This is a very sensational book in the United States, and the author entered Harvard University. As one of the lucky ones of the cold disciples, the author interviewed the same kind of partners who broke through inequality in the form of fieldwork, but he raised a deeper question - how more double poor students entered the university than the cold lucky ones, but could not integrate, and then led to failure. That is, elite universities have actually turned their backs on poor students. Hanmen disciples go to college, which is a worldwide topic. According to statistics, the proportion of poor students in Chinese universities accounts for about 20%. The disparity between the rich and the poor has brought about the solidification of intergenerational mobility, how to start with education? Each country has a different programme. From the support of this American scholar, we can also glimpse the chronic diseases of American society in education, and inspire us to do a good job in the educational fairness of socialism with Chinese characteristics. To this end, the lecture hall has compiled some chapters of the book "Cold Disciples Going to College" for the benefit of readers.
"Cold Door Children Go to College" [Beauty] by Anthony Abraham Jack Tian Lei Sun Jingchao Translation Editor Wang Chenchen Life, Reading, Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore published in June 2021
【Excerpts from the text】
This book chronicles the campus life of today's American college students, and when I started writing, it was nearly two decades since the first loan-free student policies were launched. It is true that the reform of the student aid policy has brought about significant changes in the composition of the undergraduate student population, allowing the rich and the poor to coexist on the university campus. However, to be a "citizen" in any community does not mean more than just the presence of the body in a certain place. It also needs to be emotionally attributed to that place, the kind of emotion that shapes who you think you are. And the many stories told in this book are also forcing us to see a painful truth: being admitted does not mean being able to fit in. When poor students arrive at elite universities, they have to go through all kinds of struggles; To help them succeed, what changes we need to make, not just on campus but beyond the university.
Taking the "past seriously": diversity of poor students
Researchers and university administrators often think that the world's poor students are the same, which erases the huge differences between poor students. To understand current students, universities must first understand their past.
* The "birth gap" between the double poor students and the cold lucky ones is not all
To understand the social life of undergraduates from poor families, our approach must be consistent with the complexities inherent in the "poor" group itself. Speaking of this complexity, from beginning to end, I emphasize one dimension, which is the difference between a double poor student and a poor lucky person. The difference is that although they are both students from low-income families, one group has attended a preparatory high school before going to college, and the other group has not, which reveals the flaws of a large number of current sociological research: scholars pay too much attention to the origin of students' families, and the family background solidifies the class structure.
How children are socialized depends on the class status of their original families——— and such ways of thinking have led to a rigid understanding that when these children enter adolescence and reach college, whether they can obtain the cultural capital they need also depends on the family situation. As the book's account of student life at Yingjie University shows, cultural capital is passed from parents to children, but that's not the whole story. The point is that you can't just look at a student's original family, but look at the experiences within the full spectrum that shape a student and his various abilities.
* Neighborhood communities and high schools are prevalent in segregation and widespread poverty as key points
I believe that we must examine the experiences of students in neighborhood communities and in secondary schools, as they are "gateway institutions" that exacerbate inequality. This deepens our understanding of the theory——— what shapes the daily experience of undergraduates, and allows us to find practical ways to prepare for the new diversity that universities are currently eagerly pursuing.
The stark contrast between the cold lucky and the double poor students clearly shows that high school constitutes a powerful social force, and the experience of this stage not only shapes the academic tendencies of students when they step into the university door, but also cultivates their abilities——— no matter which university they enter after secondary school, determines whether they can devote themselves to university life and find a sense of belonging on campus. Not only that, but when we look beyond the family, we can perceive the historical legacies of race, especially the upbringing of poor black and Latino students, whose neighborhoods and schools have always prevailed, and how these racist diseases have widened class differences.
* How I benefit from training at the preparatory school as a cold lucky person
I myself was one of the lucky ones in the cold door. When I switched from a local public high school to a wealthy Gulliver Foundation School, the two worlds collided. As I became familiar with Gulliver's new world, I developed a different understanding of social class and race, but also about privilege and poverty. That was the training I did for my later studies at Amherst College——— something my family had never taught, something I could never have learned from expensive books about college life. Speaking of my experiences at Gulliver, they taught me how to manage relationships, whether it is facing rich classmates or teachers with graduate degrees, I can get along with them; Not only that, but I also rehearsed how to get along with my friends and family when I got home.
* Ogun's friend in his hometown was killed when he was a freshman, how can I help him get through it?
