We are heading into another academic year. I recently came across a claim that most high school students are arranging their lives around building a resume for college admissions. Such student activity, the book claimed, includes boosting standardized test scores, maximizing the student’s grade point average, and cultivating a strong list of extracurriculars.Â
It is a fact that about sixty percent of high school graduates pursue some kind of post-high school education. But as someone who works in the lower regions of higher education, I can tell you that most of the students I see were not putting inordinate levels of attention to college prep. Most of them did minimal preparation for their standardized tests, if they did any. The high school GPA for many of my students was mediocre. If they participated in extra-curricular activities, it was because they wanted to, not because it was a resume builder. Not only are many students not intently crafting an application portfolio, some of my students decide to go to college about a week before classes start. And this is people who go to college. We aren’t even talking about the forty percent who pursue no education after high school.
A high percentage of my students are what we call first generation college goers, i.e., neither of their parents are college graduates. I suspect the notion that most high school students are obsessing over their college career is the perspective of highly educated people who are themselves sons or daughters of educated people. They assume that getting into a selective college and earning multiple scholarships is the way of the high school world, because that’s how it is for everyone they know.
Although it was a long time ago, I can recall my own college preparation. It’s easy because there is so little to recall. Like many of my students, I was a first-generation college goer. And although I have four older siblings, only one had gone to a four-year college right out of high school. I really had no idea what I was doing and had no familial help. The entirety of my thinking about college was summed up in one session with the high school guidance counselor during my senior year. I walked into his office for the mandatory “What are you going to do when you graduate?” meeting. He asked, “So what are you interested in?” Honestly, I had given the matter very little thought. I liked to write and was interested in politics, so I said, “Journalism, I guess.” “And do you want to go to college in state or out of state?” Again, I had never given this question a moment of thought. “In state, I suppose,” was my response. He punched this into a very antiquated computer (this was 1988, folks), and it spit out two public universities in my state (Minnesota) that had a journalism program. He printed that out and handed it to me. And that, dear reader, was all the advice anyone gave me about going to college. It took less than five minutes.
I suspect many of my students are like I was. I didn’t even know how to apply to college, much less how to apply for financial aid. I did score very well on my college prep exam (the ACT). I did so with absolutely zero preparation. I don’t say that to brag but to point out that I didn’t know you could or should study for such tests. I was simply told to be at this place and this time to take the test. So I did. Once achieving a good score, I didn’t realize that many schools give scholarships to students who do well on such tests. And this is how I ended up at a community college for a year. I didn’t know what else to do.
I did get educated in that one year, by which I mean I learned something about how to navigate college admissions (and, honestly, I had some good classes at that community college). A high school buddy suggested I transfer to his school and helped me get all the application materials. It just so happened that he was a Government major. This is when I learned that Government/Political Science existed. I remember thinking with some astonishment, “You mean you can major in politics?” Again, I suspect the same is true for many student like mine. There are fields of study that they don’t even know exist, or that the thing they are interested in can be a field of study. So, I transferred, and the rest, as they say, is history.
One of my pet peeves is that when our national discourse turns to higher education, it almost exclusively concerns elite colleges and universities. These are the kinds of places that are highly populated with students who took high school honors classes to bolster their GPA, took college test prep classes, and whose parents made sure they went to summer camps and pursued particular extracurriculars precisely so their college application would be gaudy with success. And it is just these kinds of students who graduate, become authors, and write about how every student puts maximum effort into college admissions. After all, everyone they went to college with was highly motivated and high achieving.
But this is not most of higher education. Tens of thousands of students end up at schools like mine, non-selective regional public schools. Most of these students, like their faculty members (i.e., me), are there because that’s the best they could do. They were never getting into an Ivy League school or one of many small private liberal arts schools that dot the nation. Over the years I’ve had many students who could have been successful almost anywhere. I recall a former student who earned a White House internship and came back realizing the Ivy League folks he interned with were no smarter than he was. But such students end up at less prestigious schools because they don’t know how to play the game of getting into the more selective schools, and, frankly, they come from a background that makes them doubt they can really compete at those levels.
Thomas Jefferson famously had very democratic notions regarding education. His basic theory was that everyone deserved at least an introduction to higher level learning. Many will get a little taste of higher education and decide they don’t like it. That’s fine. But there are all sorts of people, due to circumstances, who don’t know what they don’t know. Our less selective schools give a shot to such students.
I am teaching a considerable number of freshmen this Fall. Many of them will not really be prepared for college. We’ll teach them what we can and hope for the best. And some, over the course of the next four years, will learn things about themselves and the world that right now they couldn’t even imagine, just as in 1988 I could have never imagined I’d have a doctorate in Political Science and be teaching at a university. As the old song goes, we’re ready to take a chance again. Who knows what the next year will bring.