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The hardest part about growing up poor was knowing I couldn’t mess up. Not even once.

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I think we have an ideology about talent that says that talent is a tangible, resilient, hardened, shiny thing. It will always rise to the top. To find and encourage talent, all you have to do as a society is to make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits, free tuition, letters to the kids with high score s . … You raise your hand and say, “Over here!” And the talent will come running, but that’s not true … [i]t’s not resilient and shiny … [t]alent is really, really fragile.

— Malcolm Gladwell

I grew up in East Oakland, California, as the youngest son of Teochew-Vietnamese immigrants. School was always easy for me — I never really felt challenged throughout elementary school. Amid the droves of teacher strikes and substitutes, the truly dedicated teachers of Oakland’s Maxwell Park Elementary School were few and far between.

But in fifth grade, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Mrs. Harris, who changed my life forever. On weekends, Mrs. Harris invited students to her house for lunch. Using her own money, she gave away trinkets to those who did well on assignments.

And during a parent-teacher conference, she did something unthinkable and so incredible that I didn’t fully comprehend its impact until years later. She begged my parents to have me apply to private middle schools to get me out of the failing Oakland public schools .

My parents, who don’t speak much English, did not understand what was happening. They didn’t know what a private school was, let alone why anyone would pay for school when there was free public education. Neither graduated from high school before fleeing from Vietnam to America with my eldest brother in tow. While they valued education for their children, they thought of education as uniform and binary — you either went to school or you didn’t. And as long as their kids went to school, that was good enough.

If it had been up to my parents, nothing would have happened. But Mrs. Harris was hell-bent on making sure that I would have this opportunity for a better education. Every day, she would ask me, “So have you started applying yet?” “Did your parents look into Head-Royce yet?”

After weeks of hounding my parents, Mrs. Harris, my brother, and most of my 16 aunts and uncles managed to convince my parents to look into this private school idea. Thanks to their efforts, I ended up applying to the prestigious Head-Royce School in Oakland, taking the admissions test, and getting accepted.

But I didn’t attend. Instead, I ended up going to the local public middle school because my parents and I had failed to turn in the financial aid forms before the deadline . It took a village to push my parents to apply to Head-Royce, but there wasn’t anyone around to help us with something as mundane yet essential as filling out the financial aid forms on time. There probably were people who could have helped us, but my parents didn’t want to bother anyone by asking for help. That was their immigrant mindset: You shut up, work hard, and definitely don’t burden others.

I got a voicemail from the head of admissions at Head-Royce, asking if I still wanted to enroll despite the lack of financial aid. Growing up, I never really thought that we were poor, or at least I didn’t understand what that meant. The words “federally assisted lunch program” actually made me feel special since I got free lunches at school.

But once I found out that the school’s tuition cost more than my parents made in a year, I realized there was a world beyond what I had known. Before applying, I had no idea that Head-Royce or private schools even existed, but now that I had a window into that world, it felt like the window had been boarded over, shutting me out.

Here’s the crazy part — I internalized this whole process to mean that I wasn’t good enough for Head-Royce. I had taken a shot at the big leagues, trying to get into a better school, and I had been rejected. I wasn’t smart enough. I hadn’t worked hard enough. I wasn’t enough.

At first, my parents complained about the unfair system. However, soon after, both my parents and I took the closed door to mean that I wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t scored high enough on the tests, that Head-Royce didn’t want me after all. If I had and if they did, they would have given me a scholarship. I felt awful and ashamed. I wasn’t good enough.

It’s a feeling that has persisted throughout my life, even as I attended an excellent college and started a successful company. It’s a feeling that many people like me — people who have fought their way out of poverty — struggle with. This is a problem we need to fix, and fast.

I really needed someone to believe in me

I might have given up on myself, but Mrs. Harris refused to give up on me. When she found out that I wasn’t going to Head-Royce, she went to work on a backup plan. We tried to get into a better public middle school in the wealthy part of Oakland, but nothing came of our efforts. Undeterred, Mrs. Harris contacted and pushed to get me into the Heads Up summer program, which offered free classes at Head-Royce for underserved kids.

During summer classes at Heads Up, I felt challenged academically for the first time ever and really started to love school. That newfound appreciation for education also rubbed off on my parents — they somehow saved up enough from their minimum wage jobs to pay for a math tutor whose house I went to twice a week that year. Mrs. Harris changed everything. I hope she’s reading this, since I don’t think I ever even said thank you. Thank you.

Those summer classes gave me hope during sixth grade, which ended up feeling like a lost year. I can’t remember any of the teachers’ names. I just have memories of the English teacher who the kids made cry and the substitute math teacher who yelled at me when I corrected him on how to do long division — never mind why a sixth-grade class was still being taught long division.

I applied again to Head-Royce, this time for seventh grade. We applied for financial aid as soon as it opened up and had several people check over the forms to make sure everything looked right. Thanks to the generosity of the Malone Family Foundation , I received a financial aid package that allowed me to attend the school.

Head-Royce felt like paradise. Everyone there was smart and loved to learn. The coursework was actually challenging. I loved it. Even so, I never felt like I fit in. I never, ever told anyone about what had happened when I had previously applied to Head-Royce — it remained a huge, shameful, dirty secret. I don’t think I ever got over that feeling that I wasn’t good enough, though it certainly motivated to me to work my butt off.

Years later, at Stanford, where a large percentage of the student body receives some financial aid, I maintained that internalized feeling of not belonging in this world, of not being good enough. I never talked about it. Not at Head-Royce. Not at Stanford.

Why the feeling of not being good enough haunts kids who grew up poor

On my way to a friend’s new luxury apartment in San Francisco last month, I listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast called “Carlos Doesn’t Remember . ” I quickly found myself in tears — the protagonist’s story was my story. It was probably many of your stories.

Carlos is a smart, hard-working high school sophomore from a bad part of LA. He was fortunate enough to meet Eric Eisner, a former entertainment lawyer who founded a program called YES to help kids like Carlos get a scholarship to an elite private school. It sounds like he’s got his ticket out, but it’s never that simple. You don’t just leave behind where you came from because you get a scholarship to a good school.

Gladwell revisits a moment in Carlos’s life when his private school teachers were concerned that he didn’t play with the other kids during recess. It wasn’t due to a lack of friends, because he was usually very gregarious in the classroom. Nor was it due to him feeling self-conscious as the only Hispanic kid at the predominantly white school. Eisner found out: H e literally couldn’t play because his shoes were three sizes too big and he couldn’t afford another pair .

Carlos had also been accepted to a prestigious boarding school but didn’t enroll because he didn’t want to leave his sister alone in foster care. He doesn’t like to talk about these things — in fact, he claims he doesn’t remember any of these incidents.

Carlos’s story highlights a problem that I’ve experienced but was never able to articulate. While scholarships are supposed to be an equalizer — and we as a society should continue to make education more affordable and scholarships available — the real battle underprivileged kids face can be much more insidious and intangible. My co-founder Ricky Yean touched on this battle in “ Why it’s so hard to succeed in Silicon Valley when you grew up poor ” :

Tangible inequalities — that which can be seen and measured, like money or access — get the majority of the attention, and deservedly so. But inequalities that live in your mind can keep the deck stacked against you long after you’ve made it out of the one-room apartment you shared with your dad. This is insidious, difficult-to-discuss, and takes a long essay to explain.

Being poor, you cannot afford to fuck up the opportunity that comes along

After listening to Gladwell’s podcast, I realized that both Ricky and I — any many others who’ve tried to escape poverty — are motivated by survival instinct. Once you see a way out, you become laser-focused on that opportunity. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a scholastic or sports scholarship, or a less traditional path. Being poor, you cannot afford to fuck up the opportunity that comes along.

You don’t take it for granted because you understand you’re playing by someone else’s rules. Even today, Ricky and I often feel like that. Given the long odds we beat to get here, sometimes in our heads, our world feels very fragile; at any moment, the clock could strike midnight. We’ve encouraged each other to talk more openly about these feelings, in an effort to strengthen and reinforce the reality of what we’ve built.

As Gladwell points out, it’s often only possible for poor kids like me to reach their potential when we have a champion who can not only show us the way but help carry us there. Mrs. Harris was that hero for me. She wasn’t a big-shot lawyer in this case; she was just a teacher who believed in me. She made opportunities happen for me, and she persisted when things hit unexpected roadblocks.

But not every kid is lucky enough to have a Mrs. Harris. Or an Eric Eisner. Remembering that and thinking about how many underprivileged kids must be experiencing this on a daily basis is why Carlos’s story brought me to tears.

We as a society need to do more to not only find these lost diamonds in the rough but dig them up, champion their cause, and push open doors for them — like Mrs. Harris did for me.

We always need more Mrs. Harrises and Eric Eisners, but this isn’t just a call for champions. I believe that in order to level the playing field for underprivileged, minority, or other disadvantaged groups, providing opportunities is not enough — we need to start talking openly about the differences in background, mindset, and opportunities that persist even after you attempt to level the field.

When discussing diversity, people often bring up the idea of a pipeline, where the focus is on bringing in as many qualified, underrepresented, or underprivileged candidates as possible. But perhaps we should start thinking about it as less of a pipeline and more of a leaky funnel.

The fact is when you grow up poor or disadvantaged, there are innumerable places where you might drop off before you have a chance at a better life. As Gladwell points out, many of the brightest students in Carlos’s hometown end up gang-affiliated as early as the eighth grade, long before free SAT prep courses, scholarships, and admissions officers can open up doors for them. We have to do more to ensure that the underserved know what opportunities are available to them and help them through every step of realizing those opportunities.

In the face of adversity, you have far fewer chances, a much smaller margin for error. The oversights and slights you internalize over the course of many, many years make the rare opportunities you find even rarer and leave you unable to capitalize on what’s left. If we want to start to spot and seal the cracks and leaks that leave people behind, we need to begin the dialogue on unseen inequalities and unexpected drop-offs.

To everyone who has experienced this— who has felt like they don’t belong or aren’t good enough — the world needs to hear your story. Only then can it begin to give current and future underdogs a better chance at a better life. And just remember: You are good enough. You do belong.

David Tran is the co-founder and CTO of PRX.co , a venture-backed , software-powered PR startup. Previously he started Crowdbooster, a social media optimization solution, was an entrepreneur in residence at Stanford's StartX, and graduated from Stanford with a BS in c omputer s cience. David spends a lot of his free time training for marathons and rooting for the Warriors, the A's, and the Stanford Cardinal.

This essay is adapted from a post that originally ran on Medium .

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

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The New York Times

Magazine | i was a low-income college student. classes weren’t the hard part., i was a low-income college student. classes weren’t the hard part..

By ANTHONY ABRAHAM JACK SEPT. 10, 2019

Schools must learn that when you come from poverty, you need more than financial aid to succeed.

The Disappearing Schools of Puerto Rico

The koch foundation is trying to reshape foreign policy. with liberal allies., what college admissions offices really want.

N ight came early in the chill of March. It was my freshman year at Amherst College, a small school of some 1,600 undergraduates in the hills of western Massachusetts, and I was a kid on scholarship from Miami. I had just survived my first winter, but spring seemed just as frigid. Amherst felt a little colder — or perhaps just lonelier — without the money to return home for spring break like so many of my peers.

At that moment, however, I thought less of home and more about the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I walked past Valentine Hall, the cafeteria, its large windows ghostly in the moonlight. Only the emergency exit signs blazed red in the darkness. There was just enough light to see the chairs stacked on top of the tables and the trays out of reach through the gates that barred me from entry. Amherst provided no meals during holidays and breaks, but not all of us could afford to leave campus. After my first year, I knew when these disruptions were coming and planned for hungry days, charting them on my calendar.

Back home in Miami, we knew what to do when money was tight and the family needed to be fed. At the time, in the late ’90s, McDonald’s ran a special: 29-cent hamburgers on Wednesdays and 39-cent cheeseburgers on Sundays. Without that special, I am not sure what we would have done when the week outlasted our reserves before payday. But up at Amherst, there was no McDonald’s special, no quick fix.

I worked extra shifts as a gym monitor to help cover the unavoidable costs of staying on campus during breaks. At the gym, the vending machines were stocked with Cheetos and Yoo-hoos, welcome complements to the ham-and-cheese and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I got from CVS; there are no corner stores or bodegas in Amherst. Not so welcome was the air conditioning on full force in the gym, despite lingering mounds of snow outside. I would check in 20 or so people during my 10-hour shifts, mostly faculty and staff who lived in the area. I recognized them, but they didn’t pay me much mind. Friends would not return until the Friday and Saturday before classes began again. Many came back tan. But what I noticed more was how so many of them returned rested — how different our holidays had been.

We like to think that landing a coveted college spot is a golden ticket for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We think less critically about what happens next. I lived this gap as a first-generation college student. And I returned to it as a first-generation graduate student, spending two years observing campus life and interviewing more than 100 undergraduates at an elite university. Many students from low-income families described having to learn and decode a whole new set of cues and terms like professors’ “office hours” (many didn’t know what they were or how to use them), and foreign rituals like being invited to get coffee with an instructor (and not knowing whether they were expected to pay) — all those moments between convocation and commencement where college life is actually lived.

