Recently, two New York Times articles emerged concerning the wealth distribution at certain elite, private schools, including Kenyon. The first article emphasized that some student populations are made up of more students from the top one percent than the entire bottom sixty percent combined. Kenyon College came in 8th, with 19.8 percent of our school’s population from the top one percent and 12.2 percent from the bottom sixty percent. That’s not great, but considering our school has a smaller endowment than many others equitable to its size and prestige. (For example, Swarthmore has a slightly smaller student population but an endowment of almost 2 billion, compared to 200 million for Kenyon.) That means less money to give away. So, these facts aren’t as shocking as they may appear on the surface, but are pretty alarming and veering on queasy at first glance.
However, this fact didn’t bug me as much as the one present in the second article, which speaks to economic diversity at Kenyon College. The median income at Kenyon College is $213,500. Now, I don’t know exactly how much money comes into my family, but I know it’s near or below that. Also, in addition, that income is spread among the five members of my family, including my two brothers, one of which is also in college and playing a Division I sport and can’t have a job during the season.
My family was impacted by the 2008 financial crisis in that my dad became unemployed for a while, then worked for a company that didn’t pay very well, was unemployed again and then now has a job that has fortunately placed our family in the best place financially that we have ever been in.
That means for most of my childhood, I didn’t have a lot of privileges that it seems a lot of my peers at Kenyon had. I didn’t spend my summers traveling abroad. In a lot of my classes and in my friend group, it seems like everyone has summered in Italy, seen the Mont Saint-Michel in France and hung out with their buds in Scotland. I’ve never even left the country. My family doesn’t have a beach house, a cabin, or a condo over a lake in another state; some of my peers have all three. A lot of people who go to Kenyon went to private schools or boarding schools for high school. Granted, not everyone who went to a private school went there because their family had money, but in my experience, a lot of them do come from affluent families. Friends of mine who went to private schools took anthropology, sociology and philosophy classes; those weren’t offered to anyone in my entire school district. They read books that weren’t taught at my school and learned more about high-level literary and cultural theory. I feel behind in all my classes. They’ve done things that my family couldn’t fathom doing because we concentrated more on trying to save money for college and letting us do simple things like pursuing community theatre and my brothers playing baseball.
The clear inequities between me and my peers appear in more subtle ways as well. There have been times where friends want to go on alcohol runs or have us pitch in to have a nice dinner together and they’ll ask for us all to contribute $15 like it isn’t a big deal. They don’t see why I can’t just fly across the country to visit them over summer break.
But there are more nefarious ways the socioeconomic difference rears its ugly head as well. Last semester, I applied to a ton of jobs on campus and got none of them. The problem with that is I am supposed to contribute $1000 via work study towards my tuition; I made zero last semester. So that’s another loan I now have to take out. Yet, when I had to turn around and go home from walking to a party when I found out I didn’t get the Gund Gallery Associate job, they thought I was just upset because I simply wanted the job. They didn’t get that I needed it as well.
I know that regardless of all of these inconveniences that I’ve led a very privileged life. I’ve always had food in my belly, a roof over my head and clothes on my back. My parents pay for my gas, car insurance, and phone bill. My prom dress came from a nice store at a nice mall. I also know that there is nothing wrong with having multiple homes, being able to drop $15 on alcohol every weekend and being a part of the 18.8% of Kenyon students who come from homes that bring in $650,000. However, I know how disheartening it can be to feel inadequate to your peers because your family could not afford you the opportunities everyone seems to have. I know how guilty it feels to turn down going to a state school for free and go to a school that is going to put you $60,000 in debt after graduation. I know how awkward it is to not have the cash to pay for fun things with your friends. I know how out of place it feels, not having the economic status all of your friends have.
I don’t think there is an easy solution to the lack of economic diversity at Kenyon. I’m probably never going to get used to feeling like the loser friend who can’t afford things and be a part of it all. And I’m going to have to turn down opportunities because I don’t have the means to pay for them. But it’s also allowed me to put into perspective how lucky I was to grow up where I did with the family I had. I never really realized I had less money than a lot of people until I came to Kenyon because my parents gave my the best life possible, even though we exist in the “forgotten middle class.”