Underserved Students and the Politics of the Practical

One thing that's bothered me for a while is how often low-income and first generation students are steered pretty hard toward "jobs" rather than "education" when it comes to college. I can't argue with the imperative to earn money and support yourself and your family after college, not to mention paying off student loans, but I worry that with all best intentions we may be developing a laboring class to the long-term detriment of American intellectual and national life. It may be better educated than earlier working classes, but it still smacks of a division between the privileged and non-privileged.

Jonathan Kozol wrote, "Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself." His compassion for children is well-known, but what strikes me here is the phrase "utilitarian adulthood." Much is made of ensuring that students are able to get jobs when they graduate from college. That's well and good, but it seems to me that Latino, African American, and low-income/first-generation students are seen more in that "utilitarian" light than their more privileged white counterparts. Working to change that outlook is one reason I do what I do.

If you are a well-off white student from a good high school, it's relatively easy to consider a liberal arts education without thinking about post-college work. You may want to be a doctor or lawyer or CPA, but you are comfortable knowing that you can still major philosophy, anthropology or English, any of which ignite the old jokes like "What are you going to do, open a philosophy store?" as Mark Slouka writes in his Harper's essay, "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." But you still can afford to explore, take your time, or even think about going to graduate school to be an anthropologist or a historian because you're relatively sure you'll be employed at something after college. (Recent history aside.) You can major in theater because you know you'll eventually work for an investment bank anyway or if you do go into theater can rely on parents for support, at least for a little while. (I realize what a huge generalization that is, but I believe it's justified in contrast to underserved students' experiences.)

But first-generation kids get pushed toward the practical: Even if they're being encouraged to go to college, they're steered toward curricula that will end in a job right out of college. They're NOT steered toward the arts or history because the payoff isn't nearly the same. Most college advising programs I've seen advising low-income students emphasize the income-enhancing aspects of college attendance, not the intellectual stimuli or the opportunity to see well beyond one's own borders. Again, while I can't argue with more income, I can wish that we attended more to these students' minds instead of seeing them just as future laborers with BAs. Otherwise we risk their continued marginalization.

A young African American colleague recently told me about her own experience coming up through the Chicago school system. Although she is extremely good at math and was taking advanced courses at an early age, she was pushed to take a basketball scholarship at an obscure Florida college because she is also extremely tall. Even though she had demonstrated her brainpower, it was obscured by her height. Luckily she left her original college and transferred to one more appropriate to her talents, but my guess is that's more an exception than a rule. She was seen as a body, not as a mind; as a laborer, not as an intellectual.

One result of the emphasis on college as job preparation rather than life or even career development is that we continue to have a dearth of African American, Latino, and other artists and intellectuals from out of the mainstream. I've met many bright underserved students for whom the idea of "liberal arts" is a non-starter; they have to be sure they can make money right out of the gate so they can't waste time with "frills." It's hard to be comfortable studying Hispanic or Victorian literature when you feel the hot breath of necessity on your neck. But no one seems to have told them that they can live intellectual lives and have careers, and that's a shame.

Michael Roth's recent passionate defense of the liberal arts in the Huffington Post seems archaic in this context: "The cosmopolitanism of curricula at America' best liberal arts colleges is in tune with the wonderful diversity of student life. The thirst for experimentation, the ability to cross disciplinary or cultural borders, the scale of residential life -- all of these factors extend to learning outside the classroom and create vibrant communities that students remember and value throughout their lives." My guess it would leave a room full of low-income parents and students laughing bitterly--these ideas all sound like airy luxuries most people can't afford, and they'd be right. About the affordability, anyway.

But Roth (who is the president of Wesleyan University in CT) touches on some of the things that make higher education in the United States so vital and essential even without a direct link to jobs. He says "The key is that the students at these schools are developing skills, learning how to learn, in ways that will serve them for decades." They are the things that help make going to college worthwhile not just as preparation for one's working life but also for one's mindfulness of life in the world, including being a citizen in its widest sense. The differences between training for a  "job" and embarking on a "career" (one implies simply laboring at a task; the other implies vocation, growth, and mobility) include developing one's ability to be imaginative, to see beyond surfaces, to make connections or see patterns among seemingly disparate things, and to be flexible. Why shouldn't underserved students be able to develop these capacities the same as their better served peers?

Of course, Americans have long been suspicious of non-practical education, going back to long before the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Sitting around reading just doesn't look like work (sorry, Mr. Lincoln), so what good is it? But as we move more and more into being a nation of ideas and services rather than muscular production, we need to be sure that brainpower is valued wherever it shows up. Education is a down payment on the possible: we can't know what will happen from moment to moment much less in a year or a decade. (Not to mention how many jobs will evaporate or come to be in the next few years.) All our students need encouragement to be well-educated, not just trained.

I was surprised to learn years ago that the Olympics were once confined to amateurs because that kept working class competitors out. Only the leisure class had the time and money to train for the contests, while workers had to, well, work. Colleges have been doing their best to enable "working class" students to overcome a similar barrier but current economic and social conditions are making it hard to justify college attendance as a social good in and of itself. But practicality and ratiocination (my favorite word from an undergraduate course in American literature) can coexist and even support each other. It's not an either/or situation. If we are to have a strong and multi-varied American culture now and in the future we need to create scholars, artists, and thinkers from every corner of American life. Enabling everyone who wants it to be an "amateur" for a few precious years can immeasurably expand our collective ability to live useful, thoughtful, and adaptable lives.

