What It Was Like to Attend an Elite University as a Scholarship Kid
Thoughts on inequity and exceptionalism in higher education.
Recently, I stumbled on a slightly bombastic piece in The Atlantic about elite universities and the tendency among professors employed by them to justify intra-college inequities. Among my other feelings about the piece (some contentious!), this excerpt stood out to me: “...Elite colleges simultaneously reproduce class inequality and belief in the justness of that inequality. This process begins with whom they let in. Nothing makes rich people feel more secure in the fairness of the system than spending time around other rich people.”
And sure, most of us understand that a certain “narrowness” of social context (as the piece identifies) begins to create an echo chamber that drowns out diversity of thought. Some, like myself, can even be found guilty of creating unintentional political echo chambers ourselves. But we’d be hard-pressed to justify or celebrate the heterogenous make-up of any learning institution. That seems to me a surefire recipe for injustice.
And yet, even within the most open-minded colleges across America, even the ones that use glossy photos of multicultural students laughing on a fall-leaf-flecked quad, we can find cracks in the illusion among the students themselves. Beyond these idyllic photos are students on the fringes, left behind (and out) by class or race or any number of determinants of privilege. Once, I was one such student, a scholarship kid swimming in a very big pond of extreme money and power, with absolutely no inkling of how to position myself in such a world. But I had a strong desire to understand where I’d landed, like an anthropologist examining her surroundings.
The Burberry Kids
It was late September when I arrived in the Midwest for the first time. I’d never known real cold until I set foot in Hyde Park for my freshman orientation. I was getting inducted into the grey, Gothic halls of the University of Chicago with the rest of my class. (“It’s like a scene from Harry Potter,” I gushed to my dormmates. Later, I would worry this sounded unsophisticated.) That first day on campus, I shivered among the first of the falling leaves, cupping my hands around my ears to ward off that infamous wind. I’d just come from 80-degree weather in my coastal hometown and though we’d bought a few sweaters, I had no idea what it meant to freeze.
Before my mother flew back to Florida, she and I scurried to Chinatown to buy a coat for $60 (she haggled the vendor down from $75, a feat that kept her Vietnamese-mama heart light for weeks). The peacoat was itchy and ill-fitting, but we didn’t think of going to the Michigan Mile to look for something, not even in the gigantic multi-storied Macy’s that bore very little resemblance to our own squat version, back in my sleepy hometown. As we said goodbye on the corner of East 55th Street, I could not stop holding my mother, even when the cab pulled up to take her to the airport. I let the meter run while I squeezed her, my very last reminder of home.