There are been several recent dismaying articles about the chaos and confusion about student loans in the wake of major changes from the "Big Beautiful Bill" and rushed implementation from the Department of Education. Loan disbursements are being delayed for enrolled students, and ever-shifting changes in repayment plans are overwhelming those trying to get out of debt.

Rushed Enforcement of New Loan Policies For Enrolled Students

For The Hechinger report, Erin Rood writes of how colleges are scrambling to interpret and adapt to major changes in student loan policy after the federal government ignored long-mandated timelines that give campuses enough time to learn new policies, modify third-party software, and communicate with students about changes.

When it comes to disbursing financial aid, the relationship between the federal government and higher education institutions is complex. To help mitigate that, the Higher Education Act lays out a “master calendar,” which outlines formal dates and deadlines the Department of Education must follow. 

Under the master calendar, the department has to start the rulemaking process a full year and a half before the academic school year starts. After negotiations, months of public comment and department review, a final rule needs to be issued in November of the preceding year. But because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed in July 2025 with an effective date of July 1, the department couldn’t follow this timeline. And that gave colleges less time to adjust.  

Some new rules were only posted by the Department of Education in August, weeks before the semester started. Contradictory guidance for colleges has been posted on different parts of the Department of Education website.

Students loan disbursements are then being delayed without warning or explanation, leaving students in already precarious circumstances scrambling to find the money to pay the rent and cover late fees from landlords and credit card companies. At the start of their terms, they are spending hours trying to get clear answers about when their money will come instead of diving into their coursework.

Confusing Changes in PSLF Programs, Without Explanation

The Student Debt Crisis Center reports on quiet change in online information about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, that leaves people confused and further behind. Without explanation or direct communication with people enrolled in the program, the Department of Education ended borrower's capacity to buyback months in which they were enrolled in programs allowing them to defer payments (such as the short-lived income-based SAVE programs) or otherwise have forbearance.

Without any explanation, borrowers will now lose eligibility for debt cancellation after years in public service work, or at best will have to extend their payments longer than they'd planned (and been promised). Though many many lives will be affected, "The Department of Education has not publicly announced this change or explained how or when it was implemented."

Intentional Uncertainty About College Affordability

In an excellent Dame Magazine essay, The Student Debt Crisis Needs More Than Another Repayment Plan Rainesford Stauffer interviews higher ed scholars and advocates about both the current chaos and about policies that get us beyond shifts in student loan payments to broader reforms to make college affordable and accessible.

On the chaos, Daniel Collier says:

Ever-changing repayment programs, coupled with limited or untrustworthy information from the federal government, make it impossible for people to feel like they’re on steady ground. “Those burdens pile up on people,” Collier said, adding that such stressors relate to financial, psychological, and social distress. “Those burdens relate to financial distress, and those burdens stop people from making quality decisions about their lives. It stops people from taking new jobs.”

Dominque J. Baker argues for much great certainty about affordability for students as essential to recruiting poor and working-class students:

Before a student enrolls in college, it’s critical to create more certainty about aid that will be available—and have generous aid, Baker said. On the back end, after someone has graduated, there has to be more certainty around repayment.

The scholars and advocates argue for a restoration of Pell Grant levels to cover the costs of college, scholarships, guaranteed free college for low-income students, cancellation of student loans, zero-interest student loans, and accountability for the companies servicing student loans.

All of the proposed reforms invite students to imagine themselves having a place on college campuses. All invite students who've grown up within economic precarity to imagine stable and predictable futures.

Instead, the federal government's cumulative actions (along with the actions of state legislatures) seem at times to dare poor and working-class students to believe that college is for people like them. And if they do take the dare, their ability to pay their bills during every semester of college and then to pay their loans will be as far beyond their personal control as possible. That's an incredible price to ask students to pay for daring to seek a better life though education.

It's a system set up to convey to everyone that students with parents who casually cover tuition and housing and and then send fun spending money belong in college. Everyone else will be tested over and over, no matter how many social activities campuses plan for them to instill a precarious sense of belonging as they scramble to pay the rent.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an opinion piece on the invisibility of social class in the college curriculum. Colleges Teach Gender and Race. They Ignore Class was written by the American Enterprise Institute/ Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College's Jon Shields and Corey Tazarra, associate professor of history at Scrips College.

With few exceptions, students are not encouraged to think deeply about class as a social structure, one that often separates them from Americans of all racial stripes. And they have almost no opportunity to encounter books that feature the world of non-college-educated white Americans in particular. This oversight is unfortunate, especially at a time when these voters are being mobilized against higher education.

It's a promising title and a promising analytical premise.

Yet by the end of the essay, I felt wary about sharing the article, thinking that the good of calling attention to the relative invisibility of social class in the curriculum is negated by so many other arguments that could make it more difficult to serve and to represent diverse students in higher education.

So I'm sharing the piece because it's very good to draw attention to the absence of opportunities to learn about social class. But I encourage wariness of how these authors frame their argument.

Be Wary of Word Search as Analysis

First, the project the authors describe is part of normalizing a practice (most often by conservative groups) of scanning course syllabi (or grant applications or scientific journal articles) for a small set of key words and then drawing broad conclusions from those word searches. We've seen how problematic these word searches of academic work have been when conducted by people who have little knowledge of the work in a field but are driven by particular political agendas.

The authors also describe using "a new data tool that extracts book titles from syllabi, allowing us to see how often they’re assigned and in what classes" (we might assume that this is some version of AI, though it's not clear why they're vague about this). The analysis was conducted at a single campus: The 85,000 syllabi of courses taught between 2011-25 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Be Wary About Erasing Most College Campuses in Discourse about "Colleges"

The authors do not explain why they chose one flagship campus in one state in which higher education curriculum is under conservative political pressure, but it does not serve the interests of poor and working-class students to continue to pretend that flagship campuses (or elite private campuses) represent "colleges".

I'll repeat that the point about the absence of social class in the curriculum is well-taken. And the title of the article about a single flagship campus is "colleges", plural. The broader trend of pundits ignoring regional state campuses and community colleges when they write about "higher education" works directly against the interests of the working-class by erasing the educational experiences of many students from public discourse. That erasure also means that these campuses constantly struggle for resources and for recognition about how higher education policy may work against them – yet another crisis of representation beyond omissions within the curriculum.

Be Wary About Who Defines What Counts as Class Analysis

The authors report searching for class-related key words in titles: “class,” “stratification,” “poverty,” or “inequality”. This search would have missed the course on education, social class, and social mobility that I taught for years: Education and the American Dream. It would also have missed courses that included analysis of social mobility, federal social safety nets, and or tax policies that favor the very wealthy. It would have missed classes on inequitable education funding, historical perspectives on college access, or the history or labor movements.

That search would have missed classes critiquing concentrations of wealth and the growing entanglement of wealth and political power.

