The New Yorker Radio Hour - Is the Gift of Tuition Enough?

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

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.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. It was a Friday afternoon. Everybody is excited because it's the weekend. We get to class. They say don't get settled yet because we're going to go downstairs and do the privilege exercise. And they tell us to all stand next to each other in a horizontal line and hold hands. and I was just like, I like moving.

This is exciting. This is fun. This is different. Priscilla Alaw B is a radio producer, and she was the first in her family to go to college. And one afternoon during her sophomore year, the entire class was asked to participate in something called the Privilege Walk. So my teachers, basically, I do not remember them giving us any kind of warning or prepping us in any way. They said, okay, guys, listen carefully. If one or both of your parents graduated from college, take one step forward. If you knew since you were a child that it was expected of you to go to college, take one step forward. If you're going to be the first person in your immediate family to graduate from college, take one step back.

If you started school speaking a language other than English, take one step back. If you feel certain that you will not be followed, harassed, or watched under close surveillance while shopping, take one step forward. Those memories just, like, flooded back to me, these bad things happening to me. And I remember just seeing my classmates. The lighter of my classmates just moving forward, I would like remember these horrible memories and then I would have to step back. My taking a step backward meant that like the chain was broken.

I couldn't, you know, keep holding hands to the person next to me. I could see them going forward, but they couldn't see me going backward. By the end of those 20 minutes, the people in the front were asked to turn around. and my friend and myself, who are two black women, were the only ones at the back of the room. This all happened more than a decade ago, but Priscilla remembers it as if it were yesterday. I remember saying to my friend,

oh my God, I'm so upset. I can't believe this just happened with my Friday. We felt so naked. I don't think I started to play. processed it until we went back upstairs and we all sat back down and started to go around the circle and debrief and talk about the experience that we just had. Like, just I couldn't stop the tears. Like, I just was a puddle of water. Most people are facing the front. They don't see that there are people behind them. They don't see that there are people who are taking steps forward.

but can never catch up. They don't see the inequities. They just think everybody's just like them walking through life. The privilege walk exercise is still used on campuses. It's designed to show how power and economic advantage affects students' lives. Elite schools are trying hard to recruit students of color and students who are less well-off financially. Yale University, for example, now covers full tuition. for families making less than $75,000 a year.

And yet the reality is that for many students of color, students who are in one way or another, minorities, getting a higher education can feel like taking one step forward and then one step back. The radio hours producer, Kalalia, has been exploring that experience. And in her reporting, she came to know a student named Manny. So my name is Manny Rodriguez.

I'm actually a senior at a liberal arts college in the Northeast. Mani is a young Puerto Rican gay man on a predominantly white and straight college campus. It's only recently that this school has actually made it a point to look for certain students like myself. I met him through my partner, a professor who was assigned to be Mani's mentor. He's part of a growing group of students of color enrolled at private college. He goes to Trinity College in Connecticut, and at Trinity in the 1960s, people of color were only about 4% of students. In 2019, that number was 20%. Seems like a good amount of progress, right? But what's the experience of those students, and how much has it changed? There's a book. It's called

The Privileged Poor by Anthony Jack. It asks some hard questions about the efforts of selective private schools to diversify. When it comes to students like Manny, is admission or even a full scholarship enough? Say, how are you doing? I'm fine. So where should we go? So I have to be quiet. The quietest place possible.

I don't know if that's, I would love to see where you're staying. When I learned that Manny would be staying on campus during the holiday break, I asked if I could spend some time with them. So this is like where the students stand. and I stay in this one to 13. While the majority of his classmates were gearing up to go home and see their family and friends, many would be staying longer to earn a little extra money

at his three part-time jobs. You know, as the years have gone on, I've kind of decorated less and less and less because it's like I'm just here for the space. But feel free to sit wherever you want. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going to put my bag down. A fan.

Okay. His dorm room is pretty clean for a college student. It's decorated with flowers, Christmas lights, affirmation on post-it notes, some family photos, and a huge Puerto Rican flag. Tell me about this flag. Yes. I keep a flag on the wall,

just to remind myself of my roots and where I'm from, and I hope to go there one day very soon, actually. So Manny's never been to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico, but he says he's all about the culture. Just about every time we speak, he complains about the food on campus. In our dining hall, there's all these extravagant foods. They have like a sushi section, a smoothie section, a sandwich section. And I don't think it's that the food is bad. I don't. But I don't eat like sandwiches. I don't eat like burgers. I've never had, I've never like really had them.

