In academia, lower socioeconomic status hinders sense of belonging | Science

For Sharon Su, attending graduate school at Columbia University feels like being caught between “two incredibly different worlds.” The neuroscience Ph.D. student is surrounded by classmates whose parents can help them out financially while they attend graduate school in pricey New York City. Meanwhile, “[I] focus a lot of my time figuring out how to make ends meet,” says Su, the child of Sino-Vietnamese war refugees who sends some of their $48,000 annual stipend to people they care about in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they grew up.

Su often avoids talking about their financial struggles and upbringing with other students and feels disconnected from the childhood experiences of more privileged classmates. At the same time, Su also feels alienated from friends and family they grew up with. Last month, for example, they attended the funeral of a childhood friend and left feeling like they were no longer a full-fledged member of their former community. “People remember me, but they don’t feel like they know me anymore,” they say. “I internalized it as them viewing me as a partial outsider, someone who has left.”

Su isn’t alone in these struggles. Overall, science, technology, engineering, and medicine Ph.D. students who self-identify as belonging to a lower socioeconomic status (SES) group experience challenges with interpersonal connections, both inside and outside of academia, according to a recent study of 600 first-year Ph.D. students at Columbia, Stanford University, and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). Relative to higher SES classmates, they reported having a harder time making friends in graduate school, feeling as though they weren’t as well understood by colleagues, and maintaining fewer close personal ties with people outside of academia. “They’re at double risk of being isolated from their friends and colleagues inside [academia] and also from their own family outside of academia,” says study author Hyun Joon Park, an assistant professor of psychology at Connecticut College.

Ph.D. students who belong to other minoritized groups—including women, underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, and international students—also experienced challenges with interpersonal understanding and social ties. But self-identified socioeconomic status—which goes beyond simply income to encompass a perceived “gestalt sense of where they fit in in the U.S.,” explains study co-author and Penn State, University Park, psychology professor Jonathan Cook—was the strongest predictor of whether a student encountered social problems during graduate school. The findings are “not merely an artifact of lower SES students coincidentally belonging to other high-risk groups,” the authors write in the paper, published last month in the Journal of Social Issues.

“The paper … hits the nail on the head,” says Elena Aquino, a second-year Ph.D. student in biosciences at Stanford who grew up in a poor household and requested to go by a pseudonym so she could speak openly about her experiences in graduate school. After attending a public university for her bachelor’s degree, she was struck by how many of her graduate school classmates had attended elite private institutions and seemed to have no problem affording to live in the notoriously expensive San Francisco Bay Area. “It is very interesting to see who will order drinks for everyone,” she says. Many also have parents who went to graduate school, and “they seem to know a lot more of the hidden curriculum,” she adds. She is thankful that she befriended one other student in her program who grew up under similar circumstances in Southern California and is also Hispanic. “If I didn’t have them in the program, I don’t think I’d be happy here,” she says.

The study’s findings, though not surprising, could point to one reason why there are so few faculty members from lower SES backgrounds, says Jennie Brand, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In August, she and her colleagues published a study in Nature Human Behaviour reporting that U.S. faculty members grew up in neighborhoods with median household incomes 24% higher than the national average. “The professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged,” she and her colleagues wrote.

Park says one step universities could take would be to provide programs for lower SES students that are similar to existing programs meant to help individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Amerria Causey, a first-year Ph.D. student studying virology at Harvard University who grew up in an impoverished rural area in Mississippi, benefited from one such effort: a monthlong paid summer program Harvard runs for incoming life sciences graduate students who are members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The program involved sessions on how to be a resilient scientist and how to overcome conflicts with others. But more than that, it was a way to create community. “Most of us were the only person of color in our program, or one of a few in our program,” she says. “I was able to find my community really, really easily so I haven’t felt as isolated since being here.” Causey suggests similar programs for lower SES students could be helpful, but that they should be separated from programs for students of color because the lived experiences can be very different.

“SES can be kind of an invisible identity,” Cook notes. “People can easily belong to the low SES group and not have other people know.” Because of that, it’s important to not overlook the issues lower SES students face—including when thinking about graduate student stipends and benefits. For instance, not everyone can pay scientific society membership fees or cover conference expenses that go beyond the amount a department is willing to reimburse, he notes. “There’s a lot of things that we do in academia that we don’t really think that much about the costs.”

“It frustrates me to no end the lack of consideration for SES,” Su says. Some days, they feel as though they should be following a more lucrative career path that would enable them to be more financially generous with the people they care about. But at this point, “I can’t imagine myself not doing science, which I also find incredibly annoying,” they say. “I’m drinking the Kool-Aid of academia at this point because I’m just like, ‘Fuck it. I really like science. It is what it is. I’ll do it.’”

