Divergent Paths to College

Race, Class, and Inequality in High Schools

Megan M Holland

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813590271
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In Divergent Paths to College, Megan M. Holland examines how high schools structure different pathways that lead students to very different college destinations based on race and class. She finds that racial and class inequalities are reproduced through unequal access to key sources of information, even among students in the same school and even in schools with well-established college-going cultures. As the college application process becomes increasingly complex and high-stakes, social capital, or relationships with people who can provide information as well as support and guidance, becomes much more critical. Although much has been written about the college-bound experience, we know less about the role that social capital plays, and specifically how high schools can serve as organizational brokers of social ties. The relationships that high schools cultivate between students and higher education institutions by inviting college admissions officers into their schools to market to students, is a particularly critical, yet unexplored source of college information.

1

College Dreams and College Outcomes

Eve, Mariah, William, and Hannah1 are all certain they will attend college. Eve, the daughter of African immigrants, wants to be a doctor. Mariah, who is upbeat and friendly even as she battles a chronic illness, comes to our first interview with a list of more than twenty schools that she is interested in. William, whose family hails from Europe, plans on college, but seems more excited about the social life it might offer than academics. Hannah debates between attending her mother’s alma mater or State, where her sister currently attends. All have college plans and contend that “everyone goes to college” at their high schools. And to an extent, this is true. Eve and William attend Park City High School (PCHS), and Mariah and Hannah attend Evanstown High School (EHS), which are about twenty miles from each other in the suburbs of a northeastern state.2 At both high schools, over 95 percent of students graduate on time and over 90 percent of those attend college, with 75 percent attending a four-year college. Both schools send a number of students to Ivy League universities, among other colleges, every year. The odds are in their favor that Eve, Mariah, William, and Hannah will attend college after high school.

Only three of these students ended up attending any college (two- or four-year), however, and only one graduated within four years. Most important, it was not random chance that dictated who attended and graduated and who did not. Along the way, these students, who were all moderate achievers,3 diverged in their paths to college. These paths were defined by students’ social background, such as their race and class, and also by the way their high schools structured access to critical college information. What happened along the way? What role did these “college-going” schools play in guiding students down disparate paths?

Both Evanstown and Park City high schools have school cultures focused on college. They are situated in well-to-do suburbs with home prices and median incomes above the average for the state. The schools are both rated in the top one hundred in the state. Both have student–counselor ratios well below the national average, and even below the American School Counselor Association recommended ratio of 250:1. It is interesting to note that both schools also have student populations that are relatively diverse, both racially and socioeconomically. Why was it, then, that Mariah, Eve, William, and Hannah had such different experiences despite attending the same, or similar schools?

Today, college attendance is critical. A college degree is associated with obtaining a higher-paying job, making more money over the course of a lifetime, better chances for social mobility, and better health outcomes.4 The former president of the United States appealed to all students to commit to attending college, even for just a few years.5 In 2016, a presidential candidate ran on a platform of reducing or removing college costs so that everyone could attend debt-free.6 The popular media, policymakers, and educators have spent a lot of time trying to convince students how important it is to attend college. This campaign to increase college aspirations has largely been successful: today, the vast majority of youth aspire to a college degree.7 These students know how important it is to go to college, and many see postsecondary education as the next logical step after high school. What students do not know, however, is how to effectively navigate the increasingly complex and competitive college application process. They know where they want to go, but how do they get there?

For Eve, Mariah, William, and Hannah, this was where their paths diverged. Their stories are defined by varying levels of privilege. That privilege consists of economic resources, which are crucial to their stories, but also their social and cultural resources and how they translated these into important information about the college application process. Their high schools reinforced the different paths to college these students started out on by valuing and enhancing privilege and disadvantaging those who were not privileged with college information. How did the high schools do this? In this book, I argue that Park City and Evanstown high schools connected students to college information via organizational brokering,8 that is, the schools had a hand in creating connections among students, adults, and institutions that could provide information, resources, and further connections, or what sociologists call social capital.9 However, not all students had access to the same opportunities for connections and this was largely related to their racial and class backgrounds. As a result, more privileged students were propelled by the schools into gaining access to even more social capital, while less privileged students had less access. In doing this, more privileged students were directed toward more selective colleges and universities, while less privileged students were steered toward less selective or nonselective two- and four-year colleges, or no college destination at all. Evanstown and Park City high schools ended up tracking students into very different college destinations due to their brokering of college information, despite an overall culture in both schools that heavily pushed college aspirations, and four-year college attendance.

The literature on college application has been characterized by a focus on “choice”—whether students choose to apply to or attend college, and if so where. The way counselors, students, and parents talked about college at both Park City and Evanstown high schools also focused on where students chose to apply and where they would choose to enroll. However, I argue in this book that this language belied the reality that some students had fewer choices than it would appear. Few students could articulate how or why they chose to attend college, and most did not feel they had any other options. Even those who did not attend college rarely chose this alternative path. Instead, whether or not students attended college, and particularly where they attended, was a result of differential access to social connections and college information, which put students on different paths. Organizational brokering solidified and reinforced differences in college pathways.

