SPEAKER_00
Hello, and welcome to .edu, the higher education podcast from the American Council on Education. I'm John Fansmith in Government Relations here at AC, and I'm joined by my co-host, Lorella Spinoza.

Hey, Lorell. Hey. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01
Doing good, thanks.

SPEAKER_00
Great. And I think we're going to be doing a whole lot better in a little bit because we are joined today by a pretty amazing guest that I'm really looking forward to our conversation with Tony Jack, who is a professor of education at Harvard University and author of the recently published book, The Privileged Poor, How Elite Colleges Are Failing Poor Students. Welcome, Tony.

Thanks for joining us today.

SPEAKER_02
Thank you all for having me.

SPEAKER_00
So I teased a little bit. You have a book that's relatively recently out. I think February was released.

And you're in the New York Times Magazine section yesterday. With the book and the piece in the New York Times, focus on your work as an academic researcher. We know from our conversations with you, a lot of your work is driven in large part by your own personal experiences.

Can you just give us and our listeners a little bit of a background into yourself and your work and how your own personal experience has influenced your work?

SPEAKER_02
Yes. Thank you for allowing me to start there. I always begin by saying I am a first-generation college student.

I start with that social and biographical fact because so much of what I do and who I am stems from that. I am, like I said, the first part of my family to go to college, but my path to Amherst College, which is where I went as an undergrad, took a different route in many ways. I'm a headstart kid.

I'm born and raised in Coconut Grove, part of Miami. I went to public school my entire life except for my senior year of high school. I had a football coach who preferred athlete students to student athletes.

I was the geeky and the geeky. Sort of an unfortunate trade, right? I was that geeky, nerdy kid who loved to watch cartoons and read and was perfectly a couple in my identity as that person. In my junior year, I actually switched.

At the end of my junior year, I actually switched high schools because he kicked me off the team and I ended up going to Gulliver Prep, which is a private school in Miami. My mom is a security guard. My brother is a janitor.

Money wasn't flowing in the house. Towards the end of the football season, beginning of the spring, an Amherst College football coach called my coach and asked, do you have a student who can make it past our admissions test this year? The football coach said, you know what? We have a guy this year. I think you will like him.

That's how I got to Amherst College. I took my first flight to actually visit Amherst College. The first time I had ever stepped foot on a plane.

I fell in love with the place. It was gorgeous. I fell in love with what I was learning about a liberal arts education.

My first real campus visit fell in love. When I come convocation and started meeting my peers, I thought I was the only poor black kid around because everybody was talking about private jets, studying abroad, going to people's second homes, court size seats to basketball games, season tickets to football games, and boxes, not the cheap, neat, open seats.

SPEAKER_00
No standing room only.

SPEAKER_02
Right. Then they said, oh yeah, my mom works as a janitor at this building. I live with my grandparents because both my parents were substance abusers and they left me.

I realized that the experiences that they were talking about were very similar to my own once I got to Gulliver. They got access to the academic and social experiences of the top 1% because they also got a scholarship to Andover, Exeter, St. Paul, Chote, Hockaday, Chicago, L.

A.

SPEAKER_01
These very, very elite boys in high schools in our country.

SPEAKER_02
It turns out that my detour through Gulliver was a well-established on-ramp to elite colleges because of programs like Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, Teak, and the like. It was a really, really important experience for me to have that at Amherst because what I didn't know is that actually set the foundation for my entire research agenda now is trying to understand the over-diversity among lower income students because the literature and school officials treated all first generation college students the same and they ignored the divergent trajectories to college.

SPEAKER_00
The privilege poor goes deeper into this and you had, I think, a really interesting process of research for that. Can you talk just a little bit about, you found this area of focus, obviously, which has great resonance in your personal life. How did you sort of pursue that as an academic study?

SPEAKER_02
You know, I'm a qualitative researcher and I believe in the power, not just of stories, but just the power of narratives as a whole. Letting people tell their own story and letting people give a sense of their beginning, their middle, their end. Once I started interviewing students and let them tell their own story, I was able to observe that what I saw at Amherst, again, was not an anomaly but something that I was able to observe across generations of students but also across universities.

And so privilege poor and W disadvantage, the two terms that I came up with, privilege poor meaning the students who lower income students who attended these private day and boarding high schools and the W disadvantage, those lower income students who attended local, typically distressed public schools, I began to see this by mode distribution. And now I understand that privilege poor and W disadvantage are loaded terms and my choice in terms is purposeful. I was tired of the downplaying on how prolonged exposure to neighborhood and school inequalities, these structural inequalities affect the life chances and the mobility prospects of lower income, especially lower income black and Latinx youth.

