For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall. NY Times article well worth the read...

[Igel]

8. Yup.

Some things left out, inevitably.

Most of my low SES kids are convinced that the world's against them. Just like the sentiment in one of the first response posts, they impute intent where there is little or no intent. In fact, I've seen admissions committee members flout state law in order to help low SES kids, esp. blacks and Latinos. They personalize something that really isn't personal. They are the center of their universe--so they must be at the center of other people's universes, too. I keep telling them that really, they're like me--just not that important in the grand scheme of things. They're shocked when I say that.

They also often have limited horizons for their lives--both in times of time frame and what's possible. I have one kid who works 40 hours a week. He's over 18, it's legal, and he's afraid if he asks for time off to actually do his homework or study for a test they'll cut his hours to the minimum. Like a number of other kids, he desperately needs the income because has to pay rent and buy his own food.

He left home the day after his 18th birthday. He's on his own, with car insurance, food, utilities, rent. Not because he needed to leave home. He wanted to. His father was cramping his style with rules and expectations he didn't share. Roommate? That would also cramp his "style." As it is, he says he has a career. He works for MacDonald's as counter help. Thing is, his father's not making much more income per year, so as far as this kid's "reference group" is concerned, he's doing well.

Another girl's grades just cratered. But she's happy as a clam. She got a job, and now comes to school wearing new, sophisticated, trendy clothes. She has the respect of her peers--and doesn't much care about her parent's respect, her teachers', or that of other groups. That's what matters to her. (When I went to a working class school, prepping for a decent job, college if possible, earned respect and said something about you. Having nice clothes said something about your parents, not you.)

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The article focuses on SAT prep courses and other later add-ons. The real difference happens before 3rd grade. Grades and aptitute tests in 5th and 6th grade are eerily predictive of high school and college success. Tell me what a kid's doing in 7th grade and I can probably tell you what he'll be doing in 12th. Late focus is pointless. We've made a big deal of early focus, EC programs, but the parents that dropped the ball during EC usually don't pick it up later.

Making matters worse are changes in family structure. This has confounded easy comparison of child poverty figures as well. Moreover these days kids from low SES families constitute a much larger percentage of the college-age population than before because of a larger difference in fertility rates between high and low SES families.

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The article also says that students should go to the best school they should go to because they have lower drop out rates. This is a fairly meaningless claim without knowing what's going on.

The lesser schools have students who drop out more frequently because of financial, family, academic problems. Better schools get around a lot of the financial problems, and school prestige or being away from home helps to overcame family problems. What the article doesn't say is that the better schools still have truly abysmal minority drop out rates, in nearly every case, and that most of the drop outs do so because they're in the bottom 25% or even 10% of the GPA curve. They simply wash out.

In other words, the drop out rates can't be directly compared because they're due to quantitatively different sets of causes. Students should to the best college they can *succeed* at, and for many 1st gen college attendees that's not the best school they can get into. It's certainly a school that's away from home.

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In many cases the students aren't trained properly. The article points out one cause of student failure at least twice without bothering to identify it as anything but bad attitude on the part of the schools. It's not. It's an unspoken expectation, one that the students typically meet in some contexts but not at college. They need to advocate for themselves. They need to go to office hours, ask faculty and TAs for help if they need it, etc., etc. They often don't. They're more than willing to challenge peers, they carp about authorities to their peers, but they don't address those in authority on anything like even footing. There are a lot of reasons for it, but it smacks of inequality to so treat ethnic groups so differently in order to try to assure similar kinds of outcomes.