Is the Gift of Tuition Enough?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Élite schools are trying hard to recruit students of color and students who are less well-off financially; Yale University, as one example, now covers full tuition for families making less than seventy-five thousand dollars. Yet, many of these students find that the experience and the culture of a selective private university may remain challenging. Even a full-ride scholarship may not meet the needs of a student from a poor or working-class family. The New Yorker Radio Hour’s KalaLea spent time at Trinity College with Manny Rodriguez, who was then a senior, working three jobs to cover his expenses and help his family. They met before the Thanksgiving break, where Rodriguez remained on campus picking up extra shifts. He could not afford the airfare to visit his mother. Often late for classes, unable to meet professors during office hours, and deeply anxious about expenses that many of his classmates wouldn’t notice, Rodriguez explains the ways that college is not structured for people like himself. “I feel like I’ve struggled to finish,” he says, “and I’m going to be crawling on my graduation day.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.7	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:12.5	It was a Friday afternoon.
0:15.2	Everybody's excited because it's the weekend.
0:18.0	We get to class.
0:19.8	They say, don't get settled yet because we're going to go downstairs
0:22.7	and do the privilege exercise. And they tell us to all stand next to each other in a horizontal
0:31.0	line and hold hands. And I was just like, I like moving. This is exciting. This is fun. This is different.
0:41.6	Priscilla Alabi is a radio producer, and she was the first in her family to go to college.
0:47.2	And one afternoon during her sophomore year, the entire class was asked to participate in something called the privilege walk.
0:55.4	So my teachers, basically, I do not remember them giving us any kind of warning or prepping us in any way.
1:03.0	They said, okay, guys, listen carefully.
1:06.3	If one or both of your parents graduated from college, take one step forward.
1:13.6	If you knew since you were a child that it was expected of you to go to college, take one step forward.
1:22.7	If you're going to be the first person in your immediate family to graduate from college, take one step back.
1:31.4	If you started school speaking a language other than English, take one step back.
1:39.2	If you feel certain that you will not be followed, harassed, or watched under close surveillance while
1:46.2	shopping, take one step forward. Those memories just like flooded back to me, these bad
1:54.7	things happening to me. And I remember just seeing my classmates, the lighter of my classmates, just moving forward,
2:04.1	I would like remember these horrible memories and then I would have to step back.
2:10.1	My taking a step backward meant that like the chain was broken. I couldn't, you know,
2:15.3	keep holding hands to the person next to me.
	...

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