Chynna C. Haas had just about had it with the University of Wisconsin at Madison by the fall of her sophomore year.
Although the campus was only an hour’s drive away from her hometown of Beloit, at times it seemed she had journeyed to an entirely different world, one where her working-class background left her feeling distinctly out of place.
She had grown tired of working several jobs to pay her bills, tired of dealing with the hassle involved in trying to get money from the financial-aid office, tired of hearing professors and students make disparaging comments about people of modest means.
As much as anything else, Ms. Haas felt isolated. Although about 14 percent of the university’s incoming freshmen and undergraduate transfer students qualify for Pell Grants, and about 23 percent are first-generation college students, her peers who came from such backgrounds tended not to advertise the fact. On a campus where the median family income was considerably higher than in the rest of the state, she says, “there was so much stigma attached” to being working class or poor that many such students tried to pass themselves off as affluent.
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She considered dropping out or transferring to the system’s Whitewater campus. But then, she says, she hit upon another idea: forming an organization in which working-class students could come together.
“I was trying,” she says, “to find students who were like me.”
So in 2007 she founded the university’s Working Class Student Union, an innovative group that offers Madison’s working-class students the same sort of emotional support, camaraderie, and chance to speak with a collective voice that other college students have long derived from groups organized around race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Ms. Haas went on to graduate this year, but the group remains active. “I don’t think anyone foresaw the impact being as positive as it has been,” says Lori M. Berquam, the campus’s dean of students. “It met a need—and it continues to meet a need on our campus—that I did not think we were even aware existed.”
The group started slowly. During its first year, its meetings generally drew fewer than a half-dozen students, and Ms. Haas, who was elected president, ended up covering many expenses out of her own pocket.
One early challenge was figuring out where the group fit in with other organizations on campus. Could its members claim to be a minority—accurately reflecting their status on campus—even though Wisconsin is predominantly a working-class state? Many members of campus groups for black and Hispanic students were working class. Did they have anything to gain by joining or working with a group in which race and ethnicity take a back seat to socioeconomic background?
Danielle F. dela Gorgendiere, a senior at Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, last year used the Madison group as a model in establishing a group for working-class students on her campus. She continues to struggle to recruit black or Hispanic students, who instead see groups organized around ethnicity or race as “their go-to.”
“I am having a really hard time getting it off the ground,” she says. “There is a lot of faculty interest, but there is not a lot of student interest.”
Ms. Haas, who is of both white and American Indian ancestry, sought to build bridges by trying to collaborate with other groups.
“What they did was very strategic and very smart,” Ms. Berquam says. “They cooperatively planned programs and events together, so it was not an ‘us versus them,’ it was a ‘we.’”
In its second year, the Madison group received a $500 grant from student-activity fees and used part of the money to put on an event called “Class Matters,” with art, music, and food, such as casseroles, its members associated with their backgrounds. Ms. Haas became a key source for local journalists who needed the perspective of working-class students, and her group became a prominent voice in debates over tuition and financial-aid policy within the University of Wisconsin system and in the state Legislature.
Last year the group received $63,000 in student-activity funds and went into high gear. It used just over half of the money to bring in an outside speaker—Sherry L. Linkon, co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University—and to set up and supply its office. With the remaining money, it hired four part-time staff members, whose responsibilities include helping working-class students as they navigate life on campus and training volunteers for similar advocacy work.
Ms. Haas, 22, moved back to Beloit after graduating but continues to advise the group she founded on a voluntary basis. Her successor as president, Heidi J. Freymiller, a 30-year-old senior from Fennimore, Wis., says she plans to keep the group on the same course.
Biddy Martin, Madison’s chancellor, says the Working Class Student Union has made a big contribution to her institution, by articulating the challenges that low-income and first-generation students face “when they come to a campus of this sort.”