Introduction

In recent decades, highly selective boarding high schools and universities in the United States that previously seldom accepted students from disadvantaged social classes began to raise the proportion of black, Latino, and other minority students. For example, the proportion of African American students in Columbia University has raised from 0.8% in 1951 to 8% in 2012 (Khan 2012 p.5). Universities, organizations, and the government also have offered scholarships to help minorities to get higher education. As a result, the economic backgrounds of students in elite colleges display great diversity. Jack (2016) categorizes students into three groups based on their respective economic condition: the Doubly Disadvantaged (DD), who grow up and receive education in lower-income communities; the Privileged Poor (PP), who lived in lower-income communities but attended elite high schools; and Middle-and-Upper-Class (MUC), who grow up in higher-income communities and receive elite education. He further suggests a significant cultural gap between DD and MUC students: the high-school education that the DD students receive is much more rigid, with teachers being far-away authorities, of less in-class interaction and cramming as the predominant way to pass the test as opposed to MUC’s education (p. 8-13). Considering that their high school education has normalized active class participation, PP resembles MUC students on class engagement, question-asking, and relationship with professors and teaching assistants (Aries and Seider, 2005). However, there is still a performance gap between PP and MUC students’ at college (Jack, 2016; Collier and David, 2008). But the literature explains little of why the performance gap between the two groups of students still exists although they receive the same high school education. This paper examines this question by differentiating two kinds of resources available to students, cultural and material resources, and analyzing their influences. The cultural resource refers to the contextual and cultural factors such as home, school, and community environments, while the material resource includes socio-economic factors, such as wealth and education resources. I argue that the difference in cultural resource between the PP and the MUC students is the main reason for the inequality in college academic performance.

Cultural Resource

Bourdieu (1977) argues that students in high cultural capitals usually perform better at school, as the teachers communicate with them more easily and give them more attention. This section tries to explain how the difference in cultural resources between PP and MUC students, such as mindset, uncertainty about future, adaptation, and emotional support from family, contributes to their gap of academic performance.

Mindset

People from the lower class understand independence, one of the most representative values of America, in a different way from people from the middle and upper class do. According to Stephens (2014b), the lower class interprets independence as a quality being tough, resilient, and adjustive to the social condition, which he called “hard independence” (pp. 614-616). On the contrary, people from the middle and upper classes consider independence as being able to influence the situation and focus on expressing oneself, which he called expressive independence (pp. 614-616). This distinction has a considerable influence on students' academic performance. Because professors tend to set expectations in conformity with expressive independence when evaluating a student’s performance, the lower class background may cause a lack of sense of belonging at college for the PP students, and at the same time, they cannot figure out why their ways of study do not work, let alone coming up with solutions.

Uncertainty about future

According to Cooper (2014), MUC students are much more worried about their future than DD and PP students do, even if they are more economically competitive. While most PP students are likely to gain higher incomes and social status than their parents, many MUC students struggle for this goal and can hardly achieve it. In fact, Tevington (2018) suggests that MUC students have the same “anxiety” of reproducing the social status of their parents. Although causing uncomfortable feelings, this anxiety plays a vital role in encouraging the MUC students to pursue better academic performance.

Inadequate and Overcorrect Adaptions

PP students’ adaption to elite educational style is usually inadequate or overcorrected. The explanation for inadequate adaption is straightforward: as PP students generally spent their childhood and finished their elementary school in lower-income neighborhoods, it is difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate the influence of their local cultures of education—test-oriented courses, a lack of communication between students and teachers, etc. Jack (2016) also provides an examples for this: Daniel, a student from lower-income community, considered his MUC peers as "kiss-asses"(P. 9). Rather than trying to blend in the majority, Daniel drew a moral boundary between him and "kiss-asses" and highlighted the dignity of achieving high scores by concentrating on individual work. Some PP students still think the way like Daniel and, thus, cannot perform well as the MUC do in college.

The case with overcorrecting adaption is more complicated. Many PP students try hard to eradicate their original mindset, which contains those typical features of low-income community, but sometimes they go too far. These students tend to behave over-actively in class and engage too much with professors, which may create a sense of discomfort for the professors. PP students’ origin can help explain this phenomenon: they upscale to elite schools from poor areas, so they treasure every opportunity. By contrast, MUC students take these education resources for granted because they have access to them ever since they were born. Although professors generally prefer students who engage more with them, overcorrect adaption may indeed create discomfort that annoys them. Thus, they tend to spend more time with MUC students, (Carter, 2005) which contributes to the performance gap.

