How elite colleges fail half of the poor students they admit

“Access isn’t the same as acceptance.” —Anthony Abraham Jack


By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com

Jun 17, 2019

America’s best universities — the Ivies as well as selective state colleges — have made a concerted effort to diversify their student bodies in recent years. In particular, they’ve opened the doors to more low-income students.

On the surface, that’s a good thing. More poor students in top universities means more opportunities for Americans to climb the social ladder. But a new book by Harvard professor Anthony Abraham Jack, called The Privileged Poor, argues that the recruiting tactics of these colleges are leaving a lot of people behind.

According to Jack, the culture on elite campuses is shaped by wealth and privilege, and most of the students who attend these school are prepared for it before they arrive. They attend prep schools or expensive boarding schools and they have a clear sense of how to navigate the environment.

The “privileged poor,” as Jack calls them, are the students who come from low-income neighborhoods but earn a scholarship into one of those prestigious prep schools that serves as a pipeline to the Ivy League. Of the anonymized universities Jack studied, 50 percent of the low-income students were among the “privileged poor.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/17/18647250/privileged-poor-university-admissions-anthony-abraham-jack