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This page serves as an introduction to resources and topics on Socioeconomic issues.
Socioeconomic is related or involving a combination of social and economic factors. These factors include but are not limited to income, education, employment, community safety and social supports and networks.
Socioeconomic status is the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income and occupation. APA Definition
Definitions from the Northeastern University CIE FUNL Definitions.
These tabs offer a small selection of resources on socio-economics issues and topics. To view more recommendations explore the Snell Library website.
I Don't Want to Die Poor by
There’s nothing funny about student loan debt (trust me, I know!), but Michael Arceneaux finds a way to talk about it with honesty and humor in this collection of biographical essays that touch on everything from poverty and sexuality to Blackness and popular culture. Touching and hilarious, this book of essays can be taken as a whole because the topics and Arceneaux’s voice give it a great sense of cohesion. If you like to laugh while you cry, don’t miss this one.
The Privileged Poor by
An NPR Favorite Book of the Year Winner of the Critics' Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies Association Winner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award Winner of the CEP?Mildred Garc??a Award for Exemplary Scholarship Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize Getting in is only half the battle. The Privileged Poor reveals how?and why?disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges, and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive. The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors?and their coffers?to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In The Privileged Poor, Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they've arrived on campus. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This bracing and necessary book documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others. Despite their lofty aspirations, top colleges hedge their bets by recruiting their new diversity largely from the same old sources, admitting scores of lower-income black, Latino, and white undergraduates from elite private high schools like Exeter and Andover. These students approach campus life very differently from students who attended local, and typically troubled, public high schools and are often left to flounder on their own. Drawing on interviews with dozens of undergraduates at one of America's most famous colleges and on his own experiences as one of the privileged poor, Jack describes the lives poor students bring with them and shows how powerfully background affects their chances of success. If we truly want our top colleges to be engines of opportunity, university policies and campus cultures will have to change. Jack provides concrete advice to help schools reduce these hidden disadvantages?advice we cannot afford to ignore.
The Price of Admission by
Every spring thousands of middle-class and lower-income high-school seniors learn that they have been rejected by America’s most exclusive colleges. What they may never learn is how many candidates like themselves have been passed over in favor of wealthy white students with lesser credentials—children of alumni, big donors, or celebrities. In this explosive book, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Daniel Golden argues that America, the so-called land of opportunity, is rapidly becoming an aristocracy in which America’s richest families receive special access to elite higher education—enabling them to give their children even more of a head start. Based on two years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews with students, parents, school administrators, and admissions personnel—some of whom risked their jobs to speak to the author—The Price of Admissionexposes the corrupt admissions practices that favor the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous. InThe Price of Admission, Golden names names, along with grades and test scores. He reveals how the sons of former vice president Al Gore, one-time Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist leapt ahead of more deserving applicants at Harvard, Brown, and Princeton. He explores favoritism at the Ivy Leagues, Duke, the University of Virginia, and Notre Dame, among other institutions. He reveals that colleges hold Asian American students to a higher standard than whites; comply with Title IX by giving scholarships to rich women in “patrician sports” like horseback riding, squash, and crew; and repay congressmen for favors by admitting their children. He also reveals that Harvard maintains a “Z-list” for well-connected but underqualified students, who are quietly admitted on the condition that they wait a year to enroll. The Price of Admissionexplodes the myth of an American meritocracy—the belief that no matter what your background, if you are smart and diligent enough, you will have access to the nation’s most elite universities. It is must reading not only for parents and students with a personal stake in college admissions, but also for those disturbed by the growing divide between ordinary and privileged Americans. From the Hardcover edition.
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