I'm not arguing that there are likely many more course classes about social class in the curriculum than these authors found. It will be no surprise to readers of this site that I strongly advocate for deeper analysis of social class in the college curriculum and in co-curricular spaces.

I am cautioning – strongly – against normalizing the conservative fondness for searching massive numbers of syllabi using a limited number of key terms without any discussions with faculty or administrators, and without the humility to inquire about the language that specialized scholars use when teaching. I'm especially wary of authors who decline to subject their analysis to feedback before publication from the entities that they critique.

Actual advocacy for poor and working-class representation and for students likely would not start with a "gotcha" piece in the national press, especially absent any other work that either author is doing around social class equity in education.

Be Wary about Made Up Measures of Inclusion Masked as Objectivity

Because they acknowledge that course titles might miss some content, the authors go further to report on courses that included specific "influential texts" about social class in assigned readings. They write:

...we identified some of the most important works of social science on class, informed by our knowledge of the literature as well as citation counts. Additionally, we included JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy because of the political stature of the author. (bold added)

Given that neither author is a sociologist (where most research on social class is published) and that citation counts measure the inclusion of a work in published literature reviews – but also reflect both the length of time that something has been in print and the intensity of criticism of a work by other scholars – I'd be cautious about trusting their choices of "most important" based on citations.

Indeed the list of "most important" includes the often cited Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods (published 23 years ago), Paul Willis's Learning to Labor (published 50 years ago), Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, published 25 years ago.

The authors do not articulate reasons why faculty would continue to teach studies of social and political conditions of a generation (or more) ago, even if those studies have accumulated citations in historic overviews of a discipline in that span of time.

They've also obviously made personal choices here. They do not include bell hooks in this list, for example, perhaps because they do not consider that the work of a Black feminist could also be about social class. Yet her books Teaching to Transgress and Where We Stand: Class Matters are rich in class analysis, and each would be comfortably within the range of citations on their list of "most important" books about social class, had they been included. They do not make clear how they decided that a book advancing an argument against immigration in the context of the Brexit vote was included while none of hooks' books were.

Other books are less clearly about social class (Richard Florida's Cities and the Creative Class, for example). Joan Williams' The White Working Class, is included as a scholarly text about class, though Williams is a legacy Yale and Harvard-educated legal scholar who often stumbles when interpreting others' scholarship across the multiple social science disciplines from which she builds her case.

Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was never intended as a scholarly work, and the authors do not explain including it on this list beyond his "political stature". It is now common for candidates to release books as part of crafting a persona before launching campaigns and few are read in college classes.

Another clue about the limited conceptions of "class as a social structure" in this analysis is the absence of any books about the very privileged. Anthony Jack's The Privileged Poor, Seamus Khan's Privilege are just two studies of elite's exclusion of the less privileged in educational settings.

Jess Calarco's book Negotiating Opportunities on middle-class parents insisting on advantages for their children in schools to the detriment of working-class children has been cited more than 11 books that did make the "influential" texts on the list, but is not included. Richard Reeves' Dream Hoarders, an analysis of how the upper middle-class now hoards resources and opportunity for their own children, has been cited more than 6 of the "influential texts" on their list, but was not included.

Be Wary of Assertions of Zero Sum in the Curriculum

Race

The authors attempt to document how many courses on race and gender UT Austin has offered. In a chart, they report the number of courses on race, gender, justice, and class across time, as if scholars understand (and teach about) these as distinct categories.

They critique courses on race for excluding "the most prominent Black social scientists who write on race from nonradical perspectives". "Nonradical" is of course not an objective term.

On this list of books they would instead have students read, they include William Julius Wilson's 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, and a 1999 book of essays about the legacies of slavery.

The exclusion of these dated books, they argue, is evidence of the marginalization of "so many prominent Black social scientists" as if the only reason that colleges no longer teach books on social conditions a generation ago is ideological.

Gender

The authors document how many classes UT Austin offers on gender and then argue, at this political moment in which we're witnessing major job losses for women and the public denigration, assault, and exclusion of women in US politics:

Like race, gender is an important topic. But universities might also reflect on the justification for having something like 20 times as many courses on gender than class. Since the 1970s, our class divisions have increased, while many gender gaps have diminished. Just look around college campuses. A majority of college graduates are women, while comparatively few hail from poor or working-class backgrounds.

Again, we can agree that there should be so many more courses in which students can learn more about the US class structure and about structural class inequalities. And we can – and should – make that argument without wrapping it in claims that we've accomplished gender equality or in unsubstantiated claims that there are few poor or working-class students on a given campus. And we can absolutely make the argument for more coursework on class without erasing the 20% of undergraduate women students who are single mothers, often living at the poverty level, often women of color, because gender and race and class are not distinct categories.

Be Wary About Blaming Curriculum for Broader Policy Failures

If we do want to talk about how "class as a social structure" works, we need to talk about what a powerful elite is now doing to limit college access for poor and working-class students. We need to talk about cuts in federal Pell grants, about tolerance for unequal funding for public high schools, about a conservative agenda that defines college as a private rather than a public good so that states have cut the tuition subsidies that built public higher education systems. We need to talk about the current Department of Education cutting funding for TRIO and other college pipeline programs.

We might ask the authors where classes on social class might be taught as campuses are cutting sociology departments, the humanities, and other liberal arts programs.

If we're concerned about under-representation or scholars from poor and working-class backgrounds on college faculty, we could talk about budget constraints leading to campuses now hiring more part-time and contingent faculty than tenure track faculty, placing academic careers out of reach for scholars without family resources to tide them over as they patch together enough courses to cover the rent.

We need to talk about cuts to federal grants for social science research that fund emerging scholars as they learn to interrogate all of these things.

All of these policy choices are object lessons in "class as a social structure". In my field, we talk about both the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum and nothing in the academic records of either of these authors indicates any concern for the latter.

Yes to More Curricular Representation, As Part of Broader Equity-Based Reform

No essay has to address every obstacle to the access and success of poor and working-class students, but these authors advance a political agenda that focuses on the low-hanging fruit of curriculum while ignoring all the ways federal and state governments are placing college beyond the reach of many students.

Admittedly, it's easier to run a batch of syllabi though AI and to then claim that work as being in the interests of poor and working-class people than to ask anyone working with these students where the greatest roadblocks might be and what might be done to remove them. Even when focusing on a single campus, as these authors do, there is no mention if any constructive engagement with faculty about curriculum development.

The authors are correct that there is too little attention to social class in the curriculum. Completely.

Yet they seem not to be acting entirely in good faith about supporting faculty, staff, and students in developing opportunities to learn about social class inequalities.

