Nataly Delcid is a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Opinion At private school, my family’s income sets me apart more than ethnicity
At my local public high school, my geometry teacher joked with my class by telling us we were going to Harvard whenever we would answer a question right. Despite all the effort the university put into the robust affirmative action program that the Supreme Court just struck down, the image of us strolling through Harvard Yard was comical. No one like us had gone to a school like that. One of my peers remarked that students who made it to the Ivy League didn’t seem like “real people.”
For me, that all changed on my 16th birthday. After two years of building a case for admission that included Advanced Placement classes, editing the yearbook, interning at a tech start-up and competing in varsity lacrosse, Exeter notified me of my acceptance with nearly full financial aid. At Exeter, for the first time, I was surrounded by students from wealthy, educated families who constantly affirmed their potential — kids who had been told their whole lives they could do anything they want. Expectations, to say the least, were different. At Exeter, going to Harvard wasn’t a funny dream, it was a perfectly reasonable goal.
Other things were different, too, of course. Classes with fewer than 12 students debated political theories, often guided by teachers with PhDs. I could walk downstairs and knock on my math teacher’s door after dinner or on a Saturday night to get tutoring. At my public school, teachers oversaw 30 students reading out of old textbooks. Our bathrooms often had their toilet seats and doors stolen. And the school couldn’t set up a print student newspaper because of the cost.
One thing that wasn’t different? There were lots of non-White faces around me — just like at my public school. Exeter’s student body is quite racially diverse, with more than half of its students identifying as people of color.
But racial diversity does not necessarily mean economic diversity. About half of Exeter families pay more than $60,000 annually to attend — nearly as much as the median household income in the United States. Similarly, at Harvard, 71 percent of Black, Hispanic and Native American students come from wealthy homes.
And that’s the deeper reality I confronted at Exeter. Other minority students have attended private schools since they were toddlers, and I was different. Money, not my ethnic background, prevented me from accessing those same opportunities. Such a financial chasm can have an enormous impact. According to a 2011 Stanford University analysis, for instance, the academic achievement gap between high- and low-income families is nearly twice as large as the Black-White achievement gap, and the disparity has shown no sign of closing. My ethnicity never held me back from what I could achieve; growing up under-resourced did.
As a nation, we put too much emphasis on the appearance of diversity. But diversity is more than a picture of a multiracial friend group studying together on an academic quad. It’s about that friend group exchanging ideas to create a future in which the next generation develops a more nuanced way of looking at the world. If you admit an entire body of students from diverse races and ethnicities but with the same kind of upbringing, you’ll still end up producing a lot of people who think the same way.
It is shallow for institutions to group students by racial and ethnic identities because there is an inherent assumption that people from the same group come from the same walk of life. In reality, students from the same economic and educational background can have far more in common than students who click the same box on a college application.
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on affirmative action has higher education asking a simple question: What now? My experience suggests the answer. Colleges should not use race as a tool to measure diversity; they should use the actual characteristics they stereotype with race. Considering diversity in income, familial education statuses and other learning barriers will yield a class truly diverse in race, ethnicity and thought.