Article: The challenge of being poor at America's richest colleges

<p>I guess I live in a rural area and the jobs for college kids just don’t pay that much. DD was a lifeguard and it didn’t pay her nearly 10k for the summer. The retail stores all pay min wage, and don’t offer that many hours. Any internships that were local seem to be unpaid, and if they want a pay for housing there were low paying internships that when you take housing costs into account, they weren’t really saving much.</p>

<p>“I can tell you where they aren’t: around here. Seasonal jobs typically pay close to minimum wage.”</p>

<p>It is taboo to claim elite colleges are different from regular colleges but this is one area they differ. It is very hard not to get a summer job if you want one when you attend them.</p>

<p>No, romani, I don’t think myself or ProudPatriot (or anybody else sympathetic to our way of thinking) believes that the poor kids have it easy on campus–most if not all have to work for walking-around money & to adhere to their workstudy agreement. But…the ones totally subsidized are getting a quarter-million dollar education for FREE, no way around that statement. On the other end of the spectrum, the high-income folks don’t mind spending that kind of dough for their own kids.</p>

<p>So that leaves everybody else, the middle-income parents really scrimping so their kid can afford an elite $60K school with $20K aid, but that’s still forty grand a year, one-sixty over four years. That’s their choice. Or the state schools, now $25K-$40K a year, no bargain anymore. And the Parent PLUS loans that go along with it.</p>

<p>This latter group is the one that has it tough in my opinion. And this is only for undergrad, with no guarantee of employment. Thank goodness I only had two kids! :)</p>

<p>Minimum wage jobs are very much the norm around here too. The job I had with the state was one of only two positions like that when I started. One of one when I quit.</p>

<p>The kids I know who went to elite colleges could only get decent jobs if they stayed at school and didn’t come home. That involved paying to live in Boston, et al, which pretty much ate up the money. As far as my S was concerned, he only spent one summer at home, and was unable to find anything but temp work. (Partly because of the timing of the quarter system, but every other kid I knew who was working here either was continuing in a HS job or got a job through relatives. Or both. HS jobs aren’t common, either.) Hanover, NH is not exactly a hotbed of summer employment. In subsequent years, he was able to get summer work at the Rassias institute and live at his fraternity.</p>

<p>Around here, it is not uncommon to see adults working fast food jobs.</p>

<p>I agree with post #53.</p>

<p>One of my (full-pay) Ds is a tight-wad about money. When college friends were going out to dinner rather than staying on campus, she would go to the dining hall beforehand and fill up, then go with them and order just a drink or cup of soup. She preferred to save her money for other things since the dining hall food was already paid for.</p>

<p>“didn’t come home”</p>

<p>Why do they need to come home? The point of a summer job is to enhance your career prospects and so one should try to go where the job is. It defeats the purpose of one’s education if they are not trying for experience in the area of their interest and are rushing home to work in their high school jobs.</p>

<p>My kids are firmly middle class. We made a choice to be where we are. I haven’t worked more than part-time since the kids were born. We aren’t ashamed of it. However, the majority of the kids friends come from extreme wealth and issue do pop-up. It’s rarely the parents. They tend to be more aware because, for the most part, they are self-made. They’ve had “kraft mac and cheese” years. The kids though, tend to be pretty clueless to the middle and lower classes. I can’t tell you how many times D’s gone on a movie date with friends, having a good time when suddenly, the party decides to impulsively do something out of her price range… “let’s get pedicures!” The 15 dollar event is now 40 bucks with D being the only kid who works and pays her own way. </p>

<p>My kids have gotten pretty good at maneuvering in this world but I get funny stories about the cluelessness of their friends… the unintentional callousness… the total lack of perspective. It doesn’t make them bad or heartless people. I wouldn’t even call most of their friends “spoiled.” These are good kids who I know their parents have made efforts to try to keep humble. They just don’t really comprehend because they are teenagers with limited life experiences. It would be like my kids having any real understanding of what it means to go hungry. I could sit them in a soup kitchen everyday and they can gain compassion but they aren’t really going to know what it’s like to watch others eat while you can’t.</p>

<p>Basically, I’m not surprised by anything in this article. It sound like the kids interviewed haven’t had years to adapt to the disparity like my own kids have had. I don’t see it as whining. It’s just stating facts. The idea that a person with less is ungrateful because they acknowledge the disparity or lament in any exclusion is well, clueless.</p>

<p>I think the issue of “didn’t come home” is that now you have to pay for housing and there go your summer earnings.</p>

<p>At least at my alma mater, every millionaire student receives a at least a $120k subsidy (you could call it a scholarship if you like.) That is because the college calculates the cost of a year to the college at $90k, but the full-pay student only pays $60k. So really, the difference between the rich and poor students when it comes to financial aid is solely a matter of how it is couched. But the wealthy student gets a “good deal”, the poor student a “necessary” one. Big difference in how it feels.</p>