Scholars of (higher) education should interact with scholars of urban (and rural) poverty, so that we can better understand the different experiences of young students before and during college. How structural inequality is rooted in neighborhoods and occurs on campuses can more fully grasp this proposition and deepen scholars' understanding of the challenges that students face from middle school to university. This allows for policies to help students integrate into the university campus while being prepared to address the many challenges they face.
Students from poor backgrounds——— especially black and Latino youth, have never been able to escape high crime rates, street violence, disorder, and other social ills in their neighborhoods and schools because of the vicious overlap of slums and apartheids, and even after they enter college, these troubles continue to plague their daily lives.
Ogun encountered this change in her first year of college, when a friend of her hometown was killed. Mental health and counseling centers should be prepared not only to be able to help students walk through the grief of the death of their elders in their homes; When a classmate's brother is unfortunately killed due to a gang firefight, the counselor should also provide corresponding assistance. The same help has to reach poor students from rural areas, who sometimes experience the deaths of friends and family members because of agricultural or mining accidents, black lung disease or the growing morphine crisis.
Recognizing that there are many structural inequalities in our society, and understanding how such inequalities affect student lives, can improve the policies, habits and services of our universities.
* Open and honest discussion of the sources and flows of poverty in the United States will help students to correctly understand themselves
In 2015, the author gave a lecture at Amherst College entitled "Diversity in Elite Universities"
Openly discussing poverty and inequality in the United States——— their origins and ——— and how they unfold on college campuses can also help students get to know themselves. In 2015, I gave a lecture at Amherst College on Diversity in Elite Universities. After the lecture, Maya and Toya, two sophomores, approached me with "Your terms provide us with a language that can tell the difference between the two of us." Toyah had previously attended a private high school, thanks to a scholarship from the White Foundation——— a New Jersey nonprofit that sent outstanding underdogs to private boarding or day middle schools. But Maya stayed in Newark, attending a local public school. Coming from a neighboring community, the two girls became friends, but whenever they talked about their experiences at Amherst, they disagreed and argued. Maya says she often feels lost, but Toyah says she never has. In their view, with the concept of double poor students and cold lucky people, the differences they experience can not only be put back into the context of the college campus, but also pulled back to a deeper perspective——— tracing the inequalities they experienced in neighborhood neighborhoods, and how their very different high school experiences ultimately shaped the lives they experienced in Amherst. Previously, maya and Toya had inevitably focused on individual differences as soon as they discussed, and their debate was therefore like a personal attack, but with the above concept and context, the discussion was elevated to a dialogue about social inequality.
Without incorporating the consequences, injured poor students will refuse to choose a highlight career
I would like to thank the scholars who study the issue of economic stratification, thanks to their work, and we now know that graduating from college can be extremely rewarding, a paper college diploma, reflected in a lifetime of economic income. And now, we have to go back in time from this result, understand how college attendance can drive or hinder this process, and analyze the mechanisms that happen in between. In other words, we don't know enough about the university's function as a springboard for social mobility, about how it can help students succeed in the future, or deepen their current predicament, and we need to look at it more deeply and analyze it in greater detail.
Now, students have received an acceptance letter from an elite university, but that fact alone doesn't mean they can take advantage of the full range of contacts and resources they have access to on campus. On the contrary, there are students, such as Valeria and Miguel, who have closed themselves off from the university community and seem out of place, most of them double poor students. Inside every elite institution, there is an invisible "curriculum" full of unwritten rules, unexplained terms, and a whole bunch of things that insiders take for granted.
When looking for a job, for some undergraduates, the work environment they aspire to is better to be close to their experience at the university, whether it's the similar structure of the people around them or the similarity of elite status, but some students do the opposite and they want to escape. Psychologist Valerie Perdy-Vaughans and her collaborators have studied professionals in the workplace, and they have found that if they have encountered hostile signals from the environment, pointing to a certain identity group, then people tend to avoid similar environments in the future. This phenomenon is the most harmful to double-poor students: if students believe in their hearts that the university has admitted them, promised them a life of intensive academic training and rich social experience, but when they enter the university, and deliberately exclude them from the outside, then when they graduate, they will avoid those lofty jobs and worry about the recurrence of the past.
Looking Ahead: Policy Solutions
Author Anthony Abraham Jack, a poor black kid born in Miami, succeeded as a "lucky man" through his talent and hard work.
