Taking Class out of College

~ Laura

Last week, David Brooks wrote that cultural capital, the poor don’t have it and the rich have it in spades, is the factor that explains who gets a college degree and who pumps your gas. I asked for your opinions on the topic and got some interesting comments, despite the fact it was an unfairly large and amorphous question.

The link between class and college degree has to be weakened. How we do it will have to be a composite of hundreds of little and large measures. It is as much a matter of culture as it is institutional structures. For example, the system of locally funded education is one of prime causes not only for vastly unequal system of education, but for creating economically exclusive communities who then incubate their own norms and networks.

But this topic is so huge, the causes so multivariate, that I’m not sure how to confine it to one blog post. Let me just mention one research paper that I worked in ’96 that is but one piece to the puzzle.

I was part of a project that looked at why good students left CUNY. CUNY was (and still is) plagued by a large dropout rate and its many critics were demanding answers. Surprisingly, a large number of its dropouts had a decent GPA. So, what happened?

We conducted phone surveys and focus groups and found that the students had many problems. Most of CUNY’s students were the first generation to attend school. They were also from poor to moderate family incomes. Being the first and coming from complicated families made college life difficult for them.

Many were forced to dropout or take some time off because of family crises. Also, many were unable to navigate the system alone. Without other family or friends to guide them, they were unable to figure out the bureaucracy. They complained that there were no advisers to help them. They said they wanted more hand holding.

It’s hard to think how to resolve the problem of family crises, but more handholding is an easy remedy.

It might be worth doing more interviews with smart kids like these, who were unable to finish, and smart kids who never even get that far. Many a hundred little changes, like better academic advising, can help make a dent in this large social problem.

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “Taking Class out of College”

  1. These are all the same kinds of stories I hear from my students at the community college I work in– family crises, increased responsibilities, no concrete guidance they could see, or that they weren’t too afraid to ask for. It’s frustrating to see kids have to drop in and out of school, especially since so much financial aid depends on students’ enrollment status.

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  2. One of the absolutely major things which has moved towards disconnecting class and college was adoption of the SAT. Up through the mid 60s, dumb thoroughbreds like Bush and Kerry got into Yale on the strength of the prep schools they had gone to, and when Yale, for example, started stressing SAT heavily in the late 60s suddenly there was an immense change in who got that advantage, and if you could show a stellar SAT you could get in from a public school in Biloxi. There was a big ideological component in this, urgency of training all out talent to compete with the Russkies, etc.
    This mattered/matters less at non-elite schools, where most of the applicants are admitted, but it has still been a big democratizing influence.

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  6. One problem I ran into when I went to a private university was that I had teachers who had attitudes that I HAD to put school first – As in, I had a lab teacher who rescheduled our final THE DAY BEFORE THE TEST to 4 hours later. She refused to accept that I couldn’t make it because of my job, saying “School should come first.” I retorted, “How the fuck do you think I pay for school? I’m working 2 full time jobs so I can pay your salary, I’m not wanting to go to a party or something. If I don’t go to work, they fire me, and I have to drop out.”
    She flunked me.
    I got kicked out of school for academic non-performance.
    It took me 5 years to recover my finances enough to return.

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