Emotional Support

Stemming from the difference in economic ability, the emotional support that the two classes are able to provide is different. According to Hymowitz et al. (2013), most first births among women who has less than a college degree happen outside of marriage. Along with the constant absence of a sense of security in poor communities, the lack of love, care, and security might cause mental illnesses for children in the future.

Material Resources

One of the most obvious differences between the working class and middle-and-upper class is the economic condition, which contributes to their respective school performance. The MUC have access to much more material resources, such as wealth and education resources, than the working class does. (Logan, Minca, and Adar 2012)

Economic Power

Although every family may spend a similar proportion of household income on kids’ education (Wightman, 2013), the contrast in economic power determines the difference in the total amount of economic resources devoted. The quantitative difference in educational investment results in a qualitative change—a completely different method to train their children across social classes. MUC parents provide their kids with organized extra-curricular activities and hire personal tutors for better academic performance. On the contrary, PP parents have to devote most of their time to work to get through the day, and their kids are relatively much freer to play with their peers and their family. Thus, the differences in academic ability and knowledge base between PP and MUC students are formed.

Institutional Preference

Brantlinger (2003) argues that the MUC is in charge of the elite schools, whether they are conscious or not. They arrange the school structures and determine admission. As a result, the teachers in these schools generally prefer MUC values. On the contrary, although the PPs are enrolled in these highly selective high schools, these schools were not ORIGINALLY built for them. Therefore, rather than helping deal with the difficulties that PP students may confront, some school rules and norms put the students into a disadvantaged situation.

Why is Compensating Material Resources Relatively Easy? Extracurricular tutoring is the another significant factor that contribute to the difference of material resources. However, this distinction is diluted in highly selective high schools and colleges. The educational resources there is the exceptionally abundant, so that the need for extracurricular academic tutoring decreases. This does not mean that, however, students who attend these schools necessarily have fewer extracurricular courses, but that the resources school can provide is enough, if students can make full use of them. Khan (2012) once tried a week-long simulation of St. Paul’s students’ life, finishing their reading assignments, math problems, as well as science experiments. He discovered that students needed more than three-and-a-half hours to finish daily assignments. Hardly anyone really accomplished that, leaving a large amount of “unused materials”. PP students may minimize their “unused materials” to compensate for their lack of extracurricular resources.

Why is Compensating Cultural Resources Relatively Difficult? The PP students’ lack of cultural resource is difficult to be compensated at schools. As both the faculty and MUC students consider how they interact with each other as the only right way, they may not discern the disadvantaged situation of those who come from a poor community. PP students’ structural disadvantage is neglected. The only thing that the schools can expect is the PP students’ automatic transition—a suffering experience and may result in a decline in their academic performance. The research result of Stephens et al. (2014a) suggests that, if schools have provided additional instructions for cultural transition to PP students, their cumulative GPAs improve from 3.16 to 3.40 on a 4.0 scale. This revealed how severe the condition of lack of cultural resources is. Besides, from the perspective of privileged poor students, to completely eradicate their original understanding of school and teaching is difficult. Transition to elite culture means that they are objecting to their family and community’s values, which is challenging and undesirable. In addition, some PP students appreciate their origins: they gain higher psychological well-being from and overcome adversity with the spirit of resilience and the courage when facing difficulties, which they learned from their ascending experience as positive factors for their study. Therefore, their lack of cultural resources is much more complicated and difficult to be compensated.

Conclusion & Discussion

This paper discusses differences in cultural and material resources between pp students and MUC students and the impacts on their academic performance gaps. Notably, inadequate and overcorrected adaptation from a lower-class community to an elite school plays a vital role in explaining why PP students cannot fully integrate themselves into these schools. Other factors, both cultural and material, also contribute to the distinction. The last part of this paper argues that the issue of cultural resources is less likely to be solved, and thus, is more important than that of material resources in the formation of performance gap. Although the lack of cultural recourses indeed contributes to the hardship PP students encounter at school, due to the page limit, this paper does not delve into the positive influence it gives them: self-reliance, empathy for others, etc. (Aries and Seider, 2005; Stephens, et al. 2014b) The upscaling experience may urge the privileged poor to work hard and be more confident when confronted with adversities. Although PP students usually do not have the best academic performance at elite schools, they benefit the most from it—highly selective schools provide resources and networks that are otherwise not available for them (Dale & Kruger, 2011). With easier access to higher education, social mobility, a reflection of the American spirit, can be maintained.

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