All of a sudden I see the phrase nearly everywhere: “under-resourced schools.” I get a number of magazines from the varied colleges I attended, and I skim them over now and then and even sometimes read an article or two in them. And suddenly—at least it seems as though it’s sudden—I see article after article about how the university is intent on serving students from under-resourced schools.
Special remedial programs for them. Increases in numbers admitted. Reading these magazines, one would get the impression that these colleges exist to serve this particular group and this group only.
So, what does it mean? Is it a cover for racial preferences? Or does it include even poor whites in Appalachia? And what are the “resources” these schools don’t have? Money? Or something else?
Actually, it’s a term that’s been kicking around in the educational world for quite some time. I’ve seen articles from 2012 that refer to it, and I have little doubt it goes back quite a bit further (for example, see this from 2009). Here’s a definition from that last link:
Under-resourced students have limited access to external resources, such as support systems, mentors, and money. Their lack of supports makes daily demands—like childcare, transportation, one or more jobs—develop into crises that, time and again, derail their education. Amazingly resilient, these individuals often act first to solve problems and preserve personal connections with others rather than sacrifice relationships for the sake of achievement, as their middle-class counterparts would expect.
An interesting admixture of truth and utter PCBS (an acronym I just coined; please figure it out for yourself). The truth is that plenty of students have limited access to support systems, mentors, and/or money. Note that “or” that I added, and that “money” is only one of the resources that can be scarce, and probably not the only important one.
Plenty of rich kids, with well-funded school systems, feel adrift and unsupported as well as unmentored. I certainly did (although actually my school system was about average in the funding department, neither wealthy nor poverty-striken). Despite being a good student, I got very little mentoring and very little assistance in making decisions about education that affected the rest of my life.
I made some pretty poor ones, I might add, although they looked good on paper.
Not only that, but in that quote above, although some “under-resourced” students are indeed “amazingly resilient,” many (most?) are not, and that’s the problem. I wasn’t particularly resilient, either—at least, not as resilient as I would have liked to have been—although money was never the issue. And despite being what the author would call a “middle-class counterpart” of these “under-resourced students,” I constantly and consistently, for decades, “preserved personal connections with others rather than sacrificing relationships for the sake of achievement.”
I hate those sorts of class-based generalizations and simplifications, but that’s the province of the left and of the leftist educators that have basically taken over the educational system.
One of the biggest determinants of all of academic achievement is the family and neighborhood atmosphere. A recent essay I found through an online search acknowledges that right up-front:
The one resource that trumps all others when it comes to a student’s education is adults in their life who care about them and value education themselves. No matter how much the teachers and staff at a school care about a student, the fact is that the student spends the majority of their time outside of the school, with their families and in their neighborhoods.
Another part of this thrust to deal with an influx of students from “under-resourced” schools or environments is this sort of thing. The article describes a special physics course at Stanford, an elite university:
In an attempt to increase diversity within its physics department, Stanford University has created a modified physics course for “underrepresented” physics majors. Its purpose, according to the university, is to help retain nontraditional or “minority” students interested in physics. However well-intentioned this may be, implying that racial minorities need different coursework is, frankly, racist and regressive.
The initiative was created in response to a 2016 survey that revealed Stanford’s physics department to be one of the “least diverse” departments within the institution. As a result, the physics department felt that a greater focus on “education equity” in the department’s course work could remedy the diversity gap.
Stanford has added two other new physics courses as well, both focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline. Students will learn about “issues of diversity and culture in physics” by applying concepts such as “critical race theory.” They’re also taught “what it is like to be a female professor” or “a faculty member raised first-generation/low income.”
While nonminority students are welcome to take the new classes, it’s clearly implied that these extra measures are meant for minorities by the university’s news release about making physics inclusive.
Reading some of the links, it’s hard to determine whether this represents a dumbing down of the actual basic physics coursework—which would be very alarming indeed—or just the introduction of information meant to tell minorities (or whoever the under-resourced might be) that they are welcome in physics if they are interested and can do the work. I have no quarrel with the latter.
My point, however, is that college has become a relentless and unremitting focus on race and class, and everything is related to those two things in a reductionist theory of achievement. This is standard leftist stuff, which is of course no accident, since the left has taken over virtually the entire educational world.