But in the end, faculty and administrators holding broader and deeper commitments to justice and equity would do well to finally begin their own work on ensuring that students leave college informed about deep and worsening social class inequalities. It's deeply unfortunate that academics with no prior work on social class equity, funded by conservative think tanks that work against equity and access, have taken the lead on this.

Thanks to Betsy Leondar-Wright for sending me this piece in the spirit of our mutual frustration with the invisibility of social class across college campuses.

I just finished Kashana Cauley's The Playback and recommend it highly as a serious, sobering, and funny romp through a fictional (perhaps near) future in which the public is so indifferent to heavy-handed enforcement against people behind on student loans that three college-educated retail workers take matter into their own hands and plan revenge.

All three Black women were first-generation college students who believed the recruiters and financial aid counselors that going deeply into debt for college was their ticket to limitless futures. The lives of all three were thrown off course by bad luck and bad choices that would be mere speed bumps for others. None have any hope of ever getting out of debt. They now work together in clothing store in a mall, trapped and exploited in low-wage work, mistrustful of even one another.

And as they fall further behind on their payments while struggling to pay the rent, they are stalked by the private "Debt Police" who roam freely in public and private spaces to casually beat people as they chat with one other about absurd self-help routines. No one ever intervenes. With nothing left to lose, the three women plot together about how they'll take a run at their own liberation.

The New York Times reviewer writes:

It’s a student loan heist story. A tale of revenge, cheap tequila, a hand-sewn Catwoman suit and the mall, with debt and despair simmering in the background. 

As that despair intensifies, Jada, the narrator, articulates in a single paragraph what dozens of policy documents have tried to explain across pages:

“First, we screwed up by not coming from money. Then we demanded the same education as everyone else. But when we finished our studies, they paid us the least, leaving us with higher balances to carry forward. Forever.”

Yet the book is funny. As Jada drives toward hope for a future of her own making in her decrepit white Honda Civic (no one would ever notice a parked white Honda Civic as the driver does surveillance), Cauley invites us to laugh at the absurdity of a social system in which the only actors benefitting from the educational aspirations of poor young people are the companies lending them tuition money.

Cauley invites is to laugh with these women who have the audacity to fight back.

It's a fun, serious, and quick read as we transition back to the academic year.

Last week, the Economic Hardship Project and the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program at Columbia University released a new report: Recognition Without Representation: Working Class in U.S. Print Media 1980-2025

Elena Krumova and her team analyzed digitized copies of the New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dayton Daily News, Minnesota Star Tribune, and Chicago Daily Herald, all papers in once heavily-industrialized regions. Searching for the term "working class" outside of obituaries or foreign sources, they asked:

How do American newspapers describe the working class: how do they talk about it, in what contexts, and in what terms? 

Since 2015, the researchers found sustained use of the term "working class" but significant shifts from reporting on actual economic circumstances (outsourcing, plant closures, housing costs, labor issues, for example) in particular locations to reporting on "the working class" as an abstract political entity:

Overall, we show that over the last 45 years, the attention to the American working class has shifted from a fragmented, regional topic into a centralized, highly political and cultural identity. Where it is not specifically mentioned in political frames, it is an identity marker for characters and neighborhoods in works of art, rather than in stories about housing, education, work, family, or religious life. 

This "working class in the abstract" erases the broad diversity of the actual working class, now that the working class is no longer primarily white male factory workers:

Gender representation is strikingly similar across outlets. In both the NYT and other publications, 50% – 65% of articles leave gender unspecified. Men appear more frequently than women when gender is specified, but women rarely exceed 5% – 7% of coverage in either outlet.

Similarly unspecified are other demographic markers such as race or immigrant status, with the vast majority of articles talking about working class in the aggregate.

In sum, the most common use of the term "working class" in these publications is when journalists or others puzzle about their voting behavior or comment upon a character in literature or theater or movies. Rarely are working-class people speaking about the circumstances of their own lives:

Class identity and particularly working class appears to be something to be analyzed, appealed to, or explained rather than described in situ. It is mainly a political actor and perhaps also a marker of authenticity and character when it comes to the arts, i.e. something that exists statistically and rhetorically but not in any concrete social reality that these actors get to define themselves. 

In other words, the working class is talked about more, but described less. It is not centering voices and experiences from communities that can sociologically be described as working class, whether one relies on economic or cultural delineations. The discussion remains at a distance, the identity ill-defined and thin. It will not be right to call this “othering” of the working class, but what we get from the coverage is a hum, a low-level rumbling rather than a full voice.

Krumova does also mention Fox News as broadcast media with tremendous influence over defining a "working class" cultural identity. Their on-air personnel perform not as the wealthy actors that they are but as cultural allies against the educated elite, foreclosing critique of structural inequalities:

What the Fox News hosts did was perform “working class” as a cultural practice while at the same time eschewing topics about economic inequality, affordability, health care, education, and other economic concerns.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent interview with Krumova about her research and the consequences of this shift in media in which working-class people "are primarily viewed through this prism of horse-race politics in media coverage".

Her final recommendation in this interview will be familiar to readers of this site:

News organizations should also look into increasing the recruitment, training, and promotion of journalists with working-class backgrounds, just as was done for increasing the representation for women and minorities—such as recruitment outside the college track and training that doesn’t depend entirely on universities but happens on the job itself.

And to bring this back around to education and class, colleges can also help to serve this cause of broader representation of working-class life in journalism by ensuring that all students graduate understanding class stratification.

But colleges are falling far short when even students from poor and working-class backgrounds are likely to learn little about the structural inequalities shaping even their own pathways to college.

We know that being deep in student debt means more than simply managing monthly payments. Daniel Collier at the University of Memphis has created a fascinating website to explore how complex "more" may actually be.

Drawing on data from 1,810 survey records and 67 interviews, the site invites users to explore 15 major themes from respondents including policy uncertainties, experiences of delayed adulthood, emotional distresses, and reflections on the value of college in the end. The site includes beautifully rendered interview quotes across this broad range of themes. Short audio clips are provided for some interview segments. The immediacy of debt across so many dimensions of the lives of these people become poignantly visible.

Interactive features allow users to build their own descriptive cross tabs from survey responses, comparing 23 different outcomes across multiple respondent characteristics, from federal debt load to race and ethnicity and marital status to highest degree earned.

The Outcomes that can be explored:

And the respondent characteristics:

All of this is represented in clear, well-organized graphics (the URL suggests the help of chatgpt), with some web pages (with multiple downloads) designated specifically for the press and policy makers. For example, one example cut at the data:

The project is a model of the kinds of questions we should be asking about how student debt shapes of lives of those carrying the loans and for telling the stories of those in debt. Scholarly work presented in such an accessible, well-organized website moves research from behind academic journal paywalls and into the hands of students, journalists, activists, and policy makers.

What's Next?