Social Connections and Postsecondary Trajectories

Social connections, and the information and resources that are derived from those connections, had a critical impact on students’ postsecondary transition experiences at Park City and Evanstown high schools. William and Hannah, both White with college-educated10 parents, received help with essays and applications from family and friends, as well as suggestions on potential colleges to apply to. Their trajectories after high school differed—William took two years off, attended community college for a year, and had just begun his first semester at State University when I reinterviewed him four years after he graduated high school. Hannah enrolled at State immediately after high school, graduated with a 3.3 GPA in four years, and was planning on attending graduate school. Yet social connections played a critical role in each of their lives, as did their economic resources. William, consistently supported by his parents, traveled the world working for a nonprofit owned by a family friend. Hannah applied to the wrong school at State University, but her father was able to talk to a dean and get her into the right (and more selective) one. Her family paid for her college education and was going to finance her graduate education as well. While these connections might seem small, they were activated at critical turning points in William’s and Hannah’s lives.

In contrast, though equally ambitious, Mariah and Eve’s postsecondary transitions were rockier and their futures more tenuous when I reinterviewed them four years after high school. Mariah and Eve are both Black. Eve’s parents immigrated from Africa and have college degrees from their home countries. Mariah lives with her mother and has a strained relationship with her father. Her mother has a college degree that she obtained later in life. However, Mariah and Eve’s families did not have the wealth or connections that William’s and Hannah’s did. Mariah received sporadic help from family while applying to college (an aunt paid for her application fees), but struggled with a confusing and sometimes overwhelming process. Eve’s parents read over her essays, but, like Mariah, she did not have anyone else to provide advice. Her counselor was helpful, but not really with “legit things like personal statements and things like that because she is at school.” Both Eve and Mariah were influenced by emails and letters they got from colleges encouraging them to apply and offering free applications. Mariah could not believe that some colleges “[would] even know me or want me or anything are emailing me [and they] sound awesome.” After high school, Eve, having made mistakes on the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and submitting it late, found out that she would not receive enough financial aid to attend her chosen university. Her parents could not make up the difference. She found her high school counselor unhelpful and ended up not attending college. The four years since then for Eve have consisted of a string of entry-level jobs found through relentlessly submitting applications. Mariah did attend a local competitive11 state university, a significant step down from elite, most competitive New York University, which she described as her “dream school” when I spoke with her during her junior year. She struggled with paying her bills, family and health issues, and a lack of support at her school. She was not going to be graduating in four years, but hoped to finish in December of her fifth year.

Resources tend to accrue to those who have privilege to begin with, including social capital. William and Hannah were able to draw on these ties to negotiate challenges that could have turned out very differently. The lack of economic resources and social connections compounded each other for Mariah and Eve, when financial troubles exposed the lack of ties each had.

For the most part, the social connections that were critical here were forged outside of their high schools and were the products of students’ social backgrounds. William and Hannah came to school with more wealth, generations of family members who had attended college, older siblings with college experience, and families with connections that could provide jobs and “ins” into higher education. Mariah and Eve came to school with few or none of these advantages. One is perhaps left wondering where their high schools figured into these students’ stories. Considering the importance each high school placed on college attendance, shouldn’t their high schools have stepped in to provide Mariah and Eve with the support they could not get from their families? Why didn’t Eve’s counselor help her with the FAFSA so she could have avoided the financial issues that led her to forgo college? Why didn’t a counselor work with Mariah during the college search, and discuss with her how to evaluate all the “flattering” emails she got from colleges?12

This is a key question that has inspired this book. What role do high schools play in influencing students’ postsecondary trajectories? Can they help make up for the different resources and amounts of social capital that students bring to school, or do they reinforce these initial differences? In my interviews with Eve, Hannah, William, Mariah, and dozens of others, their high schools and counselors seemed to be only a small part of the story, at least initially. When I asked students to indicate who was most helpful to them in the college application process, students were twice as likely to list parents over counselors.

That most students, across social background, felt that their counselors and high schools played little role in helping them apply to college, or for some were obstacles in the process, was intriguing to me. Decades of research suggests that high schools are critical players in the college application process. Those who attend better-resourced schools are more likely to attend college and to attend a more selective one.13 Elite private schools have long-standing connections with some of the most competitive colleges.14 Counselors in particular can be critical sources of information for students during the college process, especially first-generation college students.15 Why, then, did the students in my sample not really see their high schools or school counselors as very important?

As I began analyzing students’ stories, I came to see that the high schools did play a role in influencing the social capital that students had access to as they navigated the college application process, and even long after applications were submitted. This role existed in the background, however, when the high schools acted as organizational brokers, connecting students to each other, to counselors, and to college admissions officers through classes, counseling meetings, and college events. These connections provided opportunities for students to obtain support, resources, and information. The way that brokering worked among students was not equal, however. For students such as William and Hannah, the connections that the schools provided to peers with similar backgrounds and social connections in classes, to school counselors who reinforced what they already knew about the college process, and to college admissions officers through school-sponsored informational sessions, seemed to be unintentional or simple “givens” for how high schools worked. Yet for students such as Mariah and Eve, these were not givens. They were in lower-tracked classes with others who lacked connections. They attended similar meetings with their counselors, but did not know what to ask or what to do with the information that they were given, or that the real help came when you sought out your counselor multiple times after that on your own. They were also encouraged to attend very different types of college events that connected them to less selective colleges in environments that provided little information.

Students such as Mariah and Eve entered high school with less social capital and fewer economic resources compared with peers such as William and Hannah, and this gap did not lessen over time. Mariah and Eve, and other s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. College Dreams and College Outcomes
• 2. Everyone Goes to College
• 3. Racial Context, Tracking, and Peers
• 4. When Brokering Fails: Guidance Holes and Broken Trust
• 5. Opportunities or Opportunistic: Marketing in Higher Education
• 6. Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
• 7. Consequences for the Application Process, College Destinations, and Beyond
• Methodological Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author