best day of my life.’”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.