we need to talk about the class ceiling
Recently, a friend said to me “it’s too bad there isn’t a ‘life experience’ section on job applications.”
He said this as I stared down yet another rejection, an email (or silence) that I’ve become well acquainted with. That’s part of life, sure, but there’s also a serious gap in navigating job applications when you’re not from a middle class, privileged background.
I’m going to name some specific examples to illustrate the point, and the gap as I see it.
1) The ‘your academics aren’t strong enough’ excuse.
I got this from KPMG after soaring through their first couple rounds of assessment. I liked the recruiter, I liked the company, and the position was in public sector auditing. It was after the recruiter sent me a couple of glowing update emails about the process that she wrote back: ‘Sorry, but it seems like we’re missing your A-Level or AP exam results [side note: this was a UK based job, but she knew I’m American]. Could you send those over?’
I was 8 years post high school at that point. And I responded honestly: ‘Due to where I lived and the economic challenges my family faced at the time, I never took AP exams. I do have results from the state exams and SAT scores if you’d like.’
The response? ‘We require A-levels or AP scores. Sorry, we can’t move forward with your application as your academics are not strong enough.’
Now it’s one thing if I legitimately had not done much academically in the meantime. But I have an Ivy League degree (cum laude)! I have a UK law degree! I’d won prizes for my writing! But nope. It was all because of high school.
So what was I doing instead of taking AP courses, you ask? I was working, for $5.75/hour, so my little brother and my sick mother could eat.
At 14, I read up on the state laws around high school completion. It turned out that if you took the grade 12 exams in science/math/English/history and passed with a certain high percentage, you could be declared done with school. Age didn’t matter.
So at 15, I took the grade 12 exams. I scored above 90% on all of them, with 2 perfect scores. The state board found this irregular, but couldn’t stop me from getting a certificate from them that I was done with my secondary schooling.
Age 16 is when high school students typically consider their AP course options. I got a job and enrolled in an EMT night course at the local community college. We moved to a cheaper rental house. I sold movie theater tickets during the day, learned to be a projectionist, and on the weekends I refereed youth ice and roller hockey games in return for some of my league fees waived, so I could continue to play hockey too.
Two weeks after my 17th birthday, I passed my EMT exams. I enrolled in at university with the promise of playing hockey. They didn’t ask for AP scores.
So no, KPMG, I never had time to take AP tests. What I learned instead was what it was like to budget for groceries and gas, how bosses could be kind or cruel, how there’s almost always a way around red tape. I learned to study and work at the same time. Incidentally, through my EMT courses and ambulance ride-alongs, I also learned to save lives. I learned how to put together files to apply to disability payments (for my mom) and how that always takes applying twice. I learned how to drive around letting her cry so my little brother wouldn’t see her cry at home.
Tell me, how do I put that into a job application, when they ask why I don’t have AP scores?
2) The ‘We’d have liked to see a summer internship in this field’ excuse.
Mmkay: so more classic in the class ceiling is the internship, nearly always unpaid, in high cost areas, and let’s not forget the professional attire and the costs associated with that. I went to college with a suitcase full of jeans, track pants (it was the mid-2000s, okay) and hockey tournament tshirts. I didn’t even have a proper winter coat or boots, because I couldn’t afford them. Where was I supposed to get a suit for interviews?
Soft skills also came into play. I didn’t have the connections that so, so many who work internships have. I didn’t know you were supposed to shake hands with the entire interview panel, or the expected body language in an interview. To top that off, my working class accent and vernacular were pretty much immediately recognisable. This all worked against me.
Even so, I worked a couple of internships over my undergraduate years, both offered when a professor referred me. But I couldn’t do them full time over the summer: I had no way to pay rent. I’d work a paying job, somewhere around minimum wage, 35 hours a week. I’d work an internship 15-20 hours a week. This isn’t really the way to build up a typical resume. So no, various NGOs who have told me this, I couldn’t take a prestigious, full time internship in X place that wasn’t where I lived. I didn’t have the resources. How do I put that on an application?
3) The ‘But you really only have a couple years of work history, so you deserve this much less pay’ excuse.
Nope, nope, nope. I’ve held a job with no more than a couple weeks of unemployment for the last 12 years. When companies – including my current workplace – tell me they aren’t counting work that wasn’t what they consider ‘appropriate, full-time work,’ what does that mean?
At 16 I worked full time in a movie theater. At 17 and 18, it was doing emergency medicine a couple of overnight shifts a week – but I’m pretty sure that remains the most high stakes job I’ll ever hold. At 19 it was full time, during a year off from university, as a courier for the state government. 20-22 was 35 hours a week at Starbucks during school breaks, and 18-25 hours a week during term time. Does this not count? Post college, I taught debate, public speaking, and critical reasoning around the world for most of a year, as it was what I could get immediately and I had student loan bills to pay. Does it count? I worked at museums, at nonprofits, as a tutor, as a freelance writer and researcher, all to make ends meet. Does that count?
It’s insulting to say only 40-hour workweek, 9-5 jobs, after you’ve finished the entirety of your schooling (including a masters!) count towards job history and thus the salary you can expect. Those jobs are the ones I’ve learned least at, excepting, of course, what poor work ethic many office workers have. I learned more about providing good service at Starbucks than in customer support. I learned more about high pressure situations as an EMT than in managerial meetings. I learned more about compelling an audience through teaching debate than giving conference talks, as I do now. Why doesn’t the past experience count?
I remain indebted to the professors who believed, and continue to believe, in me, as they still push me to write my way out. I pay attention now to how few working class kids I knew at university, how few worked during study, and how ever fewer have progressed to what we might call middle class success. There’s a hard class ceiling, and though I don’t know how to shatter it (other than doing everything I can to follow Lin-Manuel’s steps), but I do know it needs to be talked about. We need people to realise society and its expectations are holding smart, capable, hard-workers down. And we should rise up.
