The nation’s most-selective colleges say they want to admit more low-income students, and there is clear evidence that many more such students could do the work and succeed.
Yet the numbers remain stubbornly low: In 2006, only 5 percent of the students admitted to the nation’s most competitive institutions came from families in the bottom socioeconomic quartile, according to data that appear in the new book Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College (Century Foundation Press, 2010).
Higher-education experts call such students “strivers"—low-income and first-generation-college students who overcome the odds to do quite well despite various disadvantages. How can elite institutions find more such students who will thrive on their campuses?
Mine is an unusual vantage point from which to view the problem. I understand the needs of selective colleges and universities, as I graduated from three elite institutions I might not get into today (Brown University, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School), and I serve on the president’s advisory committee on diversity at Brown. I lead CollegeTracks, a community-based college-access group that provides individual advice to more than 550 low-income and first-generation seniors in two public high schools in Maryland each year, in the suburbs of Washington, where college admissions is an obsession for many kids and their parents.
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I want to introduce you to three students—Oscar, Hiwot, and Julie. All qualify for federal Pell Grants, available only to students with exceptional financial need. Without intense individualized support from CollegeTracks staff members and volunteers, they would have been invisible to the colleges where they are now thriving. In all likelihood, they would be at a community college or commuting to a state school with considerable loans.
About 25 percent of the CollegeTracks seniors are admitted to colleges that Barron’s considers “most,” “highly,” and “very” competitive. From the journeys of Oscar, Hiwot, Julie, and other strivers like them, we have learned much that could help selective colleges recruit and enroll many more low-income students who are likely to succeed. They will surely contribute as much as, or more than, they receive there.
Oscar Portillo is a sophomore at Middlebury College, studying Chinese. He has a full institutional scholarship—Middlebury pays for his tuition, room, board, and a computer—and is a Gates Millennium Scholar. As a member of the campus Latino organization he is an advocate for the Dream Act, bipartisan legislation now before Congress that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented young people who meet certain criteria.
Hiwot Kassaye is a first-year student in Smith College’s engineering program and plans to become a biomedical engineer. She, too, was offered a full institutional scholarship.
Julie Castaneda is in her first year at University of Maryland-Baltimore County, studying engineering and public policy. Like most low-income students, she had to piece together financial aid from many separate grants to pay for college. Her package includes a Pell Grant, the maximum state scholarship of $14,200, a mechanical-engineering STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) scholarship from the university, and other small private scholarships.
- Oscar and Hiwot are recent immigrants who came to the United States during high school. Julie is a first-generation American. Like many immigrant families, they do not speak English at home. Oscar began learning English in ninth grade.
- All are risk-takers who ignored people who told them the odds were stacked against them or advised them to work rather than go to college. Hiwot and Julie are attending colleges farther away from home than they and their parents thought would be comfortable. Oscar is continuing his journey far from his parents and siblings, who live in rural El Salvador.
- All dreamed of going to excellent colleges, but none had parents or relatives with experience at American colleges. As in most public schools, large caseloads made it impossible for their college counselors to give them the intense, continuing help they needed to identify colleges that fit their interests and to make it through the complicated admissions and financial-aid gantlet.
- Oscar and Hiwot flew through their ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses in high school and had excellent grades, but their transcripts, with just a few AP courses and grades from other countries, did not fully reflect their academic accomplishments.
- Their standardized-test scores also sorely understated their proven abilities. With CollegeTracks’ help, Oscar and Hiwot registered for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Their high scores on the Toefl better reflected their abilities and were significant in their acceptances to several highly selective colleges. Like all the students we see, neither knew the English test existed; nor could they have successfully registered for it by themselves. Oscar and Hiwot also benefited from free test prep provided by PrepMatters, a private test-prep company that is a CollegeTracks partner.
- Without considerable expert assistance, the students could not have met the documentation requirements for federal, state, and institutional financial aid. Oscar and Hiwot had to get data from parents living in Latin America and Ethiopia. Our staff members spent hours with financial-aid officers to demonstrate Hiwot’s status as a domestic rather than international student. Julie needed the $14,200 state grant to pay for a strong, public, four-year institution.
- Access to computers and the Internet was sometimes difficult for these students. They all applied to colleges with January 1 deadlines, so they did not have access to high-school computers or counselors during the critical holiday period before applications were due. Our staff members and volunteers helped them meet that deadline.
And here are some of the major barriers that selective colleges face in getting more low-income students:
They overestimate the risks. Admitting more low-income students will lower a college’s average SAT or ACT scores and rankings. That risk could be reduced if the rankings methodologies gave less weight to test scores and more to enrollment and success of underrepresented students. Admitting more low-income students may reduce retention and graduation rates, another legitimate concern, but those reductions are not inevitable. Recent studies show that some colleges have developed strategies to significantly raise graduation rates among underrepresented students, which could serve as best practices. Some colleges have dealt with the real risk of increased financial-aid expenses by making need-based aid a fund-raising priority.
They underestimate the benefits of improved socioeconomic diversity. Colleges with diverse student populations attract top students. Graduates who have lived and learned with students different from themselves are more likely to succeed and inspire others in a diverse world.
They have trouble finding low-income students likely to succeed. Selective colleges fight among themselves for the small group of low-income students who attend elite private schools or score well on standardized tests. Even with the growth of organizations that help identify additional promising low-income students, the pool is too small to fuel significant socioeconomic diversity on the nation’s selective campuses.
We believe that college-access groups like ours can help colleges achieve socioeconomic diversity by expanding the pool and helping to reduce the risks of admitting such students. Each year hundreds of community-based groups across the country serve tens of thousands of low-income students who are eager to go to college but don’t know the path to get there. We make more of these students visible to colleges, ensure that they complete the admissions and financial-aid process successfully, and offer them support during their college years.
We are grateful to the colleges and universities with which we already have strong relationships, and look forward to building relationships with many more. For institutions that are interested, the National College Access Network (www.collegeaccess.org), with many community-based program members, is a great place to start.
The socioeconomic diversity our qualified low-income students bring to America’s campuses will make them more vibrant places, graduating students who are prepared for the future.