And so privilege poor and W disadvantage is also my attempt to move away from studying individual differences between a student whose parents went to college and a student whose parents did not to actually bring in conversation about those structural inequalities. Because the privilege poor brings up this interesting kind of oxymoronic, like this kind of contradictory thing in your mind, right? How can some people privilege and poor? And that is exactly the question I want someone to engage with when they look at the title and realize I'm talking about a group of people, why, how they are economically disadvantaged, but they have the social and academic experience at the top 1%. Who really experiences culture shock and isolation on the social side of things in college is not just those from lower income backgrounds.

Is those from lower income backgrounds have not had access to the hidden curriculum that permeates higher education. When we think of lower income black and Latinx youth, we think of a lower income student whose parents did not go to school, who lives in a disadvantaged neighborhood and who attends a school that mirrors those demographic and social facts, right? That's generally true. But my research was the first to show that on average, one half of lower income black students at elite colleges and on average, one third of lower income Latinx students at elite colleges are actually the products of private high schools.

And not just any private high school, we're not talking about the inner city Catholic high school that's around the corner, that's not much different from the public school that's down the street. We're talking about schools that cost at times more per year than most colleges.

SPEAKER_00
We're talking about schools that mirror the elite colleges they're going to.

SPEAKER_01
Right. And they go to on scholarship, right? They have full support to be there because they have a new base financially to go there.

SPEAKER_02
Exactly. I start with the price because that's to me the tip of the iceberg. What really matters about going to these schools, but it puts you in the context of how different they are, what really matters is what happens in the everyday.

It's not only who you are educated by, but it's who you are educated alongside. And so privileged poor, again, lower income students who attend boarding day and preparatory high schools, almost exclusively on scholarship, whether need-based or athletic, because there are some that combine the two, are the privileged poor. The W disadvantage are those students who are equally economically poor, but who do not attend private schools, who tend to go to local, typically distressed public school.

And again, the difference is not to highlight, oh, one group is better than the other, or one group is more deserving of admission than the other, is to highlight the ways in which segregation, poverty, racial exclusion manifest themselves in the lives of today's youth.

SPEAKER_00
And I think that's really interesting too, because your research is such a great job of showing where that distinction manifests when these students get to a college campus. It also demonstrates some areas where there's common barriers to low-income students succeeding on campus. Can you just tell us a little bit more about, through your interviews, through your research, the obstacles low-income students face and sort of how the privileged poor and the W disadvantage might share similarities or have real distinct differences in how they respond to those challenges?

SPEAKER_02
The privileged poor have a leg up in understanding and navigating the hidden curriculum. And by hidden curriculum, again, it's that system of unwritten rules and unset expectations that permeate all institutions of higher education. One thing that always comes to mind when we think about the hidden curriculum is thinking about who feels, who knows what office hours are from the moment they step on the campus? Who feels comfortable going to office hours and who knows that they even should? Because we know that office hours are more than just about getting academic help.

It's about the possibility of developing relationships that then lead to mentorships that then lead to a whole host of outcomes, letters of recommendation, and so on.

SPEAKER_00
And that really struck me, actually, that there were students who would hear the term office hours and think, not what I think we in higher ed tend to commonly understand that to mean, but in fact, sort of the opposite, right?

SPEAKER_02
Yes. So I had a dean from Dean College here in Massachusetts reached out to me to ask, how can she foster academic engagement among her lower-income students? And I suggested something that I have been, I'm on this national campaign to get faculty members to define office hours, because whenever we say office hours in class, we always say when they are, we never say what they are. And so I told her that we should define it.

I got an email back from her. She said, you know what? I'm so glad this resonated with her because what she said is when she finally asked her students why they did not come to her for office hours, she told her, you said that your office hours are from two to four. We thought that was your time to do your work undisturbed.

Something was lost in translation. They had nothing to do with English proficiency, but rather the very coded language that we use in higher education, that because we are so accustomed, many of us, to teaching a student with a certain level of exposure to college life, either through parents or simply, you know, through some kind of contact, we don't take the time to question what we take for granted. Now, the privileged poor do have a leg up because they've had four to six years of being trained to think about help seeking differently.

They think about help seeking as a way to get ahead. They've been drilled by their teachers and headmasters and counselors and mental health counselors, right? Because private schools have way more layers of support than public schools. So I don't want to, I would love to talk about the fact that sometimes we should not be talking about the difference between a good public and a bad public, but the gulf between public and private in America and the resource differences.

But the public school, the WDT advantage, however, don't have that. They still have the lessons that you should treat authority with difference, with difference in distance.

