Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor

If a student chooses to not apply to a given school, is it on that school?

I think there might be some cherry-picking here (note the absence of the "top test scores" descriptor). Perhaps some of these low-income students who excelled in high school yet don't complete college really weren't all that prepared for college to begin with. Further, is it really reasonable to think that a student who doesn't graduate from a less-selective college would have been more likely to succeed at one of "the nation's best colleges"? I find that hard to accept.

This is simply not true. It wouldn't be true even if you wrote "And since most colleges ..."

 

I agree on both points. Where the heck are the guidance counselors? How good are the high schools that they're attending? Are these kids really that well prepared? How many AP classes do these kids take?

 

This is very true.

 

You have one counselor servicing between 200 and 300 students. If those students are not walking through the door, these counselors are not coming to them for help.

 

There are schools where it's a good bit worse than that, especially in grades 9-11. Sometimes they'll have a separate counselors for seniors, but by that time, most of the kids are on the track that they're on and there's very little that can be changed.

So cranberry - the guidance counselors aren't there because they've been laid off, and the schools likely aren't preparing the students that well. But if they're not as well prepared because they couldn't afford private school and didn't win the charter school lottery, are you going to just tell them tough shit when it comes to going to a good college, especially if they've done the best they could given the quality of their school?

 

What is the effect of helicopter parents on college admissions? I did everything myself, except for my parents writing two checks for application fees. But I loved looking up stuff on colleges and bought one of those thick directories in the days before the public used the Web.

No one in my large graduating class at a suburban high school out West thought a top-tier school was an option. Only knew of two students in four years that went to top schools -- one to MIT on an ROTC scholarship and the other went to Davidson with parents who could pay the "sticker price." You'd think an Ivy or a top school in California would have been options.

 

Nothing wrong with MIT.

Did the kid who went to Davidson stay in the Southeast? Like many similar schools, Davidson is more useful for the old-boy network than its name on your resume.

 

Sorry, I don't buy that in its entirety. I get that public schools, particularly in the inner-city, are incredibly under-resourced and that classes are too big, but aren't we talking about the most exceptional students in those schools? The ones with great grades and great test scores, right? These are exactly the kids who would get and seek attention from teachers and guidance counselors and school principals.

If you're getting A's and have outstanding SAT scores in high school, you've likely heard of the best colleges and universities and, if not, you're smart enough to find out.

The real issue is that the very best students from the worst schools still aren't going to be close to sufficiently prepared for so-called elite colleges and universities. Until we stop understaffing and under-resourcing our public school systems this particular cycle isn't going to be broken.

 

Isn't this why we need to identify these kids even earlier?

The smartest kids are already standing out but 6th, 7th, 8th grade.

Get them into magnet high schools. Put them on a college prep course. Provide them with guidance counselors.

If you leave 'em in failing schools, surrounded by kids who are going nowhere, they're likely to go nowhere.

 

One reason why bright kids fall through the cracks is testing. When the school depends on getting as good as test grades as possible, or improving, the kids they focus on are the kids who are on the threshold of passing. Lots of resources go there. Lots.
Sometimes parents have to seek out the stuff for the top kids, and in households strained by economics, not always possible.

 

Or you could try and make the school they are already in better.

 

In terms of helping the kids learn about schools, a place I taught at in inner-city Houston would name the kids' homerooms after colleges their teachers went to. In the 7th grade, we had homerooms named after Pitt, U of Houston, Wisconsin, ACU and Tennessee. First day of school each homeroom teacher did taught the kids about their college. Throughout the year, the kids would ask questions about the schools and learn more about them through their natural curiosity. With new homerooms each year, by the time the students graduated, they'd at least have heard of a good amount of schools in Texas and outside the state. It doesn't solve every problem, obviously, but if you have kids who don't even know of colleges outside of Local U (and a lot of our kids had never been to a major US city other than Houston when we got them), it helps expose them to some great places to get an education. It really was a cool idea.

(And since someone will probably ask, we did have a "college counselor" - basically your traditional guidance counselor - who'd help the kids apply for financial aid.)