The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

At the end of summer at Renowned, groups of teenagers walked around carrying cylindrical backpacks and white baskets. These students were incoming freshmen in the Community Detail program on their way to clean dorm rooms recently vacated by the hundreds of students who attended summer programs at Renowned. Students in the program described foul conditions, but many lower-income students felt they had no choice but to participate. Unlike the other activities available to incoming freshmen, Community Detail paid participants. Once the number of scholarship students increased, Renowned rolled Community Detail into preorientation because the school no longer had enough workers to clean dormitories before school started. This meant poor students felt separate from their peers even before matriculating.

Many students were eager about the other three preorientation activities offered—a hiking program, an arts program, and a volunteering program—but they could not afford to turn down the opportunity to earn money. Madeline, an upper-income Black student, noted that students who need the $600 the program offers feel obligated to do the program. Nicole, a Privileged Poor Black student who joined Community Detail because of that incentive, was furious that how the first thing poor students see at Renowned are dirty dorms that they have to clean. This reminded her of the painful stories her grandmother told about cleaning the homes of rich white families. Some students did see Community Detail as character-building, but most described cleaning up piles of dead roaches and vomit. Students’ Snapchats compared working Community Detail to being a slave on a plantation. Some non-disadvantaged students did participate in the program, but 60% of the participants came from the 15% of students on full financial aid. Moreover, since food was not included, even skimping on meals for the week would leave the students netting only $400.

During the school year, those working Community Detail cleaned the bathrooms of the dorm rooms occupied by their peers. While other jobs were available to students on campus, Community Detail offered two big incentives: It paid better and offered a flexible schedule. Thus, lower-income students felt they had no choice, even as many recognized that the higher pay probably meant no one wanted the job. These students learned the same protocols to enter dorms to clean up after their classmates that custodial staff used when cleaning professors’ offices. The program even made non-participating students feel uncomfortable. Carol, an upper-income Black student, felt like Cinderella’s evil stepsister, forcing her classmates to clean up after her. For students who did participate, it was often humiliating. Jose, a Doubly Disadvantaged Latino, was deeply pained: Cleaning up the feces of his peers resembled the work his mother still did back home, work she told him she never wanted him to have to do.

Additionally, Community Detail created rifts on campus, exacerbating inequality. The program directors told Jack that one of the benefits of the program was preventing wealthy students from hiring maids to clean their rooms, displays of wealth which they figured would make poorer students feel uncomfortable. But as Jack pointed out, the students who worked Community Detail were often not seen as peers by their classmates. Stacy, a Doubly Disadvantaged Black student, noted that none of the students seemed to clean between Community Detail visits, noting a particularly filthy bathroom. Another student recounted a classmate confronting her on the quad to tell her that she’d missed a spot when cleaning a bathroom. Both students felt judged by their peers for their job, not their character or academic performance.

Race contributes to the problem. Elise, a Doubly Disadvantaged white student who had been able to blend in by finding nice clothes at thrift stores, noted that Community Detail let her peers know she was poor, revealing something they would not have otherwise known. She described the job itself as humiliating. For instance, after she handled a particularly gross bathroom covered in used condoms, no one even thanked her for cleaning it or acknowledged her presence. While lower-income white students can often hide their class status, Black and Latino undergraduates assume that everyone on campus expects them to be poor—working Community Detail merely confirmed it. Roughly a third of the Black and Latino students Jack spoke had family members who worked as maids, janitors, or house cleaners. Ogun, a Privileged Poor Latina, noted the instant power dynamic shift that happened when a classmate saw her cleaning their bathroom like a stereotypical Latina maid. Other students darkly wondered whether Community Detail was essentially a way of making the poorest students do the dirtiest jobs to humiliate them.