Now, as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I teach a course I’ve titled C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) — borrowing the title of that still-relevant Wu-Tang Clan track — in which we examine how poverty shapes the ways in which many students make it to and through college. Admission alone, as it turns out, is not the great equalizer. Just walking through the campus gates unavoidably heightens these students’ awareness and experience of the deep inequalities around them.

I’ve spent half my life in Miami and the other half in Massachusetts. One 20-minute phone call with an Amherst football coach when I was a high school senior, and a college brochure that arrived two days later, brought this dual citizenship into existence. I can still hear my brother asking, “What is an Amherst?” We didn’t have internet at home, so we had to wait to get to the school computer lab before we could look up the unfamiliar name. We learned that the “H” was as silent as my brother was when he found out a United States president — Calvin Coolidge — was an alumnus, and so was the eminent black physician Dr. Charles Drew. Now maybe his baby brother could be one, too.

The path from Miami to Massachusetts was not one that everyone around me could see. I attended George Washington Carver Middle School, which had an International Baccalaureate program, in my neighborhood, Coconut Grove. But the summer before I started at Carver, I took some summer school electives at Ponce de Leon Middle School, our zoned school, where my mom worked as a security guard and which she helped to desegregate in the ’60s. Before the starting bell one day, an assistant principal from Carver saw me goofing around with some friends from around the way. She strode over and said to me, “You don’t have the potential to be a Carverite.”

That assistant principal saw black, boisterous boys and deemed us, and me, less than . She didn’t see my drive to succeed. My family didn’t have much, but since my days in Head Start, I was always a top performer in every subject. During one rough patch, I stayed home from school for a few days when we couldn’t afford all the supplies needed to carry out my science-fair experiment on bulb voltage and battery life. I developed my hypotheses and outlined my proposed methods without the materials and had everything ready to go when we were able to afford the supplies. I missed the ribbon but got the A. So on that summer morning when the assistant principal admonished me, anger welled up inside me, but I couldn’t let it show. That would have just played into her preconceived notion of who — or rather, what — I was. I had to prove her wrong. I had to prove myself right.

But even as I write these words, I’m aware that this is exactly the kind of story that poor, black and Latinx students are conditioned to write for college application essays. In everyday life, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, we “wear the mask that grins and lies” that “hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,” but when we write these all-important essays we are pushed — by teachers, counselors and anyone who gives advice — to tug the heartstrings of upper-middle-class white admissions officers. “Make them cry,” we hear. And so we pimp out our trauma for a shot at a future we want but can’t fully imagine.

At Coral Gables Senior High, I was the safe friend in the eyes of my friends’ mothers. The nerdy, chubby kid who geeked out to novels and cartoons did not pose as much of a threat as his less bookish football teammates. But being the safe friend couldn’t protect me any more than anyone else from the dangers all around us.

I’m still haunted by the memory of one night when a group of us decided to go to the CocoWalk AMC theater for a movie. We ran into some folks from school near the corner of Frow and Elizabeth and stopped to joke and roast one another. Then, up ahead at the corner, we heard raised voices. We could make out three men starting to fight. As we watched, frozen, one picked up a cinder block and heaved it down on the head of another man on the ground. An angry voice rang out in our direction: “Who dat is down there?!” Terrified, we sprinted away behind the nearby houses. After seconds that felt like forever, doors slammed and a car sped off. We came out only after the roar of dual exhaust pipes faded away and raced home in the opposite direction, knowing better than to stay and invite questions.

Once I was at Amherst, the phone would ring with news of similar nights. I would be reading a novel for class or reviewing my chemistry notes for a test when my mother’s ring tone, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” by the Tokens, would break the silence. Something in her “Hey, Tony, you busy?” let me know I was about to share in the emotional burden that bad news brings. My family didn’t understand how disruptive those calls could be. Neither did I, really. No one had ever left. We normally went through these events together. But I was no longer able to help figure out when the coast was clear, to investigate the flashing police lights. I always wondered, unnerved, just how close my family was to whatever prompted such a call. I was away. They were still there.

Neighborhoods are more than a collection of homes and shops, more than uneven sidewalks or winding roads. Some communities protect us from hurt, harm and danger. Others provide no respite at all. This process is not random but the consequence of historical patterns of exclusion and racism. Life in privileged communities means that children traverse safer streets, have access to good schools and interact with neighbors who can supply more than the proverbial cup of sugar. Life in distressed communities can mean learning to distinguish between firecrackers and gunshots.

These starkly different environments have a profound impact on children’s cognitive functioning, social development and physical health. Research on concentrated disadvantage makes it abundantly clear that inequality depresses the mobility prospects of even the brightest kids, with poor black youth disproportionately exposed to neighborhood violence. In his 2010 study of Chicago youth from adolescence to young adulthood, the sociologist Patrick Sharkey, then at New York University and now at Princeton, shows how such violence disrupts learning in ways equivalent to missing two years of schooling. And yet we equate performance on tests with potential, as if learning happens in a vacuum. It doesn’t.

Even if they make it to dorms on leafy-green campuses, disadvantaged students still live in poverty’s long shadow. They worry about those back home just as much as those back home worry about them. At Amherst, I would get messages, in the few moments I had between lunch and lab, announcing that someone needed something: $75 for diabetes medicine or $100 to turn the lights back on. One day a call announced that a $675 mortgage payment needed to be paid. It wasn’t the first time. I was annoyed. I was mad that I was annoyed. Was I not the future they had invested in all these years? Did I have enough to spare? Were they expecting the whole thing? How much time did I have? This was before apps like Venmo that allow you to send money to anyone instantly, so it would take almost three hours, start to finish, to get to the nearest Walmart, on Route 9, to send a bit of spare cash home by MoneyGram. That ride on the B43 bus was as lonely as it was long.

By my junior year, I had secured four jobs in addition to monitoring and cleaning the gym. My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times. That fall, right after Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, I was called in to the financial-aid office. They wanted to discuss my work schedule and to tell me that they would be reaching out to my bosses to let them know I needed to cut back hours. I was working too much; that’s what the work-study rules said.

I pleaded with them not to. I needed the money. More truthfully, my family and I did. One responsibility of being the one who leaves is sending remittances back, a reality that many of us who are the first to venture away from home know all too well. I assured the officials I was handling all my work. In truth, I was really just pushing through; I became a robot, hyperscheduled and mechanical in my interactions. My grades were good, and so I thought I was good. I worried that if I worked less, I would not be able to help my family recover from the storms, let alone get through all their everyday emergencies. But if I was their safety net, I had none.

[ What college admissions offices really want .]

I was surprised this spring when I learned about the College Board’s new Environmental Context Dashboard, renamed Landscape , a set of measures for colleges to use in admissions that takes into consideration students’ neighborhood and high school environments, the constellation of influences — individual and institutional — that shape students’ chances at upward mobility. Critics saw this “adversity index,” as it came to be known, as just another attempt by the College Board to maintain its dominance over college admissions or elide the harm that the SAT has inflicted upon generations of youth from disadvantaged communities. (After pressure, the College Board announced it would not combine the neighborhood and school scores into one individual score.)

I hated the SAT. It stole Saturdays from me, especially when I transferred to the private high school where I spent my senior year on a scholarship. And not because I went to tutoring sessions or met with private coaches but because my more privileged peers did, while I passed the hours at home by myself. (I wasn’t doing practice tests either. I couldn’t afford the book.) Those lonely afternoons served as reminders of my poverty and also my precarious future. But now, as a sociologist of education who spent two years interning in the Amherst admissions office, I see the College Board’s new index as a step — and just one step — in the right direction to demonstrate the impact of instability that contributes to differences in performance and social well-being to admissions committees, those gatekeepers of higher education. And at a time when affirmative action is under renewed attack, the index permits an alternative to explicit considerations of race in college admissions by taking into account the ecological factors that are intimately tied to race. The supplemental scores Landscape provides can’t level the playing field, but they offer some context for just how unequal it is.

Colleges have made racial and class diversity into virtues with which they welcome students during orientation and entice alumni to make donations. But students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds often bear the brunt of the tension that exists between proclamation and practice of this social experiment. Schools cannot simply showcase smiling black and brown faces in their glossy brochures and students wearing shirts blaring “First Gen and Proud” in curated videos and then abdicate responsibility for the problems from home that a more diverse class may bring with them to campus. Does this entail going beyond providing tuition, room and board? Yes. It requires colleges and universities to question what they take for granted, about their students and about the institutions themselves. And to do this, they’ll need more than an algorithm. What’s needed is a deeply human touch.

This means ensuring that campus services meet the needs of all students. College can be a difficult time for everyone. Divorces of parents and deaths of grandparents are not uncommon. Counselors and advisers are more or less prepared for these universal types of challenges. But whom do students turn to when they get those 2 a.m. calls bringing news of street violence, eviction or arrests? Hiring more diverse staff and administrators, as well as those who are familiar with these issues, is important in this effort — but this work can’t just be consigned to the diversity dean, who is often the only person of color in the office.

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College administrations must make a sustained effort to understand the stress and isolation that can define everyday college life for these more vulnerable students. This necessitates more than forming ad hoc committees to produce reports that all too often sit on a dean’s desk collecting dust. Climate or exit surveys can take the pulse of the community and reveal blind spots among administrators, faculty and staff. Officials can hold training sessions to help them face their own racial and class biases. They should also form sustained partnerships with student groups and keep those lines of communication open throughout the school year and across incoming and outgoing classes.

When I was learning to chart the hungry days on my calendar, I was one of the nearly 40 percent of undergraduates who struggle with food insecurity. Before all else, colleges must meet students’ basic needs — it is hard to focus and function when you’re hungry. There are practical and immediate steps that can be tailored to the campus and student body, whether by expanding meal plans, as Connecticut College and Smith College did around recesses in the academic calendar; allowing meal-share programs on campus, like Swipe Out Hunger, which permits students to donate unused dining credits for other students to use; or opening food pantries and food banks, as at Bunker Hill Community College, Appalachian State University and Columbia University.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that in 2016, of the nearly 3.3 million students who were eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), less than half applied. Students in need must navigate not only the bureaucratic red tape to apply but also the double bind of the 20-hour workweek requirement — the minimum to receive SNAP benefits, but also the federal work-study maximum — all while staying in good academic standing.

I knew how to ask for help in college. I understood that it was how you got what you needed. I eventually lobbied Tony Marx, then the president of Amherst, to provide support during spring break, which he agreed to in my junior year. Amherst provided funds for lower-income students to eat in Schwemm’s, the campus coffee shop, and expanded support during other breaks in subsequent years.

But the full weight of my responsibilities, even the most quotidian ones, was often as invisible to me as it was to my adviser and financial-aid officer. And sometimes students like me continue to carry the weight of home long after we graduate and in ways we still aren’t aware of. I got a text from home days before my 32nd birthday — after I’d gone to college, earned my doctorate and secured my position as a professor — asking me to “call DirectTV and take your name off the bill.” I had to ask: “My name on the bill? Since when?” The response: “Since we been living here.”

It had been almost two decades.

Anthony Abraham Jack is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.”

More Education

By JONATHAN M. KATZ and DIANA ZEYNEB ALHINDAWI

By BEVERLY GAGE

By PAUL TOUGH

More on NYTimes.com

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Poor, but Privileged

• Posted May 20, 2017
• By Lory Hough

When Tony Jack started his freshman year at Amherst College in 2003, something seemed off. He looked around and saw a diverse group of students, but unlike him, none seemed poor. They talked about study abroad programs and boarding schools like Andover and Groton. Back at home, in Miami, summer was just a season. At Amherst, he quickly learned, it was also a verb.

“I kept asking myself, am I really the only poor black person here?”

The answer was no.

Some of his classmates had grown up the way he did — barely making ends meet, the first in their families to go to college — but they had taken part in programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance that pluck promising, low-income kids from struggling urban schools and give them funding to attend private high schools.

What Jack noticed about these students was that, unlike other poor kids who hadn’t gone to elite schools, they all seemed to be transitioning from high school to college without issue. They were already versed in college terms like “orientation” and “syllabus.” They didn’t hesitate to approach faculty members or raise their hands in class.

Jack didn’t know it at the time, but this observation would eventually help shape the research question that he is currently trying to answer as a junior fellow at the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows and as an incoming faculty member at the Ed School: Why do students from equally disadvantaged backgrounds experience the same college so differently?

What he found is that colleges and universities, and society in general, tend to treat all low-income students the same. While reading articles for his Ph.D. in Harvard’s sociology department, Jack says the story — whether it was written by an anthropologist, economist, or sociologist — was always the same.

“If you’re poor and black, if you’re poor and Latino, if you’re poor and anything in college, you’ll have this experience. Period,” he says. “There was so little variation in talking about the experience of poor students. I didn’t see in the research what I saw at Amherst.”

So Jack did what made the most sense: He set out to change the research — and the national conversation around diversity in higher education.

As his mentor and dissertation chair William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, says, “When Tony initially described his research project I immediately thought, Here is a project that will very likely uncover issues not previously considered by sociologists and will enhance our understanding of how pre-college exposure to important social milieus for the acquisition of cultural and social capital matters for low-income students.”

After two years of interviewing more than 100 black, Latino, and white undergraduates at an elite university, Jack came up with a new way to think about how factors like poverty and socioeconomic segregation — segregation by class — shape the way students experience college. He splits low-income college students into two groups: The “doubly disadvantaged” are poor kids who went to public schools, often underresourced.

