I went down a bit of a research wormhole today, I was doing my reading for The American Community College and found a line that I couldn’t get out of my head.
“the result is that 74% of students at the nations top 146 colleges come from the richest socioeconomic quartile and just 3% come from the poorest quartile” Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose
This was in comparison to the 26% of students from the poorest quartile that attend Community Colleges. During my last year at Beloit College, Olivia Love and I got an unexpected check from the college and when we started asking questions, Olivia was told that there was left over money and it went to the poorest 30 students at the school, the bottom 2.5% out of our classmates. Using the same metrics that Carnevale and Rose used to determine the top 146 schools in 2004, I looked at Beloit college and found that it was in the top two tiers of most competitive/ highly competitive plus, their cut off for the top schools.
I had a strong suspicion that Olivia and I would fall into the poorest of the poor category. We both grew up hovering at or just below the poverty level, we met as children and reconnected at our local community college, College of Lake County. Olivia was there to finish high school (always a brilliant student, never challenged enough by her local public high school) and I was there after just barely managing to graduate high school, with a GPA so low that it was below most colleges cut off for admission.
I will defend Community Colleges until I take my dying breath, they are amazing resources that folks from all different walks of life have access to. For me, I was able to build my confidence in school. For the first time I got an A in a class, and my professors encouraged me and I felt a new fire. Both Olivia and I were able to work along going to classes, as did most of the students in our classes.
I didn’t have the social/familial capital to know how to set my sights on a college and apply, so once I was in my 3rd year of Community College I thought that would be the end of my formal education journey, and I heavily considered applying for a banker promotion at my job. Olivia had applied to a handful of colleges in Wisconsin and Beloit seemed really appealing to her and Susan, Olivia’s mother and my good family friend. They pulled me aside for an intervention of sorts and helped me look at 4 year colleges, I didn’t understand that students like us (poor) could go to a baccalaureate granting institution. I had gone to CLC for free because of federal aid, and they showed me that Beloit offered generous financial aid packages to poor families too.
We both applied and were accepted. Olivia and I lived together for our first year, non-traditional students against the bougie world that is Beloit. We both acclimated well (with our own missteps and terrible stories, no doubt) but we made it.
At Beloit we represent/ed the 2.5% of the poorest students, in the nation we represent the 3% of students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile attending one of the top colleges in the top two tiers of selectivity in the United States.
Olivia has been on the Dean’s List every semester she has attended Beloit, she has starred in musicals and made long lasting friendships. She still works multiple jobs, a reality of low-income students and a habit that will probably never go away.
I started my first semester of grad-school at UW-Madison in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis program, with an emphasis on Higher Education Student Affairs, it is the #1 program of its kind in the United States.
Is this a Community College success story? Is this a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” example? How many students out of that 3% graduate from the “top-colleges” that they got into? At what cost- emotionally and financially?
Olivia and I both still experience imposter-syndrome in our respective spaces, I’ve been told that no matter how much success we have that feeling will never go away.
Written by: Willow Wallis