Three years ago on our blog, we shared our thoughts on an article by Paul Tough in the New York Times Magazine titled “Who Gets to Graduate?” In this article, Tough highlighted how low-income first generation students of color entering college commonly experience feelings of not belonging or thoughts that “they are not good enough to be there” regardless of how well they performed in high school or on standardized tests such as the SATs. 

Now, a more recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Anthony Abraham Jack, an Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, details his struggle to adapt to the peculiarities of a Northeastern college town after living in Miami his whole life.

This article reflects on the author’s lived experience as a first generation, low-income student of color at an elite college and validates the data we receive from the work of our grantees such as I Have a Dream Foundation New York, Legal Outreach, Sadie Nash Leadership Project and Street Squash in the area of college persistence. As this article highlights, the college application process is only the first of many difficulties that low-income students must face when embarking on this new stage of life that has been historically kept out of their reach. A large hurdle low-income and first generation students must overcome is the social barrier to entry; the lack of cultural and social capital which are both mechanisms of class reproduction. Unlike economic capital, cultural capital is intangible. Cultural capital is typically associated with a knowledge of ‘refined,’ high-class social understandings such as fine art but in the case of matriculation, it can also refer to a knowledge of university-specific resources like office hours, networking and even social traditions. Studies have shown that white, wealthy children are more likely than low-income children of color to have a sense of the expected social landscape of universities.

Over the past decade of funding work in the area of youth and education, the Foundation’s thinking has evolved around what support for college looks like within the goal of helping students achieve degree attainment and ultimately better economic mobility. We have learned some powerful lessons after following students longitudinally through the Ravenswood II I Have a Dream program, where our initial support focused on high school and college matriculation however, this quickly shifted to providing students with tools to cultivate cultural capital and career exploration while they pursue their degrees.

Professor Jack’s recommendations highlight an urgent call to action (that we co-sign based on experience) for higher education institutions to better understand and act on issues stemming from belongingness and how they manifest for low-income first generation students of color in academic success. His observations also drive us to consider how campus services can be redesigned to meet the needs of all students and do so with a deeply human touch. If the idea of college for all continues to be fed into a student’s and family’s biosphere from a very young age, in order to make this an authentic right, we believe colleges must follow suit with fuller supports for the students that are at the greatest risk of dropping out.