The “privileged poor” are poor kids who went to private high schools, usually well resourced. As he explained during a recent podcast interview with a Harvard alumni group, the terms are purposefully loaded. “Privileged poor is kind of like jumbo shrimp, right?” he said. “It’s got that oxymoronic quality to it intended to make the reader ask: How can one person be both privileged and poor?”

What he found is that students who are privileged poor and went to private high schools come to college not only academically prepared, but also culturally prepared. Jack says they come knowing how to navigate the informal social rules that govern college life and this gives them an advantage. For many, it also helps them get more out of college. On the other hand, the doubly disadvantaged, although also academically gifted, usually come less exposed to the norms and unspoken expectations of college, making the transition especially difficult. The privileged poor also experience culture shock, but much earlier, he explains — in middle or high school, when they are recruited into programs like Prep for Prep. As one student told Jack, “The shock I would have experienced [at an elite college], I experienced from eighth grade to high school, …from public to private school.”

While talking about these two groups, Jack often uses office hours as a way to explain how different their experience can be in college.

“One thing I would like for every college to do is institute a policy that professors define terms like ‘office hours’ on the syllabus. That’s so simple,” he says. “The college doesn’t have to dictate what kind of description they give because office hours look different for a chemistry class or a Spanish class. But what would happen if a professor said, ‘Hey, I’m Professor Jack. The class meets on Tuesday and Thursday at a certain time, and my office hours are 1 to 2:30, now let’s get started,’ versus ‘Hello everybody. I’m Professor Jack, and class is Wednesday and office hours are Thursday from 1 to 2:30, and I view office hours as a time for us to not only go over course material and larger course aims, but also an opportunity to talk about fellowships or how this course relates to larger issues.’ That’s making it personal. How different do those two things sound to everyone? In the first one, you’re assuming everyone knows what office hours are. They don’t. That’s a fact of the matter. Not all kids come to college knowing what office hours are. So translate it. And this is a kind of translation that has nothing to do with language like Spanish or French or Mandarin. This is about translating the college experience for students and their families.”

When Jack started at Amherst, he was lucky enough to know what office hours were because, although he had attended public schools in Miami through 11th grade, he transferred his senior year to a nearby private school, Gulliver Prep, after a bad experience with a football coach who didn’t value his academic skills. That one year — just one year — gave him a leg up navigating his way in college.

“My one year gave me such an advantage,” he says, noting that because of that year in private school, he puts himself in the privileged poor category. “My school had mandatory office hours for teachers. Because they did that, I was used to going not only to my academic adviser at Amherst, but also to the academic dean. It put me on a pathway to be a little more at ease at Amherst."

While he was doing his research, he found that other privileged poor students felt the same level of comfort when it came to approaching faculty. He tells a story about a boy from a troubled neighborhood who attended an affluent boarding school. In college, the boy felt “empowered” telling professors he wanted to meet with them, and he had no qualms calling a professor on his cell phone for virtual office hours. As Jack said, low-income kids who come up through the private school pipeline learn not only that it’s okay to reach out to faculty, but that it’s actually expected. In his research, he found that the privileged poor pattern with middle-class students in this way. In contrast, the doubly disadvantaged kids not only feel too intimidated to speak up, especially to those in authority, but they believe that the way to success is simply to put your head down and work hard.

Jack credits former First Lady Michelle Obama for being public and personal about similar struggles in college. Recently, when asked to write an op-ed reflecting on President Obama, Jack asked if he could write about Michelle instead.

Jack says about the speech, “She laid it out and made it so personal. What she has done for my research in that one speech is as influential as some sociologists I’ve been reading for the last eight years. She’s allowed me to see how powerful the personal narrative of someone in a position of power can be.”

Since then, Jack has been very forthcoming about sharing his personal narrative. He grew up in West Grove, a section of Coconut Grove that the Miami Herald dubbed “the Miami neighborhood that time forgot.” Some of Florida’s first black settlers, Bahamian natives, set roots there in the 1880s, and the area quickly became home for people who worked at the Peacock Inn or as nannies and butlers for the wealthy. He lived there with his sister and brother, a single mom, and his grandparents. His mom, Marilyn, worked security; his grandmother was a maid for a lawyer in nearby Pinecrest. He says the Wednesday before payday was often tough.

“When I go home, it’s one of those moments in which you remember the lived history of segregation, both racial and socioeconomic,” he says, “and you see the legacy of that.”

He started out as a Head Start kid, something he says he’s very proud of, and later spent most of his nonschool hours at nearby Elizabeth Virrick Park, a city-run playground that offered organized afterschool and summer programs. One of the highlights was ceramics, something he did at Virrick from elementary to high school with a park leader named Gina Knowles.

“We would go there every day after school and stay with Gina. I never really talked about Gina before,” he says. “With her I made owl banks, chess sets, everything.” He pulls up photos on his phone of a few of his pieces, including a ceramic chef that holds cooking utensils and sits in the kitchen of his Cambridge apartment. There’s another of a Dalmatian dog he called Cookies and Cream that he gave to one of his elementary school teachers who recently shared a photo on Facebook.

“We used to stay at Virrick until 11 at night, when the lights went out, doing ceramics and playing flag football and card games like Spades and Tonk,” he says. “If I was doing any activity outside of home, it was at Virrick. It was a safe space to be creative.”

The neighborhood though, like many, skewed toward sports — something Jack liked but didn’t love.

“The neighborhood was one where if you were good at sports, everyone knew who you were — a classic tale,” he says. Frank Gore, a running back for the Indianapolis Colts, was a local kid. “Everyone knew Frank. He was a cool dude,” Jack says. “But I was a bookworm. I was always a nerd.” Because of his size — Jack is now 6’4” with a size 16 foot — his mother didn’t want him to play organized football with kids his age until freshman year in high school when he reluctantly joined to please his brother. “I enjoyed the camaraderie, but I still did ceramics.”

Football was what led him to private school.

“I had no intention of going to private school, but we had a football coach who only wanted you as an athlete–student. If you didn’t need the coach to go to college, he didn’t care,” Jack says. He was eventually cut from the team after a shoulder injury, and the situation led to what he calls a “bad breakup” with the school. He decided to leave. “I would have stayed. I was going to be a public school student my whole life.”

At Gulliver Prep, he says he was exposed to a lot, both good and bad. He got more attention from his teachers and thrived in small classes, but he says, “They weren’t ready for diversity. They didn’t know how to deal with you. They were used to wealthy white or wealthy Latino.”

He remembers turning in a paper for AP European history and got a B. He worked harder and got an A- on the next paper. The teacher held up his A-paper to the class and questioned if it was his work. He was mad. His mom was mad.

“But it was one of those moments when you learn a lot. I never take for granted that these places [elite schools] have issues. I never want it to be seen that it’s all a bowl of cherries,” he says. “It’s a Band-Aid where stitches are needed. Sending a student to a private school can help that student, but it doesn’t add to structural inequality. I’m clear that I don’t think everyone should go to private schools.”

What Jack does think is that we need to do a better job of equalizing the pre-college experience. Disadvantaged students shouldn’t have to be recruited into a program like Prep for Prep and leave the public-school system to get a good college education.

We also need to start telling the full story about disadvantaged kids and success. He talks about former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick as a good example.

But they’re one and the same person, Jack stresses. “We love telling poverty stories of poor black people so that we don’t actually want to see any kind of diversity in that story. To tell you how life can be for someone who’s poor and black or poor and Latino — everyone wants to hear that — but to tell a story about how all of a sudden that person went to one of the oldest, most prestigious boarding schools in the country with a multimillion dollar endowment, then went to Harvard Law after Harvard undergraduate? That is real. My research shows that on average, 50 percent of the lower-income black students at elite colleges graduated from private high schools, which is remarkable. One-third of lower-income Latinos, on average, graduate from private schools. These are huge numbers. But we still want to say they have a singular experience. What I’m saying is not only do they not have a singular experience, but I’m showing just how different their experiences are [from one another]. I’m also using their experiences to show that where their experiences are different, their divergent pre-college experiences are shaping their sense of belonging in college and how they move through elite institutions.”

We also need to rethink what diversity means for colleges and universities. While higher education has made necessary strides in the past few decades, as Jack recently wrote in The New York Times , “they have thought less about what the inclusion means for academic life, or how colleges themselves might need to change to help the least advantaged on their road to success.”

In other words, achieving diversity alone isn’t the final answer, he says. “I don’t mean to sell it short, but creating a diverse class is easy. That requires money. That requires being able to say we’re going to recruit this many people and we’re going to take the cost of the school off the table. That’s easy compared to creating an inclusive community. I say time and time again, we need to move from diversity to inclusion. We need underrepresented students to not only graduate, but also graduate whole and hearty. That’s a more noble goal in the end.”

After spending seven years as a resident tutor at Mather, one of Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses where he says he was allowed to be the “ Glee -loving, Harry Potter -reading, House -watching person that students would geek out with,” he saw many doubly disadvantaged kids who didn’t feel whole and hearty. “Universities have a responsibility to say we’re not helping all of our students in a way that we should.”

Which is why he’s already gone to bat for them, first by helping to get the Harvard undergraduate dining halls to stay open during breaks so that low-income kids who aren’t going home or on vacation have a place to eat.

“I could talk all day about how these two groups experience college differently, but both groups go hungry during spring break,” he says, referring also the privileged poor. “I never say one is richer than the other. I say one has more cultural capital than the other. Both lack economic capital.”

He’s also mentoring future Ed School students. To one student from his home state, he said, “If you come here, I’m going to mentor you through the nonacademic side of Harvard. To know that now I’m in a position where not only can my research help colleges become more open and accessible to all of its students, but also my being here is making the place feel slightly more comfortable for some students” is amazing.

Quoting actress Viola Davis, he says, “Diversity is not a trending topic or something to be placed on the back burner as soon as the day is done. What we do here shapes conversations in ways we should never underestimate. I don’t take it for granted that the things we do here can shape the policies that a generation has to contend with. Which is why I’m very clear that I don’t think everyone should go to private school. I don’t think that is the route to end inequality. That will only produce it even more. I have to be careful about my policy recommendations.

In the book he is currently writing with Harvard Education Press, slated to come out in the fall of 2018, Jack is also clear that his goals are personal.

“As I write this book, I’m not writing it for sociologists or for a battle to see who understands x theory better,” he says. “I’m writing it so that both students and college officials can understand the experiences of the new diversity in higher education and then understand what we need to do to fix some of the problems that have been growing and festering for too long. I realize that’s an ambitious goal, but I didn’t spend eight years in a Ph.D. program to push sand around. This book is as much about the profession as it is about the person. I’m a first-generation college student before I’m a professor and I’m ok with that. This research, the fact that some of the stories are about people who graduated 10, 25, 30 years ago, that could be me. I’m a qualitative researcher so I value data, but also the stories and the perspective of people who trusted me with the experiences they had, good or bad. I do not take that lightly.”

It’s one of the reasons his mom values his contribution to education.

“She’s a smart woman, and she worked at a public school for 30 years as a middle school security guard,” he says. “She knows, from an historical context, that public schools have been gutted. She saw that field trips ended. She saw that summer programs, which were for enrichment, not just catching up, ended. Now there’s nothing. She also drove me to private school and saw the difference.”

But that’s not the only reason she’s proud.

“She’s most proud that I found something that makes me happy. She always wanted us to do our best. She didn’t make us get certain grades. She loves that I’m loving what I do and that I’m still me. No matter what, I’m still me,” he says. This includes a continued love for all things Harry Potter. He even has a pair of Harry Potter Chuck Taylors given to him as a gift after officiating a wedding (he’s done five). Harvard College students have given a Ravenclaw beanie, an Elders Wand pen, and a Hogwarts computer decal. Even his favorite quote is from Hogwarts’ headmaster Albus Dumbledore: It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

“When I got to Amherst, I was working so much — four jobs — that I exhausted all of my financial aid work study funds in the first semester,” he says. “I got straight A’s that year, but I never got to know or explore Amherst. It reminded me to slow down. I so often am future-oriented that I forget to live in the present.”

He’s trying to do just that. These days, he takes long walks along the Charles (listening to Harry Potter books on tape), and treats students to dinners out as often as he can.

“The kind of conversation you have over a meal or baking is much deeper,” he says. It’s a lesson he learned from his grandmother, who taught him how to bake from scratch, including her famous pound cake. “With Swan Down flour, Land O’Lakes butter, and Dixie Crystals sugar,” he says. “If you came home with anything else, you had to go back out to the store.”

Although his star is clearly rising fast at Harvard (he also has a forthcoming professorship at Radcliffe and the Ed School recruited him two years before he’s slated to start) family has kept him grounded, says Amherst Professor Kristin Bumiller. She taught Jack in several of her courses and even now, a decade later, says her connection to him is “one of the strongest I have made during my long career teaching at Amherst.” He feels like family, she says, and he often visits for birthday parties and other events. (It’s one of the things he says he loves about Amherst College. “Relationships never end” at Amherst, he recently tweeted.) In turn, she follows his research and has gone to all his graduations. She knows his relatives. “After you meet his mother, you fully understand the secret to his success — it is founded in her enormous pride in his accomplishments, instilling the sensibility of always doing what is right and responsible, and the ability to put him in his place with the roll of an eye.”