All that said, Collier himself suggests caution in interpreting this data. There is nothing (that I could find) on the site about who completed the surveys or how they were recruited, nothing about the characteristics of the people being interviewed. He doesn't clarify what scholars, journalists or policy makers can infer from these responses about the 43 million people carrying student loan debt. Our capacity to better understand those millions is, of course, central to the broader value of this iteration of the project. Representation of the larger population of debtors doesn't require the loss of the personal in a project like this, but the project will have deeper value with clarity about whose voices are represented here (and whose voices we have yet to hear).

We don't know, for example, if the respondents to the surveys represent the distribution they very different sorts of people in student debt among those 43 million. The average debt for graduates with a bachelors degree is around $26,000. The basic information that we do have (n values on reported responses about debt levels seem to be skewed toward those with heavier loan balances; n values for "highest degree earned are much higher for graduate and professional degrees than for associates degrees) suggests that we're perhaps learning important things about some of the trees within the diversity of student debt holders but not yet the forest.

UPDATE (8/13): After I posted this on the Education and Class Bluesky account, Professor Collier replied that he's now updated the information on recruitment and sampling – there's a detailed explanation there now on the methods page, and readers now have a much clearer understanding of who is represented here.

The interactive data features are fascinating and informative – to a point. The general public, journalists, and policy makers are left on their own to evaluate the actual significance of different outcomes across respondent characteristics – no statistical analyses have been done. Collier does not claim otherwise in footnotes to his data tables:

Results are unweighted and descriptive. They do not establish causation or indicate that differences are statistically significant.

Journalists and other members of the public will have to be trusted not to make their own inferences about causality or generalizability from this (valuable) descriptive data.

As with all provocative scholarship, the broad range of data points also sparked my thinking about what else we might ask in work like this. The study explored an impressively broad range of personal characteristics and personal outcomes. I'm curious also about how student debt matters in one's public life.

Do financial stressors and subsequent work pressures mean that those deep in student debt are less able than others to contribute to political campaigns? To volunteer for candidates? To attend community events such as hearings on proposed data centers or political town halls? To volunteer in service of others in their communities or in their children's schools?

What can we learn about whether deep student debt restricts the public visibility, the public voice, or the civic contributions of debt holders? It would seem worth knowing about the public costs of high levels of student debt as well as the personal costs. No project can or should address everything, yet more projects can simultaneously explore the personal and the public fallout of crippling debt.

All that said, we will learn a great deal more about the lives of people who are carrying student loans as this project develops, and there is much here to spark deeper scholarly questions and deeper analysis from the field.

I read so often about the importance of students' sense of "belonging" in college, and yet just this week, I've also read about multiple states choosing precarious special funding models for supports for low-income students rather than regular dedicated state budget lines. Each of these unstable funding streams seems to convey to students that their ability to enroll and to stay in college - to belong – will remain an open question.

All the special social events for low-income/first-generation students are fun and good; being able to focus on fun and on courses without endless worry about money may evince an even stronger sense of belonging among peers whose parents pay the bills.

In each of these states, students working hard to get into college and/or vocational training have been left unclear about how to plan and uncertain whether to trust the whole process.

I wrote earlier this week about the Texas legislature promising to reward community colleges for success with low-income students, yet failing to budget enough money to fund the campuses that met targets for student success. These campuses are now facing budget cuts instead of the predicted budget increases.

In Tennessee, the legislature funded 13 scholarship programs for college and job training programs with lottery proceeds rather than from a stable line item in the state budget. But now, in part because the state also recently legalized online sports betting (with proceeds going to K-12 school maintenance and construction), lottery revenue is dropping:

Net lottery proceeds — the money left over after prizes and operating costs are covered — have fallen 21.9% since fiscal year 2022, while scholarship enrollment and spending have continued to grow, according to the report produced by nonpartisan think tank ThinkTennessee and the Tennessee Skills Coalition. The report projects a funding shortfall of up to $344 million by fiscal year 2030.

In Mississippi this summer, 170 students who'd been in foster care got the "soul-crushing" news just weeks before the start of the semester that they would not be getting promised funding to cover their food, housing, and fees.

As in Texas and Tennessee, the Mississippi legislature declined to provide stable funding for these students:

The scholarship structure is paired with a unique funding mechanism. “Each year, the Legislature has to provide a specific appropriation for the FAITH Scholarship. It is not one of those programs that is just covered like MTAG and MESG and HELP (other financial aid programs in the state) under our general appropriation,” Jennifer Rogers told the Mississippi Free Press in a July 31 interview.

“We asked for right at $4.6 million to fully fund FAITH for the 2026-2027 academic year. We received $3 million.”

Ironically, the new and easier FAFSA financial aid application processes contributed to more students applying for the FAITH scholarships this year, as the legislature casually underfunded the program.

In Mississippi, nonprofits rushed in to temporarily fill funding gaps. In Tennessee and Texas, legislatures promised to eventually work on fixes.

We've yet to develop anything close to a collective commitment to funding higher education for low-income students as a public investment – in them and in what they'll bring to their communities, families, and workplaces.

Other states had already announced expected shortfalls in promised access scholarship programs; federal education budgets have been piecemeal and unpredictable for far too long.

Pell Grants once did much of this work, but now, with state and federal budget cuts, so many students are one car repair away from having to drop out.

These are all policy choices, made by legislatures with very few members from poor and working-class backgrounds.

Other choices are possible, especially if we take seriously the mission of educating all students on campus about the structural economic inequalities shaping access to college.

In 2023, Texas changed how community colleges would be funded. Instead of the state sending money for the number of students enrolled, campuses would instead get paid for success with students:

House Bill 8 gives colleges money primarily based on how many students complete industry certificates or associate’s degrees, transfer to universities or participate in dual credit. Bonuses are given based on educating high-need students, including those who are economically and academically disadvantaged as well as nontraditional adult learners.

It should have worked.

The schools delivered.

But the state hadn't budgeted enough money for actually attaining the goals that the state had set, and multiple campuses now will now see funding cuts under the new formula instead of the higher funding levels they'd planned for.

The president of one community college that may see a 20% budget cut wrote:

“Successful colleges should not be penalized for exceeding expectations,” Benson wrote. “The timing couldn’t be worse. PJC is serving record numbers of students, expanding workforce programs, strengthening partnerships with school districts and employers, and producing outstanding student outcomes.”

When I introduced my teacher education students to the extensive testing schedules they'd be following in their careers, I'd watch their shoulders slump. They understood that the justification for all of these tests was "accountability" for ensuring that all students were learning. A worthy goal, we all agreed.

But then I'd ask them the key question:

"So if you do all that the state and the feds want you to do and every single student in your school aces the tests, what do you think will happen? Will your hard work and success be publicly celebrated? Or will they rewrite the tests to make them harder?"

Every idealistic/new to the profession student paused for a moment and then predicted that they'd just make the tests harder.

