Spring 2006
"Helping the poor connect with college"
Guest Column
Durham Herald-Sun
Thursday, March 2
By Marcia Eisenstein, '06
In early April, the Duke admissions office will mail acceptance
letters to slightly more than 3,000 top high school seniors. Each
will have earned great grades, scored high on the SATs and racked
up an admirable set of extracurricular activities. You can also
bet that each turned in an attention grabbing application that helped
admissions officers see the person’s motivations, aspirations
and ambitions.
Yet each year in America, nearly 200,000 low-income students graduate
from high school academically ready for college, but they fail to
apply. I thought about this as I watched Ashley, proudly wearing
an East Carolina University sweatshirt, walk in to Durham’s
Southern High School for the fifth and final College Connection
session. As the first individual in her family to attend college,
and a recipient of an academic scholarship, Ashley was not only
opening doors for herself but for her family’s future generations
as well.
I vividly remember applying to college my senior year of high school.
Fortunate enough to have two parents with both undergraduate and
graduate degrees, as well as an older brother who had recently been
through the application process, I received endless parental guidance
and support while filling out applications. The college application
process is a time consuming endeavor for all college-bound students
regardless of race, income or parental education level. Yet after
working with Ashley and several other public high school seniors
I immediately noticed the inherent and widespread inequities within
the college application process.
In the fall semester of my sophomore year I co-founded College Connection,
an initiative aimed to ease the college application process for
motivated, low-income high school seniors, many of whom are first-generation
applicants. After recruiting and training adult volunteers from
the immediate community with an intensive training program developed
in coordination with Duke’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions,
College Connection pairs each volunteer with a senior at a local
Durham high school. Together, the student and volunteer attend a
series of scheduled workshops and complete every aspect of the college
application process, from filling out SAT fee waivers, to creating
lists of potential colleges and revising scholarship essays. The
ultimate goal of College Connection is not only for the student
to submit high quality applications to their respective schools,
but for the student and adult volunteer to forge a relationship
they otherwise would not have developed.
In working with College Connection I noticed the close, if not inseparable
link between producing a high quality college application and having
unlimited access to a college guidance counselor or a parent or
mentor with college experience. Gaining access to such resources
is increasingly difficult, especially for students from low-income
communities such as the one College Connection serves.
School guidance counselor offices are woefully understaffed; it
is not uncommon for some guidance counselors to be responsible for
up to 500 students apiece. Compounding this factor is a general
lack of parental knowledge regarding the application process. My
personal experiences with College Connection are that the great
majority of parents without college degrees are supportive and interested
in sending their children to college. But it’s a huge task
for a parent without college experience to gather the necessary
resources and expertise to facilitate the process. Guiding a student
through the application process is difficult enough; guiding a first
generation college student through the application process is an
entirely different ballgame.
Remedying these inequities is not an overnight process but rather
a gradual method that begins with a fundamental change in human
resource allocation. Flooding schools in low-income communities
with “How to Apply to College” pamphlets or interactive
computer programs that assist in the application process is a small
step in the right direction. But much more needs to be done to catalyze
meaningful, long-term change. The value of quality human interaction—either
a college guidance counselor or mentor or parent—should never
be underestimated. While applying to college might seem like a routine
process of filling in the blanks and checking all the right boxes,
the process is more significant than one might initially imagine.
For Ashley, applying to college was taking the first step in ending
the poverty line in her family and charting a course for success
throughout her life.
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