It’s the eye roll that also keeps him grounded. “When I go home to visit, I’m not Dr. Jack or someone who’s been in this paper or interviewed by this person,” he says. “I still take out the trash. The last time I went home, my mom made me catch an Uber. She didn’t even pick me up. I’m just me.”

Photographs by Todd Dionne

Recess: Tony Jack, Knitter

Ed. Magazine

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How Poverty Changes Your Mind-Set

Understanding psychology may be key to addressing the problem..

• By Alice G. Walton
• February 19, 2018
• CBR - Behavioral Science
• Share This Page

The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank. In the United States, however, the poverty rate has been more stubborn—41 million people lived below the country’s poverty line in 2016, about 13 percent of the population, nearly the same rate as in 2007. Recent policy initiatives haven’t meaningfully reduced that rate. House Speaker Paul Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin) indicated this past December that the government would make fighting poverty, but also welfare, which many Republicans believe is a failed policy, a priority in 2018.

US lawmakers have expressed frustration when investments such as welfare programs don’t pull people out of poverty. “I believe in helping those who cannot help themselves but would if they could,” said Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican of Utah) this past December, when explaining his views on government spending. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Hatch’s statement reflects a common view that removing government support would force many poor people to improve their conditions themselves. Without welfare and government assistance, would able-bodied people find a job, get an education, stop buying lottery tickets, and focus on paying bills?

Not quite, indicate researchers, whose work is telling a different story of poverty. Contrary to the refrain that bad decisions lead to poverty, data indicate that it is the cognitive toll of being poor that leads to bad decisions. And actually, decisions that may seem counterproductive could be entirely rational, even shrewd. The findings suggest that to successfully reduce poverty, it would help to take this psychology into account.

What drives ‘bad’ decisions

In a 2013 study published in Science , researchers from the University of Warwick, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia find that for poor individuals, working through a difficult financial problem produces a cognitive strain that’s equivalent to a 13-point deficit in IQ or a full night’s sleep lost. Similar cognitive deficits were observed in people who were under real-life financial stress. Theirs is one of multiple studies suggesting that poverty can harm cognition.

But it was the fact that cognition seems to change with changing financial conditions that Chicago Booth’s Anuj K. Shah , along with Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan  and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir , two authors of the Science paper, were interested in getting to the root of. They suspected that poverty might essentially create a new mind-set—one that shifts what people pay attention to and therefore how they make decisions.

“Some say you really have to understand the broad social structure of being poor, and what people do and don’t have access to,” says Shah. “Others say that poor individuals have different values or preferences. We stepped back and asked: ‘Is there something else going on?’”

To test the idea, the researchers designed experiments that stripped away money and put other resources in demand. In one such study, the researchers had participants play variants of the popular games Wheel of Fortune , Angry Birds , and Family Feud , looking for how scarcity affected players’ attention. “Rich” people in these constructs had more chances to earn points, so more time to play the game. “Poor” people had fewer chances.

In the Wheel of Fortune –style game, the researchers measured how cognitively fatigued the players became. Logic would predict that rich players would be more fatigued, since they were allowed more turns to make more guesses. Instead, the researchers observed that poor players, having received fewer tries to guess at the answers, were more fatigued, having put more effort into each guess.

In an Angry Birds –style game in which people tried to shoot targets, rich players were given more chances to train a virtual slingshot on a target. Poor players, given fewer attempts, spent longer lining up their shots, and many scored more points per shot than rich players. For all the extra shots rich players had, they didn’t do as well, proportionally. “It seems that to understand the psychology of scarcity, we must also appreciate the psychology of abundance. If scarcity can engage us too much, abundance might engage us too little,” the researchers write.

Make every shot count Using a video-game scenario to test the influence of scarcity, the researchers find that people with limited chances performed better.

Shah et al., 2012

In some ways, scarcity appears to make people better problem solvers. In these game versions of the world, says Shah, the players randomly assigned to be poor focused on what was concrete and in front of them. And that’s what happens in real life, too, write Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir. When money is tight, “the very lack of available resources makes each expense more insistent and more pressing. A trip to the grocery store looms larger, and this month’s rent constantly seizes our attention. Because these problems feel bigger and capture our attention, we engage more deeply in solving them.”

Unfortunately, one way to solve the problem in the short run is to borrow, which can backfire. In the experiments, when poor participants were allowed to borrow resources, that borrowing undid some of the advantages of scarcity. When the researchers looked at performance as a function of borrowing, they find that poor players often borrowed more than they should have, and performed better when they weren’t permitted to borrow. Poverty led to wise decisions, but it also led to counterproductive ones.

Trade-offs become real

Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir looked further into how poverty affects decision-making, and find that poor people may evaluate trade-offs better than their wealthier counterparts. Just as the Angry Birds players spent more time lining up a shot, people with actual financial concerns might also make better, more focused decisions, closer to what economists consider ideal.

The researchers asked real people of various socioeconomic strata if they were willing to travel an extra 30 minutes to save $50 on a $300 tablet. Some said they were. But when asked if they’d drive that far to save the same amount on a $1,000 tablet, some of the respondents changed their minds. Their answer depended on their income.

Money on the brain

For the poor, the thought of money is never far away.

In fact, just as you focus on your own name amid the din of conversation, poorer people might tune into the finances of things more readily, according to ongoing research by Chicago Booth’s Shah, University of British Columbia’s Jiaying Zhao , Harvard’s Mullainathan, and Princeton’s Shafir.

In one experiment, the researchers had participants look briefly at a list of words that were either related to money or to men but contained neither the word “money” nor “man.” The researchers then asked the participants to recall as many words as they could.

Poorer participants looking at the money-related list were more likely than wealthier participants to say that “money” was on the list. Income didn’t appear to affect how people responded to the other list.

“Everyone regularly deals with most of the items on the money-related list,” write the researchers. “But strikingly, wealth affords us the luxury to see those items—rent, phone, grocery—as largely disconnected. For poorer participants, however, that list takes on a different texture. The items are all associated with prominent financial concerns, strongly related to the one concept that is not there but is often remembered: Money.”

In another experiment, the researchers asked participants from a range of income levels to imagine different scenarios in which they encountered some unexpected activity, such as ending up at a fancier-than-expected restaurant with a group of friends. What kinds of thoughts were most likely to come to their minds? Poorer participants, more often than wealthier ones, mentioned cost-related thoughts. And the thoughts were intrusive. Thinking about receiving bad medical news, poorer participants worried about impending treatment costs. Thinking about driving routines, they had trouble suppressing thoughts about transportation costs. The research collectively suggests that poverty shifts a person’s focus and attention. And once thoughts about money emerge, they’re difficult to suppress.

Anuj K. Shah , Jiaying Zhao , Sendhil Mullainathan , and Eldar Shafir , “Money in the Mental Lives of the Poor,” Social Cognition, forthcoming.

Many people were, irrationally, more likely to say yes when buying a $300 tablet rather than a $1,000 one. But that response was more common among wealthier people. For poorer individuals, the cost of the tablet often didn’t matter—regardless of the price, they were just as likely to travel for the discount.

That’s the correct financial decision, according to traditional economics—to drive the extra distance no matter the original cost. Saving $50 is the same regardless of the amount of the item in question. But wealthier participants saw the savings in relative terms, noticing the percentage savings. By contrast, poorer participants thought in absolute terms. To them, $50 saved was $50 to spend on groceries or the electric bill.

The same pattern showed up in experiments that involved smaller and larger amounts of money or other rewards. Even calories fit the pattern: people who were dieting, and therefore in a scarcity mind-set, recognized that an order of McDonald’s fries was just as fattening whether thought of in terms of daily or weekly calorie intakes. But people who were not dieting were more swayed by context. Once again, scarcity prompted the more accurate decision.

Put it into practice

If people in poverty are making smart decisions considering the situation, how could that be recognized and better encouraged? There may be ways to help people when they’re facing potentially expensive borrowing decisions. For example, Chicago Booth’s Marianne Bertrand  and University of California at Berkeley’s Adair Morse  studied high-interest payday loans and find that people made better decisions when the interest rate was expressed in terms of dollar amounts, namely the cost they’d pay over three months. “We’d explain this by saying that a dollar amount is a lot more concrete,” says Shah. “You can think about exactly what you’d have to give up to pay off the loan.”

“Program designers and policy makers often suffer from a failure to accurately take the perspective of the people they are trying to help,” says Chicago Booth’s Christopher J. Bryan . “They design programs that would be appealing to people if they had the luxury of being able to devote careful thought and attention to considering them. But poverty imposes a heavy attentional ‘tax’ that prevents people from devoting that kind of thought to new opportunities, so program uptake is low.”

Across income levels, financial stress affects decisions

Even for people who are not in poverty, financial pressures can affect decision-making—and some companies are taking steps to address that.

Financial worries affect a person’s ability to function and focus, especially at work, according to a survey conducted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Polling 1,200 employees at companies of all sizes and all over the United States, the company finds that 56 percent of people were stressed about their finances. Of these, 53 percent said that their financial stress affected their ability to concentrate at work.

The company argues that financial planning would help the situation, prodding employers to offer additional resources to increase “financial wellness” and reduce financial stress. Forty percent of people polled said they wished their employers would take a more active role in assisting with financial planning, and 85 percent said they’d participate in an employer-provided financial education program.

Northwestern Mutual, for its part, recently partnered with a neuroscience research firm to understand more about what’s going on in the brain when people make financial decisions, with and without an adviser.

To see what areas of the brain are involved in financial decision-making, they hooked participants up to an EEG machine, which measures brain activity, then had them imagine scenarios that included making choices about investing in a child’s college fund or devising a budget after a divorce. The participants were sometimes given additional information to guide them in making their decisions. The results suggest that the brain is less stressed when help is offered: signals in the brain associated with calm decision-making were 21 percent higher when participants had more financial advice. Conversely, signals that indicate attention were 20 percent higher when the participants were not given any additional help, suggesting that these participants’ brains were working harder to process the information. The takeaway, says Northwestern Mutual’s Rebekah Barsch, is that having assistance can make a big difference in a person’s perception of financial stress.

This aligns with what Chicago Booth’s Abigail Sussman  has suggested in her own policy work as part of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association’s working group on financial decision-making, a consortium of academic researchers. In 2017, the group released a report outlining some of the behavioral variables that may contribute to consumers’ poor financial decisions, and describing what companies can do to help customers make better ones.

One suggestion: lenders should be more transparent and make information easier to understand. A credit-card company could notify customers before a charge is added to their account, or provide online tools to help customers understand how interest accrues. For instance, visualizations could illustrate how compound interest works, and calculators could show the total cost of a purchase under various repayment plans. Similarly, the researchers suggest that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau might create a tool for people applying for mortgages, showing the best type of mortgage based on the individual’s data, as well as her projected risk of defaulting. Companies act in their own interests, but “it’s generally not in the company’s best interest to have all of their customers defaulting,” says Sussman. To some extent, she says, “they’re interested in helping.”

“2017 Brain on Finance Study,” Northwestern Mutual Newsroom website (news.northwesternmutual.com/brain-on-finance-study), Accessed January 2017.

“2017 Workplace Benefits Report,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch report, June 2017.

Brigitte C. Madrian , Hal E. Hershfield , Abigail B. Sussman, Saurabh Bhargava , Jeremy Burke , Scott A. Huettel , Julian Jamison , Eric J. Johnson , John G. Lynch , Stephan Meier , Scott Rick , and Suzanne B. Shu , “Behaviorally Informed Policies for Household Financial Decisionmaking,” Behavioral Science and Policy, January 2017.

Bryan was the lead author of a policy paper that recommended new strategies to policy makers and other relevant parties based on recent findings. Among other things, he and his coresearchers advise that an effort be made to reduce the up-front cost of future-oriented behaviors. For example, they point out that in a study by researchers at the World Bank, Harvard, and Yale, giving kids free school uniforms boosted school enrollment in Kenya by more than 6 percentage points. Similarly, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto, in conjunction with H&R Block, find that offering US students assistance with their applications for federally funded college student aid has been shown to increase enrollment in college by 24 percent.

The researchers urge service providers to weigh price and inconvenience carefully, particularly when offering health-related services, which many people may forgo if the cost or the distance is too great. A program in Uganda brought health products such as water-purification tablets and antimalarial drugs to people door-to-door, which removed the issue of making people travel to get these products. That simple step to counter the inconvenience of seeking out products and services had an effect. “It can sometimes be better to charge a small fee and make a service very convenient than to charge nothing for a very inconvenient service,” write the researchers. In this case, the cost of delivery was included in the price of the products.

The researchers also recommend taking into account the timing of incentives—and they advise to avoid offering them when money is tight and people are consumed with the pressing need to budget what little they have to meet basic needs. In India, where sugarcane farmers are paid annually after the harvest, farmers’ attention scores were the equivalent of 10 IQ points higher than just before the harvest, when farmers were relatively poor, according to data from the 2013 Science study mentioned earlier.

Offering subsidies or other incentives when people are more receptive to and have the spare capacity to consider them, such as after a harvest or a payday, may make a difference over the long run. One effort, in Tanzania, asked people to sign up for health insurance at cashpoint locations right after payday, and the timing led to a 20 percentage point increase in health-insurance use.

