FGLI Unmasked

The podcast episode discusses the experiences of first-generation and low-income undergraduates at the University of Virginia (UVA). It questions whether admittance rates alone are a fair measure of the status of marginalized students on campus. The stories from students highlight the challenges they face and the disparities in income and background between them and their peers. The episode also examines the impact of these disparities on academic pursuits and daily life. It concludes by suggesting that inclusion alone is not enough to address the classism in the educational system, and that universities need to prioritize intellectual values over financial incentives. Hello, my name is Mariana Sherry and this is UVA FGLI Unmasked. In this episode we will be uncovering the hidden lives of first-generation and low-income undergraduates at this University. The University of Virginia espouses a doctrine of meritocracy for students of all backgrounds. In 2017, UVA Today published a report entitled Diversity on the Rise, basing UVA's strides in inclusion. As of the release of this report, 38.4% of UVA's incoming class demonstrated financial need, and 13% were Pell Grant recipients. However, are admittance rates alone a fair standard of measure for the status of marginalized students on Grounds? Let's hear from some of these students to get a better picture of what life really looks like as an FGLI academic on Grounds. Today we have Ruth Bessie, an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences. So Ruth, can you tell me a little bit about your academic background? Yes, so I went to high school in Nova, that's northern Virginia, and my school was an IB school and I pursued the IB diploma. And now I'm here and I'm majoring in chemistry and minoring in data analytics. And what brought you to UVA in particular? I just wanted to be academically challenged and my parents didn't really want me going too far, so I thought that the school would be the best fit for me. Is there anything in particular that sets you apart from the standard UVA student? I would say that I face just like a unique set of challenges. Like my mother is pursuing a degree in like LPN, that's like licensed practitioner nursing, and I often have to help her with like assignments and things like that. And I would just say like my family dynamic is not like representative of the average UVA student. Yeah, and I just often have to kind of accommodate for both sectors of my life. Yeah, and I can get like mentally taxing I think. And how do you see those differences manifest in your day-to-day life? I would say the biggest thing is just like being conscious of like others around me and how I just treat others and just talk to other people in general. I mostly see this amplified with like just staff like workers at the university for example. So like dining hall workers or bus drivers or just like truly anybody in general. It's just like a different kind of care or just like just conscious thought when you're speaking to those people. It's just I think a different take on like authority and how we perceive authority and just like I think just people that are older than us in general. I can completely understand how dehumanizing it can feel to see the treatment of others by our peers on this campus to people we are demographically similar to. It is definitely a wake-up call. Would you say that this kind of caught between two worlds phenomena like impacts how you approach your academics? I would definitely say it has some sort of impact. I think I'm more like I'm a person that's like very regimented with how I just pursue my academics in general. Like I have like a set schedule for like my day-to-day or like week-to-week and like I often find myself like accommodating for like my family like and it's just like it just it kind of just breaks up my like you know like my regimented like schedule and I kind of have to plan my yeah I just always keep my family in the back of my mind. It's never just a solo like how I'm gonna get there and how I'm gonna complete a task. Thank you so much for sharing. Of course. Put in their demographic context these stories make sense. The median family income of a student from UVA is $155,500 which is double the national average. 67% of students come from the top 20%. The average income is in the 81st percentile of U.S. household incomes. Only 2.8% of students are from the bottom quintile in comparison to the 67% which come from the top. These disparities in which you enter an environment dominated by those of a different class background engender feelings of isolation, helplessness, and inefficacy. There's a certain illegibility that comes from the inability to connect with the broad majority of your peers in which your experiences simply are not tangible to them and walking through the world in which your peers simply cannot understand the background that you came from is a psychic burden that unlike imposter syndrome has not been discussed in much literature around the admittance of students of low income backgrounds into these higher education spaces. And now we have Anna, an undergraduate in the School of Architecture. Anna, do you mind telling us a little bit about your academic background? Sure. So my high school had a scientific research program which many schools across the nation have. In my high school in particular because I'm from New York so it was a low income and very heavily immigrant based population or demographic and so the scientific research program or women's basketball were the two ways for you to get to college outside of the programs our school was very underfunded and overcrowded so those quite competitive programs may I add were the two paths to college and not that success couldn't be found outside of those programs but those were really the two ways. So what brought you to the University of Virginia in particular? Um so I applied to college through QuestBridge which if you don't know it's a scholarship program for low income students. But I didn't know anything about the school here and then it just so happened that it was one of the schools I got into and offered me the best scholarship out of all of them so after appealing my financial aid in that process I committed here. So do you mind explaining a little bit how the appeals process and how sorting out financial aid and all those other processes as an independent student not connected to a private organization how navigating that yourself kind of went as a first year student? Um I would say quite honestly like definitely one of the most stressful experiences I've ever had. My parents were attempting to navigate the tax system and everything with that and getting those documents together to prove that you know the income level is what it is. However my parents are undocumented so I can't qualify for any like Planner Plus loans or any type of loans in which you need a co-signer. I cannot get a co-signer so I essentially had to write an appeal saying that I couldn't qualify but when asked why it's kind of like um and there's a lot of fear around that especially you know considering our political climate. My parents have a lot of you know qualms about talking about it so a long process a lot of emails back and forth with financial aid, with the deans of admissions, the presidents of the college but eventually I was able to qualify for an additional scholarship under UVA and that's what allowed me to commit here. Yeah yourself as a student here how do these disparities manifest in your daily life? I think simply like the way we are able to navigate social life even with academics quite honestly just like to think of the classes you take like every time you take a class and needing textbooks and other things like that like it's not just a it's not a like mindless click of whether or not like you are getting that thing it's searching the entire internet to see if you can find the pdf for free and so yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your story. The under-enrollment of low-income students is not exclusive to the University of Virginia. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score children from families in the top 1% were 34% more likely to be admitted than the average applicant and for those from the top 0.1% were more than twice as likely to get in. Colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and recruited athletes and gave children from private schools higher non-academic ratings. These policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1%. In a world in which academic success has morphed into a class signifier rather than a specialization in an area of interest degrees amount to this as well. This system has reflected in an over admittance of wealthy students with no academic direction who are placed in collegiate environments simply for the experience and low-income students actually pursuing their areas of interest having to work twice as hard to get to the very same places and then put in the same rooms as these students with disparate interests involved. Low-income students are not rewarded for their intellect but for effectively conforming to upper class norms. This configuration benefits no one as both high and low-income youth who may not be passionate about furthering their studies are funneled into this path arbitrarily. This is obviously more detrimental to low-income students who do not have the same safety nets to fall back on. This also potentially poses impossible barriers to students who have the potential to exceed in academia but do not have the resources to do so. This phenomenon is exemplified in the podcast Three Miles through which the structural process of private scholarships necessarily exclude and disengage potential students. Taking the lived experiences of first-gen and low-income students into account it is evident that inclusion alone is not enough to mitigate the inherent classism imbued in our educational system. It is only through the restoration of intellectual values and the disentanglement of capital incentives that universities such as UVA can adequately fulfill their purpose as institutions to educate.