Myriad obstacles stand between low-income students and a college education—even for those who beat the odds, graduate from high school, and gain acceptance into a post-secondary institution. Indeed, 20 percent of these young people will not make it past their first semester—which raises a couple of questions: Why is this happening? And how do we fix it?
According to authors Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page, much of the problem is what happens (or doesn’t) between the last day of high school and the first days of college. They call it the “summer melt.” Things like stacks of enrollment paperwork, complicated financial forms, and daunting tuition bills prove to be substantial hindrances for these kids, many of whom are the first in their families to make it this far. And once they get to campus, they often lack the support to persevere through those difficult first months. In other words, preparing these youngsters for freshman year involves more than academics. To this end, the authors propose three solutions.
First, high schools need to expand the role of college counselors, paying them to work in the summer months and encouraging them to spend more time with individual students in need. The Boston-based college access organization, uAspire, did this and saw positive results. Next, higher education institutions should utilize technology to keep students informed and on target throughout the college enrollment process. One example is the SCOPE project, which launched a texting strategy that kept students up to date with their enrollment tasks and provided easy and fast communication between students and counselors. Third and finally, colleges ought to employ and train current students to be peer mentors to incoming freshmen, which would support these at-risk young people in ways professional counselors and recruiters cannot.
The book describes various contexts in which these strategies have been successful. The next step is to implement them on a larger scale. In all, Castleman and Page’s commonsense, proven solutions demonstrate that, for kids who are academically prepared for college, a little extra support can go a long way.
SOURCE: Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page, Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press 2014).