Center for Student Opportunity

I'm a big fan of the Center for Student Opportunity,  a nonprofit organization with a mission to promote college access and opportunity among first-generation and historically underserved student populations. They've produced a very fine guidebook of colleges that focuses on information particularly appropriate to these students, including what support is offered, scholarships and so on. It also has essays and tips from experts in the front. I saw the first edition last year at NACAC and bought ten copies on the spot to give to the charter school counselors I've been working with over the past two years.


CSO has also created a strong website called College Center that lets students search for college access programs, ask experts questions about the college process and search for colleges offering advising, mentoring, transition programs, and so on. I expect them to continue adding to the list as they go on. 


Colleges can find out how to partner with CSO to reach underserved students by clicking here. With a contribution to CSO (based on Carnegie Classification), institutions can not only reach individual students but also community organizations. Everybody wins.


CSO's most recent addition is a blog section where ten students from minority, low-income, and first-generation backgrounds are sharing their stories or high school and college. The initial entries have the energy of a new project, projecting optimism and immediacy. Although there are only a few from each student so far, I hope they continue to record their thoughts and experiences for the benefit of their peers about to go through the process themselves. 


Their situations reflect the concerns that many first-generation students have, such as having to be an example for their younger siblings and communities. They are also poignant in their forthrightness--one student blogger talks about how she discovered she was pregnant while she was applying to colleges. This forthrightness can help students who think that personal circumstances make it impossible to think about continuing their educations. (They blog as part of their having become Opportunity Scholars--see below.)


If you are a counselor or community volunteer who works with first-generation, low-income, and otherwise underserved students, the Center for Student Opportunity can be a great help. Not only does the website have excellent resources, there is also a page where you can download free guides for helping high school students, parents/families, and others. Students also have the opportunity to be nominated as Opportunity Scholars; if selected, they receive college counseling support from a network of volunteer counselors as well as a chance for a $1,000.00 renewable scholarship in college. 


If you are a college and want to expand your outreach to underrepresented students, be sure to look at CSO's Colleges Partnership Program. 


There's plenty more to explore on the site, and I expect it just to get better and better as more and more individuals and institutions connect to it. It is a welcome and necessary resource for the students we serve.

Back to the Future

Those of us who applied to college thirty or so years ago seem mostly to have tossed out a few applications, taken the SAT or ACT once, and then gotten on with the rest of our high school lives. We waited and hoped for the best. Some of us were lucky enough to have a counselor who casually mentioned a college or two we'd never heard of and encouraged us to apply, which we did. That was certainly my experience. Mr. Boulhouwer, counselor at West Morris Regional H.S. in Chester NJ is responsible for my applying to and eventually attending Amherst College in Amherst MA. He suggested I try a "liberal arts" college. After explaining to me what that was, he tossed out Amherst and I said I'd give it a shot. The rest, as they say, is history. (To this day I'm convinced that I didn't even know Amherst was all-male until I got there; I probably would have been a Williams alum if he'd said "Williams" instead.)

I've joked with any number of adults of about my age who have similar stories about how they got to their alma maters: the chance remark, the off-hand suggestion by a math teacher, or the casual observation by a respected neighbor or relative. There was no strategizing, no long-term planning, no multiple testing, no weighing the pros and cons of every school. At some level, we knew we'd be fine anywhere we went and we trusted that the schools would make good decisions (although not necessarily the ones we wanted). Once the applications were done we went about our business. And in fact we did turn out pretty well, most of us.

Having made the transition from working with the uber-strategic to the underserved, I've discovered many similarities between the latter and my generation of college-goers. Low-income and first generation students interested in going to college tend to be hard workers fully involved in their schools and communities, out of choice and necessity. They're not strategizers, they're young people who hope their talents and experiences will be enough to get them admitted to college; that is to say, they haven't been good students and participants in order to get into college, they're going to get into college because they're good students and participants. They're not multi-testers trying to break 2200, they're test takers because they have to be, and let it go at that. Most of them can't afford, literally or figuratively, to spend hours and hours parsing essay questions; they've got real things to do.

In these ways and others, I'm finding that the low-income and first-generation students I work with are very much like we were many years ago when it comes to college admission. Without romanticizing too much, I'd say that they have an authenticity that colleges and universities say they want, an openness to and desire for new experiences that can make them exceptional students in any classroom. Yes, many of them are rough around the edges and many have gone through things we wouldn't wish on anyone, but they have a resilience and even an optimism that make them wonderful to work with. They believe that college is going to help them live better lives and learn important things; they are honored to be chosen and pleased to have the opportunities to advance; they are grateful to be able to fulfill their hopes and dreams and those of their families. They don't see college acceptance as a right or a mark of innate privilege; they see it as the result of hard work and determination. And they're willing to bring these qualities to campus.

For these students, applying to college is an adjunct to their lives, not their purpose in life, as it seems to be for so many of their overprivileged peers. And in that way, they avoid the largely self-created stress we hear way too much about. Their lives are their own and if a college accepts them, that's great; if not, they'll try again. It makes me hopeful for the future.