Perceptions of Affluence on Campus

Art by Rebecca Dutta SC ’15

In one of my classes, a student described a neighborhood by saying “it’s the bad side of town. You just don’t go there, especially at night.” I wanted to raise my hand and tell her that some of her classmates probably live on “that” side of town, including myself. But I didn’t raise my hand because, like many students, I was ashamed of my background. So let’s start by taking away the shame from this statement: I’m poor. And I’m not the only one.

I come from a place where most people are poor. And I don’t mean “can’t afford the latest iPod poor” but “can’t afford gas this week poor.” When I got my first laptop, I felt like the luckiest teenager alive. It goes without saying that my experience at Scripps has been very different. When I go to class, I open up my battered old Dell in a sea of quietly glowing Macs. I don’t have a $200 bedspread from Anthropologie. I stay on campus over breaks because plane tickets home cost almost as much as I pay for a semester of tuition with financial aid. None of these things mean that you are or aren’t low-income—nor are they necessarily “bad” things. They are my experience and my experience alone. Every low-income student has a different experience, different priorities, and different limitations. We are not the same. We are Black, Latina, Asian, White, and any combination you can think of. We are religious, atheist, and spiritual. We are from everywhere in the world. But the one thing we all share is a low-income background. So why don’t people see us?

The results of our survey showed that there are people who do not perceive class difference on campus at all. Or if they do, they think it has little or no effect on the daily lives of students. I was completely floored by these responses. Of course, the personal experience of other students soundly refutes this. One student complained that “people often talk about poorer students as if they do not exist on campus”. Another said that “class issues are a very real experience at the 5Cs. Anybody who tries to deny it or doesn’t seem to notice it is oblivious to the way the world really works.” When I was a bright-eyed first year, happy to have been given an opportunity to get out of the cycle of poverty that traps many intelligent high school students, it was incredibly disheartening to hear wealthier students talk about how lucky we were to get such substantial financial aid. “If only I were poor,” they’d lament, “or black. I could go to college for free.” Of course, there can be no discussion of class that does not include discussions of race, for the two are inexplicably tied. One student’s experience of a Core I discussion on affirmative action (ref here) demonstrates this perfectly. (See next page for more student opinions and stories.)

So how can students have such drastically different experiences of class on the same campus? Privilege. If you aren’t familiar with the term, privilege is about the advantages you have and think are normal. It is about society accommodating you and often dealing in your favor. Privilege is not inherently bad and almost everyone has it in some form. In the case of class privilege, it might mean that you don’t realize that others have not had access to the same resources, experiences, and opportunities that you have. That incredible internship in L.A. that your parents pulled connections to get for you? That is not happening for a student in the rural South, whose working class parents have no connections. That SAT prep class that helped you climb those hundred points you needed? Not an option for many low-income students, who might know almost nothing about the test until the day they sit down to take it for the first, and probably only, time. Privilege is blinding, which is why we need to recognize it. Recognizing privilege means accepting criticism without becoming defensive, listening instead of speaking, using respectful and inclusive language, and calling out others when they say or do something offensive. Only by recognizing our own privilege can we begin to have meaningful conversations about what it means to be low-income, particularly on a rather affluent college campus.

Many of the survey respondents expressed a feeling of disconnect between upper and lower class students on campus, especially among first-year roommates. I know I had trouble communicating with my two very wealthy roommates in my first year, hoping they’d understand why I couldn’t split the cost of renting a fridge with them. But what I’ve learned most from my time at Scripps is that we cannot just hope that others will consider us; we have to tell them to. We cannot afford to be ashamed of our socioeconomic status. By owning our low-income status, we let other students know that we exist, that they cannot talk about us as if we don’t, and that they have to consider experiences outside of their norm. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for the lack of visibility of what it means to be low-income on campus, but we should try to change it. Many of our survey respondents agreed that there needs to be more open dialogue about classism on campus—but when and if that dialogue occurs is up to us as a community.

For more information on privilege, including white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc., please visit: http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146

Survey Responses

Question: What do you think about class issues on the 5Cs? Do you have any personal stories, anecdotes, or examples of class difference and/or perceptions of affluence on campus?

Responses:

I have never experienced downright malevolent classism at the 5Cs, but I do get a sense of a disconnect between wealthy students and middle or lower-class students. As a middle-class student the privilege upper-class students have is very visible to me.

Usually students seem to be generous and courteous, but those of more affluence do sometimes assume that constant shopping, or having an iPhone is an easy, obvious necessity.

Classism is a big problem, but not enough people are aware because they are stuck in the affluent bubble of private schools

I think that class is an issue/subject that is an extremely neglected topic on the 5C campus. Especially when it comes to lower class individuals having visibility. Because students here don’t fit the mold of the “poor scholarship kid”, people often talk about poorer students as if they do not exist on campus. We need a dialogue, not necessarily to complain about being poor and about affluence, but to bring visibility and complexity to what it means to be a middle class, low class, and high class individual.

I never really think about class on the 5Cs because everyone has the same meal plans, the same flex, and no one really cares about what clothes you wear so I find that the class issue rarely ever comes up.

I think class issues are a very real experience at the 5Cs. Anybody who tries to deny it or doesn’t seem to notice it is oblivious to the way the world really works. We can change it by pushing for admissions to recruit more students of color and for the Scripps to refuse to say that we can’t afford them.

The first time I noticed it was when I was a first year meeting new people. These other students were talking about their vacations and things they had done in the past, and I could tell that there was a very big difference between them and me. I felt excluded out of the conversation because I had not been to Hawaii and learned how to surf, etc.

Core 1, Scripps. Section about affirmative action, the conversation went in the direction of it not being important and not fair, because people of color don’t need it anymore. It turned into a discussion going in the direction of people of color wasting their opportunities to get educated. However, no one mentioned (and I didn’t feel comfortable being the one to bring this up at this point) that there is institutional and systematic barriers in place that don’t give the basic opportunities, such as education, to people of color. It was very uncomfortable to feel that I couldn’t say anything and that the professor didn’t show much support for the other side of the argument/discussion.

I think that overall, the campus is assumed to be more affluent than it is.

I have way too many stories to count. In my CORE 1 class alone, students talked about the ways that lower class students had “advantages” and “extra help” over them. I tried explaining that not every starts at the start-line of the race, and that low-income or resource-limited people get this “extra help” just to get to the start-line of the race of life.

My roommate during my freshman year was very wealthy and not very self-aware, so we had a lot of trouble understanding one another. Her privilege and the disconnect I felt from it was one of the many reasons I was so unhappy my first semester.