There Is Nothing for You Here, page 40
Finally, Bonnie pointed out to critics that they were using a double standard. “You can’t perpetuate the myth in America of rugged individualism forever,” as she told me later. “Everyone benefits from networks and mentorships, but when men or people from affluent backgrounds network and mentor, nobody labels it like this. They are just ‘helping each other out.’ ”
“Doubly Disadvantaged”
In the United States, private resources like Science Club for Girls substitute and fill in for the lack of publicly funded programs, but they are not available in every town and city, exacerbating geographic inequities. Seeing this, my friend who directed the Science Club for Girls had reconnected with her alma mater, Amherst College, which established a STEM incubator in 2020 tailored toward low-income high school and underrepresented students in Massachusetts, many of whom were the first in their family to go to university. The way in which Amherst designed its programs also highlights the unique needs of students from disadvantaged backgrounds who manage to get within reach of the particularly potent educational opportunities offered by elite institutions.
Prior to 2020, Amherst had already championed initiatives to bring disadvantaged students to its campus in the summer months before their formal enrollment for a series of special supplementary courses in the basic science and math subjects they needed to complete in their first year. The courses helped fill in the gaps between their high schools’ curriculum and those of other students. Amherst scaled up the programs to accommodate the largest possible group, so individual students would not feel embarrassed or stigmatized by having to take remedial or bridging courses alone or during regular term time.
In 2019, Tony Jack, a professor of education at Harvard, who like Bonnie did his undergraduate degree at Amherst, published a deeply insightful book on the particular challenges for low-income kids going to college from underfunded, overcrowded U.S. public schools in impoverished neighborhoods. Professor Jack, who had grown up in a poor neighborhood in West Grove, Miami, Florida, recounted his experience of being the first person in his family to go to university. He was one of the few low-income Black students at Amherst in the early 2000s. He discussed the difficulties of transitioning to college from high school and the structural exclusion of low-income and minority students, who did not have the cultural capital or preparation for dealing with the informal social rules and expectations of college life.
Professor Jack had had a one-year scholarship to a private school in his senior year, just before his admission to Amherst. This helped him figure things out. As he noted in his book, around 50 percent of lower-income Black students at elite universities in the 2010s graduated from a private high school thanks to specially targeted scholarships such as these. This was the same for one third of lower-income Hispanics. Professor Jack describes these students as “the privileged poor.” They were still economically disadvantaged, but the private school experience gave them a critical boost—similar to that of the working-class kids in the UK who passed the eleven-plus and headed to a grammar school in the old days.
Nevertheless, for these disadvantaged students, everything could still be lost in translation once they got to college. As one example, low-income students tended to do their academic work on their own rather than seek help from professors during office hours. They were either too intimidated or did not know this was an option. As I had done at St. Andrews, the low-income American students that Professor Jack surveyed also worked multiple campus jobs to stay afloat. This naturally meant that they often did not have time (let alone the money) to engage in regular college activities.
The real challenge, however, was that many of these low-income students were what Professor Jack called “doubly disadvantaged”: they were academically gifted but had no prior exposure to elite networks and limited information on college opportunities. If they were to fully capitalize on the opportunity that college presented, they would need help in this crucial regard through the kind of bridging programs that colleges like Amherst had established.
Contact-Poor
My personal educational experience in the 1980s mirrored these observations and conclusions. The UK education system, just like that in the United States, was—and remains—heavily geared toward middle- and upper-class groups, who are already embedded in old-boy and old-girl networks that exclude state school and low-income students who don’t manage to find a free place at private school. Not only are algorithms working against them, but poor kids tend to be network- and contact-poor—they lack social as well as cultural capital. In fact, this is one of the reasons that they are poor in the first place.
Poor people don’t have resources or other people to help them identify opportunities and navigate their way to college and advance through life. This was certainly the case for my dad and his family. Part of fixing the infrastructure of opportunity thus involves creating networks and contacts for underprivileged kids and their families.
The fact that being contact-poor is a major disadvantage is underscored in a fascinating psychology book, Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do. The book describes how people’s personal contacts and social networks influence every aspect of life, including personal relationships, health, and happiness. It points out that for many people, those networks are constrained by geography, socioeconomic status, technology, and even their genetic makeup. People “can’t be friends with absolutely anybody,” and they don’t get to choose their birth family or initial family economic circumstances.
Similarly, in 2020 another Brookings colleague, Camille Busette, undertook a large-scale data analysis of social networks and their role in driving socioeconomic mobility in several U.S. cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina, which ranked last in a set of fifty major American cities for promoting upward mobility. In Charlotte, Camille and her colleagues interviewed residents and then looked at more than thirty thousand interpersonal network configurations according to the number of people and family and professional connections, and the value of these connections as a source of assistance in obtaining housing, education, and jobs. They evaluated and compared social networks according to demographic group, race, income, and gender. And in the process they discovered some surprising things about how social networks provide access to support, information, power, and resources and how they play a critical role in shaping opportunity.
