Yes, Students at Sarah Lawrence Are Demanding Free Detergent. But There’s More to It Than You Might Think.

Sharon, a junior history major who is part of the Diaspora Coalition, does not fit the trope of a well-to-do Sarah Lawrence student. (She requested that her last name not be used for fear of an online backlash.) Her mother, who died when Sharon was 16, was a maid and a Kmart employee. Her father is a construction worker. She could not have attended Sarah Lawrence, a college she was attracted to because of its small class sizes, if she hadn’t pieced together several scholarships and grants.

More Sarah Lawrence students fit that description than some might realize. Seventeen percent of students at the college receive Pell Grants, according to U.S. Education Department data. Sarah Lawrence’s share of students from families in the bottom 20 percent of earners is 7.5 percent, the fourth-highest among highly selective private colleges, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Equality of Opportunity Project, a group of academics who track inequality in America.

For those students, one load of laundry per week adds up, Sharon said. A washing cycle at Sarah Lawrence costs $1.50, a drying cycle another $1.50. That’s on top of detergent. The price tag could be more than $800 over a four-year stay, a burden heavier on low-income students who already struggle to finance their educations. Lost in the avalanche of ridicule for the demand are legitimate questions about what responsibility colleges have to assist with the basic living needs of their students.

“What you’re hearing in the laundry conversation is that every dollar counts,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a Temple University sociologist who studies socioeconomic and racial inequities. “They’re not saying they expect others to pay for everything. They’re saying the amount they’re being asked to pay is too high. It’s not coming from a sense of entitlement. It frankly reflects a sense of desperation.”

The social-media backlash to the laundry demand represents “a longstanding story of blaming people for not having the money for covering their basic needs,” Goldrick-Rab said, “and characterizing them as lazy and needy. We’ve done the same thing to welfare recipients and Pell Grant recipients. Now we’re doing it to the middle class.”

There’s a large struggling middle class that is neither wealthy nor eligible for Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab said. While Sarah Lawrence offers tuition discounts, cost-of-living expenses could still be a major financial hit for a middle-class family.

.. the Sarah Lawrence protest is placing a stronger emphasis on housing and food insecurity, pushing the college to rethink what it means to support low-income students.

.. Over the past five years, college administrators have started paying far more attention to supporting low-income students, said Kevin Kruger, president of Naspa-Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education. This, he said, is the product of a variety of factors, including better data about the “shocking prevalence of food and housing insecurity,” bigger gaps between Pell Grant assistance and the actual cost of an education, and the recognition that completion rates of low-income students continue to lag at a time when more such students are going to college.

.. “There’s an acknowledgment that financial aid is not enough sometimes,” Kruger said. “Some of the barriers to completion for low-income students go well beyond tuition, and they often go to basic needs. There’s a recognition that a small financial crisis of between $200 to $400 may be enough to derail a student’s enrollment.”

.. The college is in a tough spot. Though expensive to attend, it is not wealthy, with an endowment of $112 million and a heavy dependence on tuition for its operating expenses. Though it received a big chunk of attention, the detergent-and-softener demand might be one of the easiest for the college to meet. Others, such as providing housing for students during winter break and hiring new employees to focus on equity issues, would have a higher price tag.