Wesleyan, and other liberal arts colleges, always like to boast about their class diversity. We have students whose grandparents went here and students who are the first in their family to attend college. Children of movie stars and people who struggled through inner-city high schools. And somehow, the environment of a college campus remains delightfully classless. Backgrounds and old acquaintance are forgotten. We sit side-by-side in classes. Especially as underclassmen, we eat the same food. Dorm room decoration is a meritocracy. For a magical four years, we have the ability to interact as equals.

Class could even be said to be a dirty word at Wesleyan. Even as other measures of difference, such as race, gender, and geography are obsessively examined by the administration, especially for the admissions process, we’re not a school where people brag about their family’s wealth or their yacht club membership. I belong to a group, however, that I feel has been shortchanged by this policy. I belong to neither of the extreme ends of the spectrum. I’m middle class.

The middle class is shrinking in this country, and just as our population is becoming calcified into extremes of a rich few and millions of poor, I believe Wesleyan is trying to reproduce (in reverse—after all, every school this year is looking for more students who can pay in full) and exacerbate this condition through its policies–or non-policies–toward middle-class students. These students are hardly a homogeneous group, but here are my parameters for the sake of this discussion. They might receive a little financial aid or pay in full, but uncomfortably. Many will graduate with debt. In particular, many of them come from public schools. Constituting slightly more than half of the Wesleyan population, a public school background presents unique challenges that are rarely discussed.

With the variations in the quality and types of public schools, the move to college may be anything from a comfortable gradation to a huge leap. I went to a public, magnet high school. It had a wonderfully collegiate environment, but it was also tragically underfunded. We never had the AP courses or electives that other schools offered, and thus I never learned what true academic choice was. Docility is a virtue in public schools; expectations are lower.  The public school system, even at its best, is still designed to control and standardize students by spoon-feeding them information and flattening out, instead of encouraging, their creative instincts and differences. I felt this happening through the earliest years of my public education. As my closest childhood friend was writing short stories about characters like a diabetic alien named “Dbiyou Aeiyou,” I was doing mind-numbing practice for standardized tests and being yelled at to stop drawing pictures in class. I feel like I lost a lot of creative instincts that I’ve been working to discover again in the free environment of college.

Even when college-preparatory lessons were added to our curriculum, the tendency to ignore difference was apparent. We were all taught, for example, out of the same college-level writing handbook, despite the fact that some of us had been writing on a college level for years. It seemed that despite the good intentions of the principal and teachers, we were beholden to forces beyond our control: the Board of Education’s budget cuts, the state Regents curriculum, the catacombs of bureaucracy.

When I arrived at Wesleyan, I was excited and relieved to finally take charge of my education, but I didn’t know how. I knew the majors had requirements, but I didn’t think to ask about them. This is how I got advised (or non-advised) out of the COL major; this is how I ended up taking Film Analysis as my first film course. Another public-schooled friend had similar problems during his first year at Wes. “I felt like when I first came here I was very unprepared,” he told me. “Other people were so comfortable talking back to authority, whether it was PSafe, Reslife, or the deans, and that attitude is not something that I had.”

I’m not looking for pity. I know everybody has things they wish they did differently. I only wish that my educational background had been acknowledged, and that there was some kind of support system in place—even a group of designated faculty advisors—for students who have neither experienced the holistic mentoring that some prep schools offer or the pre-college programs offered to some low-income high school students, such as Upward Bound or the Carnegie Mellon programs. At Wes, guidance is there if you look for it. But some first-year students need a push to learn how to manage the college life that were not prepared for by their thoroughly “normal” high school educations.