Some of the Democratic candidates for president spend a lot of time talking about free college education. This is a complicated and important issue, as too many students who should be in college cannot afford to attend, and many of them come from underrepresented groups. Low- and middle-income underrepresented students who are able to attend college are often supported by generous scholarships from elite schools that are under huge pressure to diversify their student bodies.
Missing from this discussion is the fact that comprehensive diversity is not just good for those students, it is key to the survival of these same elite institutions. Colleges can wait for universal free college or they can do something that matters right now: Invest more resources into recruiting and supporting students from underrepresented communities.
Scholarship students often arrive on campus and find themselves in unfamiliar territory. Many are first-generation college-going students who are away from their families for the first time, and they encounter a much less diverse environment than the one they expected, or to which they are accustomed, and a level of privilege among their college peers they have never seen. This privilege is manifest in how other students dress, the time and resources they have for sports, extracurriculars, visits home and other leisure activities. This is time many scholarship students use to work to supplement their scholarships.
Surrounded by this privilege, many first-generation and students of color report feeling isolated and a sense that, despite the wooing they received by college admissions counselors, they do not belong. The culture shock that underrepresented students face on predominantly White campuses is poignantly described by Michelle Obama, who attended Princeton on a tuition scholarship, in her bestseller, Becoming, and was recently recounted by Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack in the New York Times magazine: “Just walking through the campus gates unavoidably heightens these students’ awareness and experience of the deep inequalities around them,” the Miami-raised Harvard University professor wrote about being a first-generation scholarship student at Amherst College.
The social isolation and its effects can lead to lower retention and graduation rates among underrepresented students, exacerbating a persistent achievement gap between African-American and Latino students, on the one hand, and their White and Asian peers, on the other.
The underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic groups on college campuses can also lead to the surfacing of racism and other forms of discrimination that lead to incidents of harassment, and worse. These issues are well known on college campuses and many are expanding their diversity offices and their student support infrastructures in response.
But this is not enough.
