The Inequality Machine by Paul Tough

Author:Paul Tough [Tough, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473589148
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

2. Belonging

When Amy A. arrived at the University of Texas as a freshman in the fall of 2013, she was placed in the first-ever ULN cohort. Amy was an automatic admit to UT, ranked twelfth in her graduating class of 350 from a mostly low-income high school in a racially diverse suburb of Dallas. Amy’s parents were immigrants from West Africa who spent decades sacrificing and saving in order to send Amy and her brothers to college. In high school, Amy was not only a good student, she was also outgoing and involved in everything. She loved public speaking and student leadership and organizing service projects. At the Pentecostal church in Dallas that her family attended, where the pews were filled with African immigrant families like hers, Amy was known as the A student, the future college graduate, a success story waiting to happen.

At her high school, though, Amy found it difficult to get her hands on clear and reliable information about college. Most of the school’s graduates went to community college or straight into the workforce, but Amy aspired to a high-quality four-year college. She just wasn’t sure where to go, or how to pay for it, or what steps to take to get there. During her senior year, she would often stop in to the school’s guidance office, looking for help with scholarships or financial aid, but the counselors there would just shrug. They advised her to start at the local community college and maybe consider transferring to a four-year school later on. The whole process was enormously frustrating to Amy, and it sometimes brought her to tears. “It felt like they were trying to hide education from me,” she told me. When her AP English teacher finally brought in someone to talk to the most academically minded seniors about college, it was a representative from Everest College, a for-profit trade school in Fort Worth whose parent company wound up filing for bankruptcy a few years later.

Without much help or guidance from her school or her parents, Amy applied to a handful of public and private colleges in Texas and Oklahoma. In the end, she chose UT Austin, in part because her acceptance letter came with an invitation to take part in the summer orientation program that David Laude’s office had just introduced.

I first spoke with Amy a few months later, in January of her freshman year, in a coffee shop near campus. She told me it had been a hard year so far. She had enrolled at UT with a very specific career goal in mind: dentistry. It was a path she had chosen a year earlier, as a senior in high school, when she typed into Yahoo’s search engine “top paying jobs in America” and “dentistry” popped up close to the top of the list. Amy had no particular interest in teeth, but to her, that wasn’t the important consideration.

“Dentistry, that’s a high-paying career,” she told me firmly. “When you come to college, you have to focus on a major that can get you money.

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