Much has been written about a new study by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, which found that talented, poor kids are not graduating from elite colleges at the same levels as rich kids. The New York Times reports,
Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.
This is great research, which provides awesome data. It brought national attention to a topic that's important to me. The next step in the research should be qualitative. Someone actually needs to talk to these kids to find out why they don't apply to elite colleges and what changes need to be made to get that kid from Camden into the lecture hall at Harvard.
My guess is that some kids aren't going to elite colleges, because of an information gap. They don't know about those schools and don't realize that they will get substantial discounts on tuition. They don't have the same information networks that exist in wealthy suburban neighborhood. No high school provides great information about colleges to their students, except for the fancy private schools, but kids in suburban areas learn about college rankings, safety schools, SAT test prep centers, and the benefits of padding the application with phony after-school activities from peers and the communtiy. Poor kids don't get that.
I think that poor kids are also not applying to far-off elite colleges, because they don't want to. Their networks and their community are local. They don't want to throw themselves into a vastly different culture, where they don't have the right clothes and don't share the same cultural references.
But these are just my guesses. I would love to run me some focus groups.
Apt. 11d 
I think the “238” elite colleges are too non-homogenous a sample to turn to the kids first. First, one has to separate the “meets need” schools from all the others, because there’s an obvious reason why the other schools are not accessible to the “talented poor” — money. Even if it could be true in some sense that going to an expensive elite school with loans might be beneficial in the long run, it is a significant short term risk and even I, who believe in the value of elite schools, would find difficult to advise to someone who did not have a significant safety net backing them.
The meet need schools, in turn, are the super-elites, the ones with <10% acceptance rates. It's not surprising that those in the top 25% (was it that low) wouldn't think the time expended is valuable, since most of them won't get in — again, taking the chance is a privilege of privilege (in time, and money, and social capital).
The real opportunity for many of these kids should be the flagship publics (some of which used to be elite publics), available nearly cost-free. The loss of these students when they attend those schools is the problem I'd want to address first, if public resources were required. If they're dropping out because they can't afford to pay for their state flagships, can't get the classes they need to graduate, then that's where opportunity should be addressed.
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My guess is that some kids aren’t going to elite colleges, because of an information gap. They don’t know about those schools and don’t realize that they will get substantial discounts on tuition.
I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with knowing some of the 34% who went away to college. How many of them found they couldn’t afford it after a year or two and came back home? (Even if the tuition is discounted down to free, there’s still everyday living costs with no job to earn the money to pay them and no rich parents depositing an emergency $100 in the checking account.)
If the 34% “attending” elite colleges are not graduating, and just dropping out with some accumulated debt, then the other 66% may be making the right choices.
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The real opportunity for many of these kids should be the flagship publics
Speaking flagships up your way, my cousin’s kid just to into University of Washington. Not that this is related in any way to poor people.
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And, UW is a fabulous school where a kid can get a great education, with opportunities greater than many of the 238 elites, for certain fields, an egalitarian environment, an economically diverse student body, and a large minority population — though not in URMs. The key is keeping it affordable. A goal, incidentally, that’s not being met.
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It’s not just the expenses–not even just tuition, books, food, and shelter. How do those kids go home for holidays? What do they do over the summer? Are they supposed to just stay in the dorms (if that’s even possible-are the dorms open year-round, 24/7?) and pretend they’re orphans with neither friends nor family, just to get an elite education?
What about when all their classmates come back from spring break having been to the Bahamas or Mexico or Hawaii or Europe? How will they fit in, make social connections that will lead to later work connections? Even meets needs schools surely don’t subsidize the social side of going to college.
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A lack of trained guidance counselors would be my first guess. The American School Counselor Association lists many duties secondary school counselors should take on: http://www.schoolcounselor.org/content.asp?contentid=233. Another page on their website states, Although ASCA recommends a 250-to-1 ratio of students to school counselors, the national average is actually 459 (2009–2010 school year). The national average combines low-average and high-average systems, so I’d assume there are many rural and low-income districts with more than 500 students per guidance counselor. Those districts are more likely to need the counselors to do more non-college guidance, so what’s left over?
Even if there is a guidance counselor who specializes in college counseling, his or her information could be out of date. Or he could be a fool. Educated parents with time to read books and use the internet can help a great deal. I know people who paid private counselors, in addition to their school counselors. Better results for more affluent parents may not directly reflect only the school counselors.
A cousin was a “college application godmother” to her son’s best friend’s college application process. The two boys visited the same colleges together. She reminded both boys of deadlines. His divorced parents had other things to do. It ended well for him–a full ride to our state flagship. BUT, on visiting colleges, he did not like any of the private colleges. He may not have applied to any private colleges, even though my cousin pointed out the generous aid policies of the private colleges that would admit students with his grades and test scores. He did not “see” himself at the private colleges.
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This isn’t even a hard question. 238 is way too many schools. As bj says above, we are talking about a large number (probably well over the majority of them) are not ‘needs met’ schools. And the definition of needs met is flexibley. How many of those schools even have needs blinds admission processes for 100% of the admitted class? This is a simple statement about the affordability of HE. This study, at least, says very little about the problems with guidance (not to say those don’t exist). Given the cost structure of HE, we should expect this kind of gap, given the schools we are actually talking about.
