When I got into Yale, my family asked if I meant jail

“I got into Yale!”

“You’re going to jail?”

“It’s a school. It’s a really famous school that’s hard to get into.”

“Oh, that’s nice!”

This conversation was in Spanish. Yale in Spanish sounds like “jail.” My mom stepped in, “what Abi is saying is that this seems to be a really big deal.”

“Presidents went there!” I said.

“Really? Which ones?”

“I don’t remember.” I pulled up Wikipedia. “The Clintons!”

“Wow, Abi! That’s really cool that you are going to a school that the Clintons went to!”

I think my family member was trying to make me feel better.

A few years before that, when I got into the University of Richmond, I didn’t describe it as a top 25 liberal arts college. I couldn’t tell whether college rankings were real or a marketing project by some organization called the U.S. News and World Report.

How I explained leaving El Paso: “I’m going to a private four-year university on the east coast that gave me a full ride!”

Getting into a selective college is a common entry ticket to think tanks, journalism, and politics, which feed into government. About a quarter of New York Times staffers are Ivy League graduates.

Those places hire the best students. But to be in the running for these feeder schools, your family has to know these schools exist, believe they are attainable, and support you through a years-long competition.

That is a cultural qualification.

If you have to hold that cultural qualification to get into these circles, this might be a reason why elite circles describe low-wage work inaccurately and don’t prioritize what culturally working class people value.

Otherwise it would be common knowledge that a big perk of working as a DoorDash delivery person is that you can work with your child in the car.

Most Americans don’t track selective colleges

Gallup asked Americans to name the best college in the US. A quarter said Harvard. One in five didn’t name any college. The “top” school often varied by region.

This tracks with my prior life. When I tried to explain Yale to a teenage cousin by saying it was like Harvard, he asked why I hadn’t just gone to Harvard.

Before I found that list of schools that promise to meet full need, I rarely thought about colleges either. I had a vague sense that Texas A&M was “better” than my local University of Texas at El Paso. I knew Harvard from Love Story and Princeton from A Cinderella Story.

I was blown away the first time I met someone who chose Yale over Harvard. I had every reason to be proud of Yale, but I also knew that you don’t have to explain Harvard to anyone.

In my current circles you don’t have to explain either one. There’s a shared map of a long list of top schools.

What I mean by culturally working class

I was shocked when I met people whose siblings all went to elite colleges.

How did your parents make it so that none of their four kids derailed? None of the kids ended up with a drug problem that made it hard to go to school? No one got pregnant or eloped or dropped out? All the kids cared about grades and did well? No one wanted to join the military or start working right after high school? How is that possible?

A friend explained.

The parents set an unspoken expectation “of course you will go to a good college. That’s your job, you represent the family.” Parents nudge them toward extracurriculars, good grades, and resume-relevant activities like academic summer camps. Selective colleges are a natural next step; it would be embarrassing not to.

It’s not about money. Someone can be lower income and know the system: a public school teacher, a part-time lecturer or professor, a freelance journalist, or someone with a degree who prefers more hands-on work.

They know these schools are both meaningful and attainable.

To my family, my college news seemed more like luck. My aunts and uncles said I was blessed with a good brain.

But I knew what it took. For years I tracked every hour to keep a 4.0 while running multiple clubs, volunteering, and working enough shifts to keep my car running.

Students at University of Richmond had a different family dynamic. Students called their parents for essay help. Parents were willing to pay full price ($55k+ a year) over cheaper schools because of rankings.

My “normal” was different.

At Richmond, I took a job waiting tables on campus. I didn’t know much about the school’s resume-padding student jobs. Waiting tables was what I did before, my family agreed it was good money. When I thought “job”, this is what I thought.

At that restaurant, I met other students like me. We’d bond over out-of-touch remarks from students who seemingly had never befriended what we considered a “normal person”.

The few who cross the cultural filter do so almost by accident

People with a cultural background like mine aimed for selective colleges because of small bits of information:

• “At a career fair, this Ivy League school told me about their amazing financial aid.”
• “I learned Ivy Leagues offer full financial aid. This could be my ticket out of my rural homophobic town.”
• “A teacher told me to apply for a full scholarship based solely on an essay about your life. I won and wanted to do well with this.”
• “I wanted dorms and Greek life. I wanted to live on the east coast and see four seasons.”

That last one was me. I realize mine are silly! When it’s not parents nudging you, teenagers follow their own reasons to pour their heart and soul into school.

My friends in El Paso who taught themselves to fix computers and ran cool projects in high school didn’t stumble across a small turning point like this. They were never in the running.

Why this shapes who covers and governs America

I'm in the DC policy bubble now. I advise people on how to get into the rooms where policy gets decided. The culturally working class are about as rare in those rooms as they were at my selective colleges.

I feel like I’ve betrayed the “culturally working class” bubble I was in. I know that working class perspectives don’t get accurate media coverage and I don’t know what to do. I’m often in denial about it. I am glad that committed reporters pick up DoorDash or Uber shifts to write about the work, but the broader context of why someone chooses this work is harder to capture.

The cultural divide is powerful: even though most top colleges guarantee nearly full scholarships to families making under $70k-$100k, colleges still struggle to attract low income students. Fewer still are culturally working class.

If you need that cultural inheritance to get into elite circles, those circles will structurally be out of touch with much of the country.