Sarah Phillips stated, “Pacific has far more low income students than most of the schools around us and that has real consequences. Unfortunately we live in a society where your income goes a long way in explaining what your SAT and ACT scores are and what your GPA is”.
This is sadly true especially with ethnic minority individuals, as we learned in our Psych Ethnic Diversity in the United States class. It is the general trend that Ethnic minority students with low income tend to do worse in school than students with higher income. Income is not the other factor however, because ethnic minority students also face several other stressors that White students have the privilege of not worrying about. Acculturation, extra family responsibilities, racism, and lack of resources are all issues ethnic minority students face.
Even White students who are low income face having extra family responsibilities and lack of resources. It’s devastating to see that some people cannot help the situations they are in yet they have to suffer for them. They cannot fix their family’s finances or reverse any other stressors that affect them, and they are also not responsible for any of these negative side effects from lack of privilege, yet their futures often suffer.
I understand based on statistics that there is a concern for the fact that the average salary after 10 years is only $42,700, but I think that we cannot get tied up in the concern of not making close to the average of other colleges when Pacific is a school that seeks to help students who are low income.
Although our society does not function as a caste system, we cannot have the expectation that just because a student who came from a low income family gets an education, that they are entitled or completely equipped to make just as much or close to as much as students who had the aptitude and intelligence (not considering their financial situation) to get admitted to more a prestigious university.
I believe that we should be thankful for the opportunity we give students while also striving to make this statistic more favorable while also understanding that we must have realistic expectations.
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