Introducing cognitive aids can help address the limited capacity for attention that may constrain people in poverty. In one study, it helped to show farmers research regarding the most productive ways to plant their crops. When poor, stressed, and in a scarcity mind-set, farmers had a harder time taking in the information. “This result has nothing to do with the intelligence of the farmers,” writes Bryan’s team. “A fact is only obvious if the observer has the spare attentional capacity to notice it.”

They also suggest that reminders, in the form of text messages or stickers, can be effective. Such gentle pushes—for instance, to take medication on schedule—can help people remember to do what they may otherwise forget, since other duties and obligations may compete for attention.

For those who design and implement antipoverty initiatives, it’s important to recognize that while scarcity can help people focus on costs and benefits, it can also cause stress that shifts attention and steals cognitive bandwidth. A big step forward would be to understand these psychological limits that poverty imposes and make some policy tweaks, write the researchers, to “substantially improve the impact they have on the poor.”

Works Cited

• Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse, “Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing,” Journal of Finance , November 2011. 
• Eric P. Bettinger, Bridget Terry Long, Philip Oreopoulos, and Lisa Sanbonmatsu, “The Role of Application Assistance and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment, Quarterly Journal of Economics , August 2012. 
• Christopher J. Bryan, Nina Mazar, Julian Jamison, Jeanine Braithwaite, Nadine Dechausay, Alissa Fishbane, Elizabeth Fox, Varun Gauri, Rachel Glennerster, Johannes Haushofer, Dean Karlan, and Renos Vakis, “Overcoming Behavioral Obstacles to Escaping Poverty,”  Behavioral Science & Policy , August 2017.
• David Evans, Michael Kremer, and Mũthoni Ngatia, “The Impact of Distributing School Uniforms on Children’s Education in Kenya,” Working paper, August 2013. 
• Andrea Guariso, Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Jakob Svensson, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, “An Entrepreneurial Model of Community Health Delivery in Uganda,” Centre for Economic Policy Research discussion paper, September 2016. 
• ———, “Effect of a Micro Entrepreneur-Based Community Health Delivery Program on Under-Five Mortality in Uganda: A Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial,” Centre for Economic Policy Research discussion paper, September 2016.
• Brigitte C. Madrian, Hal E. Hershfield, Abigail B. Sussman, Saurabh Bhargava, Jeremy Burke, Scott A. Huettel, Julian Jamison, Eric J. Johnson, John G. Lynch, Stephan Meier, Scott Rick, and Suzanne B. Shu, “Behaviorally Informed Policies for Household Financial Decision-Making,” Behavioral Science & Policy , August 2017. 
• Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao, “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function,”  Science , August 2013.
• Anuj K. Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, “Some Consequences of Having Too Little,”  Science , November 2012. 
• Anuj K. Shah, Eldar Shafir, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Scarcity Frames Value,”  Psychological Science , February 2015.

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5 Essays About Poverty Everyone Should Know

Poverty is one of the driving forces of inequality in the world. Between 1990-2015, much progress was made. The number of people living on less than $1.90 went from 36% to 10%. However, according to the World Bank , the COVID-19 pandemic represents a serious problem that disproportionately impacts the poor. Research released in February of 2020 shows that by 2030, up to ⅔ of the “global extreme poor” will be living in conflict-affected and fragile economies. Poverty will remain a major human rights issue for decades to come. Here are five essays about the issue that everyone should know:

“We need an economic bill of rights” –  Martin Luther King Jr.

The Guardian published an abridged version of this essay in 2018, which was originally released in Look magazine just after Dr. King was killed. In this piece, Dr. King explains why an economic bill of rights is necessary. He points out that while mass unemployment within the black community is a “social problem,” it’s a “depression” in the white community. An economic bill of rights would give a job to everyone who wants one and who can work. It would also give an income to those who can’t work. Dr. King affirms his commitment to non-violence. He’s fully aware that tensions are high. He quotes a spiritual, writing “timing is winding up.” Even while the nation progresses, poverty is getting worse.

This essay was reprinted and abridged in The Guardian in an arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King. Jr. The most visible representative of the Civil Rights Movement beginning in 1955, Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. His essays and speeches remain timely.

“How Poverty Can Follow Children Into Adulthood” – Priyanka Boghani

This article is from 2017, but it’s more relevant than ever because it was written when 2012 was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That’s no longer the case. In 2012, around ¼ American children were in poverty. Five years later, children were still more likely than adults to be poor. This is especially true for children of colour. Consequences of poverty include anxiety, hunger, and homelessness. This essay also looks at the long-term consequences that come from growing up in poverty. A child can develop health problems that affect them in adulthood. Poverty can also harm a child’s brain development. Being aware of how poverty affects children and follows them into adulthood is essential as the world deals with the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Priyanka Boghani is a journalist at PBS Frontline. She focuses on U.S. foreign policy, humanitarian crises, and conflicts in the Middle East. She also assists in managing Frontline’s social accounts.

“5 Reasons COVID-19 Will Impact the Fight to End Extreme Poverty” – Leah Rodriguez

For decades, the UN has attempted to end extreme poverty. In the face of the novel coronavirus outbreak, new challenges threaten the fight against poverty. In this essay, Dr. Natalie Linos, a Harvard social epidemiologist, urges the world to have a “social conversation” about how the disease impacts poverty and inequality. If nothing is done, it’s unlikely that the UN will meet its Global Goals by 2030. Poverty and COVID-19 intersect in five key ways. For one, low-income people are more vulnerable to disease. They also don’t have equal access to healthcare or job stability. This piece provides a clear, concise summary of why this outbreak is especially concerning for the global poor.

Leah Rodriguez’s writing at Global Citizen focuses on women, girls, water, and sanitation. She’s also worked as a web producer and homepage editor for New York Magazine’s The Cut.

“Climate apartheid”: World’s poor to suffer most from disasters” – Al Jazeera and news Agencies

The consequences of climate change are well-known to experts like Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In 2019, he submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council sounding the alarm on how climate change will devastate the poor. While the wealthy will be able to pay their way out of devastation, the poor will not. This will end up creating a “climate apartheid.” Alston states that if climate change isn’t addressed, it will undo the last five decades of progress in poverty education, as well as global health and development .

“Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America” – Barbara Ehrenreich

In this excerpt from her book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich describes her experience choosing to live undercover as an “unskilled worker” in the US. She wanted to investigate the impact the 1996 welfare reform act had on the working poor. Released in 2001, the events take place between the spring of 1998 and the summer of 2000. Ehrenreich decided to live in a town close to her “real life” and finds a place to live and a job. She has her eyes opened to the challenges and “special costs” of being poor. In 2019, The Guardian ranked the book 13th on their list of 100 best books of the 21st century.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 21 books and an activist. She’s worked as an award-winning columnist and essayist.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

First-generation college students face unique challenges

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, dick startz dick startz professor of economics - university of california, santa barbara @profitofed.

April 25, 2022

About 40% of UC-Santa Barbara students represent the first generation in their family to attend college—something my university is proud of. Often, first-generation students come from low-income backgrounds, but are they really all that different from other students who grew up in poverty but are not the first in their families to attend college? At the national level, how do first-gen students fare in college, and how are they supported?

In this post, I first provide some basic, data-based facts about these students. Unless otherwise mentioned, all our data comes from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. This survey has been conducted every eight years since 1990, and it collects information from beginning college students at the end of their first year, and then three and six years after starting college. For this post, I look only at students enrolled in four-year schools, and “first-gen” means neither parent has a four-year degree. I conclude with some discussion of evidence and reminders that “first-gen” and “low-income” are not synonymous labels for college students.

Fact 1: First-gen students are now a sizable, stable population among college enrollment.

The first fact is that neither college-entering rates nor college-graduating rates for first-gen students have changed much in recent years (see Figure 1 below). But note that they decreased drastically in the ‘90s—partially due to the increased bachelor’s attainment rate in the U.S. in the ‘60s and ‘70s—leading to more college-goers having at least one college-educated parent. Today, over 40% of entering students are first-gen, as are about one-third of graduating students. (In Figure 1, the label “Class of 2015” means students who would have graduated in 2015 if they spent four years earning their bachelor’s. As is standard, the calculation of graduation rates allows up to six years for graduation.)

Fact 2: First-gen students disproportionately enroll in less-selective colleges.

There is a very striking pattern when one looks at first-gen enrollment across college selectivity levels.

In open-admission schools, two-thirds of students are first-gen. Contrast this with “very selective” schools, where less than one-third of students are first-gen. (As an aside, the high proportion of first-gen students at my large, R1 university appears to be something of an anomaly.) The fact that very selective schools have lower fractions of first-gen students is likely not surprising as these schools are (a) more expensive and (b) require more savvy and resources on how to get admitted (i.e., guidance from parents). Unfortunately, as you will see next, outcomes for first-gen students are better precisely at those very selective schools where they are least likely to attend.

Fact 3: First-gen students complete college at lower rates than their peers.

Most first-gen students who attend a very or moderately selective school graduate, while the large majority of first-gen students who attend an open-admissions school do not. Of course, the more selective schools cherry-pick students likely to graduate, where open admission schools take all comers who meet basic qualifications. However, the same cherry-picking-or-not distinction is true for non-first-gen students. At very selective schools, family educational background is associated with a modest difference in graduation rates (10 percentage points). In contrast, the graduation rate for first-gen students at open-admission schools is below half the rate for non-first-gen by a gap of 23 percentage points.

First-gen students are different from low-income students

I dug a little deeper into graduation rates by running regressions predicting whether a student graduated on the basis of both first-gen status and parents’ income. First-gen students tend to come from lower-income families (average family income of $58,000 by my calculations) than do non-first-gen students (average family income of $120,000). Perhaps the differences in graduation rates are explained by these large differences in family income?

The first lesson from the analysis is that, while income matters, first-gen status matters even when controlling for income. Holding all else equal, I find that first-gen students are 16% less likely overall to graduate than are non-first-gen students with equal parental income. So being a first-gen student really does mean something more than just coming from a low-income family. This finding resonates with other studies that have looked at the experiences of first-gen students. (For further reading, see Terenzini et al. , Engle , and Engle and Tinto .)

The second lesson from the regressions is that the apparently varying first-gen/non-first-gen gaps in graduation rate by college selectivity—the ones shown in Figure 3 above—are mostly about the same size after controlling for family income. With these models, I find that first-gen students are about 16 percentage points less likely to graduate than other students at institutions of varying levels of selectivity. The exception is very selective institutions, where the first-gen difference is only about 7 percentage points.

First-gen students warrant more support than they get

I also examined financial aid. Interestingly, public universities give more financial aid to first-gen students while private universities give more to non-first-gen students. (Data for this question comes from the 2016 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, which is a little more current than the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey.)  The survey data shows first-gen students in public universities get about $5,100 in need-based aid and $10,100 total in their senior year, while non-first-gen students get about $3,200 in need-based aid and $8,700 overall. In private universities, first-gen students get about $8,900 in need-based aid and $19,400 overall, while non-first-gen students get about $8,800 in need-based aid and $22,000 overall.

In other words, public universities give first-gen students more need-based aid than non-first-gen students receive, presumably reflecting income differences. Merit-based aid is about equal. In contrast, at private universities, non-first-gen students get about $2,600 more financial aid than do first-gen students. What’s happening at private universities, presumably, is that non-first-gen students are competed for with considerably more “merit-based’ aid.

Prior research suggests that increased financial aid is particularly important in helping first-gen students succeed, though other academic supports could help as well. Angrist, Autor, and Pallais conducted a field experiment that randomly assigned aid to Nebraska high school graduates to study the effect of merit aids on college degree completion. They found that the estimated effect for first-gen students is twice as large as the estimates for students from more-educated families. Further, Angrist, Lang and, Oreopoulos found that a combination of financial aid for higher grades (with enhanced academic support services) was especially effective for first-gen students, but only for women as it had little apparent effect for men.

In summary, first-gen students do well at selective institutions, but the less selective institutions that most attend haven’t found a way to get graduation rates up compared to rates for non-first-gen students. Part of the difference in outcomes is due to first-gen students coming from lower-income families. Income differences don’t explain everything though. The disadvantages of coming from a family where you are a pioneer in higher education are real.

The author is grateful to UC-Santa Barbara undergraduates and Gretler Fellows Leshan Xu and Karen Zhao for research assistance.

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College Essay Examples | What Works and What Doesn't

Published on November 8, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on August 14, 2023.

One effective method for improving your college essay is to read example essays . Here are three sample essays, each with a bad and good version to help you improve your own essay.

Table of contents

Essay 1: sharing an identity or background through a montage, essay 2: overcoming a challenge, a sports injury narrative, essay 3: showing the influence of an important person or thing, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

This essay uses a montage structure to show snapshots of a student’s identity and background. The writer builds her essay around the theme of the five senses, sharing memories she associates with sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

In the weak rough draft, there is little connection between the individual anecdotes, and they do not robustly demonstrate the student’s qualities.

In the final version, the student uses an extended metaphor of a museum to create a strong connection among her stories, each showcasing a different part of her identity. She draws a specific personal insight from each memory and uses the stories to demonstrate her qualities and values.