I think that they were right.

Our systems of funding public education have never, ever been designed to meet the challenge of supporting the success of low-income students, even while those controlling the budgets continue to publicly chide schools and colleges for failing to do so.

The Hope Center has released a new analysis of emergency financial assistance on college campuses, and the news is not good.

Currently, half of all students could not come up with $500 in cash or credit to cover an unexpected expense, yet those emergencies are all to common:

... A car breaks down on the way to a final exam, a medical bill arrives the same week as rent, or a laptop fails in the middle of a term –for a student living close to the financial edge, any one of these can end a college career. The expense itself is often modest; what makes it destabilizing is the absence of savings, family support, or other financial buffers to absorb it. A small and timely grant can mean the difference between finishing the term and withdrawing altogether. (bold added)

Yet in Autumn 2025, only 4% of students got emergency grants to tide them over these events. During the pandemic, nearly 44% of students accessed emergency grants.

During the pandemic, the federal government provided billions for students to use on food, housing, transportation or medical care. That funding has ended, though so many students are still navigating food and housing insecurity and are working on aging laptops. Some states and campuses have created their own emergency funding programs, but few students are now accessing these funds.

There are are multiple reasons for the collapse in access to small emergency grants. Few students may even know about the availability of the funds, and campuses may not publicize local funds for fear that they could not meet demand. Many student financial aid offices are seriously understaffed, so there are too few resources available for outreach and communication. But ultimately, the campus and state programs can offer only a fraction of the funding that the pandemic era federal grants provided.

Drawing from research from the Trellis Project, the Hope Center confirms that first-generation, low-income, and single parenting students all face crises when facing routine emergency expenses in college.

Single parenting students are among the most financially exposed of all: 81% of single parents in the Trellis SFWS said they would struggle to find $500 for an emergency. Most relied on public assistance to get through the year.  Former foster youth and students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds carry a comparable burden. For a student with no family wealth, a single unexpected expense ceases to be a passing setback and becomes a decision about whether to remain enrolled.

The Hope Center offers suggestions about targeted communications and about reduced administrative "friction" when students need emergency support, and those recommendations should be read by staff and faculty and student leaders on every campus.

The report suggests, also, potential flexibility in some federal assistance that could translate into bigger pools of emergency funds. Beyond existing funds, the Hope Center also recommends restoration of emergency funding to ensure that all students can ride out the "unexpected" that everyone can expect.

Everyone advocating for first-generation and low-income students would do well to read those recommendations about federal support that made such a difference during the pandemic, and then contact their representatives about funding college for the thousands of students arriving on campus without the cushion of family wealth or even a savings account.

It's a political choice that students who cannot access family wealth may have to leave college before graduating when a car breaks down or a landlord issues eviction notices as they sell their building.

It's a political choice that some students are dropping out over the price of a laptop repair as their classmates benefit from families who hire rush consultants to help get them into the best Greek houses.

And it is certainly a choice for campuses to message to each that success in college is mainly about personal hard work and inherent talent.

When I was an undergraduate, I did volunteer work with a remarkable 2nd grade teacher in an elementary school in a working-class neighborhood.

The year before, the children had noticed that traffic on the street outside their school was getting busier, and many of them had to cross an increasingly busy intersection to get to and from home. It was becoming more scary to cross that street. They had a crossing guard but they were afraid for her, too.

They talked together one day in class about how that intersection needed a stop light. And the teacher asked the 7 year olds, "so how do we get a stop light?".

And thus began a months- long project in which students started out by wondering whether to write to the president or to celebrities to ask for help, but as their questions became more focused, they learned about city government and found, with the help of this teacher, the traffic control department. And the nice people in the traffic control department explained to the children that they would need to present data on traffic patterns to the people who had the power over how to spend the city's money.

So the children learned about sampling times for data collection, comparing data, explaining data, and presenting data. They used their growing literacy skills to present their report to city government. Most of these skills were in the 2nd grade curriculum for math, writing, and speaking, but instead of doing shallow decontextualized worksheets to practice these various skills, the teacher incorporated much of the required curriculum into a deeply engaging hands-on project that allowed the class to also learn things that few other 2nd graders learn.

And eventually, after months of work and learning collaborating and getting other adults involved and presenting their data, there was a new traffic light outside their school.

They were 7. And they had learned something about how to leverage power as they learned 2nd grade math and 2nd grade writing.*

Students and Power

Most upper middle class students are taught from childhood that systems exist to serve them and that they're entitled to expect changes in systems that do not serve them well. From watching family members negotiate the details of their children's schooling and then college, to participating in parents' political activities, to witnessing social interactions in which families assert their expectation that they will be heard in businesses, in public institutions, in courts of public opinion, many middle-class students learn self-advocacy and how to work "the system".

Many first-gen students are encouraged by their campuses to instead believe that systems are set up to help them, that they should work hard to learn those systems, and to be grateful when they eventually earn a place within them. We know that many first-generation students struggle and/or eventually just disappear from campus, but there is little in the literature on first-generation students learning to change what's working against their interests.

Learning Institutional Power

What if programming for first-gen students taught the fundamentals of advocating for change when systems on campus don't serve their interests? What if first-gen students were taught even some of the skills that other students learn from parents who hold positions of relative power and use that power to clear pathways for their children?

What might that look like?

Power Mapping

A few months ago, I followed a discussion on Blue Sky about working with students to frame problems and craft solutions by analyzing the power dynamics in an institution. Following that discussion and the links that people shared, I recognized that these strategies are essentially the grown-up version of what that 2nd grade teacher used to teach children about persuading power brokers about their civic concerns.

In that Blue Sky discussion, I came across Jordan Davis's series of essays, Power Mapping as Liberatory Pedagogy on his work with high school students to address the problems with access to educational technology. It's an excellent example of how this process might work with college students looking to solve other problems.

In his first post, Davis outlines the basic processes of defining problems and formulating strategies for change. His goals:

Demonstrate the relationship between stakeholders in a complex system, like a school district or neighborhood, and the power those stakeholders have relative to each other.

This helps students realize that rational decision-making often takes a backseat to power dynamics and competing interests, and that being a skilled practitioner in ed tech requires strong communication, advocacy, and analysis skills to navigate these bureaucracies.

Articulate wicked problems in their schools and school districts.

I encourage students to go, as I often say, three 'whys' deep. Yes, your school doesn’t have enough laptops because the district doesn’t have enough money for them. But why doesn’t the district have enough money for them? And to that answer, why?

Design solutions to the wicked problems they’ve identified by first considering the fears and motivations of all stakeholders involved.

They learn how to investigate unfamiliar stakeholder perspectives—such as superintendents, chief technology officers, parents other than their own.

Execute those solutions through the skills we learn in the class.

