By Brooke Lea Foster
WHEN ANA BARROS first stepped into Harvard Yard as a freshman, she felt so out of place she might as well have had the words “low income” written on her forehead. A girl from Newark doesn’t belong in a place like Harvard, she thought, as she marveled at how green the elms were, how quaint the cobblestone streets. Back home, where her family lives in a modest house bought from Habitat for Humanity, there wasn’t always money for groceries, and the world seemed gray, sirens blaring at all hours. Her parents, who immigrated to the New York area from Colombia before she was born, spoke Spanish at home. It was at school that Barros learned English. A petite 5-foot-2 with high cheekbones and a head of model-worthy hair, Barros found out in an e-mail that she’d been accepted to Harvard — a full scholarship would give her the means to attend. “I knew at that moment that I’d never suffer in the way that my parents did,” she says.
She opted for a single her freshman year, because she felt self-conscious about sharing a room with someone from a more privileged background. “All you see are class markers everywhere, from the way you dress to the way you talk,” says Barros, now a junior sociology major, as she sits in a grand, high-ceilinged space off the dining room in her Harvard College dorm. During her freshman and sophomore years, Barros hesitated to speak in class because she often mispronounced words — she knew what they meant from her own reading, but she hadn’t said many aloud before, and if she had, there had been no one to correct her. Friends paired off quickly. “You’d get weeded out of friendships based on what you could afford. If someone said let’s go to the Square for dinner and see a movie, you’d move on,” she says. Barros quickly became close with two other low-income students with whom she seemed to have more in common. She couldn’t relate to her peers who talked about buying $200 shirts or planning exotic spring break vacations. “They weren’t always conscious of how these conversations can make other people feel,” she says. In a recent sociology class, Barros’s instructor asked students to state their social class to spark discussion. “Middle,” said one student. “Upper class,” said another. Although she’d become accustomed to sharing her story with faculty, Barros passed. It made her uncomfortable. “Admitting you’re poor to your peers is sometimes too painful,” she says. “Who wants to be that one student in class speaking for everyone?”
For generations, attending an Ivy League college has been practically a birthright for children of the nation’s most elite families. But in 2004, in the hopes of diversifying its student body and giving low-income, high-achieving students a chance at an Ivy League education, Harvard announced a game-changing financial aid campaign: If a student could get in, the school would pick up the tab. (Princeton was the first Ivy to offer poor families the option, in 1998; Yale followed Harvard in 2005.) Families with incomes of less than $40,000 would no longer be expected to contribute to the cost of their student’s education. (In recent years, income eligibility has increased to $65,000, with significant grants awarded to families that make up to $150,000.) Having since been adopted, in one form or another, by all the Ivies, this “zero family contribution” approach opened the gilded doors of top colleges for many of the country’s most disadvantaged students. The number of students awarded a Pell Grant — financial aid of as much as $5,700 given to those with a family income of up to 250 percent of the poverty line, or about $60,000 for a family of four — is considered the best indicator of how many are low-income. At Harvard, where tuition, room, and board is estimated at $58,600, the Pell is a very small part of a student’s financial aid package. Last year, 19.3 percent of eligible Harvard students were awarded a Pell, an 80 percent increase since the admissions policy began 11 years ago. At Brown University, 15 percent of students get a Pell, and at Yale, 14 percent do.
But receiving a full scholarship to an Ivy League school, while a transformative experience for the nation’s poorest students, is only the first hurdle. Once on campus, students report feelings of loneliness, alienation, and plummeting self-confidence. Having grant money for tuition and fees and holding down jobs, too, as virtually all of them do, doesn’t translate to having the pocket money to keep up with free-spending peers. And some disadvantaged students feel they don’t have a right to complain to peers or administrators about anything at all; they don’t want to be perceived as ungrateful.
“IT’S TOTAL CULTURE SHOCK,” says Ted White, a Harvard sophomore. White grew up working class in Jamaica Plain and graduated as valedictorian (he was one of the only white kids in his senior class) from New Mission High School in Hyde Park; his father is an MBTA bus driver. From the start, the Harvard campus didn’t seem built for a kid from a background like his, he says. Classmates came in freshman year having started businesses or nonprofits (usually with their parents’ resources, he says) that could make even a top student wonder if he belonged. “The starting place for all of us isn’t really the same,” he says. White appreciates, for example, that Harvard gives low-income students free tickets to the freshman formal, but they have to pick up the tickets in a different line from everyone else. “It’s clear who is getting free/reduced tickets and who isn’t,” he says — a situation a Harvard spokesperson says the school is working to remedy. At times, White wondered if he’d made the right choice going to Harvard, even if he saw his matriculation, like many low-income students do, as his one shot at leaving his family’s financial struggles behind for good.
Read more:What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school?
Source: Boston Globe
