From an article from today’s NYT that has come to my inbox from multiple sources today:

The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable. Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the school did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight.

Over 100 kids who would otherwise have been denied, admitted because of thier family income.  And over 100 kids who played by all the rules, got admitted to their “reach” school, and were  then were sent away.

So, if you’re mentoring kids who will be high school seniors next year, what do you tell them?  To reach and dream big or to be “realistic”?

As my favorite social philosopher B. Springsteen once asked,

is a dream a lie that don’t come true, or is it something worse?

For weeks now, I’ve been doing — and too seldom writing about — Education and Class.

Every Tuesday at 11:00, I gather with a group of remarkable students who, next week, will begin mentoring  low-income/first generation high school juniors through the college application process.  I am their faculty adviser, and the instructor of record for the course in which they are all enrolled.

It’s been quite a ride.

Based on a program initiated four years ago on our flagship campus,  The Dream Project is student led. Students plan and lead the class sessions, arrange for speakers, make the  initial and follow-up contacts with the high schools, navigate campus bureaucracies to get things done like printing and banking, and — because this is a program to add, not dilute resources –  do fund raising.

The program has an explicit dual-focus:  Our university students will learn more about education and social mobility, college access and educational inequalities.  And high school students will learn more about writing powerful essays, finding scholarships, and aiming for colleges that they might not otherwise have considered.

Gathering on Tuesdays at 11:00 are single moms, returning students, a woman who waitresses until  2:00 every morning and a man who works the night shift in a hospital every night.  There are immigrants from Taiwan and the Middle-East, and a young woman who grew up in a refugee camp in Thailand.  There are freshman and seniors, and they’ve accomplished a great deal in these past weeks.

We now have an official university account.  We have very cool T-shirts that they all wore on Inauguration Day, newly conscious that day that they were part of something much bigger than a local campus project. We hosted a festive campus “roll out” where administrators sang their praises.  We’ve learned about “students without citizenship” and about empathetic mentoring.  We’ve started negotiations for free SAT prep courses. We’ve talked about framing stories of disadvantage as stories of resilience.  We’re ready to start with the high school kids.  We’ll never be fully ready to start with the high school kids.

On the flagship campus, the Dream Project students gather for bonding over burritos every Friday afternoon, arriving on foot from the dorm rooms and frat houses and nearby campus apartments.

Our students thought that this was a great idea.  We are a commuter campus;  they spent an hour one day trying to agree on a central location, trying to find a time that could work with their work, class, and family schedules.  They settled on Thursdays at 9:00, at a place known to be very low cost.

Only two people showed up, in spite of their best intentions.  In the end, their weeks were  just too full.

And next week, the planning comes to fruition, and we meet the high school juniors.  My students, many of whom themselves stumbled one step at a time into college, will begin talking with and listening to students much like them and will offer support, perspective, and information that they themselves may not have had when they were applying for college.

It is a student-led project.

They’ve added this project on top of  work, courses, family, and commuting.

Much of this is brand new to many of them: The public speaking on campus, the work of organizing their own learning, the challenge of cold-calling busy high school counselors,  the prospect of asking potential donors for money, the responsibility of launching what essentially will become a non-profit.   I call, email, chat in the hall, spend time one -on-one in my office, suggest readings, cajole, thank, steer, back away, buffer, nudge, recommend, and mediate.

And I’m reminded of how I learned so much of this over years, not weeks, and by trial and error (mostly error), not within this sort of collaborative endeavor.

The flagship campus students speak powerfully of how much they’ve learned in this work.

I think that our students will potentially learn even more, and will potentially learn very different things about themselves and  their own educational journeys.

There’s an interesting article in Today’s Inside Higher Education newsletter on “needs blind” admissions policies. While promising applicants that their financial need will not be considered in admissions decisions, most public and private colleges then offer financial aid packages with considerable “gaps” between need and actual costs.

Further, different groups of students (athletes, legacies, under-represented ethnic groups) are more likely to receive different sorts of financial aid packages (more grants and scholarships, fewer loans) than other students — and first-generation students are infrequently targeted for either full financial aid for for more favorable “packages”.

And finally, in these times of soaring college costs, the shift from needs-based to merit-based financial aid continues:

In 1994, when NACAC conducted a similar survey, colleges reported that 27 percent of their institutional aid funds were purely merit-based and 66 percent based on need. In the current survey, 43 percent of institutional aid funds were based on factors other than need, compared to 49 percent need-based.

At my institution, there is speculation that tuition will soar in the coming years under withering state budget cuts.

I’m not at all clear how, given headlines like that in the paper and the complex and contradictory system of financial aid, first-generation students can even imagine themselves getting in and getting through.

From today’s Inside Higher Education is news of a new report Promise Lost: Why So Many College-Qualified Students Don’t Enroll in College from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

With these students — who are disproportionately low-income or students of color — schools are doing their part:  These students have taken a college prep curriculum and gotten decent grades.

But, because of the high costs of college, inadequate information about financial aid and loans, and guidance counselors responsible for hundreds of students, these students are not applying for or enrolling in college.

There are so many ways that low-income kids are left behind.

With achievement gaps in schools, it’s all too easy to scapegoat teachers.

But when kids are achieving and still have no way up and out, there are no obvious scapegoats, and thus, it seems harder to get anyone incensed.