I've been traveling and mostly off-line (yeah!) but bookmarked some things to read more carefully when I got back.
Among them was this piece by Angelina Chapin in The Cut on young white college women spending $100 a month (on top of the thousands they pay for rush wardrobes) on black market GLP-1 weight loss drugs, hoping to get skinny enough to get into the highest status sororities. Often, their mothers are encouraging them and supplying the drugs.
Rush matters, of course, for access to the professional networks of the elite women in these high-status houses and to the hottest boys and the best parties and the envy of one's peers. Access to the highest status sororities can matter more than academics in securing the highest paying jobs after college. And as with all things high status, arbitrary roadblocks are thrown up to protect those already privileged. The standards for "skinny" are unattainable to most healthy college women:
... if you don’t have the money or the connections to glide through recruitment, looking the part is crucial. McCall says the year she recruited for Zeta, no girl bigger than a size 4 made it to the in-person round. While nobody had explicitly cut girls because of their weight, they used euphemisms like “She’s not Zeta material.” “I feel like the whole standard is changing,” McCall says. “It’s like, ‘Well, there’s no excuse for people to be fat because they could just get a GLP-1. Why would we accept somebody who wants to be fat?’” A recent University of Southern California alum said her sorority sisters had the same mentality. The aesthetic there might have seemed different — more vintage designer than Lilly Pulitzer — but still allowed for no variation in appearance. “Most girls who got in were probably size 2, zero, and double zero,” the USC alum says.
Meanwhile, the Hope Center has found that 41% of all college students experience food insecurity. Over 40% of all college students struggle with affording basic needs: Housing, health care, transportation, food. Low-income students may feel shame and stigma when they struggle daily to pay their bills and just disappear from classes.
But access to high-status opportunity now depends in part on looking as if one is starving.
Though I've been writing and teaching about educational inequalities for decades, I cannot reconcile the very different ways that privileged and poor students experience college. High status students continue to throw up barriers to access to their social worlds (now, drugging yourself into size 2 jeans) while low-income students slink to campus food pantries, knowing the stigma and pain of actual hunger.
And all those students are assured that in the end, individual success is simply a matter of hard work and resilience and structural inequalities are mere speed bumps that happened before first-year orientation.
These young women all know that their peers are injecting weight loss drugs but smile and pretend that they're celebrating self-discipline and natural beauty.
Campuses know that they masking deeply unequal pathways to and through college but smile and pretend that they're celebrating hard work and natural merit.