In his second post, Davis explores the history of techniques of power mapping, including work organizers of Black and anti-war activism of the 60s. Essentially, power mapping "can reveal stakeholders impacted by an issue that are typically overlooked and excluded, giving rise to innovative and inclusive ways to create change in a system. It can uncover hidden agendas and illuminate key questions related to how, when, why, and for whom decisions are made."

Students learn to search for potential collaborators, uncover institutional motives that run counter to motives of justice and fairness, and develop a deeper sense of belonging as they locate themselves within the many competing interests within any institution. Beyond all of this, students potentially learn a range of valuable soft skills, from leadership to problem solving, to empathisizing with those with whom they disagree.

Those goals seem, to me, essential for students navigating class and educational mobility against the odds, on campuses where the rules of success are often opaque.

In Part 3, Davis outlines the specific steps of his classroom activities with those high school students that enabled them to define problems, to identify stakeholders, and to explore the relationships among stakeholders. He generously includes examples of slides to guide student brain storming, a range of graphics though which students could map power relationships, and even a guide to grading such projects.

Miriam Posner, faculty in Information Sciences at UCLA, joined that conversation with her own set of very helpful slides that can be used guide students through these processes.

What Might This Look Like in First-Gen Programming?

Students are impossibly busy, staff are stretched, and faculty are under too many competing pressures.

And yet, if we imagine ...

Faculty in education or sociology or organizational leadership can craft course assignments that engage students in analysis of obstacles to college access.

"Introduction to College" first-year courses for credit often position first-generation students as different, behind other students, and fragile. Students could also be positioned as capable and knowledgeable about how the campus recruits, admits, advises, offers financial aid, and and organizes campus orientation. "Introduction to College' could involve students in improving any and all of those.

Social activities are important, and at the same time, first-gen students can also come to feel that they "belong" as they work together toward making their campuses better places for students like them.

There are curricular loopholes on many campuses that can be leveraged. When I proposed new courses, I also often proposed additional optional "linked" course numbers for a few credits for students who wanted to explore community-based or experiential applications of course content. First-gen students could be recruited to register for these linked options to work on campus analysis projects in a range of courses so that they're making progress toward degrees while also learning agency.

The point is that there are campus-specific mechanisms for creating spaces for students to learn about and to challenge those in power on their campuses, and students themselves could be part of finding these mechanisms.

If 2nd graders can be mentored by adults to solve complex problems very real to them, there have to be ways in which more first-generation students have opportunities to be mentored in bending systems of power to serve them.

I'd love to hear about any examples that readers know about.

*It's entirely possible that the stop light installation was scheduled and the teacher knew about it. I don't think it matters. The students learned and felt ownership over the actual processes for such petitions, and a lot of adults stepped in to teach them to how advocate for their needs in a democracy.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few weeks listening to political discourse about social class. There has been yet another news cycle of wealthy [male] consultants recruiting someone that they believed would appeal to [male] working-class voters, and then wealthy [mostly male] media figures were paid to analyze what happened when that campaign imploded.

It sometimes felt within the chaos as if informed discourse about social class and power --already so muddled – was set back decades.

So I returned to Daniel Laurison's recent research on lower voting participation rates among low-income voters, because in Laurison's work, people in poor and working-class communities are trusted to speak for themselves.

Laurison's HEARD (Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy) Center at Swarthmore conducted in-depth interviews with 144 diverse non-voting low-income people in Pennsylvania and we do well to listen to what these people say.

From Laurison:

The people in Laurison's study care deeply about their communities and could identify specific issues that are affected by politics. They did not see political decisions that made their lives better. Instead, they saw politics as a "game" in which candidates may briefly appear in election season but few politicians seem to care about them otherwise. They understood that they were speaking of a collective experience of politics, not simply their personal disengagement.

They see few people like themselves running for office or working for campaigns. Their perceptions are correct. Fewer than 2% of the members of state legislatures are from poor/working class backgrounds. Exponentially more federal office holders are millionaires than are from working-class backgrounds. Laurison's own work documents that campaign staff and consultants are overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds. He cites research on how campaign volunteers are typically older, whiter, and wealthier than people in low-income communities and may misunderstand the priorities in those communities.

And thus, Laurison and his team recommend (among other excellent things) taking representation much more seriously:

Both social-class and racial representation help build trust and confidence. To help more people see themselves in politics and trust what they hear from people asking them to vote, organizations should seek to recruit and train volunteers, staff, and candidates from the same communities they are trying to mobilize, in terms of both race and social class.

First-Generation Students as Citizens

So what might the role of college be in supporting diverse volunteers, staff, and candidates from poor and working-class backgrounds to represent their communities in the hard work of democracy?

What if first-generation students were positioned to be part this work as they learn agentive ways to navigate the complicated social spaces between home and college as family members and also as citizens?

Obviously, colleges would be only part of this work, and on some campuses, initiatives like this would be treated with suspicion, but we have to imagine how things might be different.

So as part of imagining a more responsive politics, what if campaigns specifically recruited and trained first-gen* students as paid interns to engage with their home communities – as representatives with valuable knowledge of community concerns and valuable critique of solutions proposed by campaigns?

What if first-gen programming on campus included talks and workshops intended not only to inspire students to work hard but to also begin to learn how to leverage political power for their communities?

What if candidates and their staff were invited to forums on campuses organized with the help of first-generation students? Community colleges and public four-year colleges would seem to be logical sites to develop representation and voice, and forums could be live streamed into students' communities if they wished. What if privileged students then also witnessed people from under-represented communities speaking on their own behalf and holding people in power accountable for listening?

What if community-based learning courses on campuses engaged all students in building partnerships for field research in service of the political concerns of members of low-income communities ?

Because it seems too much of a burden to encourage first-gen graduates to uplift and inspire communities when community members sense, as Laurison documents, broader political indifference to their well-being.

What if we did any of these things instead of so often downplaying the structural inequalities that are sustained by that political indifference? Might we learn that we've been selling first-generation students short to assume that they care mainly about their own individual success? Or to assume that role model is the only powerful role that they might play in their community?

What if at least some of them would also also welcome learning to be part of building representation as campaign volunteers, staff, and candidates that could help to restore trust and confidence in politics that Laurison calls for?

Especially in this fraught political moment in which so many privileged people are arguing with each other about the political needs and priorities of poor and working-class people?

*Of course not all first-gen students are from low-income homes. I'm also fine with the relatively few higher-income first-gen students learning about the politics of social class representation and voice.

For a fair and comprehensive overview of the SAT admissions exam, take a look at Smithsonian Magazine's recent article on the 100-year history, the current state of research, and the cyclical policy debates around the exam.

We know also that scores on standardized tests like the SAT correlate with family wealth. We know that wealthier students take and retake the PSAT and the SAT with the help of prep courses and private tutors to maximize scores.

