[Students are members of families and communities, and they enter
the classroom with different resources and responsibilities. Inclusive
classrooms require instructors to demonstrate awareness, empathy and
flexibility around these differences. ]
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THREE THINGS THE PANDEMIC TAUGHT US ABOUT INEQUALITY IN COLLEGE —
AND WHY THEY MATTER TODAY  
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Elena G. van Stee
February 20, 2023
The Conversation
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_ Students are members of families and communities, and they enter
the classroom with different resources and responsibilities. Inclusive
classrooms require instructors to demonstrate awareness, empathy and
flexibility around these differences. _

Low-income college students often face financial pressures and family
obligations that their instructors cannot see, SDI Productions/E+
Collection/Getty Images

 

Elise, a nursing student at an elite U.S. university in the Northeast,
found herself back home and sleeping on the floor of her parents’
one-bedroom apartment after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in
March 2020.

It was tough to get a good night’s sleep as family members passed
through to the kitchen or the front door. Such interruptions also made
it difficult to concentrate during lectures and exams. Sometimes,
limited internet bandwidth made it impossible for Elise to attend
class at all. She couldn’t ask her parents to buy her a new computer
to replace the one that was breaking down, she explained, because she
knew they couldn’t afford it.

Meanwhile, Elise’s classmate, Bella, a business student and the
daughter of two Ivy League-educated professionals, had two empty
bedrooms at her parents’ home. She used one for sleep, the other for
schoolwork. Her parents had purchased “a monitor and all these other
accessories to help make studying easier.”

As a doctoral candidate in sociology [[link removed]],
I study inequality among young adults. Elise and Bella are two of the
48 undergraduates I interviewed [[link removed]]
to understand how college students from different socioeconomic
backgrounds dealt with COVID-19 campus closings. Although all attended
the same elite university, upper-middle class students like Bella
often enjoyed academic and financial benefits from parents that their
less affluent peers like Elise did not.

Just because most college students have gone back to in-person classes
doesn’t mean these disparities
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three lessons from the pandemic that can help colleges better address
student inequality [[link removed]] going forward:

1. The digital divide disrupts learning

Elise wasn’t the only student in my study who didn’t have the
learning technology she needed. “It was a solid two and a half weeks
where I didn’t have a laptop,” said Shelton, a social sciences
major, describing how he wrote a four-page research paper on his
phone. Although Shelton had secured a laptop by the time I interviewed
him in June 2020, he still didn’t have Wi-Fi in his off-campus
apartment.

Before the pandemic, college students could typically use their
school’s computer labs and internet hot spots on campus. During
remote instruction, however, many had to join classes from smartphones
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or park outside stores
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to access free Wi-Fi.

Although most undergraduates own a cellphone and laptop
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the functionality of these devices and their ability to stay connected
to the internet are not equal
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2. Living conditions are learning conditions

When residential universities sent undergraduates home in March 2020,
some students did not have a home they could safely return to
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Others, including some in my study, feared exposing parents to
COVID-19 or being a financial burden. Still others had concerns about
space, privacy, internet access or disruptions from family members.

“I didn’t even have a desk at home,” recalled Jennifer, a STEM
major who stayed in a friend’s living room before moving to her
grandparents’ house.

Even before the pandemic, students living in dormitories were in the
minority [[link removed]]. Far more
undergraduates live off campus
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many with their parents. In a fall 2019 survey, 35% of four-year
college students and half of community college students reported
housing challenges
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which included being unable to pay rent and leaving a household
because they felt unsafe.

The struggles of students like Jennifer call attention to
socioeconomic divides [[link removed]] among
students who were living off campus all along. These include
inequalities in space, quiet and furniture for studying.

3. Many students are family caregivers, too

Finally, the pandemic increased many students’ caregiving
responsibilities [[link removed]], which
sometimes limited the time they could spend on schoolwork.

For example, Ashley, a social sciences major, described how she
shopped, cooked and managed her younger siblings’ remote schooling
while her mom worked a retail job. “It wasn’t necessarily a bad
thing that I was [home] to help, but it definitely impaired my
studies,” she told me.

Before the pandemic, Ashley had helped support her family financially
from a distance. But her responsibilities grew when she returned home
and was the only adult available to help her younger siblings.

Contrary to the popular idea of college as a time of self-focused
exploration, recent studies describe ways that some students — often
from low-income, minority or immigrant families — support their
families [[link removed]]. These include
sending money home [[link removed]],
helping siblings with homework
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with digital technology [[link removed]] and
chaperoning medical appointments
[[link removed]]. Such responsibilities are
often invisible to university instructors and administrators.

Students are members of families and communities, and they enter the
classroom with different resources and responsibilities. Inclusive
classrooms require instructors to demonstrate awareness, empathy and
flexibility around these differences.

But empathy won’t fix students’ laptops or pay their rent. The
pandemic highlighted inequalities that are reinforced by universities
designed for so-called “traditional” college students
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school, living on campus, financially supported by their parents, and
having few caregiving responsibilities. Yet such students are a
privileged minority
[[link removed]].[The
Conversation]

Elena G. van Stee
[[link removed]],
Doctoral candidate in sociology, _University of Pennsylvania
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

* racial inequality
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* students
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* college students
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