The fact that summer housing for this year has been raised by 43 percent without notifying the student body speaks loudly of the bureaucracy at Reed College. The students who tend to stay on campus over the summer, as I have done in previous years, are usually self-sufficient individuals who may not receive financial support from their family, cannot afford to go home, or don’t have a home. These same students keep the college productive by working in the mailroom, doing Grounds Crew, arranging beds for Conference & Events Planning (CEP) before Reunions Week, doing research with professors, and even working on their theses because their local public libraries do not have a sufficient databases for their area of study.
The sentiment behind raising summer housing prices without hosting a discussion is disrespectful and comes from a place of privilege. Yet I’ve heard a lot of students say things like, “$150 more [each month] for summer housing isn’t that much.” Well, maybe not for the general public at Reed, but for those of us who work two to three jobs to make ends meet, that money goes a long way. The fiscal administration acts like $150 more each month is just spare change to us, when it is not. The students who stay in summer housing also hope to save up money for the upcoming school year, something now less feasible because of the increase in rent. After talking to some members of the administration, I was told that the college is trying to profit from places it has never profited from before, e.g. summer housing, because of loans on investments like the Performing Arts Building.
Even if scholarships are given to residents over the summer, or if there is a decrease in the current price of summer housing, it is unsettling that the administration had no sense of sympathy or connection to its student body. They don’t know what it’s like to be poor and marginalized at an institution of higher learning.
This sentiment is reinforced by the new system of payment for House Advisors (HAs). They are no longer being paid through credit, but rather through rolling disbursements like other student employees. Although the school states that HAs will be paid the same amount as before, their income will be taxed. Casual conversations with the administration have suggested that at one point or another the school failed to accurately report the earnings of HAs to the IRS. This is mere speculation, but if this is the case, the student body should not be cornered into signing contracts they’re not fully comfortable with, that is, contracts that students only became aware of after they had received positions as HAs. A fair share of HAs accept these positions to lessen financial strain on their parents, but it seems that in this case they are being taken advantage of.
Why does the administration act without communicating with the people that their policies will affect? The answer is simple: They themselves are not poor, or have never been poor.
I’m a first generation college student. I’m Mexican-American and my parents immigrated to this country three decades ago from western Mexico. I’ve been poor my entire life, something a lot of people don’t know because I bury myself in obscure cinema and robust literature. Had I not been given a generous scholarship from Reed, who knows where I’d be.
I’ve struggled with my mental health and my financial problems my entire time at Reed; these things have inhibited me so much that I had to take two leaves of absence. I took my first leave of absence my sophomore year. My parents were having financial trouble, and therefore I had to go home and immediately get a job. I got a job at Subway, but got fired a week into it because I over thought how one should make a sandwich. I ended up getting a job with the City of Santa Ana and made a decent wage to help my family.
The second time I took a leave of absence it was the medical kind. I’ve suffered from clinical depression my entire life, but the spring semester of my junior year was unbearable. I took a leave, lived in my friend’s living room for six months while holding two jobs and dealing with depression and a panic disorder. That same semester I was sexually assaulted by one of my best friends, one with whom I was sharing a living space. I spent a couple nights sleeping in the Rhododendron Garden because I felt poor, guilty, and alone. I ended up spending a lot of my money on alcohol, disregarding expenses like food, shelter, etc. I was poor and I was starving; no one then knew what I was going through. I was lucky to have other friends who took me in after the sexual assault, because my previous living arrangement was no longer an option. I couldn’t afford therapy so I enrolled in a script writing class at Portland Community College in order to get free counseling as a part time student. It was my counselor at this institution who helped me greatly—an institution that the Reed administration disregards and looks down upon because it’s not a “top liberal arts school” worth $60,000 a year.
Reed isn’t special, and we’re not special; we can just afford or have means to call ourselves “special.”
I’m glad that I’ve made it to my senior year, as taxing as it has been. I don’t want anyone’s pity; I just want people to acknowledge that it is difficult to be a low income student, in my case a woman of color as well. Reed and other institutions of higher learning should commend their student body for their efforts to thrive under such difficult conditions. Reed is only emphasizing—through their actions— that a place like this is not one for students from low-SES backgrounds. Marginalizing students from low-SES backgrounds, many of whom drop out of college because of a lack of support, creates a vicious cycle for future students of low-SES backgrounds to do the same. We are regressing, not progressing. We are not diversifying, we are gentrifying.
I hope after you have all read this that you will stand in solidarity with low-SES students at the upcoming Senate meeting taking place today in the Student Union (SU) Friday, March 11. Low-SES members will be meeting soon to talk about this, and we will keep the public updated.