Camille’s team observed that in the case of Charlotte, whites had the greatest network advantages—especially white men, who had broad networks of professional, family, and personal contacts that were important sources of information and advice, and for providing references. Fathers played a particularly critical role in promoting mobility, as they were usually the primary wage-earner, with more professional connections than mothers.
White wealth and support networks consistently cascaded down through successive generations, while such networks did not for Blacks and Hispanics, who constituted most of the city’s low-income population. Middle-income residents had the broadest networks compared to poorer residents, and even to the most affluent. Those at the top of the economic ladder had small but superior social and support networks. They were elite in every respect.
Camille further concluded from the data sets that most social connections were formed through education in schools and colleges, then in the workplace. Exclusion from a good school or limited access to university, along with the loss of a job, was the primary means of losing valuable connections and social capital. Sadly, this happened to far too many already deprived people in Charlotte—and in all the other places the team surveyed.
Creating Networks
Obviously I did not grow up in such a racially or economically diverse setting as Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to being predominantly White British, Bishop Auckland’s majority population was low- to middle-income. In 2020, County Durham’s average annual salary was £23,000, or just under $31,000. It was far lower than that back in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to high and persistent unemployment.
My family had not accumulated wealth; no assets were passed down through the generations. But my parents were in the process of buying a house, and this helped to break the negative poverty-education cycle for me. Critically, my parents also helped me make all kinds of new social connections, including in our street and neighborhood. I started out contact-poor but ended up with a rich personal and professional network.
Two issues were key in creating networks in Bishop Auckland. First, Mam and Dad married and had children in their early thirties, making them older than the average parents locally. When Mam had my sister at age thirty-four, one of her close friends from school was already a grandmother. But there were benefits to being outliers in this respect: with age and experience, they had fully processed the importance of education. My dad understood that his lack of formal education was one of the reasons for the economic disparity between himself and friends, relatives, and colleagues at the hospital, who had gone to college and then on to white-collar jobs. Mam had trained as a nurse. She had a résumé and commendations from her previous positions. Dad had no qualifications of any kind apart from the on-the-job training he acquired in the coal mines. With the pits closed, there was no one to vouch for him for another job.
Second, Mam and Dad set out examples for me to follow and signed me up for free music lessons, orchestras, choirs, sports programs, and school exchanges, all funded through Durham County Council. Mam pressed me and Angela into the Brownies and Girl Guides, which Mam herself had joined as a child in Billingham during World War II. As an adult, she ran a troop in a local church hall. Many other relatives were in the Guides or Scouts. One of Dad’s older cousins was the local Guides commissioner. The Guides was a local, national, and international organization that provided strong regional networks as well as a way of meeting people from other parts of the country and social classes, if you stuck around long enough, as Mam did. The patrons of the Girl Guides and some of the commissioners were all middle- or even upper-class, the wives of the local landed gentry and philanthropic businessmen and a few professional women.
Angela and I resisted the Guides and were never enthusiasts, but Mam asserted that obtaining all the merit badges and becoming a Queen’s Guide (the equivalent of an Eagle Scout) would help with university applications. I got my Queen’s Guide badge and promptly left the troop. Angela fell one badge short a couple of years later, by not being able to complete her camping badge because of maintenance cuts for the public campsites that the Girl Guides relied on in poor areas.
Under Margaret Thatcher’s government, beginning in 1981, local county councils had been selling off public parkland as well as “surplus” school playing fields to property developers to raise money. Over the course of the 1980s, about five thousand fields were sold, drastically curtailing free sports and other outdoor programs. While they lasted, however, these opportunities did create new networks and provide leadership and other skill development that I was able to list on my university and job applications. I am especially good at tying knots and map reading (always useful when the GPS fails), but I no longer play the violin, which is probably just as well, since it tortured me and everyone else for far too long.
Mam talked a great deal about her nursing training, the people she had met, and the success she had had in her career until she had had to leave work to take care of me and Angela. She would take us to visit Miss Lilian Dyke, the retired chief obstetrician and gynecologist from the hospital, who had been one of the first female NHS consultants and had delivered us both in the maternity ward. Mam deeply admired her. Miss Dyke was from the North East, had attended a local girls’ private school, and had then studied medicine at Durham University in the 1930s. During World War II she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India and afterward trained at hospitals in Newcastle and Durham before becoming the consultant at Bishop Auckland in the 1950s. Miss Dyke mentored all the junior doctors and nurses and set up the local branches of the Red Cross. She had been forced to retire from the hospital because of ill health in the mid-1970s, but she kept up with the Red Cross. Thanks to her efforts, Bishop Auckland had the largest concentration of Red Cross activities in the UK and offered free practical training classes for schools and organizations like the Girl Guides.
