I just stumbled upon the movie The Marching Band, and loved how the characters explore themes of social class, chance, opportunity, and culture in quiet and moving ways.

The movie is the story of two brothers who never knew about one another until adulthood. Thibaut is a cultured semi-celebrity who travels the world and basks in others' respect and admiration. Jimmy works in a cafeteria in a dying mining community.

They meet and soon realize that they share the same distinctive [likely genetic] gift. For Thibaut, early recognition of that gift led to an excellent education and a very privileged career. About Jimmy, a character says "there was no one to even tell him what this meant".

I've been thinking of how I'd teach this movie and the questions I'd ask college students to consider as they watched. Among them:

• How do we understand the brothers' initial wariness of one another? Beyond the personal experience of discovering one another's existence, what do we see about them engaging with one another's social worlds? What does each have to learn about navigating the other world? Where does each err? What are the consequences for each of getting it wrong?
• What visual markers do the film makers use to designate social class? Are these visual cues stereotypes or something else?
• How does each brother understand his right to respect and admiration? How does social class shape this understanding of self?
• Each character speaks to how they have had to work hard. How does each understand "work"? How do they each understand the likely rewards for hard work?
• As Jimmy tells Thibaut about his life, we learn about many other actors/factors whose decisions shaped Jimmy's life – his family, the resources at his school, the politicians in his community, his employer. Explore some of these. When did Jimmy have agency and control over his life? When did others exercise elements of control over the opportunities that Jimmy would have? Contrast Jimmy's agency with the control that Thibaut had over his life.
• Why does the movie show us less about Thibault's trajectory to adulthood? What might this suggest about the anticipated audience or the viewpoint of the director and writers?
• Throughout the movie, each brother learns things about the other that makes clear how chance was a major factor in their lives. Recount some of these scenes. What is each brothers' reaction as they encounter these new revelations about their lives?
• In one scene, Jimmy acts on Thibaut's advice to dream big and to not give up on himself. Would Jimmy have been right to ignore this advice? Was it in his interest to follow it? Given this scene, rewrite Thibaut's advice to Jimmy.
• Stories of cross-class interaction often include stories of characters saving one another. The wealthy man saves the poor/working-class woman. The wealthy person is saved when they learn from the authenticity of a working-class character. There is an obvious story of salvation in this movie but beyond that major story line, how does this movie approach the common narrative move of cross-class salvation?
• Throughout the movie, who has access to beauty? How is this access shaped by social class? Is this fair?
• We explore several different musical genres in the film. Which are associated with social class? Which are not? How do we know? How do we imagine these social class associations came to be?
• Why is the film named after Jimmy's experiences, not Thibaut's?

Clearly, I've been thinking about this film a lot, but I'll stop there.

To understand more about brass bands in England's working-class communities, check out this news story. Note especially the reporting on where government funding for culture and the arts is invested, given Jimmy's and Thibaut's lives.

The Marching Band is on several streaming services (in French with English subtitles). If you watch, I'd love to hear what questions it evoked for you.

Education reporter Jennifer Berkshire has gone looking for education policy in the platforms and press releases of office holders and political candidates from the left and found ... almost nothing.

In her excellent post, she asks why a movement focused on justice and equity would ignore public education as a public good for the millions of families with children in public schools. With Berkshire, my own politics are firmly left, and with her, my frustrations with the left's disengagement from public education run deep.

She critiques democrats' earlier policies that sometimes conveyed that "every economic problem is really an education problem". Current leftists would clearly want to distance themselves from such simplistic takes as they advocate for broader economic reform.

But why has the growing left come up with so little else on public education?

Berkshire wonders about data showing that many members of growing Democratic Socialists of America, for example, are "highly educated but downwardly mobile", perhaps fanning a generational cynicism about education as a pathway to economic security. DSA members are overwhelmingly white, college educated, and urban. Their own schooling set them up to be among the only 35% of the US adult population with undergraduate degrees and 15% with graduate degrees. Cynicism is understandable when the relatively high quality schools they likely attended did not deliver the economic pay-off that they'd been promised.

