The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Monique Ositelu published a book review on Taylor and Francis Online. She reviewed Anthony Abraham Jack's book that discusses how elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students.

The late 1990s witnessed the introduction of a variety of institutional policies aimed at increasing college access for historically marginalized students. Princeton University, for example, took a bold step in diversifying its student body with a no-loan financial aid policy that other Ivy League and some peer elite institutions would later adopt. The purpose of this policy is to remove economic barriers in order to increase college access for low-income students. But as Anthony Abraham Jack describes in his book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, expanding access to low-income students must go beyond generous financial aid packages, as access is not equivalent to inclusion. The eyeopening student experiences chronicled in this book reveal that even on a campus with a progressive no-loan policy, institutional practices such as closing the dining hall during Spring Break and enticing low-income students to do on-campus janitorial jobs function as powerful socializing forces that shape whether or not campuses are inclusive of low-income students.

Jack introduces a nuanced, holistic approach to understanding disadvantaged college students by rejecting a monolithic view of all low-income students as representative of one homogenous experience. Jack makes this distinction through his originally coined terms, the “Privileged Poor” and the “Doubly Disadvantaged.” The Privileged Poor are low-income students who know a “hybrid reality” and who demonstrate an “ease of privilege” in navigating elite spaces, learned from attending private preparatory schools as scholarship recipients. In contrast, the Doubly Disadvantaged are overwhelmed by being thrust into a strikingly different world from that of their under-resourced neighborhood public high schools. On elite campuses, the Doubly Disadvantaged are constantly bombarded with social and economic reminders of their disadvantage. For example, not knowing the difference between a finger bowl and a drinking cup (and the appropriate customs that govern using the former), illustrates the social and economic restraints that control Doubly Disadvantaged students’ actions and comfortability in elite spaces.

This book presents a case study of Upper Income (UI), Privileged Poor (PP), and Doubly Disadvantaged (DD) students attending a prestigious public institution in the Northeast, given the pseudonym “Renowned University.” Although the student experiences and institutional practices are drawn from one elite institution, Jack argues that the conditions discussed are common among selective colleges and universities nationwide. To capture the depth of lowincome students’ experiences, Jack fully immersed himself in the college community, recruiting participants through affinity group email lists, personally inviting participants while attending campus events, and implementing snowball sampling (that is, interviewing participants referred by other participants). The book is based on a two-year research project of ethnographic observations and semistructured, in-depth interviews completed over one to three sessions per student. A total of 103 undergraduate students were interviewed. Although the captivating stories of students leave the reader wondering whether these interviewees successfully matriculated, the book focuses specifically on understanding lower-income students’ pathways to an elite college, which then shaped their navigation of Renowned.