Putting Privilege Into Relief: A Minority Student Recruitment Program at a Boarding School Summer Session

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Studying Privilege and Oppression Across Educational Systems

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of an elite New England boarding school’s five-week Summer Session, this paper examines a financial aid partnership between the boarding school and a network of urban public secondary schools. I explore the partnership program’s function in financial aid students’ narratives of coming to attend Summer Session at a school with a long history of serving affluent, mostly white students. I then contrast these narratives with those of affluent students, reporting on the social and cultural capital that helped them more easily identify with the elite school. In this way, I show that the scholarship program’s carefully-organized supports correspond to—and illuminate—forms of privilege that undergird affluent students’ journeys to an exclusive learning space.

Author

• Burke Scarbrough, University of Minnesota - Duluth