Some students felt they had no choice but to quit the program. Marcia, a Doubly Disadvantaged Latina, explained that the job was a signifier of who she was. Plus, it was inconvenient to have to change clothes to go to class, something other campus jobs didn’t require. Moreover, other campus jobs taught skills that could be used after graduation. One white alumnus of Renowned contacted Jack to tell him about a humiliating experience that had happened 35 years prior in Community Detail. Right before winter break, one of his peers handed him an envelope full of cash: a Christmas bonus. At that moment, he realized that his peers saw him as a servant. For many disadvantaged students at Renowned, the message was clear: They had to clean before they could be successful in school. For Black and Latino students, that message brought to the forefront all the painful memories of America’s segregated past.

Renowned, like many schools, offers scholarship students financial support for both laptops and winter coats. Additionally, a program called Scholarship Plus helps lower-income students participate in campus events. Each semester, scholarship students are eligible for five free tickets to events such as talks by celebrities, student group activities, and movie screenings. Both upper-income and disadvantaged students agreed the program was positive, but it did have bad elements. While most students waited at the main box office to get tickets for an event, students seeking Scholarship Plus tickets had to go to a separate small stand and use separate doors. This created a segregated experience, a rich line and a poor line. Many students recounted feeling ashamed of using the separate line, as it reminded them of lines for social services and welfare. Others noted being embarrassed to be seen by their peers using that line, especially as they felt that some students already saw them as moochers living off of Renowned’s money. The Dean of Student Affairs admitted that the way Scholarship Plus had been implemented might have exacerbated the problem it was trying to solve: social integration.

Each year, Renowned’s policy was to close cafeterias during the nine days that made up spring break, a time when most upper-income students went on exotic vacations and most middle-income students traveled home to visit their families. This was typical of other schools too; Jack found that just one out four of the schools he searched kept cafeterias open without restriction during spring break. But while other scholars have focused on the discrepancy in vacations for richer and poorer students, none of the students Jack spoke to brought up their peers’ trips; rather, they mostly focused on where they would find their next meals.

Many students felt blindsided by the news that the cafeterias would be closed. While the school did announce it on the cafeteria website, the information was buried in a way that made it hard to find. Most low-income students could not afford to go home, and had very little money to use on food off campus. To survive, they came up with different coping strategies. Some stockpiled anything they could from the cafeteria: bread, peanut butter, jelly. Others relied on considerate cafeteria workers, who left out extra bags of cereal or loaves of bread for them. Michelle, a Latina who had experienced homelessness growing up, went to local food pantries. Jack took some students out to eat during spring break to ease their burden; none of the students finished the food on their plates: they wanted takeout boxes so they could stretch one meal into two.

Renowned’s only attempt to assist poor students during the break was a guide of affordable local restaurants. For most of Jack’s subjects though, even the supposedly cheap restaurants were too expensive. By contrast, athletes who had to stay on campus during the break were given a daily allowance of $35 to spend on food, plus a free full breakfast each day.

Food insecurity is a major problem in the US, with one out of six children food insecure. This problem does not disappear in college. At a conference at which Jack presented his research on food insecurity, a young woman in a Columbia University sweatshirt told everyone in the room that she used to increase her online dating activity in the weeks before spring break so she could get men to buy her meals during the break. Many students in the audience nodded in sympathy. Administrators should be aware that closing cafeterias during break punishes poor students and may even force them into dangerous situations.

While Renowned has made great strides, the school needs to admit that some school policies emphasize class differences. After a year of lobbying administrators, Jack successfully got Renowned to leave its cafeterias open during spring break for the first time in 2015. His work with other colleges has been successful in that regard too, as many are starting to recognize food insecurity as a real problem for their students. Though Renowned rejected Jack’s advice to make all tickets electronic, at least it got rid of the separate lines for Scholarship Plus; now students can print out tickets at home. Renowned has not made changes to its Community Detail program. Jack suggests that instead of hiring students to clean bathrooms, colleges could hire janitors and offer students only those jobs that will enrich their academic and professional lives. Changes like these will make colleges more inclusive.