What the Privileged Poor Can Teach Us - The New York Times:
SELECTIVE colleges look nothing like they did 20 years ago. In the late 1990s, they began adopting no-loan policies to promote socioeconomic diversity. Princeton kicked things off in 1998. Amherst College followed in 1999 and has been a leader in creating diverse classes ever since. Spurred by a combination of blistering reports that documented the loss in human capital caused by financial barriers to college attendance and by politicians like Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who admonished colleges for not spending more of their endowments on access, 48 schools adopted similar policies in 2007 and 2008. Many people celebrated the opening of college doors to a broader array of students. I benefited myself from these new policies.
While elite colleges have taken strides in financially supporting students previously left outside their gates, they have thought less about what that inclusion means for academic life, or how colleges themselves might need to change to help the least advantaged continue on their road to success.
Colleges lag in readying themselves for increasingly diverse student bodies, in part because they habitually get their new diversity from old sources. My research shows that, on average, half of the lower-income black undergraduates at elite colleges today come from private high schools like Andover and Dalton. As early as middle school (and sometimes sooner), students participate in programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance. These programs remove lower-income students from typically distressed public schools and place them in predominantly white, resource-rich, affluent private schools. Elite colleges effectively hedge their bets: They recruit those already familiar with the social and cultural norms that pervade their own campuses.
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