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Students from poor families were once kept out of these bastions of privilege by a devilish duo. We–and include myself in this group–were excluded by lack of information, on one hand, and tuition costs that rivaled or even eclipsed our family’s annual incomes, on the other. Some colleges took action. Beginning with Princeton in 1998, several colleges began enacting initiatives like no-loan financial aid policies to combat class inequalities that have a stranglehold on our delicate democracy and even more fragile system of higher education. With an unprecedented gift from Michael Bloomberg this past November, Johns Hopkins University will join the list of no-loan colleges in this country. Through these initiatives, colleges declared that money will no longer be a barrier to entry. It will no longer curtail your success.

But uncritically praising universities as democratic institutions for increasing access reflects a limited civic imagination. An admissions letter and generous financial aid do not a diverse college make. Access ain’t inclusion.

I worry that colleges have extended coveted invitations to excited, eager, able youth before adequately preparing for their arrival. We seem to have forgotten an old truth: Citizenship is so much more than just being in a place. It is accessing all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

This is what I study. It is also what I lived and live.

“Where are the other poor, black people?” This is the first question that I can remember asking myself in 2003 after I arrived at Amherst College and took part in what I call “convocation conversations.” You know what I’m talking about–those chats in which people conveniently work in verbal versions of their resumes and narrate their summer schedules for any and all to hear. My new peers swapped stories of multiweek trips abroad and fancy parties hosted at second homes. They regaled us with personal accounts of courtside seats to professional basketball games and invitations to private premiers of movies that had not yet hit theaters. They knew about Canada Goose before it was cool. These were class markers I associated with rich people. My first time on a plane was traveling from Miami to Amherst for my recruiting trip. Back home, summer was just a season. At Amherst, summer was also a verb.

What I thought I found on my first days at Amherst was the legacy of William Bowen and Derek Bok’s groundbreaking study, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences Considering Race in College and University Admissions. In this work, they showed that an overwhelming majority of the black students at elite colleges come from privileged backgrounds: the sons of lawyers, or daughters of doctors, or children of commerce. I resigned myself to be, yet again, the only poor black person in a rich, white place.

Imagine my surprise, however, when one of my classmates who studied abroad in Spain during her junior year of high school turned out also to come from a family that struggled to make ends meet. Feeling comfortable with each other, we shared stories of doing homework by candlelight. We did this not to be romantic but rather because the power was out. We knew a common struggle all too well: that sometimes there was more month at the end of the money. The vacation homes my new classmates ventured to, it turned out, were not their own, but rather those of their wealthy high school peers. Alas, I was not the only one granted access to privileged experiences and places beyond what my family could afford or even knew about.

Like my freshman imagination, social science research did not make space for these experiences as part of the larger first-gen story. When social scientists wrote about lower-income students, they wrote of a single experience chronicling culture shock and social isolation.

Yet all the while, as my research uncovered, colleges and universities were hedging their bets: they were getting their new diversity from old sources: the Andovers and Exeters of the world. So, I set out to trouble the waters.

The Privileged Poor focuses on undergraduate life at pseudonymous Renowned University, an elite, wealthy, white university in the Northeast that adopted no-loan financial aid policies. I sat down with 103 black, white, and Latino undergraduates and conducted ethnographic observations of campus life for two years to investigate what it is like to be a student at Renowned. In this research, I highlight how lower-income undergraduates at Renowned have shared beginnings but lived evermore divergent lives before coming to college. I explore the experiences of those who live in poor, often segregated communities but enter college from elite boarding, day, and preparatory schools like Exeter, Choate, or Dalton–those whom I call the Privileged Poor. I compare their experiences to equally economically distressed peers who enter from local, typically distressed public schools–those whom I call the Doubly Disadvantaged.

Admittedly, these terms are loaded. To be honest, this choice is purposeful. In addition to the oxymoronic quality of “Privileged Poor” that sticks with you, like jumbo shrimp, to engage with or even find fault in the terms still forces one to interrogate what they intend to capture. How can one be privileged and poor? Even using the qualifier “doubly” inspires an intersectional way of thinking when there previously wasn’t one.

Personally, I wanted to move the conversation away from individual differences to focus on how structural inequalities like segregation, joblessness, poverty, disinvestment in public K-12 education, and the hollowing out of both center cities and the nation’s bread basket manifest themselves on our campuses. My investigation into this overlooked diversity among lower-income youth pushes back against the dangerous downplaying of how prolonged exposure to savage inequities in our neighborhoods and schools affect how students navigate college, if they make it there at all.

We cannot escape the fact that while some neighborhoods and secondary schools keep us from hurt, harm, and danger, others place us in the thick of it.

Conventional wisdom dictates that you need to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going. When it comes to understanding the undergraduate experience, the same sentiment is true. We must examine where students come from–and what they have been through–to understand why they chart the paths they do once they reach our gates. Doing so forces us to think about how school policies and practices facilitate or hinder that process.

Which students immerse themselves in the college community? Who wants to leave after the first week? Who gets the strongest letters of recommendation and life-changing internships? Who says of their experience, “I couldn’t breathe here?” Who calls their college “a toxic environment”? Or what about those who call college “unsurprising,” label it “the next step,” or liken college to “déjà vu”? To overlook the rich diversity of experiences within first-generation college students is to base policy on only a partial picture. As it stands, our understanding of how poverty and inequality, and class and culture shape college life remains incomplete and the policies we implement to help students miss the mark.

For example, colleges expect students to be comfortable and proactive in forging relationships with faculty. This is the road to extensions, extra help, recommendation letters, internships, and invitations to special dinners. This is the road to emotional support when times get rough. Yet this expectation remains unsaid; there is no manual of dos and don’ts, whens and hows. An unspoken, “If undergraduates want something, they will come,” operates as the gold standard, the college corollary to the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Imagine the culture shock, then, that some first-gens experience navigating what sociologist Jean Anyon calls the “hidden curriculum.”