But disillusionment with their own trajectories is an entirely different question than that of the politics of how many of their generational peers were assigned to K-12 schools without the college counselors, AP courses, or qualified teachers that many DSA members may have taken for granted. A politics based on their own experience does not explain their relative disinterest in how many of even their college-bound peers --especially those from rural communities – were sorted into resource-starved community colleges or regional state colleges, as if stratification in higher education is irrelevant in shaping life chances and democratic participation.

Berkshire observes that many leftist activists are young and do not have children, though all have experienced years of schooling. And I'm especially curious about how their own schooling informs their disengagement with the politics of education that left hundreds of thousands of students of their generation struggling to get to and stay in college, if they aspired to college at all.

Yet we do not know how many leftist leaders were educated in private or elite public schools, and I believe strongly that it matters. I often try to verify whether highly-educated Leftist activists speaking on behalf of "the people" in politics were educated among poor and working-class people who could inform their understanding of the world. Anecdotally, a disproportionate number of people in leadership in Leftist organizations (and the political consultants that guide their campaigns and policy agendas) came up through relatively elite private education and may have only weak ties to people educated in public schools.

Activists and writers and campaign consultants and candidates educated among the very elite do hear from faculty and staff about how deserving they are of all of the resources on those campuses because of their unique potential and their innate intelligence and character; it's less clear that they learn anything about admissions policies that favored the wealthy, not just the innately talented. It's less clear that they learn anything about underfunded public colleges and inequalities in K-12 education.

And, as with the disproportionate number of college faculty from privileged families, it may simply not be in the interest of many politically active leftists to acknowledge educational inequalities from which they benefitted, especially if they speak about equity and justice from platforms that they accessed via exclusive networks of other elite educated people.

The Children of Opportunity Hoarders?

Beyond the possibility that many leftists attended college surrounded by the elite, highly-educated white students likely also witnessed their parents' opportunity hoarding when they were in K-12 schools. No article can address everything, but I do wish that Berkshire had questioned what the children of educated white parents learned as those parents navigated the tensions between investing in political activism for educational equity for other families and the time required for the intensive parenting that even progressive parents leverage to access opportunities for their own children within systems with too few resources for everyone.

For example, while Berkshire acknowledges that elected leaders may fear backlash from teachers' unions when proposing reforms, she does not write about how advocacy on behalf of ones' own children generates intense political backlash from powerful parents convinced that their own children are more deserving than others.

Whether they were educated within public or private schools, any social movement of white, highly-educated young people will likely include a disproportionate number of members raised by parents who insisted that their children deserve the best teachers, the special academic programs, the riches of private fund-raising when those things are out of reach for other children.

And as children, they likely heard that all of this was "just wanting what's best for my [special] children", not a collective politics of privilege.

We have no idea how the children raised by privileged parents studied by scholars like Lareau, Calarco or Hamilton now make meaning of the politics of their own advantages within deeply unequal schooling. It seems a worthwhile question to explore, especially as at least some of those children are now adults holding leadership in leftist organizations.

We might hope, in a movement centered on advocacy for workers, that we'd have much more transparency about the class backgrounds of movement leadership.

In the meantime, given the racial and economic segregation of public schools, it's not clear to me how many leftist activists even know much about the inequalities in public education.

Public Education in Political Crosshairs

Berkshire contrasts leftist silences about education with the decades-long project of the right to dismantle public education and to blame teachers for structural poverty. Elsewhere, she's written extensively about the right-wing's embrace of school vouchers and the "mom populism" of centrist voters pushing back against vouchers and subsequent cuts to school funding and to the culture wars that the right wages over school curriculum.

Thus, at this intensely political moment, the left's indifference to public education is a loud silence.

Imagining Education From the Left

Berkshire challenges the left to imagine how school might now be otherwise, to imagine institutions grounded in democratic and not just economic purpose, schools in which every child is afforded the resources that they need to learn and to thrive.

But without broader social-class representation in the leadership of leftist organizations (and in their political campaigns) we may keep talking about why those who won the education game are still struggling instead of also asking why so few students ever got to the starting line.