For Sharon Su, attending graduate school at Columbia University feels like being caught between “two incredibly different worlds.” The neuroscience Ph.D. student is surrounded by classmates whose parents can help them out financially while they attend graduate school in pricey New York City. Meanwhile, “[I] focus a lot of my time figuring out how to make ends meet,” says Su, the child of Sino-Vietnamese war refugees who sends some of their $48,000 annual stipend to people they care about in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they grew up.

Su often avoids talking about their financial struggles and upbringing with other students and feels disconnected from the childhood experiences of more privileged classmates. At the same time, Su also feels alienated from friends and family they grew up with. Last month, for example, they attended the funeral of a childhood friend and left feeling like they were no longer a full-fledged member of their former community. “People remember me, but they don’t feel like they know me anymore,” they say. “I internalized it as them viewing me as a partial outsider, someone who has left.”

Su isn’t alone in these struggles. Overall, science, technology, engineering, and medicine Ph.D. students who self-identify as belonging to a lower socioeconomic status (SES) group experience challenges with interpersonal connections, both inside and outside of academia, according to a recent study of 600 first-year Ph.D. students at Columbia, Stanford University, and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). Relative to higher SES classmates, they reported having a harder time making friends in graduate school, feeling as though they weren’t as well understood by colleagues, and maintaining fewer close personal ties with people outside of academia. “They’re at double risk of being isolated from their friends and colleagues inside [academia] and also from their own family outside of academia,” says study author Hyun Joon Park, an assistant professor of psychology at Connecticut College.

Ph.D. students who belong to other minoritized groups—including women, underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, and international students—also experienced challenges with interpersonal understanding and social ties. But self-identified socioeconomic status—which goes beyond simply income to encompass a perceived “gestalt sense of where they fit in in the U.S.,” explains study co-author and Penn State, University Park, psychology professor Jonathan Cook—was the strongest predictor of whether a student encountered social problems during graduate school. The findings are “not merely an artifact of lower SES students coincidentally belonging to other high-risk groups,” the authors write in the paper, published last month in the Journal of Social Issues.

“The paper … hits the nail on the head,” says Elena Aquino, a second-year Ph.D. student in biosciences at Stanford who grew up in a poor household and requested to go by a pseudonym so she could speak openly about her experiences in graduate school. After attending a public university for her bachelor’s degree, she was struck by how many of her graduate school classmates had attended elite private institutions and seemed to have no problem affording to live in the notoriously expensive San Francisco Bay Area. “It is very interesting to see who will order drinks for everyone,” she says. Many also have parents who went to graduate school, and “they seem to know a lot more of the hidden curriculum,” she adds. She is thankful that she befriended one other student in her program who grew up under similar circumstances in Southern California and is also Hispanic. “If I didn’t have them in the program, I don’t think I’d be happy here,” she says.

The study’s findings, though not surprising, could point to one reason why there are so few faculty members from lower SES backgrounds, says Jennie Brand, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In August, she and her colleagues published a study in Nature Human Behaviour reporting that U.S. faculty members grew up in neighborhoods with median household incomes 24% higher than the national average. “The professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged,” she and her colleagues wrote.

Park says one step universities could take would be to provide programs for lower SES students that are similar to existing programs meant to help individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Amerria Causey, a first-year Ph.D. student studying virology at Harvard University who grew up in an impoverished rural area in Mississippi, benefited from one such effort: a monthlong paid summer program Harvard runs for incoming life sciences graduate students who are members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The program involved sessions on how to be a resilient scientist and how to overcome conflicts with others. But more than that, it was a way to create community. “Most of us were the only person of color in our program, or one of a few in our program,” she says. “I was able to find my community really, really easily so I haven’t felt as isolated since being here.” Causey suggests similar programs for lower SES students could be helpful, but that they should be separated from programs for students of color because the lived experiences can be very different.

“SES can be kind of an invisible identity,” Cook notes. “People can easily belong to the low SES group and not have other people know.” Because of that, it’s important to not overlook the issues lower SES students face—including when thinking about graduate student stipends and benefits. For instance, not everyone can pay scientific society membership fees or cover conference expenses that go beyond the amount a department is willing to reimburse, he notes. “There’s a lot of things that we do in academia that we don’t really think that much about the costs.”

“It frustrates me to no end the lack of consideration for SES,” Su says. Some days, they feel as though they should be following a more lucrative career path that would enable them to be more financially generous with the people they care about. But at this point, “I can’t imagine myself not doing science, which I also find incredibly annoying,” they say. “I’m drinking the Kool-Aid of academia at this point because I’m just like, ‘Fuck it. I really like science. It is what it is. I’ll do it.’”