Low-Income Confessions From the Underground of the Ivy League

Elitism doesn’t end at admission

An Ivy League campus filled mostly with ranks of low-income kids is a surreal idea most would assume they’d never see. During the height of the COVID shutdowns, however, when only those students with special circumstances that’d make college life from home impossible were given campus housing, that’s exactly what happened. Most of said kids (though certainly not all) were low-income, leaving Columbia University, at least for a year, a safe haven for poor students. That, of course, didn’t last, and the university is now happily back to its default state as a zoo of the uber-rich, but at least for that fleeting moment, the world could be reminded what a meritocratic Ivy League may look like.

While still a student of a rural Midwestern public high school, I was given three options for college: local tech schools if I wanted to learn a trade, local private colleges if I had the cash and wanted to spend it, or local public schools if I checked neither of the other two boxes. So, even though I had the right grades, test scores, and extracurriculars to be competitive at any of the top colleges in the country, that wasn’t an option. The only reason I ended up at Columbia was because I actively did the opposite of everything my high school counselor and administration told me, and even then, I only got in through what may best be called a stroke of luck. My experience in this wasn’t at all uncommon. Really, it’s more of the norm.