Last month, I began a new position as Assistant Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA, teaching both halves of the U.S. history survey. I love the job, not only because I get to teach the survey, which, as I’ve already explained, I thoroughly enjoy, but also because of the students I get to work with.

It is a shame that so much discussion of students and learning is defined by the cliche of “diversity.” Diversity is, of course, immensely important, but the word gets invoked so reflexively by both faculty and administrators that it has become a trite term, on many college campuses almost laughable in what it reveals and what it obscures.

At Washington University in St. Louis, the running joke among both grad students and faculty was that, for all that WashU has done to promote racial and ethnic diversity, the campus reflected a staggering class homogeneity. The vast majority of students on campus were from very privileged economic backgrounds; many of them came from the fanciest of fancy prep schools, where they were involved in all the extracurricular activities that schools like WashU look for when making admissions decisions. This is true, I think, at most elite four-year institutions. My colleagues and I have had many conversations about the effect this has on the educational environment, but one in particular that has always stuck out for me is the effect it has on how we compare the students at four-year institutions to the students at two-year colleges.

After completing my coursework for my M.A. at The College of William & Mary (a public school, but one that certainly competes with any private school in terms of prestige, and in its attractiveness to students of exceptional privilege), I adjuncted at a community college in Iowa, near where I grew up. I remember the dean who hired me telling me, “You went to William & Mary. You’re probably used to a certain level of student achievement. You need to remember that most students here won’t have that.” He was telling me in a not-so-subtle way to lower my expectations for the students at the community college, that the students I would encounter there would not be able to handle the same level of academic rigor.

I began to think about the variety of statements really being communicated there, whether intentionally or not. Clearly, he was trying to alert me to the fact that some of the students I would encounter would have had no more than a high school education–and potentially a poor education, at that. Some would have a GED rather than a high school diploma. Others would be coming back for school after years of being out, and may have lost or never been taught the skills that I or the students at a place like W&M take for granted. I would encounter some students who spoke English as a second language. Indeed, at that community college, and the one where I currently teach, I have encountered students who enter my class from a variety of educational backgrounds. Some are non-traditional students. Some are from very different countries, cultures, and linguistic traditions. Some can barely write a coherent sentence.

But he was also implying that all this was different from the students I had encountered at W&M. That this type of diversity he was describing about the students at the community college–class, cultural, linguistic, educational–actually made them less prepared for my class, and less able to do the work, than the students at elite schools like W&M. I continued to hear this message about community college education, articulated in a variety of ways by friends and colleagues (“You’re teaching a community college? How are you going to modify/adapt/change/insert euphemism for ‘dumb-down’ your syllabus for that?”).

After I moved to St. Louis, I kept that comment, and all it implied, in the back of my mind as I encountered students in my courses at WashU. I certainly encountered students from different countries and cultures, including some who spoke English as a second language. But to my knowledge I encountered no one with a GED, no one who had ever dropped out of high school. My students came from top public high schools and extremely expensive private schools. I had students in my class who could read Latin, and some who spoke Greek. Most had taken numerous Adavanced Placement courses. And yet for all of that, I was surprised at how unprepared many of them were to do what I considered entry-level college analysis. They often struggled to grasp the overall argument or perspective in a document, and to articulate its historical relevance using evidence. Some could also barely write a coherent sentence.

To put it bluntly, in my experience, contrary to what I have been repeatedly told, my community college students were no less well-prepared to do what I was asking than were the WashU students. Or, put another way, the WashU students, despite all the pricey education, were often no better prepared than were their community college counterparts.

In fact, in some areas of analysis–like finding the contemporary relevance of historical issues–my community college students far outshine the students I had at WashU. I remember lecturing to my community college students in Iowa about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and getting a reaction from multiple women in the class about how Friedan’s argument resonated with them because they still get pressured by their parents to “find a man” and start a family, even as they are trying to pursue higher education. Just last week, I was leading discussion in my U.S. History II class about exploitation of workers during the Gilded Age, and specifically about a document written by an industrialist claiming that the workers at the factory he observed never complained about their work conditions. One student in my class observed that he knew from personal experience that workers don’t complain to their bosses about working conditions; they complain to one another. Complaining too much to the higher-ups, he explained, might get you fired, and you don’t want to risk that if you really need the job. A black student in my U.S. History I class remarked in a discussion about slavery that whites “brought us” to America to be exploited. He used the word us, including himself and black people today into the picture, calling attention to the continued impact of slavery on black lives, and the culpability of whites to the perpetuation of racial injustice, today. His formulation made several students in my class visibly squirm in their seats.

These remarkable insights came from students with personal experience dealing with varying degrees of injustice and indignity; experience living without the privilege most of the students at elite schools have always had. Of course, there were women and students of color at WashU, who could speak to their own experiences, and on occasion, they did. But the times they demonstrated a direct connection between the historical lessons we were learning and their actual lived experience–or the lived experience of anyone today–were much rarer. History for most of them had little if anything to do with life lived today.

These experiences lead me to think that for all the rhetoric that surrounds “diversity” in higher education, we often disparage the cultural, educational, racial, ethnic, and especially economic composition of the community college student body when we assume students are not up to the task of doing the same level work as students at often far less diverse four-year institutions. Community college students are every bit as capable of high achievement as the students at elite schools. In fact, their life experiences–like working multiple jobs to pay for school; meticulously monitoring expenses (even going without school supplies) because they are on a very thin budget; taking care of younger siblings, or even raising them, because a parent is away temporarily or permanently; and navigating the pressures of college with little or no guidance or support–provide them insights into American history and culture that students of privilege often don’t see. If we truly value “diversity,” we need to stop disparaging community college students by assuming they are less prepared to think critically about history the way we would like them to.