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.

Invisible no more: How advising programs are finding new talent for top colleges

But a growing movement of nonprofit talent hunters and advisers is seeking to raise the ambitions of disadvantaged students and connect them with premier colleges, attacking a widespread problem researchers call “undermatching.” Some are helping eye-catching numbers of students land at colleges with low admission rates, including Georgetown University in Washington.

.. Most disadvantaged students with strong academic credentials “just don’t get why it is that they should be interested in applying to a selective college,” said Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford University economist. They take one look at the sticker price of private colleges, often exceeding $60,000 a year, and write them off. They don’t realize financial aid can put schools with small class sizes and high graduation rates within their reach. Instead, Hoxby said, these students focus on community colleges or others they see as accessible, inexpensive and ­convenient.

.. in a 2012 study that at least 25,000 low-income students a year, and probably 35,000, rank in the top 10 percent on SAT or ACT admission test scores and have at least an ­A-minus average. Most of them, Hoxby and Avery found, do not apply to any selective college — rendering them effectively invisible to admissions officers.

.. The Hoxby-Avery study rang alarms. It suggested selective colleges were overlooking legions of deserving students.

The Top 20 Percent Are the Real ‘Hoarders’ of Wealth

Richard Reeves. In his new book, Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that the upper middle class, or the top 20 percent, is “hoarding” the American Dream.

.. Reeves first points to unequal development of human capital.

By unequal development of human capital, Reeves is talking about parenting and education. Upper middle class parents are more likely to be married, and they’re more likely to plan their pregnancies. A study at the Columbia School of Social Work found that parenting behavior, namely maternal warmth and sensitivity, to be the most important factor of the gap between upper middle class children and bottom-income quintile children. In other words, parenting behavior is more important than maternal education, family size, and race.

Furthermore, upper middle class children generally live in neighborhoods with high-performing public schools, or they attend posh private schools. Upper middle class parents can hire college admissions consultants for upwards of $5,000 to guarantee that their children attend a selective college. Not to mention that most upper middle class parents have often gone through the college admissions process themselves and can help their children succeed.

.. In order to give all children the chance to succeed, Reeves suggest that we

  • curb exclusionary zoning, especially density requirements that prevent multi-family homes from being built in wealthy areas;
  • end legacy admissions at the top colleges in America that inevitably give preference to upper middle class children; and
  • open up internships by increasing regulatory oversight and extending student financial aid to cover summertime opportunities.

.. while Absolute mobility is concerned with whether incomes increase or decrease. Over time, everyone can be better off as the economy grows. Why do we need downward mobility from the top? If everyone’s standards of living are rising, why do we need to be concerned with class status?

..  “increasing the number of smart, poor kids making it to the top of the labor market is likely to mean an improvement in quality and therefore productivity.” Upper middle class people are top influencers in society; they are politicians, pundits, broadcast journalists, and financial analysts. These people should be the most talented people in society, not just the ones lucky enough to be born to rich parents because that is best for the economy. To give one of many examples, a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research determined that fund managers from low-income backgrounds perform better than those from upper middle class backgrounds.