Unhelpfully, but often unwittingly, American high schools are using students’ race and class to determine which colleges to channel them toward, Megan M. Holland suggests in Divergent Paths to College: Race, Class, and Inequality in High Schools (Rutgers University Press).
At the same time, she writes, both high schools and colleges are failing to provide many collegebound students with enough of the information and “cultural capital” — knowledge acquired through membership in particular social groups — that they need to make informed choices on their own.
Students’ paths to higher education, she writes, are “defined by students’ social background, such as their race and class, and also by the way their high schools structured access to critical college information.”
Holland, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University at Buffalo, says such issues have occupied her since she went through the college-selection and college-application process herself. For her book, she examined how the process went for students at two racially and socioeconomically diverse suburban high schools in the Northeast, where she observed and surveyed both students and counselors.
She found that many students, but predominantly the white, socioeconomically advantaged ones, had networks of siblings, other family members, and friends on whom they could rely for sound advice about how to make smart decisions about college. Many had parents who helped them to get and retain the attention of counselors and teachers, if the students hadn’t already mastered that skill.
The financially needier students she observed, who were mostly black, may have had no parent who had attended college, and they floundered in bad information about how to gain access. Inadequate guidance often came from friends and peers.
Nonetheless, Holland says, some students who didn’t know how best to find a college fit “were very insightful about their experiences” when, for example, “they were talking about their counselors’ differences in expectations.” They recognized that their schools had sorted them according to whether they were perceived as bound for elite colleges or merely destined to take what they could get.
Being shunted into second-rate college preparation and information hurt those students, Holland says: “If students don’t have all the necessary information, they may choose schools that don’t fit their needs, and that they can’t afford, so they don’t persist.”
That, she adds, is bad news at a time when colleges are increasingly focused on recruitment and retention.
That colleges bear some of the blame for poor guidance was apparent, she says, when, for example, the high schools herded lower-tracked students to events at which college recruiters were intent on luring them to their campuses, whether well suited or not.
In one chapter, Holland explains why the rising expectation of “college for all” is not necessarily helpful. One outcome, she says, is that many students from non-college-savvy backgrounds jump at offers from ill-suited colleges that are eager to enroll just about any student who is willing to attend.
She suggests that colleges should provide many more application-fee waivers “so more students can broaden the types of colleges they look at.” Colleges could also do more to inform rather than just lure applicants. That would help high-school counselors, who are almost universally overextended, she says.
Being stretched so thin “made it difficult for counselors to engage in the one-on-one sessions that were most beneficial to students,” she says. In hurried meetings, they often lost students’ trust.
The counselors might, for instance, give feedback that distressed students, even though the counselors “felt they were just being realistic with students about unrealistic expectations.” That feedback might crush students’ college expectations altogether, or make them aim lower than they need to.
