Reflections on Paul Tough’s ‘The Inequality Machine’: College, COVID, and the power of “scrambling” a personal narrative
Sam Ritter
In 2019, acclaimed author Paul Tough published a compilation of research on higher education in America called The Inequality Machine. The thesis of the book, as the title implies, was that college– and where you go to college– does matter. It’s a 350-page rejoinder to those that tell us that higher education is no longer a ladder to financial security. Regardless of background or income status, college remains vitally important to career success, despite what the headlines say. And, most convincingly, Tough lays out how this is even more true for historically underrepresented students– including those who are first-generation college goers.
Much of Tough’s research is relevant to the Davis New Mexico Scholarship, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in the “why” of our scholarship program read the book. My own copy was signed by Angel Perez, gifted to me on a trip he made to Santa Fe in late January 2020. A fierce advocate for first-gen students, Angel is interviewed in the book and speaks powerfully about the pressure enrollment managers face to simultaneously enroll a diverse class of students and meet the increasingly brutal demands for tuition revenue set by the Boards of Trustees.
Angel gave me this book at a dinner with colleagues in a crowded Santa Fe restaurant– one of the last indoor in-person professional events I attended before the COVID-19 pandemic. When I finally read the book two years later, I was surprised at the intensity of my reaction; the pandemic has so clearly amplified many of the persistent challenges in college access that Tough speaks to.
Chief among them is the oft-identified challenge of discontinuity between pre-college and collegiate experience: “There are certain moments in our lives,” writes Tough, such as ”enrolling in college, that are so deeply disorienting that they scramble our personal narrative– the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” For first-generation college going students, this often happens when they fail their first test at college or do not fit into their new social situations. We see this all the time with Davis New Mexico Scholars: their high-achieving high school careers feel like a ruse when they are first on campus.
These disorienting episodes, however, can become opportunities for a change in framing that solidify students in their new realities. Significant challenges to our personal narratives, explains Tough, leave us open to “positive messages and productive stories.” In these uncertain moments, students seek “a coherent narrative to hang on to.” A lot of our work at the Davis New Mexico Scholarship is to provide students with the building blocks of this new vision for themselves and the tools to grasp onto that vision once it’s within reach.
First-generation college students have experienced a double disorientation during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have weathered the discontinuity of the transition from high school to college and of a pandemic lockdown. Both of these events cry out for coherent narratives, and while the Davis New Mexico Scholarship cannot (of course) provide a template for every student in every situation, we work hard to craft our own scholarship narrative: Davis New Mexico Scholars deserve to graduate, deserve a seat at the table, and will find success on our partner college campuses if they work hard, trust the advice and experience of other scholars, and take advantage of what the scholarship has to offer. Much of the work, then, is to enable student success by providing tools for students to see themselves within that narrative.
I’ve returned to visiting college campuses this spring– I’m penning this post from the Portland airport where I’ve visited our students at the University of Portland– and I’ve been able to witness students adjusting to new narratives about their lives. They understand that college life, like life in general, will never go back to the way it was, but they also still see themselves as part of the Davis New Mexico Scholarship community– a committed group of students striving to earn their degrees. Seeing students back on campus, I have an even higher level of appreciation for our upperclassmen scholars whose messages to be resilient and use available resources effectively are a model for underclassmen, many of whom spent their entire first year of college online.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global tragedy that has killed millions. It has splintered the way many of us understand the world and ourselves. And, while Paul Tough’s insights don’t take that away, they do point to the fact that these moments of danger and transformation also contain within them possibilities for new and stronger narratives about the world and our place in it. The Davis New Mexico Scholarship has been retooling to help its scholars understand themselves in our pandemic-scarred reality. I am proud of the work we have done to reforge continuity for ourselves and our students.
“Just stick with it. Just do it. Those four years go by fast,” said Victor, a senior psychology major at the University of Portland to the thirty or so students gathered with me for dinner on campus. “Take advantage of the scholarship and the opportunities you have at the university,” he continued, “and you are capable of fighting through to graduation.”
