Classism and Higher Education
One of the most classist systems in the U.S. is higher education. We don't mean to be; we really try to be egalitarian and open access and student-centered and all that. Yet I see the innate classism all the time.
What I mean by classism here is also a form of cluelessness for those who grew up in, perhaps, more privileged circumstances. It might also be mixed with racism from a majority culture member toward a minority culture member, and therefore an assumption of "less than." Less prepared, less really interested in improving themselves intellectually, less aware of the real value of education beyond career readiness, maybe less intelligent.
It may also stem from an idealized vision of what college education should be: four years of living in a dormitory, making friends for life, being fascinated by brilliant professors and life-changing content and books, being done in four years, rarely worrying about finances. Where this ideal comes from, I am not sure; What this dream forgets is that in those four years students have no children to raise, no car payments, no sick parents to care for. Either the students in this scenario have parents who pay for it all, or they live frugally knowing there would be a pay-off later.
I lived the second one; my college years at a fundamentalist private college were four and a half years of working 30-40 hours a week on a campus job, late nights, restrictions due the archaic rules of the college (ridiculous by today's standards), no vehicle, rare dates, even rarer times eating out. They are not a time I look back to. My mother and brothers were on Social Security but couldn't spar me any. No Pell was available.
What triggered this rant was an online meeting with a statewide committee I belong to for our University System. The point of the committee is irrelevant; the conversation would take place on any committee. A member was talking about how poor and benighted the students on her campus were, how hard it was for them to pay for things related to their education, how hard they work and that they have jobs, etc. The underlying message, these students should have our pity and we really can't expect the same of them that we did in college because of their backgrounds (which we really don't know that much about, and make assumptions on).
But are the students that disadvantaged? Are they paying for their educations because (a) their parents make too much money but don't want to spend it on college, therefore the students get no Pell money) or (b) they are estranged from their parents and have to pay their own bills, or (c) they lost their Pell due to bad grades?
I know these students in a public college. They are not as poor, underprivileged, unenlightened, downtrodden as our rhetoric would have us think. We are not transforming their lives like missionaries. We are not their servants and they are the customers, either. But they do see education transactionally rather than as an ongoing, life-time enrichment that is so much more than job training.
The right has an expression, "The soft bigotry of low expectations." I think it applies. Of course, there is another whole issue overlaid here. For about a decade, access was the watch-word--make our institutions open. Then they were open, but students weren't graduating; PRG was very low. This is a complicated problem. With lowered numbers of students (due to lower birthrates) coming in the near future, we now focus on keeping them in college and finishing--a much harder task than getting them in the door.
But back to classism. The professoriate is a profession; not one that is particularly well paid in all (most) instances, but a profession that takes at least seven years of post-secondary education to get into, sometimes more. So with it comes middle class values, a relic of a time when working class/middle class/professional class were well defined in terms of number, education, and prestige.
What I mean by classism here is also a form of cluelessness for those who grew up in, perhaps, more privileged circumstances. It might also be mixed with racism from a majority culture member toward a minority culture member, and therefore an assumption of "less than." Less prepared, less really interested in improving themselves intellectually, less aware of the real value of education beyond career readiness, maybe less intelligent.
It may also stem from an idealized vision of what college education should be: four years of living in a dormitory, making friends for life, being fascinated by brilliant professors and life-changing content and books, being done in four years, rarely worrying about finances. Where this ideal comes from, I am not sure; What this dream forgets is that in those four years students have no children to raise, no car payments, no sick parents to care for. Either the students in this scenario have parents who pay for it all, or they live frugally knowing there would be a pay-off later.
I lived the second one; my college years at a fundamentalist private college were four and a half years of working 30-40 hours a week on a campus job, late nights, restrictions due the archaic rules of the college (ridiculous by today's standards), no vehicle, rare dates, even rarer times eating out. They are not a time I look back to. My mother and brothers were on Social Security but couldn't spar me any. No Pell was available.
What triggered this rant was an online meeting with a statewide committee I belong to for our University System. The point of the committee is irrelevant; the conversation would take place on any committee. A member was talking about how poor and benighted the students on her campus were, how hard it was for them to pay for things related to their education, how hard they work and that they have jobs, etc. The underlying message, these students should have our pity and we really can't expect the same of them that we did in college because of their backgrounds (which we really don't know that much about, and make assumptions on).
But are the students that disadvantaged? Are they paying for their educations because (a) their parents make too much money but don't want to spend it on college, therefore the students get no Pell money) or (b) they are estranged from their parents and have to pay their own bills, or (c) they lost their Pell due to bad grades?
I know these students in a public college. They are not as poor, underprivileged, unenlightened, downtrodden as our rhetoric would have us think. We are not transforming their lives like missionaries. We are not their servants and they are the customers, either. But they do see education transactionally rather than as an ongoing, life-time enrichment that is so much more than job training.
The right has an expression, "The soft bigotry of low expectations." I think it applies. Of course, there is another whole issue overlaid here. For about a decade, access was the watch-word--make our institutions open. Then they were open, but students weren't graduating; PRG was very low. This is a complicated problem. With lowered numbers of students (due to lower birthrates) coming in the near future, we now focus on keeping them in college and finishing--a much harder task than getting them in the door.
But back to classism. The professoriate is a profession; not one that is particularly well paid in all (most) instances, but a profession that takes at least seven years of post-secondary education to get into, sometimes more. So with it comes middle class values, a relic of a time when working class/middle class/professional class were well defined in terms of number, education, and prestige.
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