How My Five Senses Record My Life

Throughout my life, I have kept a record of my life’s journey with my five senses. This collection of memories matters a great deal because I experience life every day through the lens of my identity.

“Chinese! Japanese!”

My classmate pulls one eye up and the other down.

“Look what my parents did to me!”

No matter how many times he repeats it, the other kids keep laughing. I focus my almond-shaped eyes on the ground, careful not to attract attention to my discomfort, anger, and shame. How could he say such a mean thing about me? What did I do to him? Joseph’s words would engrave themselves into my memory, making me question my appearance every time I saw my eyes in the mirror.

Soaking in overflowing bubble baths with Andrew Lloyd Webber belting from the boombox.

Listening to “Cell Block Tango” with my grandparents while eating filet mignon at a dine-in show in Ashland.

Singing “The Worst Pies in London” at a Korean karaoke club while laughing hysterically with my brother, who can do an eerily spot-on rendition of Sweeney Todd.

Taking car rides with Mom in the Toyota Sequoia as we compete to hit the high note in “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera . Neither of us stands a chance!

The sweet scent of vegetables, Chinese noodles, and sushi wafts through the room as we sit around the table. My grandma presents a good-smelling mixture of international cuisine for our Thanksgiving feast. My favorite is the Chinese food that she cooks. Only the family prayer stands between me and the chance to indulge in these delicious morsels, comforting me with their familiar savory scents.

I rinse a faded plastic plate decorated by my younger sister at the Waterworks Art Center. I wear yellow rubber gloves to protect my hands at Mom’s insistence, but I can still feel the warm water that offers a bit of comfort as I finish the task at hand. The crusted casserole dish with stubborn remnants from my dad’s five-layer lasagna requires extra effort, so I fill it with Dawn and scalding water, setting it aside to soak. I actually don’t mind this daily chore.

I taste sweat on my upper lip as I fight to continue pedaling on a stationary bike. Ava’s next to me and tells me to go up a level. We’re biking buddies, dieting buddies, and Saturday morning carbo-load buddies. After the bike display hits 30 minutes, we do a five-minute cool down, drink Gatorade, and put our legs up to rest.

My five senses are always gathering new memories of my identity. I’m excited to expand my collection.

Word count: 455

College essay checklist

Topic and structure

• I’ve selected a topic that’s meaningful to me.
• My essay reveals something different from the rest of my application.
• I have a clear and well-structured narrative.
• I’ve concluded with an insight or a creative ending.

Writing style and tone

• I’ve crafted an introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.
• I’ve written my essay in a way that shows instead of tells.
• I’ve used appropriate style and tone for a college essay.
• I’ve used specific, vivid personal stories that would be hard to replicate.
• I’ve demonstrated my positive traits and values in my essay.
• My essay is focused on me, not another person or thing.
• I’ve included self-reflection and insight in my essay.
• I’ve respected the word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

Making Sense of My Identity

Welcome to The Rose Arimoto Museum. You are about to enter the “Making Sense of My Identity” collection. Allow me to guide you through select exhibits, carefully curated memories from Rose’s sensory experiences.

First, the Sight Exhibit.

“Chinese! Japanese!”

“Look what my parents did to me!”

No matter how many times he repeats it, the other kids keep laughing. I focus my almond-shaped eyes on the ground, careful not to attract attention as my lip trembles and palms sweat. Joseph couldn’t have known how his words would engrave themselves into my memory, making me question my appearance every time I saw my eyes in the mirror.

Ten years later, these same eyes now fixate on an InDesign layout sheet, searching for grammar errors while my friend Selena proofreads our feature piece on racial discrimination in our hometown. As we’re the school newspaper editors, our journalism teacher Ms. Riley allows us to stay until midnight to meet tomorrow’s deadline. She commends our work ethic, which for me is fueled by writing一my new weapon of choice.

Next, you’ll encounter the Sound Exhibit.

Still, the world is my Broadway as I find my voice on stage.

Just below, enter the Smell Exhibit.

While I help my Pau Pau prepare dinner, she divulges her recipe for cha siu bau, with its soft, pillowy white exterior hiding the fragrant filling of braised barbecue pork inside. The sweet scent of candied yams, fun see , and Spam musubi wafts through the room as we gather around our Thankgsiving feast. After our family prayer, we indulge in these delicious morsels until our bellies say stop. These savory scents of my family’s cultural heritage linger long after I’ve finished the last bite.

Next up, the Touch Exhibit.

I rinse a handmade mug that I had painstakingly molded and painted in ceramics class. I wear yellow rubber gloves to protect my hands at Mom’s insistence, but I can still feel the warm water that offers a bit of comfort as I finish the task at hand. The crusted casserole dish with stubborn remnants from my dad’s five-layer lasagna requires extra effort, so I fill it with Dawn and scalding water, setting it aside to soak. For a few fleeting moments, as I continue my nightly chore, the pressure of my weekend job, tomorrow’s calculus exam, and next week’s track meet are washed away.

Finally, we end with the Taste Exhibit.

My legs fight to keep pace with the stationary bike as the salty taste of sweat seeps into corners of my mouth. Ava challenges me to take it up a level. We always train together一even keeping each other accountable on our strict protein diet of chicken breasts, broccoli, and Muscle Milk. We occasionally splurge on Saturday mornings after interval training, relishing the decadence of everything bagels smeared with raspberry walnut cream cheese. But this is Wednesday, so I push myself. I know that once the digital display hits 30:00, we’ll allow our legs to relax into a five-minute cool down, followed by the fiery tang of Fruit Punch Gatorade to rehydrate.

Thank you for your attention. This completes our tour. I invite you to rejoin us for next fall’s College Experience collection, which will exhibit Rose’s continual search for identity and learning.

Word count: 649

• I’ve crafted an essay introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

This essay uses a narrative structure to recount how a student overcame a challenge, specifically a sports injury. Since this topic is often overused, the essay requires vivid description, a memorable introduction and conclusion , and interesting insight.

The weak rough draft contains an interesting narrative, insight, and vivid imagery, but it has an overly formal tone that distracts the reader from the story. The student’s use of elaborate vocabulary in every sentence makes the essay sound inauthentic and stilted.

The final essay uses a more natural, conversational tone and chooses words that are vivid and specific without being pretentious. This allows the reader to focus on the narrative and appreciate the student’s unique insight.

One fateful evening some months ago, a defensive linebacker mauled me, his 212 pounds indisputably alighting upon my ankle. Ergo, an abhorrent cracking of calcified tissue. At first light the next day, I awoke cognizant of a new paradigm—one sans football—promulgated by a stabbing sensation that would continue to haunt me every morning of this semester.

It’s been an exceedingly taxing semester not being able to engage in football, but I am nonetheless excelling in school. That twist of fate never would have come to pass if I hadn’t broken my ankle. I still limp down the halls at school, but I’m feeling less maudlin these days. My friends don’t steer clear anymore, and I have a lot more of them. My teachers, emboldened by my newfound interest in learning, continually invite me to learn more and do my best. Football is still on hold, but I feel like I’m finally playing a game that matters.

Five months ago, right after my ill-fated injury, my friends’ demeanor became icy and remote, although I couldn’t fathom why. My teachers, in contrast, beckoned me close and invited me on a new learning journey. But despite their indubitably kind advances, even they recoiled when I drew near.

A few weeks later, I started to change my attitude vis-à-vis my newfound situation and determined to put my energy toward productive ends (i.e., homework). I wasn’t enamored with school. I never had been. Nevertheless, I didn’t abhor it either. I just preferred football.

My true turn of fate came when I started studying more and participating in class. I started to enjoy history class, and I grew interested in reading more. I discovered a volume of poems written by a fellow adventurer on the road of life, and I loved it. I ravenously devoured everything in the writer’s oeuvre .

As the weeks flitted past, I found myself spending my time with a group of people who were quite different from me. They participated in theater and played instruments in marching band. They raised their hands in class when the teacher posed a question. Because of their auspicious influence, I started raising my hand too. I am no longer vapid, and I now have something to say.

I am certain that your school would benefit from my miraculous academic transformation, and I entreat you to consider my application to your fine institution. Accepting me to your university would be an unequivocally righteous decision.

Word count: 408

• I’ve chosen a college essay topic that’s meaningful to me.
• I’ve respected the essay word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

As I step out of bed, the pain shoots through my foot and up my leg like it has every morning since “the game.” That night, a defensive linebacker tackled me, his 212 pounds landing decidedly on my ankle. I heard the sound before I felt it. The next morning, I awoke to a new reality—one without football—announced by a stabbing sensation that would continue to haunt me every morning of this semester.

My broken ankle broke my spirit.

My friends steered clear of me as I hobbled down the halls at school. My teachers tried to find the delicate balance between giving me space and offering me help. I was as unsure how to deal with myself as they were.

In time, I figured out how to redirect some of my frustration, anger, and pent-up energy toward my studies. I had never not liked school, but I had never really liked it either. In my mind, football practice was my real-life classroom, where I could learn all I ever needed to know.

Then there was that day in Mrs. Brady’s history class. We sang a ridiculous-sounding mnemonic song to memorize all the Chinese dynasties from Shang to Qing. I mumbled the words at first, but I got caught up in the middle of the laughter and began singing along. Starting that day, I began browsing YouTube videos about history, curious to learn more. I had started learning something new, and, to my surprise, I liked it.

With my afternoons free from burpees and scrimmages, I dared to crack open a few more of my books to see what was in them. That’s when my English poetry book, Paint Me Like I Am , caught my attention. It was full of poems written by students my age from WritersCorps. I couldn’t get enough.

I wasn’t the only one who was taken with the poems. Previously, I’d only been vaguely aware of Christina as one of the weird kids I avoided. Crammed in the margins of her high-top Chuck Taylors were scribbled lines of her own poetry and infinite doodles. Beyond her punk rock persona was a sensitive artist, puppy-lover, and environmental activist that a wide receiver like me would have never noticed before.

With Christina, I started making friends with people who once would have been invisible to me: drama geeks, teachers’ pets, band nerds. Most were college bound but not to play a sport. They were smart and talented, and they cared about people and politics and all sorts of issues that I hadn’t considered before. Strangely, they also seemed to care about me.

I still limp down the halls at school, but I don’t seem to mind as much these days. My friends don’t steer clear anymore, and I have a lot more of them. My teachers, excited by my newfound interest in learning, continually invite me to learn more and do my best. Football is still on hold, but I feel like I’m finally playing a game that matters.

My broken ankle broke my spirit. Then, it broke my ignorance.

Word count: 512

This essay uses a narrative structure to show how a pet positively influenced the student’s values and character.

In the weak draft, the student doesn’t focus on himself, instead delving into too much detail about his dog’s positive traits and his grandma’s illness. The essay’s structure is meandering, with tangents and details that don’t communicate any specific insight.

In the improved version, the student keeps the focus on himself, not his pet. He chooses the most relevant stories to demonstrate specific qualities, and the structure more clearly builds up to an insightful conclusion.

Man’s Best Friend

I desperately wanted a cat. I begged my parents for one, but once again, my sisters overruled me, so we drove up the Thompson Valley Canyon from Loveland to Estes Park to meet our newest family member. My sisters had already hatched their master plan, complete with a Finding Nemo blanket to entice the pups. The blanket was a hit with all of them, except for one—the one who walked over and sat in my lap. That was the day that Francisco became a Villanova.

Maybe I should say he was mine because I got stuck with all the chores. As expected, my dog-loving sisters were nowhere to be found! My mom was “extra” with all the doggy gear. Cisco even had to wear these silly little puppy shoes outside so that when he came back in, he wouldn’t get the carpets dirty. If it was raining, my mother insisted I dress Cisco in a ridiculous yellow raincoat, but, in my opinion, it was an unnecessary source of humiliation for poor Cisco. It didn’t take long for Cisco to decide that his outerwear could be used as toys in a game of Keep Away. As soon as I took off one of his shoes, he would run away with it, hiding under the bed where I couldn’t reach him. But, he seemed to appreciate his ensemble more when we had to walk through snowdrifts to get his job done.

When my abuela was dying from cancer, we went in the middle of the night to see her before she passed. I was sad and scared. But, my dad let me take Cisco in the car, so Cisco cuddled with me and made me feel much better. It’s like he could read my mind. Once we arrived at the hospital, the fluorescent lighting made the entire scene seem unreal, as if I was watching the scene unfold through someone else’s eyes. My grandma lay calmly on her bed, smiling at us even through her last moments of pain. I disliked seeing the tubes and machines hooked up to her. It was unnatural to see her like this一it was so unlike the way I usually saw her beautiful in her flowery dress, whistling a Billie Holiday tune and baking snickerdoodle cookies in the kitchen. The hospital didn’t usually allow dogs, but they made a special exception to respect my grandma’s last wishes that the whole family be together. Cisco remained at the foot of the bed, intently watching abuela with a silence that seemed more effective at communicating comfort and compassion than the rest of us who attempted to offer up words of comfort that just seemed hollow and insincere. It was then that I truly appreciated Cisco’s empathy for others.

As I accompanied my dad to pick up our dry cleaner’s from Ms. Chapman, a family friend asked, “How’s Cisco?” before even asking about my sisters or me. Cisco is the Villanova family mascot, a Goldendoodle better recognized by strangers throughout Loveland than the individual members of my family.