From the difference between the poor lucky and the double poor students, we can see how the inequality of opportunity restricts the children of the cold door, not only during the university period, but also back to an earlier stage. The middle school where the double poor students once attended, the teachers were exhausted all day long in school, either to fight for the minimum material treatment or to quell the fights on campus.
* Massive increase in funding to subsidize poor students to go to private colleges and universities, non-collective benefit, which is a complete shirking of responsibility
So, can we conclude that the best solution is to increase funding on a large scale to finance poor students to study in private schools? Support for this programme is growing throughout the country. It must be noted, however, that such a programme would also lead to lasting negative impacts——— i.e., public education would suffer a systematic reduction in investment. Sending poor children to private schools sporadically is not a social policy, but a complete shirking of responsibility. Whether it's programs like Better Opportunities or Preparing for Preparatory Schools, sending students from low-income families to preparatory schools, or initiatives by private schools to provide scholarships to poor students, all of this is well-intentioned effort, but the problem is that it is the individuals, not the collective, who benefit from these programs.
* "Protracted war- investing in resource- and fund-poor communities is confronting the chronic disease of structural inequality
What our country needs now is what sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls "protracted war-like investment" ——— to work tirelessly to transform our public education, especially in underfunded, resource-poor communities. The right answer is to do the opposite, to pour these resources into poor communities that locals can't even think of. As long as poor students also have access to a variety of resources, just like the children of wealthy families of their age, it turns out that they can learn and apply skills that will lay the foundation for success in universities and other mainstream institutions. To bridge this divide of opportunity and resources, we must confront deep-seated structural inequalities——— the reason why so many American communities have long been forgotten and so many public schools have been ignored. With problems deep in the marrow and inequality spreading everywhere, radical change seems impossible. Our current political leaders have yet to show the responsibility or insight to embark on such revolutionary change.
*One method: Cultivate a "college" culture in public high schools and start an "office time" program
But at the state, county, and city policy level, we have a lot to offer, even if it's just starting at a school. For example, high school administrators can foster a "college" culture on campus, allowing students to learn skills that people can use when they get to college. Promising reforms have been launched in some places, including the "Climbing Instruction" program, a support network of adult teachers with graduate degrees that will include middle school students in this network, so that children can learn to deal with their instructors as equal partners. In addition, promoting self-reliance and self-reliance both inside and outside the curriculum and encouraging dealing with adult teachers and leaders can also create a culture of university attendance, and can also help young people establish their own academic pursuits and align with the cultural and social norms of university campuses. Sociologist Hugh Mehan looked at public middle schools in California, and according to his research, these structural changes can really make a difference.
In discussions with teachers, counselors, and secondary school principals, I also discussed the idea that secondary schools might want to align themselves with liberal arts colleges and universities and use the same set of terms used in colleges on campus. For example, some schools have begun to change, calling the teacher's Q&A to students "office time" and even inviting the student's family to participate, so that the student's family is not only involved, but also exposed to the new language. Some of these changes require increased funding for public education, or even perseverance, to elevate practices transplanted from private secondary schools to institutions. With these measures of change, we can bridge the gap between public secondary schools and universities——— the former must provide education for all students from poor backgrounds, while the latter provides the best opportunity for poor students to create a new life, and there can be no world between the former and the university.
*Method 2: Fundamentally solve the problem of food shortages in colleges and universities, and improve scholarships for nutrition
However, relying only on high school to work hard to help middle school students prepare for college life is certainly not enough. At the university level, one way to help students is through scholarships and bursaries, such as the Gates Scholarship, in which funders transfer cash directly to students, thus making up the difference between budget and actual expenses.
Food shortages are a recurring problem in my interviews at Yingjie University, and a persistent problem that has long plagued undergraduate students across the United States. Connecticut College no longer charges fees to students who stay during spring break. Some schools, such as Virginia Commonwealth University and Columbia University, have food supply stations or reserve rooms for students. These initiatives are all pointing in the right direction, but they alone are not enough. Setting up a food supply station on campus is like putting a Band-Aid on a torn wound. We need national policy changes that will help college students across the country.
First, expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to cover undergraduate students; The second is to increase the amount of Pell Scholarships and increase the cash that students can get through this program. Students are provided with more nutritious food that not only benefits their health, but also frees up part of their time to work in shifts and engage in enriching academic and social activities, such as attending celebrity lectures or study groups.
Li Nian edited 20,000 words from the original text of "Closing Remarks After Admission"
【Book Catalog】
Author: Anthony Abraham Jack
Editor: Qian Yichen