Jourdan Shepard, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, created a lively blogosphere debate with his online post decrying the expectation that students will aspire to elitism and classism at the historically Black all male college. “Every August, a new freshman class walks through the gates of the school and into the campus gymnasium only to have their older brothers try to transform them into Black elites,” Shepard wrote late last year as the Morehouse correspondent for NewsOne.com, an online aggregator of news targeted at Black Americans. “Yes, Morehouse does tell their freshmen what is expected, but the bravado has seemed to overshadow the greater good. This is a problem.”
What drew Shepard’s ire is the sense of elitism and entitlement among a certain group of students on strutting across his campus green. According to a growing body of scholarly literature, class stratification on college campuses may well be an immutable barrier that increasingly divides affluent students from their less well-off classmates, threatening the long-cherished ideal that a college education serves as the great equalizer of society.
The Big Three
Even as college campuses herald their efforts to lower racial barriers, especially at the most elite, predominately White colleges, some observers note that economic disparities among college students is creating a situation where affluent students have one experience and poor students have an entirely different one. Several academics have looked at what Shepard called “a problem,” and their findings are far from definitive. Their scholarship suggests, however, that class distinction is nothing new on college campuses, but nevertheless deserves greater attention if institutions desire to improve the educational experience for poorer students.
Indeed, Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociology professor at Princeton University, said scholars on college campuses have long been aware of and concerned about what he labeled the big-three axis of inequality on campuses — racial, gender and class distinctions — that affect student performance and outcomes.
“There’s nothing new to those of us on the faculty of sociology departments about how class differences impact our students,” he said in a recent interview. “We’ve been studying this for years, and it’s a part of the sociologist DNA to be concerned about these issues, even when the larger society hasn’t paid as much attention to it as we consistently have.”
A Growing Divide
