When Central Magnet High School opened in Bridgeport, Conn., almost 30 years ago, few of its students thought about applying to selective colleges.
The school is a magnet school, housed inside a larger regular high school. To be admitted, students need to maintain a minimum grade point average in junior high school and, in some cases, win a spot through a lottery. In the 1980s, as today, the parents of the vast majority of Central Magnet’s students did not attend college themselves.
George Moran was a guidance counselor at the school when it opened, and he is still a guidance counselor there, working his final year before retirement. I quoted him in Sunday’s article about a new study finding that most high-achieving, low-income students did not attend a selective college.
The pattern is especially worrisome because many of those students end up attending colleges near their homes with low graduation rates – and a significant portion do not earn a college degree. The median weekly pay of full-time workers with a four-year college degree was 55 percent greater last year than the pay of workers attending some college but without a four-year degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If anything, that figure understates the gap, because college graduates are also more likely to have a full-time job than those not graduating from college.
The evolution of Central Magnet over the last 30 years, in Mr. Moran’s telling, highlights how this pattern might change. Over the years, more Central Magnet students began to apply to and attend selective colleges. As they did, the students in subsequent years began to see applying to those colleges as a normal thing to do. Moving 50 miles, or hundreds of miles, away from home was no longer deeply unusual for a top student.
By now, Central Magnet graduates have attended all eight Ivy League universities, liberal arts colleges like Amherst, Colgate, Haverford, Vassar and even Rice University, some 1,500 miles away, in Houston. “All these schools that were completely unheard of in the last five years are suddenly standard fare,” Mr. Moran said. Among the 140 or so students in a senior class at Central Magnet, more than 70 percent enroll in a four-year college and about 20 percent enroll in a two-year college, he said.
Most high schools with large numbers of low-income students still resemble the Central Magnet of the 1980s, based on the results of the new study, which is by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard. The students do not apply to selective colleges partly because the colleges have not been aggressive in recruiting them. And even if a college has reached them and urged them to come, many students cannot fathom doing so. They may not know anyone who has attended such a college, Ms. Hoxby notes.
David Hunter, chief executive of QuestBridge, a California organization that helps award scholarships to top low-income students nationwide, told me that some students who received the group’s material in the mail did not initially know what to make of it. “Some of them think it could be a scam,” Mr. Hunter said. (And indeed, scholarship swindles surely exist.)
It is an expensive mistake for students to make, given that QuestBridge helps a few hundred students a year earn full scholarships to colleges like Bowdoin, Brown, Carleton, M.I.T., Northwestern, Notre Dame, Princeton, Virginia and Williams. But it’s also understandable.
Of course, a student who knows someone who previously won such a scholarship would not make that mistake – just as today’s Central Magnet students are more likely to consider colleges that match their academic profiles.
For colleges and policy makers, it’s a lesson in inertia. Changing the application and enrollments patterns of high-achieving, low-income students will probably take an enormous amount of initial work. Over time, though, the work will get easier.
Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/changing-the-culture-of-college-application/?partner=rss&emc=rss