SPEAKER_00
There were some, I was just going to say, there's some examples in the book where, I mean, just very sort of heartbreaking about students who were having mental health issues. And, you know, the privileged poor would, you know, they'd reach out to their faculty and say, look, I'm having a problem. I need extra time to do this.

They'd reach out to a counselor, a residence advisor. The doubly disadvantaged students would go into a shell. They would withdraw and they would not seek out those resources and just sort of really a captivating thing.

SPEAKER_02
They would show to the burden. Right. They thought that it was my burden to bear because also for them, they would use their parents as a yardstick for measuring adversity. Like, oh my God, I'm feeling bad.

Like I'm feeling sad because I'm here. What right do I have to feel bad? And I have three meals a day. I have room, room and board.

I have heat. And my parents are at home working two jobs each and coming home tired and broken at the end of the day. What, what right do I have to complain? Not knowing that that weight on them is something that someone else can help live, at least to build structures and place mentally for you to deal with it.

So those are the instances where the privileged poor and the doubly disadvantaged have different experiences. But there are some trouble, problems and obstacles that no amount of cultural capital can combat. There are things that are universal or poor students.

And that is actually how I got interested professionally and as a scholar as a moment of scholarly interest in food insecurity on the college campuses, because the number of schools that actually shut down during spring break and other times a year, it shocked some people. So of all the colleges in the country that have adopted no loan financial aid policies. So arguably those that are the most progressive when it comes to aid and access.

And have the greatest resources too. And have the greatest resources. Only one in five keep their dining halls open during spring break without restriction.

Now that's now that's of the wealthiest most I do good, right? And bunny ears type of schools. Only one in five. There are many schools that would actually charge students a daily rate to stay on campus during these breaks.

There's one school that I wish I were taking the screenshot that actually changed the locks on the outside of the buildings to prevent entry for students to get in during breaks. There was one school that even said something to the effect of if you were all of all so and so students leave campus for break. And if you are one of us, you would too.

And it was just like just the signaling of like just like if you are one of us and I was like wow like if you can't afford to go it's just like okay if I was here that means I'm that. That you're not one of us.

SPEAKER_01
Right it's a clear sign you're not one of us. But that's a problem toning you explored in your book and in this article we referenced earlier that the issue is that not everyone can afford to leave at break. And you talk about not being able to access food and go into some detail about how that affected you personally and how you sought effect other students.

Yes and the thing is for me to show

SPEAKER_02
how prevalent food insecurity is at a place like Harvard, at a place like Yale, at a place like Princeton, three of the wealthiest universities in the world. Just think about how prevalent it is at institutions with less money. Right. Think about with fewer resources like that is the kind of you know that's what I want to shine light on because in the conversation about food insecurity we've been chasing the magic number and scholars have been saying like oh my god like what is the magic number? I want to be that person who says like what percent of students in the country are food insecure. I don't want to just talk about that number the prevalence.

I want to understand also its nature because you can't food bank your way out of poverty and you can't food bank your way out of food insecurity. The actions that we need to take to combat food security must match the problem on these individual campuses. If you attend an Amherst or Harvard, a food bank or a food pantry is not as effective at combating this problem as it would be if you just extended the dining hall during breaks.

Right. But at a school like Bunker Hill, at a school like Commonwealth University, right, who have led the way really. I mean I think it's called the the Ram Room at VCU.

I apologize if I get the name wrong but they are one of the first in the strongest going. Right. And so I'm trying to show both its prevalence and its nature so that when we actually in that policy we're not trying to you know basically cure every single thing with penicillin we actually have more targeted outreach and more targeted policies for what we do. And one of the colleges that to me has done an absolutely amazing job and have done more with fewer resources than their peers has been Connecticut College.

And one of the reasons why I highlight them in my work is because they were one of the schools that charge students a daily rate but not only have they reversed that decision they have gone to actually provide resources, provide basic needs during those breaks but also provide resources during those breaks so that those students can recharge in a new way. Smith College has reversed their decision and I went to give a talk at Smith this past semester and the president announced and then she you know she announced was like well you know we read the work and we realized that we were one of those schools. And so we said we can't be that we can't be that school anymore.

And so they have begun to reverse and more colleges are reaching out to say that they are starting to enact policies to to to reduce some of the inequalities on campus. Now this is just one issue but it's an important one because you can't function when you can't when you when you don't have food to eat. And it reflects

SPEAKER_00
your point too about you also feel very you feel not a part of the institution because so many students are having an experience you're denied not only you denied that you're facing food insecurity while everyone else is leaving for vacations and things like that.

