Here's How to Help First Generation Students
As anyone who’s raised a high school student could tell you, the college application process can be a nightmare of deadlines, stress, and unimaginable paperwork. This anxiety is almost always compounded for first-generation students, as Samantha Ketterer’s excellent piece in the Houston Chronicle last month pointed out.
Many First Gen students must navigate this complex process largely on their own, and without the experience of parents or family members who know which dials to turn and when. And these same young people are more likely to go to high schools that are under-resourced and where counselors are overwhelmed.
Ensuring the success of First Gen students will take more than superficial changes to the college application process: it will require transforming our perceptions about what constitutes a high-quality education and bulldozing the barriers that prevent access to deserving students.
Increasingly, getting into the most elite universities has become the obsession of students, parents, and college counselors desperate to secure one of only a handful available slots. It’s an obsession that we saw play out in the Varsity Blues scandal, in which wealthy parents paid and bribed to falsify their students’ academic records. Actress Felicity Huffman, who was convicted as part of the sting, justified her actions in a recent interview saying, “It felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future.”
It may seem crazy that Huffman and dozens of other parents could be so convinced that their child’s future would be in jeopardy without an acceptance to an elite university that they would break the law, but it’s a way of thinking that’s crept into the entire college application process. Even Israel Garcia, the young subject of the Chronicle piece, was only applying to top national universities — MIT, Stanford, etc., — places where fewer than 5% of applicants get accepted.
Colleges and universities should take this as a moment of reckoning if both a famous Hollywood actress and a first-generation immigrant in Houston have the same creeping anxiety about what success in higher education means.
Our nation has allowed the media to convince us that a successful life can only be achieved through acceptance to the “one percent” elite institutions. As a college president myself, I know for a fact that there are hundreds of schools where both Mr. Garcia and Ms. Huffman’s daughter could be successful.
Combined with the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Affirmative Action, schools have the opportunity to reexamine their admissions practices, and in the process, more substantially support First Gen students in finding success.
Yes, there are superficial changes that all colleges can and should make. For example, documents should be available in multiple languages so that both students and their guardians can understand how to navigate this major life decision. Information on financial aid and scholarships should be easily understood and fully transparent (groups like the College Transparency Initiative do great work on this).
It goes without saying that application fees and submission of standardized test scores create a massive barrier to entry for lower income and First Gen students and should be eliminated whenever possible.
But this work only clears some of the hurdles. If colleges want to enroll more first-generation students, they need more of those students making the decision to go to college. You can’t start that process during a student’s senior year.
Higher education needs to shift its mindset and become true partners with high school students and their counselors throughout the education journey.
Demographic shifts and population growth in the Southwest have colleges increasingly turning to full-time remote recruiters as part of their admissions teams. These recruiters are on-the-ground, in-state with students in these regions. Being present allows them to fully understand the nuances of their students’ backgrounds, their high schools, and in the best cases, work with college counselors to ensure students are prepared to apply.
Remote recruiters from my school, Wabash College, first work with students and their families to understand that college is possible and that there are hundreds of good options. Their second mandate is to help them find a good fit – whether that’s here at Wabash or closer to home.
This can be a real challenge when students get stuck in what David Kahneman calls fast-and-slow thinking traps. Fast thinking pushes students to apply for big brand name colleges and selective universities without giving thought to other key metrics like average class size, graduation rate, academic support, number of full-time faculty, and return on investment.
On the other side, colleges are making snap judgements on students based on a checklist of academic requirements, extracurricular activities, and letters of recommendation. Too many First Gen students don’t even realize these are the things on which they are evaluated.
Seeing all applicants as fully human is a choice that every school can make. More than just numbers on a page, colleges should be building relationships with students and their schools before they ever send in a test score.
It’s a time-consuming process, to be sure. Our recruiters make time and enjoy sitting down with students and their families, not only to tell them about our school, but also to understand more about them. The goal of these personal conversations is to know what a student wants from a college and all barriers they must clear to become successful. Only then can we work with them to find the right college.
It's a mindset shift that needs to happen across all higher education.
Parents and educators, take note: if a college isn’t making the time to get to know your students and their backgrounds, you can be pretty certain that it’s not going to make the time for your student when they matriculate.
Colleges and universities that want diverse applicant pools need to support those students throughout the process, not just when it comes time to collect fees and tuition.
The culture around colleges can change in this country, and it will be better for all our students when it does.
