Yet Another Crisis: Local Solutions and External Constraints to Supporting Low-Income, First-Generation Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Five Years Later: Reflecting on Institutional Attempts to Repair Pandemic-Era Harms

Abstract

Purpose and Framework
The pandemic exacerbated the challenges that low-income, first-generation students (LIFG) faced in their risky and exhausting journey through higher education and tested universities' ability to provide adequate supports. This paper follows staff, faculty, and administrators at two universities (West State and Mission U) as they responded to COVID-19. West State (large, regional public) and Mission U (small, private) are both Hispanic Serving Institutions in the same western state. Both universities serve ~50% Pell students and graduate ~65% of Pell students in six-years.

Methods
Between July 2019 – July 2020, I conducted a year of intensive ethnographic fieldwork at Mission University and West State. Before, during, and after campus closures, I spent 162 days in the field, observing in-person and online student-facing and staff-facing activities, programs, and meetings. This observational data is complemented with 113 in-depth interviews with 91 participants evenly split across both institutions. I reinterviewed 16 core participants after campuses closed to understand how their work had changed. These qualitative data are triangulated with a mix of material artifacts—including reports and policy documents– that add historical, institutional, and political context to my participants’ experiences.

Results
Following actors at Mission and West State as they navigated and responded to the constantly changing global crisis, I show how faculty and staff harnessed their deep awareness of LIFG student needs to adapt existing policies and create supportive new ones. Immediate efforts centered on revising academic policies, distributing technology infrastructure, and disseminating Federal (CARES) and philanthropic funds (emergency grant donations) to students. Each university’s unique organizational and cultural dimensions shaped the policy formulation process and design, yielding different policies and benefits for LIFG students at each university. As Mission and West State worked to address urgent student needs, they also navigated shifts in the external political and economic environment which held different consequences for each institution based on its primary source of funding (Mission = tuition, West State = state appropriations). During the pandemic, attention surrounding the plight of low-income students combined with a state surplus resulted in a massive injection of funds into West State that supported LIFG students: emergency grants, subsidized housing, basic needs, mental health, and technology infrastructure. While Mission’s leadership also faced pressure to deliver these types of supports, its most acute pressures were from the Board and its wealthiest students, without whom the university could not cover its costs. As a result, administrators resisted calls to lower tuition, delayed announcements about remote instruction in Fall 2020, and approved a scholarship for all undergraduate students regardless of income.

Significance
By following Mission and West State through the pandemic and analyzing its differential impacts on their models, I demonstrate that while both universities are reliant on wealthier state residents for funding, the relationship between wealth, taxation, and public goods, is fundamentally different than the relationship between wealth and private goods. LIFG students, and the universities that serve them, are better protected when our system positions higher education as a public rather than private good.

Author

• Becca Spindel Bassett, University of Arkansas