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Here are my two recent encounters with systemic discrimination against the poor in the US education system:
1. This American Life episode 550 Three Miles (recently replayed on either CBC or NPR on satellite radio) highlights how poverty impacts educational opportunities. I would go further and say that this dynamic can be extrapolated from pre-K all the way to higher education, from the quality of the schools, teachers to the lack of a support network all along the way. The Posse Foundation and their scholarships were mentioned and apparently they provide about 640 full college scholarships per year to children from disadvantaged backgrounds (over 10,000 since inception in 1989). Sadly, these scholarships (and others like them) seems like a drop in the bucket (as state funding for higher education has dried up in the past decades) and something that either Uncle Sam is gladly backfilling with the GI Bill or the banks are financing for a mere pound of flesh or mere decades of usurious income garnishment.^1
2. The Atlantic ran a story in 2018 (resurfaced in my FB feed now) about how the marshmallow test is flawed, which barely scratches at the surface at the embedded US classist prejudices iceberg, posing as pseudoscience which reinforces the status quo, hobbles class mobility and implicitly gives a leg up to upper middle class and richer kids when they definitely don't need one.
The confidence angle does have personal relevance to me: less than 18 months after getting off the boat, I was being recruited by MIT (after getting max credits for both AP Calculus exams and partial credit for the first AP Physics exam and being selected twice for the Chicago area ARML teams, first as an alternate and second time on the first team, which incidentally was also the peak of my academic achievements) and I got cold feet feeling like an impostor. I chose a local private four-year engineering college instead.
When that fizzled out due to my delayed green card and getting sticker shock on out-of-state tuition costs, I went to a community college for two terms (and managed to pay my own costs with my part time job), then I transferred to a public four-year college and transferred again after one year to a better and nationally renowned public four-year college (where I had to take two part time jobs, one as an underpaid grader and one as an overpaid lab assistant to pay part of my tuition).
When I was advised to apply for a master's program, I decided not to, worried that my school loan debt was already too high and did not want to add more to it. I tried a master's degree ten years later, got accepted to a stats program, but never registered, again worried about costs (as I was still in debt at the time) and because I was between jobs at the time (working part time as a tutor for $15/hour, with dwindling savings and no rich parents to fall back on).
Lastly, I terminated contacts with recruiters at Google and Amazon again due to feeling like an impostor, the Amazon one after passing a local round of interviews (although I was told that the local Amazon office was quite desperate for fresh bodies given their terrible work-life balance and high overturn).
Notes:
^1. I find it inconsistent and quite unfair that the pensions (PAYGO model) are effectively funded by current working generations for previous generations, but that young Americans (and to some extent Canadians) have to fund their own educations (either through their parents money by the more affluent or by working while studying and/or through loans against their own futures by the poor). There is more to be said about the wide distribution of the quality of those educations (and the deleterious effect mostly on the poor) or the alumni networks impact or the legacy model, but that is a whole different topic on its own.
1. This American Life episode 550 Three Miles (recently replayed on either CBC or NPR on satellite radio) highlights how poverty impacts educational opportunities. I would go further and say that this dynamic can be extrapolated from pre-K all the way to higher education, from the quality of the schools, teachers to the lack of a support network all along the way. The Posse Foundation and their scholarships were mentioned and apparently they provide about 640 full college scholarships per year to children from disadvantaged backgrounds (over 10,000 since inception in 1989). Sadly, these scholarships (and others like them) seems like a drop in the bucket (as state funding for higher education has dried up in the past decades) and something that either Uncle Sam is gladly backfilling with the GI Bill or the banks are financing for a mere pound of flesh or mere decades of usurious income garnishment.^1
2. The Atlantic ran a story in 2018 (resurfaced in my FB feed now) about how the marshmallow test is flawed, which barely scratches at the surface at the embedded US classist prejudices iceberg, posing as pseudoscience which reinforces the status quo, hobbles class mobility and implicitly gives a leg up to upper middle class and richer kids when they definitely don't need one.
The confidence angle does have personal relevance to me: less than 18 months after getting off the boat, I was being recruited by MIT (after getting max credits for both AP Calculus exams and partial credit for the first AP Physics exam and being selected twice for the Chicago area ARML teams, first as an alternate and second time on the first team, which incidentally was also the peak of my academic achievements) and I got cold feet feeling like an impostor. I chose a local private four-year engineering college instead.
When that fizzled out due to my delayed green card and getting sticker shock on out-of-state tuition costs, I went to a community college for two terms (and managed to pay my own costs with my part time job), then I transferred to a public four-year college and transferred again after one year to a better and nationally renowned public four-year college (where I had to take two part time jobs, one as an underpaid grader and one as an overpaid lab assistant to pay part of my tuition).
When I was advised to apply for a master's program, I decided not to, worried that my school loan debt was already too high and did not want to add more to it. I tried a master's degree ten years later, got accepted to a stats program, but never registered, again worried about costs (as I was still in debt at the time) and because I was between jobs at the time (working part time as a tutor for $15/hour, with dwindling savings and no rich parents to fall back on).
Lastly, I terminated contacts with recruiters at Google and Amazon again due to feeling like an impostor, the Amazon one after passing a local round of interviews (although I was told that the local Amazon office was quite desperate for fresh bodies given their terrible work-life balance and high overturn).
Notes:
^1. I find it inconsistent and quite unfair that the pensions (PAYGO model) are effectively funded by current working generations for previous generations, but that young Americans (and to some extent Canadians) have to fund their own educations (either through their parents money by the more affluent or by working while studying and/or through loans against their own futures by the poor). There is more to be said about the wide distribution of the quality of those educations (and the deleterious effect mostly on the poor) or the alumni networks impact or the legacy model, but that is a whole different topic on its own.