We also know that some colleges still require SAT scores in the hope that admissions decisions can more objective in surfacing talented students from underrepresented communities. Few colleges required the SAT for admissions during COVID. Multiple colleges are weighing whether to reinstate testing requirements, given the challenges of evaluating AI enhanced application essays and grade inflation in high schools.

The Educational Testing Service makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year administering these testing operations. It would be fair to argue that have an interest in sustaining their roles as gatekeepers to college admissions. At the same time, the shrinking number of college-aged students in the US population also means that colleges will have to be open to a broader applicant pool than they once were if they are to sustain enrollment.

This would be a solid piece to assign in classes or to share with colleagues who are deliberating about admissions policies at the school and campus level.

The sample questions included in the article provide intriguing context for the discourse around what these tests do and do not measure.

If I were in charge, I'd have a session during first-year orientation in which I challenged all the students to ponder this graph of parental investment expenditures per child by income level:

In that orientation session at the very start of college, I'd ask students to reflect upon what it means the gaps in family spending on children's childcare, education, and organized activities have grown significantly between families in the highest income brackets and families at most other income levels.

The graph is from Orestes Hastings' new working paper "More Unequal Childhoods: 45 Years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States". Using data from the 1980-2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey, Hastings documents that over those 45 years,

Per-child spending in the top decile nearly quadrupled in real terms, while bottom-quartile spending was slightly lower in 2024 than in 1980. Thus, the top decile spent roughly three times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than thirteen times as much by 2024.

I'd gently ask the first-year students to consider what this research means in how they'll understand themselves as members of this new community of students.

Elsewhere, they will learn about the diversity in religious beliefs, in political stances, in gender orientation, in race and ethnicities, in disabilities and the myriad other ways that peers will enrich their understanding of the world.

It seems important for them to also learn that some people in the room have benefitted from so much parental investment in their competitive advantages while others parents have been able to provide much less.

These seem to be important conversations at the start of college because as is the case with every dimension of difference, they are questions about who has the power to judge and who will be judged. They're questions about responsibility for learning about the circumstances of others' lives, about responsibility for your own actions, about who we'll all become as citizens.

They are questions about the assumptions students may have made about "deserving" and "undeserving".

They are questions about the very meaning of being educated about the circumstances of our own lives. And they are conversations too rarely had on campuses.

I would be clear that privileged guilt was the very last thing that I intended in showing this graph. This chart is about parent choices and parent capacity, not anything that first-year students have done.

I would be even more clear that less privileged students should feel no shame when these difference in personal resources become evident in the dailiness of campus life.

My strong belief is that discovering these gaps shouldn't be casual or accidental for poor and working-class students, as they so often now are. Students shouldn't be left alone to learn that a lot of them have entered a race long after others left the gate, especially since they'd been promised for years that education is the great equalizer.

When looking at this chart, I might also ask what these parents fear when spending this much more on own children than parents were spending a short time ago, and why those fears have become the problem of others in their children's first-year class. I'd ask why the norm on campuses is to protect those privileged students by rarely talking about increasingly unequal childhoods, even when that means that other students blame themselves for not measuring up. I may not ask those particular questions out loud at orientation, but those questions are an entry point to analyses of the broader contexts of social and educational inequality and zero-sum beliefs about opportunity.

I'd hope that privileged students might leave that session a bit more humble about what they may understand as their relative innate merit. I'd hope that poor and working-class students might leave the session more willing to name unearned privilege and to speak up when they're being judged for the artifacts of structural inequalities that benefit those who hold the power to judge.

Mostly, I'd hope that after that first orientation session, all students would ask their professors and staff a lot more about all of this in their classes, because currently, there's so little talk about social class and economic inequalities within the student body (and within the faculty). I'd hope that students from poor and working-class backgrounds would question why first-gen support programs instead downplay differences between themselves and their peers.

Perhaps, planning that kind of an orientation session is part of why I've never, ever been put in charge.

But I can still dream.

For reference, the upper limits of household quintiles (a slightly different measure than the quartiles and deciles used in this paper but the data indicate how many households are living on relatively low incomes):

In 2024, households in the lowest quintile had incomes of $34,510 or less. Households in the second quintile had incomes as high as $65,100, those in the third quintile had incomes as high as $105,500, and those in the fourth quintile had incomes as high as $175,700. Households in the highest quintile had incomes higher than $175,700. The top 5 percent of households in the income distribution had incomes of $335,700 or higher.

It's my experience that students raised within relatively higher incomes assume that they're relatively poor because they're aware of the very wealthy, and that it's very educational for them to learn how so many families raise children with much less.

When I was part of the team building a new campus of my state's flagship university, we talked a great deal about our students who were parents.

State funding formulas based on scale meant that it would be decades before we could actually provide on-campus care. And we knew that our students who were parents would struggle to stay in school without high quality childcare.

There were so many state building formulas that assumed conventional, residential students, not the population of first-gen and non-traditional-aged students that we actually served. Eighteen percent of all undergraduates are parents; on our campus, the percentage was much higher when we opened.

We scheduled longer class sessions that met only two days a week instead of the standard three-days-a-week schedule so that students could pay for fewer days of childcare and better schedule their jobs. When the state insisted that we schedule our classroom five days a week for maximum "utilization" of space, we pointed to how many classes met late into the evenings four days a week, when classrooms on other campuses were empty.

We argued for more parking spaces than the state formula allowed, knowing that public transportation could not work for students who did daily circuits of childcare dropoff, classes, jobs off campus, childcare pickup, and then evening classes while older siblings cared for the little ones because so few childcares stayed open after 6:00.

We knew that all of this was little more than a bandaid for students who needed reliable, affordable childcare to stay in school.

And we also knew that children's wellbeing should never depend upon such piecemeal peripheral gestures.

Thus, it's been encouraging to follow the development of universal childcare in New Mexico. The state has committed to funding a range of childcare options (home care, childcare centers, religious settings, after school programs, and others) for children from birth to age 13, regardless of family income.

In New Mexico, family income no longer determines which children watch movies on a parents' phone in the back of college classrooms when parents can't afford alternatives, and which children can settle into quality childcare for the day.

Unlike the market-driven childcare in other states, childcare workers in New Mexico earn higher wages and may qualify for benefits, because a stable workforce is also essential for quality childcare and because the work is of such high social value.

No childcare provider in New Mexico is required to accept children participating in the state project, so wealthier parents are still assured of access to places that will enroll children only like their own.

Yet statewide universal childcare is a solid, basic gesture toward equity. I'm hoping that more states are watching.

I listen closely to campus messaging for what first-generation college students learn about themselves via available support programming. These programs do, of course, offer explanations for why students need support. It is safe to say that most commonly, what students are learning about the circumstances of their own lives is at best selectively incomplete.

