ABSTRACT
Higher education in the United States is depressingly stratified. Lower-income students are more likely to not go to college than their wealthy peers. If they do go, they are more likely to attend for-profit, community, and less-selective colleges, which have fewer resources to support students and lower graduation rates. New diversity means new responsibilities. Colleges are prepared to admit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, at least more so than they were twenty years ago. Stacy and Jessie, two black, lower-income first-generation college students at Renowned University, speak about segregated life below the poverty line. Stacy travels along this alternative route to Renowned. The oxymoronic quality of Privileged Poor is intentional, intended to inspire thinking about what aspects of a student's life before college prepares them for life therein. Students like Stacy learn to see authority figures as authority figures and they should keep their distance.
