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.