Or something.

Via New Republic:

… While there’s a correlation between first-gen and low-income, the biggest problems Pappano cites—students’ inability to afford textbooks and extracurricular activities, for instance—would also apply to any low-income students whose parents had gone to college. The challenges are primarily financial, not cultural. So why, then, are we reading about which students had access to “daily doses of NPR”? Does repeated exposure to Terry Gross cover tuition and living expenses?

This is only the latest example of a long-running campus conversation about the subtle, cultural ways in which class asserts—a conversation that all too often ignores the realities of economic inequality. Privilege workshops and introspections abound in higher education, yet there’s scant evidence that increased awareness will reduce the underlying financial obstacles.

In other words, checking everyone’s privilege at Harvard won’t somehow increase the economic diversity of its students. Only real policies, not hand-wringing workshops, can accomplish that. It’s time the conversation about privilege shifted accordingly.

After a few years of hearing that privilege explains it all, maybe we’ll now start seeing a renewed focus on economic inequality. Which is not to say that many of the cultural obstacles Pappano highlights aren’t real concerns. They’re just not the make-or-break issues. If you have to deal with financial-aid bureaucracy that your classmates don’t, and if you’re in danger of dropping out for financial reasons, you’re at a huge tangible disadvantage. But it’s easier for schools to address cultural obliviousness than financial affordability. It’s easier for everyone—university administrators, journalists, and students themselves—to talk about “first-gen” students than low-income ones. […]

The problem isn’t that rich kids are insufficiently discreet about their lavish vacations. It’s that being so rich still—even with tuition reform—helps get students into elite colleges. Bigger still, what about kids from poor and middle-class families who don’t land a Harvard scholarship, and ending up trying to pay their way through community college? Having a “privilege” conversation that focuses heavily on upward mobility—that is, on the indignities temporarily faced by the highest-performing poor students before they, in turn, become successful and send their kids to Harvard—gives the impression that class struggle in America consists of the stress of moving into the upper class. For most Americans, the stress comes from knowing they never will.