Burgers? Yes, burgers. What would be the ideal if the dining hall had with what Manny wanted to eat? Like, what would they have? I eat a lot of Puerto Rican food. Like petruga, which is like chicken breast and auroquangandulas, rice and beans. I love Truleta, which is like the pork chops I was telling you about. and penanas and yucca, like all these different cultural foods.

You know, that was what my grandmother made. I just want to hold on to that. Mani was raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were teenagers in high school when he was conceived. And so they were very young and, you know, and they hadn't, you know, finished their education or gone to school. Over time, Mani became a big brother. And his mom, she never seemed to have enough money.

Like, I always thought she was born. playing, like, why are you telling me you have no money? Like, if we have no money, how am I, like, living, how are we surviving? And so I would actually get really angry because I'm like, don't parents have money? Manny figured out pretty early that he wanted to go to college. With the help from the Posse Foundation, a non-profit organization, mani was awarded a full tuition scholarship. His parents drove him up to Connecticut. It was definitely a shock. immediately the first thing I noticed was how many white students there were.

That was a big transition for me. I did have some of other posse students. And so that definitely did alleviate some of the stresses and anxiety of kind of the social life. But in reality, it was very scary. At Manny's High School, all of the students were just like him, low income, and non-white. I knew that I hadn't been living in the real world for most of my life. I made it a point, you know, to start college in a way that was different.

So Mani requested a roommate, knowing that he would probably be white. He was different. You know, he came from a rural area in New Hampshire. I have my New York accent. And he was not very fond of that. And he would, you know, express physical confusion with what I said. He honestly didn't understand my dialect. Manny taught his new roommate a thing or two about New York,

and his roommate, Jack, invited him to his rowing competitions. And because of that, you know, we were able to get really close, actually, you know, and even today, like, we are very, very close. We're listening to the story of a college student named Manny Rodriguez, and we'll continue in a moment. Well, getting a full ride is huge, especially for a while. working-class family. Just the basic cost of living for any college student can be outrageous. I have three jobs on campus because I, for the most part, support myself.

What are some of the things that you pay for in your own? Yeah. So I pay my phone bill. I pay for the food and the clothes that I have here. I buy my flights. Right around the time he started calling. college. Manny's mother moved to Florida. They're very close, but now it was much more difficult for him to see her, and pretty expensive too. In a lot of ways, there's a perception that I don't need the help and that I kind of have myself together. I don't, but I do want them to focus on my siblings, and I need to make money. Oh, good.

Today is the last full day of classes before the holiday break. What class are we going to now? Yeah, so right now we're going to my biology class. It's called genes, clones, and biotechnology. And it usually runs from 925 to 1040. Right now it's 940. Mani's late for class because he had to go to the DMV for the second time this semester. I basically like lost.

my, like my wallet, and I'm so upset. And like, it didn't have much in it. This time, he lost his license. But the first time, a few months back, it was stolen. I was robbed at gunpoint in my own neighborhood. And they took my phone, and they took my money, and they took, like, my bag. It happened near his father's place in Brooklyn. Mani felt that he was targeted as a gay man because of something the robber said.

In addition to the cash from his last paycheck, his wallet had a student ID in it. Like, hello, my ID was stolen. Like, can I please get a new one? And they were asking me for money. And I didn't want to have to tell them that I was robbed. But they weren't understanding me, you know? And so I kind of had to, like, get into details that I would have robbed. avoided.

The school still didn't agree to waive the fee. He had to wait a week and ask an adult he trusted to intervene. Eventually, he got a free replacement, but the humiliation and the delay on top of his stolen paycheck, it really hurt. And having to share the details only added to the stress he already feels about being a queer person of color on campus. A student came out with an article. Basically, being very transphobic, you know, speaking about the issues surrounding trans women in sports and athletics.

And so there's a lot of ignorance, I would say, and a lot of just open bigotry. I, along with, I know many of my peers don't see this as a, you know, we can have a difference in opinion and that's it. you know, this is our lives. There's been other moments where students have had their flags taken down. The pride flag was ripped down one day from the Queer Resource Center that we have here. There was a Dominican flag from a student that was torn down. It's an example that validates the fears of so many students. It's starting to get dark.

