After all the fuss about getting in, how do poor students survive on elite campuses?
“Jack’s book brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions for fostering policies that often ‘emphasize class differences, amplifying students’ feelings of difference and undercutting their sense of belonging.’ They are struggles that Jack, an assistant professor at Harvard, knows well from his own experience as an undergraduate scholarship student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he prodded his classmates to understand being dependent on food stamps, before he graduated in 2007. For the fewer than 1 percent of children from the bottom-fifth income level of American families who attend elite institutions, he writes, ‘college can feel like a new world filled with foreign rules.’”