<p>texaspg, not every kid has a career path mapped out at 18 or 19. And some people actually like to see their kids. :rolleyes: And flossy is correct regarding costs.</p>

<p>mini, if your alma mater is like mine, it’s doing its best to get that subsidy back from you after the fact.</p>

<p>“Adding: I think I heard that at Princeton (where mini’s D went), even the washer/driers are free (included).”</p>

<p>My d.is a graduate student and teaches at Princeton (though currently lives in Venice). She went to Smith where (she believes) the quality of undergraduate education is notably higher, and class issues tend to be less overt in that cross-class dialogue is the norm rather than the exception.</p>

<p>And I DO think that some schools have figured it out better than others (Yale being an example) - the eating clubs and bicker at P. have made that difficult, and the President of Princeton has been trying to create (folks say without much success) an equivalent non-eating club experience for those who don’t/can’t join.</p>

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<p>My daughter got a 2320 with no tutoring (although she did take a brief SAT prep course offered for about $200 by her school system). </p>

<p>But she had the advantage of going to a superb public high school magnet program, so she was pretty well prepared anyway, both for standardized testing and for college. Few low-income kids are so fortunate.</p>

<p>There is no lack of compassion in here from anything I’ve read so far. I hear frustration.</p>

<p>The middle class suffers more than any other group when it come to college. With two kids in college, my parent contribution to their education equals about 90% of my after tax income each year. My success counts against me. I grew up poor and started out poor. My first job paid $14K per year. I worked my way up to significantly better circumstances and now I’m treated like some kind of 1%er that was born into and inherited wealth. So into debt I go for my kids and I assume that I’ll be working to pay off these debts for the next 20 years.</p>

<p>My kids earned scholarships but during the scholarship search, the majority of them had income criteria that we didn’t meet. </p>

<p>I’m not a complainer, this is just reality. So, feeling all fuzzy and soft inside when I hear about someone else’s issues fall flat on me since I don’t see anybody caring about how the middle class pays for this country. I got enough hands in my wallet.</p>

<p>Flossy asked what could be done differently?</p>

<p>In our experience, Smith got a lot right. They organized (and paid for) cross-class dialogues across campus. They organized a women and financial independence institute, among other reasons, so that poorer students could figure out how to manage money (and qualify for credit cards, etc.) Had funds for poor students to fly home when there were family illnesses. (In our case, TWICE raised our financial assistance within 30 days of major illnesses - without documentation.) College-paid internships that could be used anywhere in the country - and an active alumnae association that helps students find them. Full financial assistance following students to all approved study abroad programs. An “interview clothes” closet - AND folks who will show students how to dress, and how to interview effectively. </p>

<p>The result? Poor students graduating at the same rate as full-freight ones (and, last time I looked, non-white students graduating at a higher rate than Caucasian ones.)</p>

<p>Median family income in this country is around $55k, give or take, with a 20% collar from around $45-$67k. Anything above that puts folks in the top 40% of family incomes. And it true that in many colleges, the number of students in that category are vanishingly small, and a very large percentage of them are recruited athletes.</p>

<p>Snaps to that, Madaboutx.</p>

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<p>Bingo. My kids are/will be full-pay, they face almost none of the issues mentioned in the Forbes article, but even so there’s been the adjustment of learning how to navigate when you’ve got friends who come from far more money. turtletime nails it about how these are kids who have limited life experience. D1 attended a public magnet housed on the campus of a large Title I eligible campus. She arrived at college and saw an incredibly wealthy, far less diverse student body. Meanwhile, many of her friends–who came from private New England high schools–talked excitedly about how diverse the student body was. </p>

<p>One of the biggest differences D1’s noticed is in post-college plans. D1 puts in an enormous amount of work, in part because of her major, in part because it’s who she is, and in part because she is always aware that she needs to find a job after graduation. Some of her friends don’t have to worry about grades or their major in the same way, because their family backgrounds offer far more of a safety net. There will always be a place for them in the family business; there are ample family resources to cover them if they truly can’t find a job. Obviously this isn’t a hard-and-fast characterization, but it’s notable enough that she’s commented on it.</p>

<p>You know, it’s not like colleges that typically <em>don’t</em> attract wealthy students don’t have costs to students. The schools with the largest endowments provide more of the costs of attendance for the least well-off students. The student/family contribution is likely to be larger at other schools, and book costs are the same everywhere.</p>

<p>This sounds suspiciously like yet another “poor kids shouldn’t go to college” argument. Almost all of those arguments come down to “poor kids won’t appreciate it or can’t take advantage of it, so MY KID should have that space instead”. We see that from Forbes and WSJ several times a year.</p>