It's almost 5 o'clock. And he gets off at 5. Mani has a class that starts exactly when it's time for him to leave his job. We're going to be walking really fast, maybe even running, he said, so that he can make it before the door is closed. Hi. It's dark now. It is dark now, yes. How was work?

It was good. Yeah? Yeah, you know, around 5 p.m., like a lot of parents kind of rush. His insane schedule makes it very much. very difficult to get the support he needs from faculty and others. I don't utilize office hours as much as I know that I should. I find myself so hectic all the time. And it also depends on who the professor is.

Like, I may not feel too comfortable. I might want to have a professor one-on-one. And, like, in their office hours, they might have multiple students. I was nervous, like, in class, like, to ask and answer questions. And I don't want to be, like, the dumb, like, student of color. Like, I don't want to be the one to ask, like, the, you know, the stupid question or, like, give the stupid response. And so I felt the need to, like, go to my professor's office hours, tell him, I need you to know that it's not that I, Don't care, you know, but it's just really difficult for me.

He tried to tell me, you know, everyone has these questions, you know, don't worry. But I don't think so. So I have to go to this door, but it's... By the time we make it to his 5 o'clock class, the building is closed. Why? You're locked up? I'm locked out, so... Oh, I have somebody's number.

This happens up all the time. Oh, God. But it's because, like, the door is all closed at 5 p.m. I can't imagine his peers having to do all of this in one day. Class, class, work, class, work, and more class. I felt so tired for him. There are no more classes the following morning. And the campus, it's pretty bare.

Good morning. I met it with Manny just before 8 a.m. at the daycare center, where he's about to work a full eight-hour shift. It's a little harder to be as excited. But what I, you know, I actually feel like good that, you know, someone else can, like, take the day off and relax, you know, when I, and I can help them in that way. Hi. Hi, my shoe. I'm not saying one.

I know. I know. Hello. How are you? Hello. Hi. Hi, everyone. Hi.

How are you? Earlier. Mani told me that if he didn't get a scholarship to school, he'd probably be working at a daycare center, like his mom, or maybe in retail. How you do it? Show me. You actually have to have three jobs, or you want to have three jobs?

Like, if you had one job, would that be enough? I don't think so. I don't think so because there's a little. lot of things, you know, that I need to be buying now, you know, as someone that is practically an adult, you know, it's scary to say. But I don't want my siblings to think I don't care. They're so young. They don't understand. He's got five younger brothers and sisters. And for the holidays, it's really important for him to contribute something. I want to maintain some type of normalcy, and I reject the idea that, you know, that I can't participate in certain things now

because I'm too poor. You know, like, I want, I want to and I deserve to, to celebrate and, you know, and be happy and do things that anyone else can do. You know, Christmas is about family. Mani is hyper aware that getting a degree will not only improve his chances of having a better life. It could affect the lives of his entire family. They're the one to inspire him to keep going. Do you think that you are going to be a person that stays in touch? Like, this is your senior year? Yeah.

Are you going to come back for reunions? Are you going to come back to see friends? Yeah, you know. Now, the feeling that you have now. Yeah. So right now I don't feel like I'm going to. to be a student, you know, that comes back, that, you know, that donates, that is very involved in the alumni network. And I think that's in part because of my mentality right now. You know,

I appreciate the education here and everything, but it's really taken a toll on me. And I feel like I have struggled to finish, and I am going to be crawling on my graduation day. I asked Manny how the college could have made his experience less exhausting, so that he wasn't reduced to crawling by the end of it. He mentioned a couple of things like hiring a more diverse staff or doing some kind of sensitivity training for the tenured faculty, but there's so much more. private colleges are generally set up for certain types of students, especially ones who don't have to work to support themselves while at school. In his book, The Privilege Poor,

Anthony Jack writes, The elite college must change, adapt, and grow, right along with its changing student body. Yes, scholarships cost schools money, but changing the culture of an old institution might be tougher still. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Mani didn't have the luxury of choosing Trinity College. It chose him.

And despite the challenges, he's glad it did. I am blessed to be here and I have to remind myself often. Mani Rodriguez, the radio hours Kalalia, began interviewing him in 2019. Mani graduated from Trinity College last year, and he's now working on a master's in education at John. Johns Hopkins University. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us.

See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Cala, David Krasnau, David Krasnau, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With additional scoring, by L.D. Brown of Gray Reverend.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.