On our summer trip to Boyd Lake State Park, we stayed at the Cottonwood campground for a breathtaking view of the lake. Cisco was allowed to come, but we had to keep him on a leash at all times. After a satisfying meal of fish, our entire family walked along the beach. Cisco and I led the way while my mom and sisters shuffled behind. Cisco always stopped and refused to move, looking back to make sure the others were still following. Once satisfied that everyone was together, he would turn back around and continue prancing with his golden boy curly locks waving in the chilly wind.

On the beach, Cisco “accidentally” got let off his leash and went running maniacally around the sand, unfettered and free. His pure joy as he raced through the sand made me forget about my AP Chem exam or my student council responsibilities. He brings a smile not only to my family members but everyone around him.

Cisco won’t live forever, but without words, he has impressed upon me life lessons of responsibility, compassion, loyalty, and joy. I can’t imagine life without him.

Word count: 701

I quickly figured out that as “the chosen one,” I had been enlisted by Cisco to oversee all aspects of his “business.” I learned to put on Cisco’s doggie shoes to keep the carpet clean before taking him out一no matter the weather. Soon after, Cisco decided that his shoes could be used as toys in a game of Keep Away. As soon as I removed one of his shoes, he would run away with it, hiding under the bed where I couldn’t reach him. But, he seemed to appreciate his footwear more after I’d gear him up and we’d tread through the snow for his daily walks.

One morning, it was 7:15 a.m., and Alejandro was late again to pick me up. “Cisco, you don’t think he overslept again, do you?” Cisco barked, as if saying, “Of course he did!” A text message would never do, so I called his dad, even if it was going to get him in trouble. There was no use in both of us getting another tardy during our first-period class, especially since I was ready on time after taking Cisco for his morning outing. Alejandro was mad at me but not too much. He knew I had helped him out, even if he had to endure his dad’s lecture on punctuality.

Another early morning, I heard my sister yell, “Mom! Where are my good ballet flats? I can’t find them anywhere!” I hesitated and then confessed, “I moved them.” She shrieked at me in disbelief, but I continued, “I put them in your closet, so Cisco wouldn’t chew them up.” More disbelief. However, this time, there was silence instead of shrieking.

Last spring, Cisco and I were fast asleep when the phone rang at midnight. Abuela would not make it through the night after a long year of chemo, but she was in Pueblo, almost three hours away. Sitting next to me for that long car ride on I-25 in pitch-black darkness, Cisco knew exactly what I needed and snuggled right next to me as I petted his coat in a rhythm while tears streamed down my face. The hospital didn’t usually allow dogs, but they made a special exception to respect my grandma’s last wishes that the whole family be together. Cisco remained sitting at the foot of the hospital bed, intently watching abuela with a silence that communicated more comfort than our hollow words. Since then, whenever I sense someone is upset, I sit in silence with them or listen to their words, just like Cisco did.

The other day, one of my friends told me, “You’re a strange one, Josue. You’re not like everybody else but in a good way.” I didn’t know what he meant at first. “You know, you’re super responsible and grown-up. You look out for us instead of yourself. Nobody else does that.” I was a bit surprised because I wasn’t trying to do anything different. I was just being me. But then I realized who had taught me: a fluffy little puppy who I had wished was a cat! I didn’t choose Cisco, but he certainly chose me and, unexpectedly, became my teacher, mentor, and friend.

Word count: 617

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Academic writing

• Writing process
• Transition words
• Passive voice
• Paraphrasing

 Communication

• How to end an email
• Ms, mrs, miss
• How to start an email
• I hope this email finds you well
• Hope you are doing well

 Parts of speech

• Personal pronouns
• Conjunctions

A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

There are no set rules for how to structure a college application essay , but these are two common structures that work:

• A montage structure, a series of vignettes with a common theme.
• A narrative structure, a single story that shows your personal growth or how you overcame a challenge.

Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in high school.

Though admissions officers are interested in hearing your story, they’re also interested in how you tell it. An exceptionally written essay will differentiate you from other applicants, meaning that admissions officers will spend more time reading it.

You can use literary devices to catch your reader’s attention and enrich your storytelling; however, focus on using just a few devices well, rather than trying to use as many as possible.

Most importantly, your essay should be about you , not another person or thing. An insightful college admissions essay requires deep self-reflection, authenticity, and a balance between confidence and vulnerability.

Your essay shouldn’t be a résumé of your experiences but instead should tell a story that demonstrates your most important values and qualities.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

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7 Essays About Poverty: Example Essays and Prompts

Essays about poverty give valuable insight into the economic situation that we share globally. Read our guide with poverty essay examples and prompts for your paper.

In the US, the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people living below the poverty line. With a global pandemic, cost of living crisis, and climate change on the rise, we’ve seen poverty increase due to various factors. As many of us face adversity daily, we can look to essays about poverty from some of the world’s greatest speakers for inspiration and guidance.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Writing a poverty essay can be challenging due to the many factors contributing to poverty and the knock-on effects of living below the poverty line . For example, homelessness among low-income individuals stems from many different causes.

It’s important to note that poverty exists beyond the US, with many developing countries living in extreme poverty without access to essentials like clean water and housing. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

Essays About Poverty: Top Examples

1. pensioner poverty: fear of rise over decades as uk under-40s wealth falls, 2. the surprising poverty levels across the u.s., 3. why poverty persists in america, 4. post-pandemic poverty is rising in america’s suburbs.

• 5. The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty
• 6. The State of America’s Children 
• 7. COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

10 Poverty Essay Topics

1. the causes of poverty, 2. the negative effects of poverty, 3. how countries can reduce poverty rates, 4. the basic necessities and poverty, 5. how disabilities can lead to poverty, 6. how the cycle of poverty unfolds , 7. universal basic income and its relationship to poverty, 8. interview someone who has experience living in poverty, 9. the impact of the criminal justice system on poverty, 10. the different ways to create affordable housing.

There is growing concern about increasing pensioner poverty in the UK in the coming decades. Due to financial challenges like the cost of living crisis, rent increases, and the COVID-19 pandemic, under 40s have seen their finances shrink.

Osborne discusses the housing wealth gap in this article, where many under the 40s currently pay less in a pension due to rent prices. While this means they will have less pension available, they will also retire without owning a home, resulting in less personal wealth than previous generations. Osborne delves into the causes and gaps in wealth between generations in this in-depth essay.

“Those under-40s have already been identified as  facing the biggest hit from rising mortgage rates , and last week a study by the financial advice firm Hargreaves Lansdown found that almost a third of 18- to 34-year-olds had stopped or cut back on their pension contributions in order to save money.” Hilary Osborne,  The Guardian

In this 2023 essay, Jeremy Ney looks at the poverty levels across the US, stating that poverty has had the largest one-year increase in history. According to the most recent census, child poverty has more than doubled from 2021 to 2022.

Ney states that the expiration of government support and inflation has created new financial challenges for US families. With the increased cost of living and essential items like food and housing sharply increasing, more and more families have fallen below the poverty line. Throughout this essay, Ney displays statistics and data showing the wealth changes across states, ethnic groups, and households.

“Poverty in America reflects the inequality that plagues U.S. households. While certain regions have endured this pain much more than others, this new rising trend may spell ongoing challenges for even more communities.” Jeremy Ney,  TIME

In this New York Times article, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist explores why poverty exists in North America.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. Matthew Desmond,  The New York Times

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its annual data on poverty, revealing contrasting trends for 2022. While one set of findings indicated that the overall number of Americans living in poverty remained stable compared to the previous two years, another survey highlighted a concerning increase in child poverty. The rate of child poverty in the U.S. doubled from 2021 to 2022, a spike attributed mainly to the cessation of the expanded child tax credit following the pandemic. These varied outcomes underscore the Census Bureau’s multifaceted methods to measure poverty.

“The nation’s suburbs accounted for the majority of increases in the poor population following the onset of the pandemic” Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube,  Brookings

5.  The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

Nearly 11 million children are living in poverty in America. This essay explores ow the crisis reached this point—and what steps must be taken to solve it.

“In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That’s 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country.” Areeba Haider,  Center for American Progress

6.  The State of America’s Children  

This essay articles how, despite advancements, children continue to be the most impoverished demographic in the U.S., with particular subgroups — such as children of color, those under five, offspring of single mothers, and children residing in the South — facing the most severe poverty levels.

“Growing up in poverty has wide-ranging, sometimes lifelong, effects on children, putting them at a much higher risk of experiencing behavioral, social, emotional, and health challenges. Childhood poverty also plays an instrumental role in impairing a child’s ability and capacity to learn, build skills, and succeed academically.” Children’s Defense Fund

7.  COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

This essay explores how the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic 2020 led to a surge in U.S. poverty rates, with unemployment figures reaching unprecedented heights. The writer provides data confirming that individuals at the lowest economic strata bore the brunt of these challenges, indicating that the recession might have exacerbated income disparities, further widening the chasm between the affluent and the underprivileged.

“Poverty in the U.S. increased in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic hammered the economy and unemployment soared. Those at the bottom of the economic ladder were hit hardest, new figures confirm, suggesting that the recession may have widened the gap between the rich and the poor.” Elena Delavega,  World Econmic Forum

If you’re tasked with writing an essay about poverty, consider using the below topics. They offer pointers for outlining and planning an essay about this challenging topic.

One of the most specific poverty essay topics to address involves the causes of poverty. You can craft an essay to examine the most common causes of extreme poverty. Here are a few topics you might want to include:

• Racial discrimination, particularly among African Americans, has been a common cause of poverty throughout American history. Discrimination and racism can make it hard for people to get the education they need, making it nearly impossible to get a job.
• A lack of access to adequate health care can also lead to poverty. When people do not have access to healthcare, they are more likely to get sick. This could make it hard for them to go to work while also leading to major medical bills.
• Inadequate food and water can lead to poverty as well. If people’s basic needs aren’t met, they focus on finding food and water instead of getting an education they can use to find a better job.

These are just a few of the most common causes of poverty you might want to highlight in your essay. These topics could help people see why some people are more likely to become impoverished than others. You might also be interested in these essays about poverty .

Poverty affects everyone, and the impacts of an impoverished lifestyle are very real. Furthermore, the disparities when comparing adult poverty to child poverty are also significant. This opens the doors to multiple possible essay topics. Here are a few points to include:

• When children live in poverty, their development is stunted. For example, they might not be able to get to school on time due to a lack of transportation, making it hard for them to keep up with their peers. Child poverty also leads to malnutrition, which can stunt their development.
• Poverty can impact familial relationships as well. For example, members of the same family could fight for limited resources, making it hard for family members to bond. In addition, malnutrition can stunt the growth of children.
• As a side effect of poverty, people have difficulty finding a safe place to live. This creates a challenging environment for everyone involved, and it is even harder for children to grow and develop.
• When poverty leads to homelessness, it is hard for someone to get a job. They don’t have an address to use for physical communication, which leads to employment concerns.

These are just a few of the many side effects of poverty. Of course, these impacts are felt by people across the board, but it is not unusual for children to feel the effects of poverty that much more. You might also be interested in these essays about unemployment .

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty

The issue of poverty is a major human rights concern, and many countries explore poverty reduction strategies to improve people’s quality of life. You might want to examine different strategies that different countries are taking while also suggesting how some countries can do more. A few ways to write this essay include:

• Explore the poverty level in America, comparing it to the poverty level of a European country. Then, explore why different countries take different strategies.
• Compare the minimum wage in one state, such as New York, to the minimum wage in another state, such as Alabama. Why is it higher in one state? What does raising the minimum wage do to the cost of living?
• Highlight a few advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations actively lobbying their governments to do more for low-income families. Then, talk about why some efforts are more successful than others.

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty. Poverty within each country is such a broad topic that you could write a different essay on how poverty could be decreased within the country. For more, check out our list of simple essays topics for intermediate writers .

You could also write an essay on the necessities people need to survive. You could take a look at information published by the United Nations , which focuses on getting people out of the cycle of poverty across the globe. The social problem of poverty can be addressed by giving people the necessities they need to survive, particularly in rural areas. Here are some of the areas you might want to include:

• Affordable housing
• Fresh, healthy food and clean water
• Access to an affordable education
• Access to affordable healthcare

Giving everyone these necessities could significantly improve their well-being and get people out of absolute poverty. You might even want to talk about whether these necessities vary depending on where someone is living.

There are a lot of medical and social issues that contribute to poverty, and you could write about how disabilities contribute to poverty. This is one of the most important essay topics because people could be disabled through no fault of their own. Some of the issues you might want to address in this essay include:

• Talk about the road someone faces if they become disabled while serving overseas. What is it like for people to apply for benefits through the Veterans’ Administration?
• Discuss what happens if someone becomes disabled while at work. What is it like for someone to pursue disability benefits if they are hurt doing a blue-collar job instead of a desk job?
• Research and discuss the experiences of disabled people and how their disability impacts their financial situation.

People who are disabled need to have money to survive for many reasons, such as the inability to work, limitations at home, and medical expenses. A lack of money, in this situation, can lead to a dangerous cycle that can make it hard for someone to be financially stable and live a comfortable lifestyle.

