When I was accepted to the only college I'd applied to, I visited for orientation and bought a T-shirt at the book store. Wearing that t-shirt a few times around my home town was my college announcement.
When I was doing my First in Our Families digital storytelling project, one of the storytellers told me in her interview that because of crises in her low-income family, she'd arrived at college without as much as sheets for her dorm bed and had to ask the RA to help her figure out how to get some.
Today, I learned about "bed parties" in which wealthy parents announce where their child will enroll by decking out (often in intentional competition with others on tik tok and instagram) their child's bed with college bling, clothing and food in college colors, balloons, streamers, and anything else that they can tastefully cram in for the cameras.
Some parents hire event planners to buy and arrange everything.
Some parents are spending $2-3000 dollars to publicly display that they can spend that much money to celebrate college acceptance.
There are pinterest boards, YouTube videos, and Facebook parent groups to help in the planning. There are so many images of these parties online. Most seem to be by young women.
I should not be surprised that becoming educated is entwined with these displays of competitive wealth and ease. But I am.
I should not be surprised that because financial aid for other students is so meager, campuses have (underfunded) emergency funds to try to keep young people in school when cars break down, an emergency room visit breaks a budget, or there's not enough food to make it through the month. But I still am.
I should not be surprised that there is almost no public discussion about these disparities on campuses in the interests of teaching about growing class inequalities and our basic shared responsibilities to build a fair and just system of education.
And actually, I'm not surprised that instead, it's mostly up to poor and working-class students to be hit with the realization of these disparities on their own, in their dorms and class discussions and social events, and then to have nowhere to go to make sense of them.
And that it's still understood as ok that privileged students graduate without ever knowing anything about those classmates who almost had to drop out because of that $300 car repair, when they were showered with a bed full of campus bling to announce that they'd won the admissions game.