Mam’s and Dad’s stories about the clever lasses—the older cousins from our working-class extended families who had gone to university after school—were also important. We would sometimes see them at holidays. Mam and Dad encouraged us to ask about their experiences when we did. My parents also introduced me to a couple of neighbors who had gone to university as well as grammar school. This was one of the benefits of living in our own house in the new neighborhood in town rather than in public housing on the council estate. The street was not the most affluent, but some residents had gone on to all forms of higher education and training and worked in white-collar jobs.
The message was clear: if these cousins and neighbors could go to college, then I could too. Mam and Dad drove the point home by observing that I did not have the same obstacles they themselves had faced either. Dad had left school at fourteen to go down the mines, and Grandad had left earlier, at thirteen—because they had no other choice. They had both been held back by timing and larger circumstances, not just poverty. I had more opportunities than they did. The timing was right. I should try to go forward with my education as far as it would take me.
My education had, of course, not taken me to Oxford. Even if I had applied decades later, I would have been no more likely to have been admitted, since I came from Bishop Barrington Comprehensive School. Contacts, and what Tony Jack, like many others, called cultural capital, remained key to opening the door.
Even in these rarefied spheres, to be sure, there were signs of progress. The dreaded Oxford entrance exam was abolished in 1997, more than a decade after I applied, a change that helped increase the number of state school students admitted to the university. The proportion rose to over 50 percent in the early 2000s. Louise Richardson, after becoming the Oxford chancellor in 2016, pushed to improve state school access over the next several years. In 2020–2021, Oxford had its highest recorded state school intake of over 68 percent. Cambridge had achieved 68 percent in 2019. Nonetheless, in this same timeframe, only a small percentage of poor kids like me from deprived areas were admitted to Oxford. It was still out of their league, as the botched algorithm and the 2020 A-level exams had underscored.
Rather than waiting for the universities or the government to do something, students were starting to take matters into their own hands to address the question of recruitment and Oxbridge access. They were creating their own infrastructure of opportunity—their own networks and mechanisms for success. A November 2020 article in the Guardian featured a group of underrepresented students who had set up a free network called Team Upside to help their counterparts get into elite universities. They ran mock Oxbridge interviews for students from underprivileged schools and regions. A group of similar students already at Oxbridge created a digital outreach site, Inside Uni, to advise state school applicants on how to apply and prepare for interviews. The website provided real-life accounts from students and was coordinated with Oxbridge admissions officers.
One of the students who created Team Upside explained his motivations in the interview with the Guardian: “We think it’s unfair that some students who go to really top schools are provided with so much more support and guidance than other students, when every student deserves an equal opportunity to succeed. It’s really just about levelling the playing field.”
Lifelong Learning
Getting a university degree is not the only way to level the playing field of opportunity. From Dad’s experiences and all the mass layoffs in the North East in the 1980s, I knew even before I left school that no one could keep a job forever. Even a university degree would likely not be enough to deal with the changes ahead in the nature of work. You would always need to upgrade your skills to keep up with social and technological change.
Further education and lifelong learning are essential in the twenty-first century, yet they remain all too rare. In the UK, according to government figures, 34 percent of college graduates are not in “high-skilled employment” commensurate with their degree, because many postgraduate positions are in new digital and technology fields that require additional skills and training (as do jobs in engineering, manufacturing, teaching, nursing, and other fields). Careers are no longer achievable after one step on the educational ladder; they require multiple progressions.
There are many options to pursue postsecondary or tertiary education in both the United Kingdom and the United States. In the UK in 2020, a little over 50 percent of students who completed secondary school went on to university, professional and technical training, or further (continuing) education tied to apprenticeships in the workplace. The initial enrollment rates in postsecondary education in the U.S. are much higher than in the UK—between 60 and 70 percent of high school graduates—but not everyone completes college or their training courses. Back in the 1980s, most of the friends I had started out with at Etherley Lane primary school did not go to university after completing comprehensive school. They tried to enter the workforce immediately, seeking an apprenticeship, or like my mam in the 1950s, they went off to nursing school or some similar professional training course.
After driving me around in his Mini to help me choose a university in the 1980s, Jeff—Mam’s godson and my de facto brother—went on his own educational odyssey. Like many I grew up with, Jeff wanted to begin work as soon as possible in a craft apprenticeship. He had mild undiagnosed dyslexia. He always reversed the “e” in his name on our birthday cards as a small child and complained that he couldn’t read his own handwriting and notes from class. Teachers at his elementary and comprehensive schools wrote him off as “lazy and could do better” in their reports.