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Random thoughts:
I suspect Laura is right about what many students think. My father grew up in a working class family, in a Minnesota town that occasionally sent a boy to an Ivy League college, but not most years. When he headed off to Yale, several of his friends asked, “Why do you want to go off to college with all those rich kids?” Note that the top-performing kids at his high school did mostly go to college, but mostly at University of Minnesota or Carlton.
I suspect University of Washington is on the list of the 238 most selective colleges, no? (I can’t find the list which Hoxby and Avery use.)
Positing travel cost as the issue seems wrong to me. It doesn’t cost much to travel by train to Cambridge (or if you’re really good, New Haven) from anywhere in the Northeast; it doesn’t cost that much to travel to Chicago by train from anywhere in the Midwest, etc. And there are plenty of middle-class kids at any college (e.g., with family incomes around $50,000 or $75,000) who don’t go on fancy vacations. Cultural, not practical, explanations seem more plausible.
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$100 for a train ride is very expensive for many families, so I wouldn’t rule that out. I mentioned elsewhere that the costs of keeping up with the culture–clothes, trips, eating out, going to concerts–can be prohibitive as well. I suspect the broader issue of not fitting in is more of a problem. I just visited a handful of these schools and they’re pretty homogenous, especially in terms of class.
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A few ideas:
1. Your girlfriend or boyfriend is going to State U. (That sounds stupid, but you try to find an undergraduate boyfriend at a school where nearly 2/3 of the students are other young women. It’s tough out there.)
2. A bunch of kids from your high school are going to State U and you can share housing, have a warm home-away-from-home in the midst of the 20,000+ undergraduate student body, and car pool back home.
3. State U is close enough to live with your parents, or come home for the weekend, or spend spring break or Thanksgiving break at home, which is nice if you have a hometown girlfriend or boyfriend. Also, dining is often closed during those medium-sized holidays. (I went to a far-away college and weathered many lonely breaks–I only went home for Thanksgiving one year, and that was because I needed to do some interviews in my home town for a writing project.)
4. You’re planning on living and working in your home state. Going to school in an area will tend to generate internships and job offers primarily in that area. There’s little point in going to college in the NE if you don’t want to work in the NE.
I did the far-away college thing, and it put me on a very different geographic trajectory from my cousins who went to University of Washington and Washington State. I’ve bounced around geographically, but many of my younger relatives who went to in-state colleges are within driving distance of our hometown. They’re not close, exactly, but it’s a drive rather than a flight.
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Travel costs certainly kept me from applying, back in the 1970s. Portland, Oregon is pretty far from most Ivy Leagues. We didn’t even own a car so there was no way to drive to Harvard or MIT if I got in. Even Stanford is a ways away.
Do student living expenses include laundry, climate-appropriate clothing, and so on these days?
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Kai,
I grew up in Portland, and went to a fancy east coast school known for very generous financial aid. They gave me a $900 travel budget as part of my aid (this is when airfare was about $150-$300 round trip). They also factored in about $1500 for miscellaneous expenses, like eating out, buying toiletries and winter clothes, going out with friends, and so forth. The school was also committed to limiting displays of wealth disparity on campus, so they banned private TVs, getting cable, limited cars, and provided almost all campus entertainment for free, even providing a party budget for students to throw parties as long as the event was open to the entire campus. Of course, this is only one out of the 238 top colleges, and a very elite one at that, but there are at least a few schools which do really and truly make it affordable for those they admit. Also, of course, this only gets at some of the more crude material factors that make up class, not the social and psychological ones. I was middle income (though considered poor/disadvantaged by the school and certain federal grants) but in the same class as my wealthier classmates, so I felt pretty comfortable at the school, even if the more exotic East Coast cultural habits & waspiness made me feel like I’d grown up in a different country. I had friends from working class backgrounds (though not all) who still felt isolated and unwelcome because they felt out of place.
Though, now that I’m done raving about my school, 1) while getting more diverse people at very elite schools is good, it still doesn’t change the fact that only a tiny percentage can ever go to a top 10 school and we should worry about where everyone else is going/doing, and 2) it is still messed up that I was considered “disadvantaged” by my school, considering my family was probably top 50% income-wise and probably top 25% wealth wise when I attended school. Among students as well, there wasn’t much overt talk of wealth or lifestyle, but you did pick up a sense that earning in the 6 figures was seen as middle class, and making less than 50K a year was a step away from homeless. It did reveal how rarified a world the top is, and that someone making half a million a year can genuinely see themselves as an average Joe, since they’re poorer than all their neighbors making a million dollars a year, and they don’t much interact with people much outside this milieu.
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“He did not ‘see’ himself’ at the private colleges.”
Amen! You nailed it.
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Just poking my head in here to say “wow. interersting comments.”
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I think all the cultural issues are interesting, and when we’re talking about why a poor student might chose not to apply to Harvard or Yale, education, access, conversation might be the right approaches.
For most of the rest of the schools, I think the money issue is very very big. And, I think that the group of “high-achieving” students in the study are not necessarily high achieving enough that Yale & Harvard should be their targets. For the next tier, getting the students money seems to be a very big part of the solution (if a solution is desired).
There are a number of programs that try to bridge the cultural divide — Questbridge, for example. Some of the others — like the one profiled in the NY times recently might do more to raise expectations than they do to fulfill them, with a big bottom line being the lack of the kind of money support the non-poor take for granted.
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