Education reform will never be the primary driver of economic equality, but now, educational inequalities deepen growing economic inequality and almost no one in Leftist political leadership is engaging those politics. I am a strong advocate of publicly-educated people from working-class families being at the table for those deliberations, though they are now too rarely there.

It's excellent that Berkshire has opened these conversations.

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.

It's easy to assume that our highly stratified system of higher education has always existed, that high achieving students were always sent to elite institutions where the grass is always green and the classrooms always gleaming, and small groups of students bask in the attention of faculty in small seminar rooms. It's easy to assume that students on those campuses have earned those privileges by being smarter than everyone else, because they are likely to accomplish so much after college.

Yet as Zachary Bleemer and Jesse Rothstein show in their new working paper, early proponents of college enrollment advocated for open admissions everywhere: Any student who had completed a preparatory course of study in high school could enroll anywhere. Some campuses began admissions testing to screen out unqualified applicants, and many students never graduated, but tuition remained relatively low and admissions relatively open.

Then, as demand for college degrees grew after World War II and state and federal budgets invested more in higher education, public policy shifted to narratives about "merit": Only the highest achieving students would attend the most elite campuses with their small classes, star faculty, and state-of-art facilities. Utilitarian new public colleges would be built for everyone else.

And, then, once the highest achieving students were concentrated on select campuses, those campuses would invest even more in their education. More people might be allowed to get degrees, but much more would be invested in the education of the elite.

As late as 1960, most US higher education institutions remained effectively open-access and variation in per-student expenditures was relatively low. Since 1960, stratification has steadily intensified. In 1969, the top quarter of institutions by selectivity (enrolling the highest-testing students) had per-student instructional expenditures about double those at the institutions in the bottom quarter of test scores. By 1993, this had risen to about 2.5 times, and by 2019 to three times.

Bleemer and Rothstein's graphics make the contrasts vivid:

And as we know, those high achievers were overwhelmingly from the highest income households. Campuses would bestow much more on students from the wealthiest families who had attended high-resourced high schools and grew up in resource-rich communities than other campuses could invest in their students.

Then, as (large) gaps in resources between campuses leveled off, privileged students began to benefit from new internal inequalities in resource allocation.

In the 60's, students could enroll in any major they chose. Now, with increased demand for majors leading to the highest-paying careers, students must apply again for admission to majors, and high-achieving students from high-resource communities are most likely to be admitted to the majors that are the most expensive for campuses to offer, though these students pay the same tuition as everyone else.

More colleges also now offer honors programs, and high-achieving students in those programs benefit from smaller classes, more personalized advising, and extra co-curricular opportunities while paying the same as other students.

Bleemer and Rothstein find little evidence in the literature for any arguments that these inequalities are efficient. The find little empirical support for arguments that higher investments in higher achieving students generates public good, little evidence that highly competitive admissions to elite programs motivate high school students to work harder, no evidence that students in non-elite colleges couldn't also benefit from more generous investments in their education.

All of this inequality in higher education has instead been a policy choice that benefits the children of those in power.

Colleges and universities in the United States are highly stratified by students’ pre-college academic achievement, with the highest-achieving students attending colleges that spend dramatically more on instruction than those that lower-achieving students attend. Neither of these is a necessary feature of a higher education market; universities need not be as stratified by academic achievement as they are in the United States, nor do resources need to be so inequitably distributed. There is little economic evidence justifying the status quo on efficiency grounds, and substantial room for skepticism.

Matt Barnum's summary of the study in Chalkbeat succinctly drives home the point:

The result is that American higher education widens the inequality of opportunity that begins in childhood. This system is not simply the result of free choices in a free market; it is supported, subsidized, and, in the case of public universities, created by the government.

And studies like this are why I believe so strongly in teaching explicitly about social class inequalities across the curriculum and in mentoring poor and working-class students in analyzing power that works against them.

Because simply assuming that wealthy students deserve so many more resources than the vast majority of students – in kindergarten or in college – does not serve any of us well.

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.