Let me offer a few examples. Alice, a quick-witted Latina with a penchant for short answers, attended a segregated, public high school. She revealed to me that her four years before Renowned were filled with classmates fighting, setting trash cans on fire, and skipping school. For her teachers, maintaining order took precedence to teaching. Her transition to college was rough. She doesn’t feel at home at Renowned; she says being here contradicts everything about her life back home: the people, the culture, the very buildings she passes on the way to class. Professors informally say, “My door is open.” She doesn’t believe them. She feels “too intimidated, too afraid to talk to people” and consequently she “rarely [goes] to school-sponsored people for things.”

In contrast, Ogun, a reflective and discerning Latina, hails from a troubled neighborhood but attended an affluent boarding school with a multi-million-dollar endowment. Her largest class had twelve students and contact with teachers inside and outside the classroom was an everyday occurrence. Studying abroad was not only an option, but also encouraged. Office hours were built into the culture of the school. She reports feeling “empowered to go talk to a professor and say, ‘I want to meet with you.’” She even goes on to say, “My school instilled in me that I’m allowed to do that; it’s actually my right.” When her instructor was away from campus, Ogun had no qualms calling his cell phone for virtual office hours despite friends’ surprised looks and admonitions.

What was new for Alice was old for Ogun. What was a mismatch for Alice was a match for Ogun. These differences result not from individual deficiencies, but rather from societal defects. Colleges mistakenly and erroneously see Ogun as engaged and Alice as disinterested.

Moreover, colleges reward students accordingly. One residential advisor shared that when it comes to nominating students for awards and different honors, “The process is relationship-dependent, unfortunately. . . . Oftentimes the best candidates are not put forward. It’s hard to tease out what is meritocracy and what is nepotism, favoritism, cronyism or whatever you want to call it.”

Undergraduates from America’s forgotten neighborhoods and ignored schools are truly at a disadvantage as colleges continue to privilege the privileged.

But I am not so naive.

Knowing how to navigate social relationships with faculty and deans is not the only hurdle that lower-income students face. There are things that no amount of cultural capital can combat. Where Alice and Ogun’s experiences align, their shared economic disadvantage is more salient in shaping their sense of belonging, overall well-being, and ability to perform academically.

Walking around campus in March, I hear stories of trips home to rest, to Europe for backpacking, and to Mexico for partying. I even joked with one student fresh off the plane from the Caribbean, still wearing his straw hat, that he looked more like one of my cousins than his white, New England kin. Six days in the sun had given him a golden glow. Spring Break, however, means something different for lower-income students. As Valeria, a lower-income Latina from California, laments, “There’s always famine during Spring Break.”

Alice and Ogun know hunger’s sting all too well, and not just from when food stamps ran out at home. You see many colleges assume that all students depart campus during Spring Break. At Renowned, which closes all of its dining halls during the break, these closures result in one out of every seven students having to fend for themselves for meals. Let’s think about that for a moment. At one of the world’s wealthiest universities, one out of every seven students face food insecurity.

Closures, sadly, are a common college practice: Of the nearly eighty colleges that have adopted no-loan financial aid policies – the institutions that are most progressive when it comes to aid – as of 2014 only one in five kept their dining halls open during Spring Break. Johns Hopkins, even with its $1.8 billion gift, closes its dining halls during the break.

To make matters worse, some colleges charge students upwards of $35 a day to stay in their own rooms in the residential halls during Spring Break or in someone else’s room who has left on vacation. One college goes so far as to change the locks on students’ rooms to prevent entry.

When your pocket is as empty as your stomach, you are more worried about your next meal than recounting trips to the West Tisbury Market. Nicole, a lower-income black student who went to a private high school on scholarship, notes, “Spring Break is the most blatant break where privilege and wealth play a part in whether or not you leave.” And as Maria, a lower-income Latina, asks, “How can you support yourself when you can’t feed yourself?”

Capturing this harsh reality with comedic seriousness, Arianna says that “Spring Break is the real Hunger Games” and the odds are never in poor students’ favor. Just how close this reality comes to living in the districts is downright depressing.

At the most recent 1vyG conference, where students from all over the country discussed what it meant to be a first-generation college student, one young white woman, with a pixie haircut and wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt, stood in a room full of people to discuss Spring Break. Looking at me as if for courage, she revealed how she spent her last Spring Break at one of the most elite, wealthiest universities in the country: she increased her online dating activity in the lead up to Spring Break to secure dates for the following week. You see, banking on gender norms of older men paying for the first date, she felt that her only option was to use OKCupid as if it were DoorDash. She treated Tinder as if it were GrubHub. In order to eat, she offered her time. In order to eat, she offered herself.

This makes no sense. Yet this is life for far too many undergraduates. Furthermore, this reality goes beyond just what poor students face. What about the students who do not have a home to go back to? The disowned. Those who defied both the odds and their parents by choosing a college away from home instead of working or going to school nearby. The unwanted. Those students who know that harm and home are sometimes synonymous.

New students require taking on new responsibilities. We must move from access to inclusion. We must ensure that social class – symbolically and materially – does not keep lower-income students in secondary positions.

To embark upon the crucial task of making colleges look more like the world, we must question what we take for granted. We must examine how both the symbolic and material dimensions of class affect campus life. We must work to ensure that students do not just graduate, but that they do so whole and healthy.

As each class becomes ever more diverse, so do colleges’ connections to once overlooked communities, for these new ties bring various inequalities into sharper and sharper relief. I hope that The Privileged Poor not only sheds light on the problems at hand, but also provides a framework for addressing them.