The Brink: Campus work is a ticket to their future?

It absolutely is. You can work for four years as a barista, as a groundskeeper, and your contact with university officials can be very minimal. If you work as a research assistant for the same faculty member, that faculty member has four years of interactions—research, travel, asking you to babysit their cat when they go away. You become someone in their life. [Students say], “This person took me under their wing when I went to office hours, they offered me a job in their lab, and that’s how I got interested in science.” 

The Brink: Your book mentions that it’s not enough to admit a diverse class; you have to get them through to get their degrees. Why are elite schools better at ensuring that disadvantaged students graduate? 

Elite schools have money to remove hurdles out of students’ way to graduation. Things that trip students up at Bunker Hill [Community College], or at UMass Amherst, are not as prevalent here at BU, Harvard, Amherst. When we think about housing, about the gap between your financial aid package and tuition, about commuters to campus, those are things that we have known for years that lower the odds of graduation. The longer your commute, the less connected you are to the university, the more likely you are to step out of study or drop out. The more debt you have to take on, [the more] you might think that it’s not worthwhile. The more you work off campus, with your schedule constantly changing, you are more likely to have to make the choice between going to work and going to class.

Students at elite schools are the traditional age, 18 to 22. They are least likely to have kids, they are least likely to have familial responsibilities that require them to be away from campus.

But I don’t believe that graduation rates tell the whole story. You can have a school that has a 98 percent graduation rate, but the trajectory after college is divided by class, where your wealthier students, five years out, are on the path they want to be on, but your lower-income students are not—because wealthier students are more likely to have letters of recommendation and the connections introducing them to headhunters and businesses. [Disadvantaged students] who were uncomfortable in college may have a good GPA, but they don’t have a network who can vouch for them and be able to support them. 

You need eight letters of recommendation for the Rhodes Scholarship. You can have two students, one with a 4.0 GPA and one a 3.8 GPA. But that 4.0 student has never connected with faculty members, has never been to office hours; that 3.8 student has been the research assistant for two faculty members, has babysat or pet-sat for [professors], is actually embedded within a group of faculty and staff. That person is more likely to get the nod. 

Some people say: Why study elite schools? Haven’t they gotten undue attention? As a sociologist, I push back against that, because so much mobility literature was not about elite schools. I want to study two things at one time: the mobility prospects of disadvantaged youth and the gap between proclamation and practice. How are you putting [disadvantaged students’ admission] into action? Are you just opening the doors, or opening the doors and changing your daily practices to prepare yourself for who you are now welcoming in?

The Brink: Poverty hurts students long before they reach college. Are some inequalities beyond the ability of academia to fix?

It is not that I’m calling for colleges to fix the structural inequalities. I am asking them to prepare themselves. For those who have lived in poverty’s long shadow, that is incredibly important. 

If you are going to admit more lower-income students and go to those new zip codes to get students, you know that they’re bright, they’re ready to do the academic work. But the calls that those students get in the middle of the night are very different from their middle-class peers. If you’re going to go to a place that suffered tremendously due to the opioid epidemic, if you are going to recruit students who come from neighborhoods where joblessness is a modal life event for adults, if you are going to communities where disadvantage is the norm, you have to make sure that your resources on campus can help students bridge the gap. 

The Brink: What solutions would be most effective in helping marginalized students?

One of the things I suggest in the book is: Why are the offices of career services fellowships, internships, and on-campus employment typically in separate places? We know from research that contact breeds trust, and trust breeds use of an office. Northeastern [University] has all of their employment-related offices in one office, so that students, from their first year to their last year, come to the same place with all questions related to work. We don’t want social class to dictate what opportunities students view as for them or not for them. It’s about demystifying the hidden curriculum. 

You [also] have to make sure that your mental health services are prepared to help students deal with that gap. It’s not just about what [services] you have, it’s about who is carrying out therapy on campus, and what training and skill sets they have. Quite frankly, a lot of campuses don’t know how to deal with and support students who come from a more diverse class. I’ve heard Native students say mental health services are not aware of how to deal with the trauma and the legacy of settler colonialism. Mental health services know how to help students through traditional life events for someone who’s [age] 18 to 21: the death of a grandparent, divorced parents. But when it comes to problems that are located in [a particular] place—like what happens on reservations, what happens in inner cities, and what happens in rural parts of America—mental health services are not prepared to deal with a lot of those.

Right now, therapists are helping you like: “Let’s develop study skills and help you get through the semester, let’s help you focus on the present.” We’re talking about the legacy of generations of trauma and exploitation and exclusion that many students carry with them on their way to college, and health services are not prepared to deal with that. Do they have specific training to deal with colonialism? There are counselors who are trained to understand racial trauma, students who are the children of immigrants.

The Brink: Your book talks about diversifying mental health professionals.

We need people who are more aware of the structural inequalities, and especially violence that happens in the country. It’s one thing to see it every day; you learn how to navigate it from [age] zero to 18. But it’s when you come to campus you have this freedom to actually think through things. But you sometimes need guidance on how to do that.