While more African American and Hispanic young people are attending college, their enrollment takes them on very different paths from more privileged white peers, according to this new report from researchers at Georgetown.
When I started thinking about college as a working class white girl in a small town, I was on my own.
My parents were proud, my high school guidance counselors smiled and wrote me the required recommendation letters, but I was completely on my own in deciding where to apply. It really wasn’t until graduate school that I began to realize the vast differences in different colleges and universities. At 16, I knew only that it was a good thing to aspire to “college”.
Earlier reports have shown that high achieving, low-income kids have little access to information about whether they might be competitive for admissions to more elite colleges or whether they could afford to go there. At the same time, for-profict colleges that are now attracting so many kids of color and low-income kids have huge budgets for recruiting and advertising.
In this information age, when young people now carry digital connections to the world in their pockets, the ball would seem to be in the court of colleges and universities to disseminate the most basic information to young people about where they might thrive, and where they’d be welcomed.
If, in fact, they would be welcomed.
Education and Class 