The New Yorker had a very interesting piece on why smart poor students
don’t apply to selective colleges by Derek
Thompson. Thompson beings his piece by discussing the student debt crisis,
which results in “getting more students to take on more debt to obtain more
skills in a modern economy that doesn’t pay living wages to uneducated workers.”
Thompson argues that the real problem comes closer to advertising. He wants disadvantaged
students to attend elite colleges to obtain modern skills and not scare them
off. However, the more serious problem is that the smart, low-income students
never consider applying to the best colleges.
Some of the poorest high school students in the US are the top
performers. They come from the poorest 25% of families, but their grades and
SAT scores place them in the top 10—or top 5%--of all students. Getting these
students to attend the best colleges would increase social mobility, raise
national productivity, increase taxable income, shrink out deficit, cut
income-support payments, etc. (according to Thompson and presumably studies).
However, according to Caroline M.
Hoxby and Christopher Avery smart poor students don’t apply to any
selective colleges or universities, even when the most selective schools would
cost less because of financial aid. They are 75% less likely to apply to
selective schools than their wealthier classmates.
Wealthy kids with educated parents tend to have higher grades and test
scores, which is expected, but 40% of the top-performing students come from the
poorer half of the country. Wealthy
smart students are from concentrated areas of the country like New England,
California, New York, and Southern Florida, while the smart poor students tend
to be scattered across the country. This I don’t find surprising at all. Nor is
it surprising that poor smart students aren’t surrounded by an infrastructure of
teachers and counselors who know how to advise them in accessing the best
schools in the nation or higher education at all. More often than not they come
from small and/or poor districts that can’t support selective public high
schools and lack a large number of high achievers so they are less likely to
come in contact with people who have attended a selective college.
Thompson then discusses the four ways that appear to be employed when
engaging students:
- College board mailing lists,
- College counselors,
- College access programs, and,
- High school visits.
However, a lot of these aren’t really feasible for low-income students.
Poor high schools can’t afford to have full time college counselors with access
to top schools nor can poor families afford visits to top tier schools.
The researchers pose ambitious ideas to engage poor high performing
students. Their first suggestion is turning to alum networks to provide more
access on behalf of admissions officers. They also suggest using social media and
digital advertising opposed to brochures which often aren’t geared to
low-income students. Thompson concludes by charging both the institutions to
look harder for the high performing low-income students who don’t go to college
or apply to non-selective colleges.
Ok, so I haven’t read the study yet, but something is missing from
Thompson’s piece. The assumption is that these low-income high performing
students should want to attend elite schools. I’m not sure that is the case.
Nor that they have investigated the reasoning behind these students not
applying in the first place.
So we call them barriers in social science. Like domestic violence survivors
can have trouble holding employment because the IPV gets in the way, i.e.
court, violent partners showing up at work, etc. Being low-income can be a
barrier to accessing high education. But not just because higher education is
expensive, but instead that and because the student would be thrust into a
culture they are unfamiliar with. I’m curious about the risks or perceived risks
to the low-income high achievers by applying to and attending elite schools. My
thoughts immediately go to fitting in, passing for upper-class/or constructing identity
around poverty (token poor kid), the risk of failure being greater because the
institutions are more prestigious and challenging than community college and
burnout, which have greater consequences for poor kids than middle class and
the wealthy. After all, poor kids are told early by society not to rock the
boat and that you get one chance don’t blow it.
Clichés
aside, the perspectives of poor students are rooted in a fear of failure that I
don’t think wealthy students or even middle class students really understand,
and certainly admissions professionals don’t. Now, we can debate whether these
are concrete risks or not, but no one is going to apply to an ivy league school
perceiving that if you mess up at all you’re going to burnout and never get a
second chance because if you fail at the most prestigious school you should
have just gone to the regular (cheaper) one in the first place, but no do-overs.
A final thought on the barriers to applying to elite schools is the cost. I
applied to three schools when I was in high school. The one I wanted, the one I
was ok with, and a safety school. It was hella expensive, and I had a job. I
think at the time applying range from like $50-100 per school on top of the
exams like SAT and ACT (which I was told was less bias against women, people of
color, and low-income students so I essentially was told I had to take both
some schools won’t accept the ACT alone).
I’m arguing that maybe we focus on constructing a new narrative around
poverty that poor kids aren’t worthless and/or destined for prison, single
parenthood, and dead-end labor. That high performing in poverty doesn’t have to
be an anomaly because poverty doesn’t make you stupid. Poverty is a harder
player setting, and something we should be aware of, but it doesn’t have to
define an individual’s life. This message never gets to kids growing up in
poverty for a variety of reasons. So elite schools can send as many tweets as
they want, because the message is going to get lost if the kids they are
targeting still don’t perceive themselves as able.
Additionally, these elite schools have a legacy all their own, and it
isn’t always a positive one. I’m curious as to whether the idea that low-income
high performing students might not want to attend elite schools even crossed Thompson
or the researchers’ minds. The expectation is everyone wants to go to Princeton
and Brown but maybe not. Maybe being the one poor kids or the one black kid
doesn’t seem like something these kids want to do. Poverty doesn’t happen in a vacuum;
we know women, people of color, and the children of single parents are more
likely to be impoverished. There are a lot of pressures when you decide to the
token of whatever minority (referring to a lack of privilege) you are (including women) in an environment
traditionally hostile to outsiders. Maybe elite schools that have a
predominately persons of color population or all female schools would have a
better chance of recruiting these low-income high performers?
