What We’re Reading — NYT: The Implicit Punishment of Daring to Go to College When Poor

By Enoch Jemmott April 5, 2019
<p>Students walk on the campus of Queens College Flushing, NY. (Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)</p>

Students walk on the campus of Queens College Flushing, NY. (Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

Mr. Jemmott is a senior at Queens College.

This piece appeared in The New York Times on March 28, 2019:

A documentary to be screened on Capitol Hill next month, in which I am featured, chronicles the experience of low-income students navigating college admissions.

When I heard that federal prosecutors were charging 50 people in six states for a college admissions bribery scheme and read the accounts that followed, outlining all of the other extensive, mostly legal, help that applicants from rich families get, it underscored how different the admissions experience was for me and my high school classmates in Canarsie.

The Canarsie neighborhood of eastern Brooklyn is an hour subway ride from the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan and a world away from the door-opening privileges enjoyed by the children of households in “good” school districts (much less the dirty-rich families implicated in the bribery scandal.) Many of us came from low-income families, and few had parents who had attended college. We vaguely knew that college was crucial for future success, but we had little understanding of how to get there — and no idea how difficult it would be to navigate the process.

Read the rest of this piece at the New York Times.