87
Volume:
2019
,
September

After Acceptance

Submitted By:
Ian Rumsey, The Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, NY

I Was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t the Hard Part. by Anthony Abraham Jack
New York Times Magazine, September 10, 2019

Drawing from his experience as a first-generation college student attending Amherst College, Anthony Abraham Jack illustrates the difficulties that low-income students face when they arrive on campuses across the country. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds must deal with the twin challenges of navigating unfamiliar waters – deans’ office hours or invitations to join professors for coffee – along with those all too familiar – managing food insecurity or difficult news from back home. The resulting penalty these students must pay in terms of time and energy, both physical and emotional, requires that institutions rise to meet their needs. Though Jack describes his time in post-secondary institutions, his insight is no less applicable to independent schools that admit low-income families. While students in PreK-12 settings may not be managing their family’s SNAP benefits (though some, perhaps, are), there are, for many, enormous obstacles that must be overcome before learning can begin. Jack’s article suggests that independent schools must first recognize the specific needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Once they have done so, an institutional prerogative exists to creatively problem solve, alongside those students and their families, ways to alleviate disadvantage created by those needs.

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