On a campus riddled with designer bags, pricey downtown events, and peers with last names that appear on campus buildings or nearby streets, it’s no question that there is a class disparity problem within our culture. While, of course, this is a weighty issue in the social framework of student life, I think there has been a lot of emphasis on and cyclical conversations around socioeconomic disparities within the culture — but not the system.
Like most historic and prestigious universities in America, Penn served as a breeding ground for white, male, and wealthy students for nearly two centuries. An increase in admissions for students of color began in the 1960s, and the University didn’t become coeducational until 1974. In terms of Penn’s relationship with low-income students, having to pay little or no tuition without taking a loan didn’t seem like a possibility until the Class of 1971 arrived on campus. Financial aid initiatives were rolled out, slowly expanding the socioeconomic diversity of the student body. While some progress has been made with programs like Penn First Plus and initiatives like the Quaker Commitment, the financial aid process still has a ways to go. In particular, this process has a lot of room to improve when it comes to supporting families that don’t perfectly fit the Western nuclear family archetype, and whom are often immigrant and Black or Indigenous households.
Growing up in an immigrant household, I was no stranger to the “it takes a village” philosophy. Family friends and extended family assisted my parents in raising me and my siblings. In turn, our door was always open to them. My parents, sisters, and I were the only people within my family in the West for a long time, and as we settled in, my parents supported their parents and their siblings following the prayer popular in Yoruba culture: “May you grow old and may your children take very good care of you.” In my home country, there is no robust social security system, or even insurance. While here, we have job benefits and insurance to rely on for support, many in countries similar to mine in the Global South have their children as their form of insurance.
When I received my college acceptances, one of my grandparents was facing an acute health crisis, which resulted in my parents contributing to the medical bills and other financial support. This placed a huge strain on our financial situation, which I had to explain in vast, intimate detail as an “extraordinary” financial circumstance on Question 13 on the Penn Financial Aid Supplement. Long story short, the appeal was disregarded in a short, inexplicit email.
I know I am not the only student who has endured something like this. In a conversation with a friend, they shared with me a similar experience in which their Estimated Financial Contribution didn’t take into account the support their household gave to extended family members. When talking directly to a financial aid officer, they were told the reason for their denied appeal was that the financial support went to extended and not immediate family members.
Reflecting on this conversation and my own experience made me think back to that dreaded Question 13 and the nature of Penn’s financial aid process. If the experience my family endured with my grandparent’s health crisis wasn’t an “extraordinary financial circumstance,” what exactly constitutes an extraordinary circumstance? I decided to visit the Financial Aid Appeals section of the Student Registration and Financial Services website — which was interestingly a hard section to find directly on the website and required a Google search — and to my disappointment, my situation and situations like mine are explicitly disregarded. Under “Permissible Reasons for Appeal,” uninsured medical expenses are excused only for immediate family members. Additionally, under “What We Cannot Consider,” providing financial support to family living abroad is listed.
With these barriers, many families and students undergo not only financial stress but emotional stress when confronted with the pressure of choosing between a Penn education and family. Inexplicitly regarding financial support to extended family as voluntary undermines the weight of cultural responsibilities that have a weighted history that cannot be boxed into the individualistic and nuclear family structure of the West.
This barrier presented by the financial aid process is far from the only barrier students face. While, again, Penn has made strides in expanding the ways it supports students, there is still a massive room for improvement within the system. By acknowledging the diverse circumstances students come from, rather than following federal aid formulas that are disproportionately centered around Western nuclear families, Penn can move in a progressive direction and offer more opportunities to students who may not be able to afford Penn because they don’t have “extraordinary” financial circumstances.
GLORIA OLADEJO is a College sophomore studying law and society and Africana studies from Coopersburg, Pa. Her email is gloriao6@sas.upenn.edu.