SPEAKER_02
So there's a social isolation that happens as well as the the the the kind of distancing the the kind of distancing on campus that results in food insecurity right this this tension between proclamation and practice. And the thing is is is not just lower income students who who suffer from this problem. I mean we forget that there are students on our campus who were in the foster care system.

We forget that there are there are some students who know that home and harm are synonymous. Like these students are 18 to 20 you know 18 to 22 year old two years old. Let's not think of them as college students let's just think of them as individuals.

What are the modal life experiences for 18 to 22 year old individuals who come from this environment. Because if we can begin to understand that we then understand what's happening to their families and friends back home so that we can be better able to serve and help them once they get on campus. And you've raised a

SPEAKER_00
lot of great questions here and it sort of seems like a good time to ask. So what are you going to be looking at next. I mean I think we're getting a sense of sort of a range of issues you'd like to address.

But where do you think your your work is going to take you going forward.

SPEAKER_02
So I am very much interested in help seeking and hoping that we can understand ways to expand the definition of help for students especially to combat the defensive nature. The defensive stands at lower income students especially the WS Advantage have on it so they can get access to those resources. The mental health counselors to understand how to deal with trauma and things and things of that sort.

And that's one some of my research. But where I'm actually very interested in going is again exploring this structurally inequality on campus. I'm very much interested in understanding the world of work among undergraduates.

And the reason why is because a lot of stuff that we talked about students make up for by working more hours lower income students than their peers so that they can help reduce some of the inequalities back home because again understanding what is the modal experience 1821 they're oftentimes sending money home or living at home to help pay the rent and doing different things like that. And so even though most research

SPEAKER_00
shows the more you work the less likely you are to complete the less likely you are to do well in

SPEAKER_02
school. It's a burden and a challenge for students. And so we know we know those details quantitatively.

I want to understand again the nature of it. I want to understand how do students get their jobs because it's one thing to work 10 hours at someone's research assistant and you feel comfortable reaching out asking a professor hey do you need anyone to code code data for you or to write code for you. And you're getting skills in the field too.

Right. Exactly. It's another thing to work 10 hours in janitorial services which I highlight in the book where you don't get you don't have much contact with anyone who can write you a letter of recommendation who can help you through graduate school applications or anything like that.

Right. So I'm very much interested in understanding these hidden inequalities that are part of this this this larger research edition that we know you work more it takes away time from school but the decisions because there are some students who decide to work certain jobs because it reminds them of home. It doesn't make them feel alienated.

So we don't want to discourage or look down upon someone because they want to do a certain type of work because it keeps them grounded. We also want to make sure that we're not funneling

SPEAKER_00
students or dividing students on different tracks by the type of employers. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02
Because the question I have is especially in the landscape of federal work study and how it is part of certain students curriculum. I mean sorry certain students package and the like it is also very interesting how colleges are able to funnel a lot of students into manual labor jobs and what does it mean to do manual labor in an institution that privileges the life of the mind and what kind of advice on campus is that create and also what kind of internal conversations does it inspire about one's own purpose one's right to be on campus and one's own mobility. And as someone who

SPEAKER_00
works on federal policy around federal work city let me just say I'm really looking forward to what you turned up in that area. That's an area where the research can help influence policy in beneficial ways. Tony I can honestly say I feel like I could talk to you for another two hours and still not really scratch the surface of all the questions Lorelle and I have.

This has really been a very engaging conversation but I want to be I know you are speaking to members of the legislature you're doing a whole variety of pretty amazing things today so being respectful of your time I just want to cut the conversation off here. Thank you so much for coming on speaking with us. The privilege port is out.

I purchased it through Amazon. I don't know if there's other places where people can find it that you'd want to mention. I mean I love people who support local

SPEAKER_02
bookstores and I also love people who just want to get the book quicker so however makes it whatever makes you the purchaser feel most comfortable. I love hearing people's thoughts about it and pushing me on questions because those questions make me better at answering questions about policy and practice so thank you all for having me. I really appreciate it and look forward to

SPEAKER_00
future conversations. Great thank you Tony. And just one last plug if you are a college president administrator who we hope are listening to this podcast do pick it up.

It's a pretty amazing re- and pretty eye-opening in terms of I think every campus has lessons they can draw from it. Absolutely no matter where you sit. Yeah absolutely so thanks again Tony.

We're going to take a

SPEAKER_01
little break and then Lorelle and I will be back. And we're back. How you doing John? That was a

SPEAKER_00
that was a great conversation. That was a fantastic conversation. I am about 10% left in the book and

SPEAKER_01
now I gotta go finish it. No you gotta finish it. Send him some comments.