A recent research brief "It's Kind of a Flex": Reflections on Being a First-Generation College Student from First-Gen Forward, the national coordinating organization for first-gen programming on campuses, is an example of selective omissions. The brief is based on student focus groups talking about "first-generation student identity and belonging". All the students were volunteers from "within our networks" of campus programming and all were interested in talking about themselves within those contexts.

The premise of the brief is that first-gen students must first recognize their "identity" as a first-gen student in order to access resources available to them. They also have to know that they are first-gen before seeking out sponsored social activities with other first-gens so that they develop a sense of "belonging" on campus. Students were asked about developing this "first-gen identity".

These 45 students talked about learning that it mattered in "how they define themselves" to realize that:

• Their parents had not gone to college but the parents of peers had.
• They need support but often didn't realize that until they got to college and noticed they were behind peers.
• Other students "just know" about things that they don't know.
• Their educational experiences and family backgrounds were "unusual" on campus.
• But in the end, they realize that they are uniquely resourceful because they figure out how to do things on their own.

One student mentions that she learned that others students had "grown up with college counselors". That is the only mention in the entire report of any material inequalities between first-gen students and most of their peers.

There is no mention of experiencing shock at how casually peers spend money, share travel stories, or drop casual classism into game night at the dorm. There's no mention of any of these students fearing stigma if their "identity" becomes widely known to peers. There's no mention of basic needs insecurities or the grind of working multiple jobs while attending school full-time.* All of these things are mentioned in the sociological literature about first-gen students, but none are mentioned here.

There's no mention of the students even having questions about any of these things. "Different" is neutral.

As with many things within First-Gen Forward, students are praised for overcoming challenges and coming out stronger:

The most commonly-mentioned strengths were self-reliance and resourcefulness, which were frequently linked and came up in one-fifth of the comments coded as related to assets. Focus group participants regularly note that, because they do not have parents who can help them navigate college, they have to figure out their paths on their own. This builds their ability to find answers and make plans on their own. Over time, they come to see themselves as capable problem-solvers and confident in their ability to navigate new challenges.

This summary is deeply and selectively incomplete.

1. It is selectively incomplete to take for granted how poorly campuses often decline to just explain the rules of success. In this brief about how students come to feel that they "belong", the students actually describe themselves as being outside of critical campus information networks. The authors of the brief selectively omit the possibility of students advocating for proactive clear campus communication as a right for all admitted students.
2. The language about family– found so often in this network – selectively omits much of students' lives. In practice and in the literature of the field, students learn that they struggle "because they do not have parents who can help them navigate college". This language erases the layers of inequitable access to public and private resources that may be far more significant than any information that their parents might pass on about college itself. There's no mention of unmanageable workloads for counselors in many high schools or a district's lack of funds for AP or other advanced coursework. There's no mention of how wealthier districts recruit away the most experienced and qualified teachers with higher pay. There's no mention of how many high schools are just skipped over when college staff go out on high school recruitment visits. There's no mention of staff cuts on campuses that restrict students' access to the information they need.
3. That language about parents' advice being the primary difference between first-gen students and their peers omits that privileged parents know that parental advice alone cannot steer their students to success. Thus, long before college, they move to the right neighborhoods with the best possible schools where there will be college nights and staffed counseling offices. There will be other parents in these neighborhoods who've graduated from a range of places and can arrange introductions or special campus tours at places students may not have otherwise considered. Once their children are at college, they negotiate summer internships with neighbors of family members so that their children can learn insider professional knowledge and networking while the first-gen students are working retail and fast food jobs. Beyond advice, parents pay for interview clothes and rent for the first months of a new job in expensive places. These parents know that personal advice is only a fraction of what they have to offer. Yet first-gen students keep hearing that relative to peers, being first-gen mainly means being deprived of parents' knowledge about how to register for classes or declare a major. Other students "just know things" is very different from "resources have been invested in ensuring that other students have been taught things".
4. Finally, this applause of students' self-assessment that they now have figured out how to move forward is potentially setting first-gen students up for the very same struggles in graduate school or career that they experienced early in college. There is no reason to expect that "on their own", first-gen students will learn the hidden norms of graduate school admissions and fellowships, choosing graduate school advisors, career hiring, or the norms of professional workplaces. Career centers are wonderful, and career centers do not replace the career networking that starts back in the neighborhood and continues in Greek houses. This praise of first-gen student resilience and resourcefulness is especially curious given that the authors of this brief selectively omit the organization's own data that 76% of first-gen students never graduate in part because their resilience was not enough and they couldn't access resources.

I do not know who in this field of professional first-gen student support decided that for the most part, structural class inequalities simply make students stronger and thus are irrelevant to students' understanding of their "identity".

I do know that telling first-gen students, over and over, that they are "different" primarily because they can't access parents' advice is, at best, selectively incomplete and possibly even dishonest. Good intentions, notwithstanding of course, it is simply not true that the most relevant difference between first-gen students and their peers is what each can learn when they call home confused.

I believe that applauding students for doing things "on their own" rather than mentoring them to be vocal advocates for what they need is actually applauding them for being willing to settle for much less than other students (and their parents) demand of their institutions.

I also know that on most campuses, there are no faculty mentoring first-gen students in self-advocacy against institutional norms and practices , and no faculty teaching them the broader historical and political contexts of why they were behind before they ever arrived on campus.

But in the pages and pages and pages of materials from First-Gen Forward that I've read over years, I've never seen any explanation for why, unlike Student Affairs programs that collaborate with other units to teach students to recognize and resist racism and sexism and homophobia, any mention of classism or class inequalities is selectively omitted from work with first-gen students.

Declining to clarify who is making these decisions about what students should or shouldn't know about their "identities" and "belonging" is perhaps the most puzzling selective omission of all.

Footnote:

*It is very common in this literature for scholars and practitioners to point out that not all first-gen students are from poor and working-class families, and this is, of course, true. A small number may be the children of parents working the declining number of high wage jobs that can be obtained without a degree. The overwhelming number of "first-gen" students are from poor and working-class families, and I am absolutely fine with even wealthier first-gen students learning about structural inequalities within education.

Thoughout this summary of big changes coming on July 1 to Pell Grant eligibility, student loan repayments, and student loan eligibility are the words "chaos", "confusion", "panic", and "students don't know about".

A Federal Department of Education that has not yet demonstrated their concern for or knowledge of student needs has worked to rewind some Biden programs, to eliminate others, but to extend Pell grants to short-term career prep programs.

So much of this seems like solutions to poorly understood or non-existent problems.

It's taken them a long time to make all of these changes, and it's taking them a long time to develop clear communications about what students and potential students (and their parents) need to do.

If you know students heading to college, in college, or paying off college loans, please send this summary to them, talk with them about what some of this might mean for them, and try to be sure that they can get in touch with caring people who can help sort all this out.