The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students

Jack opens by asking the question he asked as a freshman at Amherst College: “Where are the other poor Black kids?” (1). All around him, he heard conversations about fancy parties at summer homes, vacations abroad, and other activities completely different from how he spent his summers. While most of the speakers were white, many were wealthy Black students too. In Gulliver, the Miami private school he had attended his senior year of high school, he had heard similar conversations, but only from white students.

At Amherst, he discovered the same thing he would learn years later as a sociology graduate student: The majority of Black students at Ivy League and similar universities come from upper-income families. Jack’s Amherst peers were no different. He was a Head Start student from Coconut Grove, a struggling community in Miami. Prior to going to Gulliver, the closest he got to wealth were the stories his grandmother told him about cleaning the homes of rich white families.

Higher education is unequally distributed: Most first-generation college students are relegated to lower-ranked, for-profit, or community colleges. In fact, just 14 percent of undergraduates at the most competitive tier of colleges come from the bottom 50% of income levels in the US.