Yeah it's just a one thing that I wanted to ask him but we didn't have time because we had such a rich discussion already was just also about the capital that the students that he's talking about that they bring given what they've been through and the resiliency aspect and there's a lot of conversation higher at about resiliency and you know the actual cultural capital that that they bring from their own communities that enriches the lives of the other students in terms of background and experience and it riches any touched on cultural capital but not really in that context. No more in the classical context of how it lacks across so we can send some joint comments. We'll send some comments as soon as I finish the book yeah.

As soon as you finish the book. I'm close. You're close yeah well actually I mean good segue because this is HBCU week which is a body of institutions that enrolls a large large share of low income students.

It's not the elite always colleges that he's speaking to but a group that really does serve our nation's african-american student population in a historical and contemporary way and you know this is also a week that we're talking a lot about college affordability and namely what it means to move into jobs that are low paying but high social value like teaching and social work where we see african-americans disproportionately in some cases represented. Sure. And yet we see this GAO report out recently on public service loan forgiveness which was a little bit disappointing. I would say in fact the GAO report and for

SPEAKER_00
people who aren't familiar the GAO is the general accounting office I think I got that right. Thank they sort of you know do analytical and research reports for the government. It's usually these reports are very very staid I think there was a quote from the lead author that said it's extremely disheartening to see what we found and in GAO parlance that's shocking that they would express that level and yeah they're not usually super opinionated in those reports.

Super dry right. Super very objective yeah. Very objective very dry and the reason why is this is actually about the temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness program which was a program created by congress because the original public service loan forgiveness program 99% of the people who applied were rejected and again as Laurel mentioned these are people generally who have a fair amount of education because they're entering fields that require specialized education right teaching master's degrees master's degrees professional degrees like law degrees business degrees medical degrees and they choose to enter public service the idea that 10 years later their loans will be forgiven it's essentially a way for people to afford advanced education and go into public service so the original program so far 90 according to the most recent data 99% of the people who have applied have been rejected congress created this temporary expanded version to say well there's all these problems with eligibility the original program had so we're going to widen the eligibility we're going to make it easier for people and we're going to put some money behind it well the GAO found that 99% of the people who applied for the temporary expanded program also were rejected you know it is it's shocking the fact that you have a fix for a program that is as functionally ineffective as the program it's attempting to fix and there's a lot of reasons why a lot of these are frankly you know some students or some borrowers they're not in the right loan programs or they haven't made the appropriate number of payments or they don't have the right types of loans but 71% of the people who are rejected were rejected because they hadn't applied to regular public service loan forgiveness before they applied to the temporary expanded one which in fact is a way of punishing people who are applying to the right program if you weren't eligible for the original you should apply for the regular the idea that you would need to know that you have to apply to the original be rejected and then apply it just doesn't make a lot of sense so of course this report has raised a lot of attention in congress where again they've appropriate they've spent 700 million dollars to help borrowers you know

SPEAKER_01
very little that money only or yet they said that much aside right 700 aside and have spent

SPEAKER_00
27 27 million because they're not approving right anyone so it's it's it's getting attention congress is obviously very displeased and I think you add to a number of other issues that we've seen in servicing and the department's over some servicing and how they're handling soon loans and it just adds to the course of problems in this area we'll talk about needing cultural capital to

SPEAKER_01
figure out these processes and the forms and who to ask and how to ask and where to push and starts to make it feel like you know somehow they're setting us up for failure here setting these

SPEAKER_00
students and I think certainly there's a lot of feeling in congress that that's exactly how it was

SPEAKER_01
designed to set people up for failure well I hope that that improves perhaps this attention and this GAO report which do do tend to provide they do raise a profile yeah absolutely yeah exactly and so there's a lot of press on this so we hope to see this turn around absolutely and and better again meet the needs of the very people that we know going to work that has high social value it's bad enough that they're not getting paid enough they they should at least get some cover from us

SPEAKER_00
as as an economy and as a society get the benefit they were promised when they made their choices well and we'll obviously keep our listeners posted if you want more information about Tony Jack or about any of the issues we've discussed you can find that on ac's website you can also find this podcast on our website at www.acenet.edu forward slash podcast you can also find the podcast on apple podcast google play or wherever you get your podcast and finally you can email us at podcast at acnet.edu to offer your feedback suggestions I would hope generous generous compliments to our performance certainly Laurel and maybe a little partial right exactly as usual but anyway we thank everyone for listening and hope you are looking forward to future episodes thanks and bye