Many people talk about the cycle of poverty, yet many aren’t entirely sure what this means or what it entails. A few key points you should address in this essay include:

• When someone is born into poverty, income inequality can make it hard to get an education.
• A lack of education makes it hard for someone to get into a good school, which gives them the foundation they need to compete for a good job. 
• A lack of money can make it hard for someone to afford college, even if they get into a good school.
• Without attending a good college, it can be hard for someone to get a good job. This makes it hard for someone to support themselves or their families. 
• Without a good paycheck, it is nearly impossible for someone to keep their children out of poverty, limiting upward mobility into the middle class.

The problem of poverty is a positive feedback loop. It can be nearly impossible for those who live this every day to escape. Therefore, you might want to explore a few initiatives that could break the cycle of world poverty and explore other measures that could break this feedback loop.

Many business people and politicians have floated the idea of a universal basic income to give people the basic resources they need to survive. While this hasn’t gotten a lot of serious traction, you could write an essay to shed light on this idea. A few points to hit on include:

• What does a universal basic income mean, and how is it distributed?
• Some people are concerned about the impact this would have on taxes. How would this be paid for?
• What is the minimum amount of money someone would need to stay out of poverty? Is it different in different areas?
• What are a few of the biggest reasons major world governments haven’t passed this?

This is one of the best essay examples because it gives you a lot of room to be creative. However, there hasn’t been a concrete structure for implementing this plan, so you might want to afford one.

Another interesting topic you might want to explore is interviewing someone living in poverty or who has been impoverished. While you can talk about statistics all day, they won’t be as powerful as interviewing someone who has lived that life. A few questions you might want to ask during your interview include:

• What was it like growing up?
• How has living in poverty made it hard for you to get a job?
• What do you feel people misunderstand about those who live in poverty?
• When you need to find a meal, do you have a place you go to? Or is it somewhere different every day?
• What do you think is the main contributor to people living in poverty?

Remember that you can also craft different questions depending on your responses. You might want to let the interviewee read the essay when you are done to ensure all the information is accurate and correct.

The criminal justice system and poverty tend to go hand in hand. People with criminal records are more likely to be impoverished for several reasons. You might want to write an essay that hits on some of these points:

• Discuss the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system both as they relate to socioeconomic status and as they relate to race.
• Explore just how hard it is for someone to get a job if they have a criminal record. Discuss how this might contribute to a life of poverty.
• Dive into how this creates a positive feedback loop. For example, when someone cannot get a job due to a criminal record, they might have to steal to survive, which worsens the issue.
• Review what the criminal justice system might be like for someone with resources when compared to someone who cannot afford to hire expert witnesses or pay for a good attorney.

You might want to include a few examples of disparate sentences for people in different socioeconomic situations to back up your points. 

Affordable housing can make a major difference when someone is trying to escape poverty

Many poverty-related problems could be reduced if people had access to affordable housing. While the cost of housing has increased dramatically in the United States , some initiatives exist to create affordable housing. Here are a few points to include:

• Talk about public programs that offer affordable housing to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Discuss private programs, such as Habitat for Humanity , doing similar things.
• Review the positive impacts that stable housing has on both adults and children.
• Dive into other measures local and federal governments could take to provide more affordable housing for people.

There are a lot of political and social angles to address with this essay, so you might want to consider spreading this out across multiple papers. Affordable housing can make a major difference when trying to escape poverty. If you want to learn more, check out our essay writing tips !

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Poverty College Essays Samples For Students

4141 samples of this type

While studying in college, you will definitely need to compose a lot of College Essays on Poverty. Lucky you if putting words together and organizing them into meaningful text comes naturally to you; if it's not the case, you can save the day by finding an already written Poverty College Essay example and using it as a template to follow.

This is when you will certainly find WowEssays' free samples collection extremely helpful as it contains numerous professionally written works on most various Poverty College Essays topics. Ideally, you should be able to find a piece that meets your criteria and use it as a template to build your own College Essay. Alternatively, our skilled essay writers can deliver you an original Poverty College Essay model written from scratch according to your personal instructions.

Essay On Education System in America

English is a language that continues to be extensively used in the course of the learning process. Some research work has been done regarding the experience of ESL students both in and out of the classroom context. This article attempts to explore the strategies that have been adopted by various ESL students in the course of performing writing tasks transcending the curriculum. Questions regarding the validity of the training under the EAP curriculum are also considered.

Development Standards Essays Example

- is the so called developed world, in fact overdeveloped is this the standard to which the rest of the world can or should aspire or is it an unsustainable level that over consumes resources, food and energy.

A procedure is a sign of development, in which new techniques are introduced in the society by the current systems of reproduction and production. The development strategy is based on environmental resources, gender, class and several other axes of inequality.

Example Of Approach to Negotiations Essay

What was your typical approach to negotiations before taking this class use your accumulated experience and insights to analyze your former approach..

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Good Coontz and Folbre Essay Example

Good investigating the global south essay example.

This paper concentrates on financial strategies and judges their prosperity focused around their effect on development and neediness decrease. The Millennium Development Goal of splitting compelling pay destitution by 2015 communicates the accord of the worldwide advancement group that neediness decrease is of overriding essentialness. There is likewise agreement that national neediness lessening methodologies and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers specifically, are an essential vehicle for centering national arrangements on decreasing destitution. Underneath this obvious agreement, there are, be that as it may, huge contrasts.

Good Poverty and Social Inequality Essay Example

Example of is urbanization good or bad for society essay.

Most people opt to leave countryside to achieve greater opportunities offered in the cities. Such a move carries with it plenty of disadvantages to the environment and people as well. The benefits and drawbacks relating to urbanization range in a wide and comprehensive scope. Nowadays, the urbanization issue is in frequent discussions more than mostly due to the increasing impacts for human lives as well as the environment (Mellor 92). This urbanization phenomenon results in poor conditions of living and working while other negative effects are on environmental quality.

Insomnia Essay Sample

Insomnia is considered to be a sleep disorder that is characterized by insufficient duration or poor quality of sleep or a combination of these phenomena over a significant period of time. The absolute duration, the quantity of ours spent while sleeping is not critical factor, since different people have a different normal, sufficient duration of sleep.

Good Essay On Context and Divorce Rates

Correlations normally show the relationship between two variables. The three types of correlations are either positive, negative or no correlation at all.

Sample Essay On Relative Poverty

Relative poverty is a measure of standard of living of an individual or a group of persons relative to the people they live around within the area. It may also be the minimum amount that a person or an individual requires in order to maintain an average standard of living. On the other hand, absolute poverty is a measure of poverty that is based on a set standard and is the same in all countries. The standard does not change over time and may involve living below certain measure poverty such as $1 a day.

Good Essay On Rural Poverty in Rwanda

Free frances lefkowitz essay sample, good essay about poverty.

According to a survey on global issues almost half the world i.e. over three billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. People are born in different cultures where they set up different definitions of an ideal life. Anybody living below that is not respected or is looked down. There is a bar set for that life which everybody should achieve. Even if one’s requirements are being met society will not accept, it since it is not meeting their requirements, and they would be looked down at with disgust, if not, then pity.

Good Negotiator Essay Example

Good essay on imperialism and modernism, sample essay on information systems management.

This analysis shows consistency of performance among the first category of students that the district education researched. There are no widespread differences in their performance. There is a positive trend where student’s portrays consistency in terms of performance. The analysis of the first year shows a positive trend of performance. This can be attributed to factors like; lack of knowledge by the teachers about the on-going research

Informational Interview Essay Examples

One of the ways to fight crime is by preventing it before it even happens. However, it is not possible to prevent crime unless the cause of the crime is known. Once the concerned people have knowledge on the causes of crime, it is easy to take preventive measures. Several programs have been set up for this reason. These programs are meant to serve the society, mainly the youth who are predisposed to crime. Most are established by non-governmental organizations. However, in some cases, government agencies set up such programs in a bid to lower crime rates in a particular area.

Essay On IQ Test Biases

Isolation of elders essays example, i. introduction.

I will base my research paper on the isolation of the aged in the society. The paper will delve deep into the problems that face the elderly in the society today. The research was triggered by my service in an organization that exposed me to elderly people. After interacting with them, I was privileged to observe them and get a subjective view of the issues they undergo in their daily lives. I served in an organization known as ABCD North End, where I got to interact with the aged from Boston community.

Existentialism Essay Samples

Genetically modified essay examples, the borgen project essay sample.

Introduction the paper addresses about a certain group, Borgen Project that is aiming to eradicate poverty and hunger in the most disadvantageous areas around the world. The current situation context of the group involves global hunger and poverty. The groups have applied effective communication strategy to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the project. The discussed issues involve the summary information about the group, the situational context, communication strategies and ways to engage with the group.

Life Of A Middle Class Family In London During The 19th Century Essay Samples

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Alvin Ailey proved he was gifted in more than one way. Raised by a young single mother, life was far from easy for him. He rose from poverty to become a figure that greatly influenced the 20th century modern dance. Alvin Ailey’s rise from poverty all the way to the top and finally succumbing to AIDs is an interesting story. He certainly had his weaknesses, but Alvin Ailey is an individual who will forever remain in the hearts of dance lovers (Ailey & Bailey 1995).

Free Poverty Essay Example

Introduction:.

Poverty is one of the real issues in the World. It is the main driver of numerous socio-monetary Issues including populace blast, unemployment, and youngster work and a climbing graph of Criminal acts. Destitution reduction ought to be the fundamental focus of the country to make it A Prosperous and creative nation. Along these lines, neediness end is a matter of central vitality.

Destitution intimates a condition in which an individual discovers him unable to support a living

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The rapidly evolving world that we live in requires minds that can innovate and come up with creative solutions to the problems that we face. Businesses in particular are at a time where fast innovation is a key ingredient to survival and growth. The problems faced by modern societies also seek innovative solutions that are cost effective, life changing and efficient. Innovation is defined as the creation of a new product that is set to change the way individuals in business, schools, government and other social structures do things.

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Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

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Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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CommonApp essay on being poor

<p>I was wondering whether writing the CA essay on being poor would be a good idea. This would fit with the background prompt. Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how to write such an essay without sounding like a pity case? </p>

<p>This is really “central to my identity”, but I don’t want to come off as a whiner who asks for pity.</p>

<p>It depends on how you write it. It could be a great window into what created you to be the person you are. OR it could sound whiny and complaining and entitled. It’s all up to you. </p>

<p>what did you accomplish inspite of poverty?</p>

<p>@bomerr, well, I’ve done pretty good in school, managed to win a competitive scholarship for an exchange program, achieved some awards, one for community service from the US Dept. of State. Also, I have some leadership positions and am the only student to ever fund a club at my school. I’m involved in a couple of NGO’s as well, for one of which I am a spokesperson. </p>

<p>These are the first things that come to my mind.</p>

<p>unless those things are directly tied to being poor you should mention this ib the additional comments section. </p>

<p>@bomerr, can you give me an example of something directly tied to being poor? </p>

<p>@12345n, thank you for the great advice, particularly the part about how this struggle aided me. It’s always a good idea to put a positive spin on things.</p>

<p>e.g. you volunteer at a homeless shelter to help other people. </p>

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Helping Others — Helping the Poor and Needy

Helping The Poor and Needy

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Published: Sep 1, 2023

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, what makes a college essay bad.

Hey everyone, I'm starting to work on my college essays, and I want to make sure I avoid any common pitfalls. In your opinion, what are some characteristics of a bad college essay? Are there any clichés or mistakes I should definitely avoid?

Hello! It's great that you're looking to avoid common essay pitfalls. A bad college essay can suffer from several issues:

1. Poor grammar and punctuation: Proofread, proofread, proofread! No matter how great your story is, if it's plagued with grammar and punctuation errors, it gives the impression that you didn't put in the effort. Ask others to review your essay and use tools like Grammarly to catch any errors you might have missed.

2. Generic or cliché topics: Some cliché essay topics include sports injuries or victories, immigrant stories, moving schools, and overcoming a challenging class. Writing about these topics can make your essay feel less unique and memorable. Keep in mind, though, that you can still write about these topics as long as you bring a fresh perspective or unique personal experience.

3. Lack of focus or depth: A good college essay showcases your personal growth, qualities, and thinking ability. Avoid trying to cover too many ideas or events, as this could result in a superficial essay. Instead, focus on one or two experiences and show how they have shaped you.

4. Negativity or complaining: While it's okay to acknowledge challenges you've faced, it's important to show resilience, persistence, or growth instead of simply complaining about your problems.

5. Failing to answer the prompt: Make sure you thoroughly address the essay prompt provided. If you don't answer the question being asked, your essay won't be helpful in showcasing your fit for the college or program.

6. Overusing quotes or big words: While it might be tempting to show off your vocabulary or include a favorite quote, it can detract from your voice and message. Focus on your own words and experiences, using advanced vocabulary and quotes sparingly.

7. Too much telling, not enough showing: "Show, don't tell" is a critical concept in good essay writing. Provide specific examples and anecdotes to illustrate your points, instead of simply claiming or listing attributes. This helps readers connect with you and makes your essay more engaging.

8. Not being authentic: Let your true self shine through your essay. Admissions officers can usually tell when you're writing what you think they want to hear, rather than writing honestly about your experiences and thoughts.

By being aware of these common issues, you'll be well on your way to writing a strong college essay that showcases your story and personality. Good luck!

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