Long before many people enroll in college, they see a version of it on glowing screens. Movies, television shows, and photographs flood our eyeballs with images of college students, shaping our understanding of whom higher education serves. The more folks we see who look like us, the more we might believe that we, too, belong in college.
But Shontise McKinney never knew that feeling. Growing up in Washington, D.C., she watched a slew of Lifetime movies about high-school and college kids with whom she had little in common. They were white; she is black. They came from two-parent homes; she was in foster care. They were wealthy; she was poor.
No one in McKinney’s family had gone to college. Though she loved books and daydreamed about becoming a meteorologist, she couldn’t see herself pursuing a postsecondary degree. Especially not after she got pregnant at 16. “College seemed like an imaginary place,” she says, “a place I just wouldn’t end up in.”
But she did. Now she’s a 25-year-old junior at the University of the District of Columbia, majoring in finance and accounting while raising two children on her own. And she felt good, really good, when she saw the images in the New College Majority Photo Series: They depict students who are mothers, just like her.
The project, a collaboration between the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation and Getty Images, is meant to fill the latter’s widely used photo library with hundreds of pictures reflecting the diversity of today’s college students. For decades, a disproportionate number of stock images have portrayed the experience of one kind of student: the 18- to 22-year-old attending a residential four-year college.
But all those fresh-faced kids on tree-shaded quads are, in fact, the minority. (Did you know that only about 15 percent of undergraduates live in campus dorms?) Now, more than ever, some higher-education experts say, the world needs to see more images of students who fit a different description.
“Pictures communicate directly what a thousand PowerPoints are never going to get you,” says Abigail Seldin, chief executive of the foundation. “Part of the reason for the disconnect between policy design and the student experience is because we as a field have not been adequately communicating the diversity of that experience.”
A while back, Seldin went looking for images of students with baby strollers in Getty’s enormous digital library. She couldn’t find any. That’s a problem, she thought. After all, 3.8 million college students — more than a fifth of all undergraduates — are raising children. Nearly half of them are single mothers. What does that look like?
The New College Majority Photo Series provides some visual answers. The first installment, in May, included more than 200 images depicting mothers enrolled in college. One woman holds an infant in a library. Another, with a baby strapped to her back, reads a textbook at a Laundromat. Another, seated before an open textbook, uses her left hand to distract a baby with a toy while taking notes with the pen in her right hand.
Pictures communicate directly what a thousand PowerPoints are never going to get you.
The latest round of photos was added to the Getty Images and iStock libraries in October. It includes images of disabled students (one shows a young man with two artificial legs carrying a backpack), as well as masked-up students enrolled during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Getty Images, in case you didn’t know, owns the world’s largest private archive of photographs and video, with more than 415 million items. The family pictured on that brochure from your bank; the man in that magazine ad for insurance; the woman smiling at you from that ad on the side of the bus: There’s a good chance all those images came from Getty’s ever-expanding trove. Corporations, small businesses, associations, and news media all mine images from the company, which over the past decade has been filling its library with more and more inclusive photographs.
An especially striking photo in the New College Majority Photo Series shows a young woman typing on a laptop while seated on the ground outside a campus building. It’s meant to capture how students lacking internet access must find ways of getting online wherever they can. Another photo shows a woman flipping through a notebook in the back seat of a car with a blanket and pillow. Some students, it’s true, sleep, eat, and study in their vehicles.
Those images remind us that college is a struggle for the many degree-seekers who lack the basic necessities: shelter, food, connectivity, enough money to live. Eddy Conroy advocates on behalf of such students at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, which has done much to illuminate the pressing challenges that many undergraduates experience. Finding appropriate photos to illustrate the center’s reports, he says, is difficult. “Three and a tree” images of younger students blissfully gathered together, or shots of joyful graduates tossing their caps into the air, just won’t do.
“That’s not what we’re looking at in our work,” says Conroy, associate director of institutional transformation at the center. “It would feel sort of dissonant to place the challenging issues we research against these idealized stereotypes of what students look like in all the images of smiling people experiencing the best-case scenario in college.”
In so many stock images, students appear, above all else, to be happy. Ecstatic, even. “They’re all smiling like crazy,” says Michael Morgan. “When you see that, you think, ‘College looks fun. I wanna do that.’”
Morgan, a professor emeritus of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has long studied “media effects,” examining how mass media shape audiences’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The countless images we absorb over time inform our understanding of reality.
“These images send a message about who counts and who doesn’t, about what’s weird and what’s usual,” Morgan says. “If people never see anybody who looks like themselves, it can cause them to believe that they don’t belong to that world, that that world is for other people. It can lower their aspirations, lower their self-esteem.”
Images send a message about who counts and who doesn’t.
All the photos in the world, of course, can’t fix the systemic inequities or topple the barriers that keep many students from enrolling and succeeding college. And no one is saying otherwise.
But stories matter. And in a world with more ways to transmit images than ever before, many stories get told through pictures. “Imagery,” says Andrew Delaney, who oversees custom content at Getty Images, “is the most widely spoken language, able to impact how we see ourselves, how we see others. … It can also impact what we feel is possible.”
The new photo series arrives at a time when we’re seeing more-inclusive imagery in pop culture, too. Like the recent commercial for Oreo cookies in which Wiz Khalifa, the rapper, and his son, Sebastian, play together at home,sharing the sweet, intimate moments we’re used to seeing white families enjoy on our TV screens.
In a tweet last winter, Sean Combs, the rapper known as Diddy, praised the cookie brand “for getting the narrative right and showing the love between black fathers and their sons.”
The more narratives that are seen and celebrated, the better, says Shontise McKinney, the student at the University of the District of Columbia. She’s taking seven courses — 19.5 credits — while caring for her sons, Jayden, 8, and Elijah, 6.
McKinney wakes up with the sun and often stays up late. She cooks big batches of spaghetti and wings to last her family for days. She sets an alarm to remind her when it’s time for her to log Elijah into each of his virtual classes. Since Covid-19 hit, she says, “the most difficult thing is feeling like I’m failing my children with their school.” She makes sure they have snacks, always.
She makes time for hiking, biking, and jump-rope sessions with them. In between, she tries to keep up with her academic work, especially the advanced accounting course that requires hours of concentration she can’t always find. She has a 3.9 grade-point average.
Sometimes McKinney can see her life changing for the better. Like when she recently received an exciting offer: A paid internship at an accounting firm this winter. She would earn more there each week than she ever did in any of her previous jobs: at McDonald’s, at Target, at a storage facility.
Having long relied on public assistance, having never earned more than $15 an hour, the young mother now can envision becoming financially secure, raising her family in a better home, and becoming a successful accountant
A single photo couldn’t capture all of McKinney’s challenges. A hundred photos couldn’t reveal the depth of her perseverance .
Still, she sees power in photos of student mothers. It’s important, she says, for other people, especially those who had a different college experience, to see what those challenges look like: “When laws and policies are put in place, when decisions are made about students, there needs to be a clear picture of who it affects.”
Campus child care, scholarships for mothers, mental-health services: “You might not think those things are necessary,” she says. “And if you don’t see us depicted — it’s like we’re forgotten about.”
The new images reminded her: She isn’t alone.
