A major breakthrough was announced last week to help low-income students attend college. The news gives educators and policy makers an occasion to applaud the persistence and accomplishments of our young people, and an opportunity to right a devastating wrong that has derailed the college dreams of many of Michigan's students.
As reported in the New York Times, experimenters sent packets of college information to a random set of highly successful students who lived in low-income areas. The packets included information on how to apply to these colleges, and fact sheets on how affordable they can be for students from low-income families.
Using this information to apply to college, 54 percent of the low-income students who received a packet were admitted to one of the highly selective colleges they learned about. Compared to the 30 percent admission rate for low-income students in a control group who didn't receive a packet, the findings are clear: highly able students from low-income areas will take advantage of more college opportunities, once they have a greater understanding of the college choices that exist.
These findings go a long way to disprove the idea that low-income students don't want to apply to (or attend) top colleges. Armed with good information and a clear understanding of how to navigate the logistics of applying to college, these students made the most of the opportunities they had created through their hard work in high school, and it paid off for many of them -- as soon as they received a little help.
While this is a cause for celebration, the results of the study should also give us pause. If more low-income students applied to top colleges just by reading a packet of papers, how many more students would expand their college dreams if they could talk about this information with someone sitting right next to them who knows them well? How many more students from all backgrounds would have a better understanding of the full array of their college choices if the information in this packet was delivered by a familiar face who could add words of encouragement and expertise at just the right time?
If you're thinking students already get this kind of help, you're only half right. While most high schools have school counselors help students make college plans, these counselors are viewed by many students as ineffective in college advising -- and many counselors view themselves as under-trained in college counseling. Combined with the sixth-highest student-counselor ratio in the nation (Michigan has one public school counselor for every 660 school-aged children), there is little reason to doubt why many Michigan counselors feel they have neither the time nor the expertise to help students make good college choices.
The first step in solving this problem is simple -- give counselors the training they need to help students make good college decisions. Only one counselor training program in the U.S. requires their counselors to take a course focused solely on college advising, and less than 40 programs even offer such a class. Is it any wonder students feel they could be better served -- or counselors feel they could be better trained?
Michigan's public policy makers can advance the futures of all of our students by giving school counselors their own "packet" of information: a separate, comprehensive course in college advising that has to be completed before a counselor sees a single student. This solution is clear, easy to implement, and rich with results that are supported by the study -- you can do more with what you know when you know more about what you can do.