<p>^ Greatlakesmom has hit on the point I keep trying to make. Until you know the circumstances of many of these kids, you really can not fathom how impossible the whole system seems to them. </p>
<p>I’ve seen kids who can’t even figure out how to pay the fee to take the SAT for cryin’ out loud! They have crummy high schools with guidance counselors who carry enormous loads of desperately needy students - the “good” kids are not on their radar at all. </p>
<p>For some of these kids, their families are held together by nothing more than a wish and a dream (and often, not even the dream). There are often serious substance abuse problems, absentee parents and too many kids (some only remotely related) in the households. These students are expected to not only financially support themselves, but they are expected to do child care too. (And, of course, some are parents themselves.) </p>
<p>They are frequently engaged simply in moving - some of these families move several times a year. You mail them stuff and it comes right back. Their phones are disconnected for non-payment. They have ZERO access to email or internet. </p>
<p>They have no support or encouragement to go to college - much less to move out of town to do so. Many of these kids have never been outside of their immediate section of the city. They’ve never been to a hotel, they’ve never even been on a road trip. They’ve also never been in what for them would be a diverse environment - looking at a school where there are very few “minority kids” can be extremely intimidating and uncomfortable and a complete deal breaker for them.</p>
<p>It’s not just about funds that might or might not be available to them. It is about a population that is too often simply disengaged from the system.</p>
<p>But remarkably, once in awhile a kid overcomes all this stuff to be the Val or Sal and actually finds a way to get to college. They are the truly amazing kids.</p>
<p>Wow, Marite, they raised 7 million in two weeks!</p>
<p>Another wow is that the school head is paid $370,000! (Being an educator myself, I always thought I was in a low paying field, but I guess not).</p>
<p>One of my good friends told me about the difficulty she had in filling out her FAFSA. Her mother refused to give her any information because in six months she would turn 18 and, according to the mother, be able to file for herself. The mother refused to listen to any indication that this wasn’t how the system worked, and got her father to back her up. My friend eventually had to go through a fight with lots of verbal abuse before her mother would even give her the information so she could fill it out herself.</p>
<p>There are just so many obstacles that most people don’t even consider because it doesn’t apply to them…</p>
<p>Weenie, I’ve actually been agreeing with your point (I think others are, too.) the editorial simplistically and wrongly discussed this as a lack of money problem, when, rather than being that, it’s a lack of access to information and knowledge of procedures, along with, often, family issues which impede these things happening.</p>
<p>There are many great public programs such as Upward Bound, Talent Search, and Gear Up whose mission is to support low income/first gen college students from middle or high school through the college app process, for this very reason. Unfortunately, the programs don’t exist in every school, and more unfortuantely, the present administration has been threatening to cut them and strangling their budgets in the last few years. These sorts of programs have tremendous success (many students at my college went through them). The college version is Student Support Services (what I work for) which gives them that continued support for how to get through college that families can’t or won’t. Also, a very successful program, but also being squeezed by the Ed Dept.</p>
<p>everyone on this thread should read the book “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League” by Washington Post journalist Ron Suskind…true story about a kid from one of the worst public high schools in Washington DC that ended up graduating from Brown…it can be done</p>
<p>It appears on this thread that these students only have a choice between a community college and the state flagship in Amherst. Why can’t they continue to live at home (like hundreds of thousands of other college students) and attend UMass-Boston?</p>
<p>I’m been closely following one student on CC where an issue is, for lack of a better word, a lack of institutional awareness on the family level: the process, the expectations of the colleges, and even the vocabulary is alien to the whole family, the student included. In this case, we have a recent remarried mom who agrees with her new husband that her daughter’s college education is not any obligation or business of the new husband. Most of you know how the colleges look at that one. Ignorance and/or naivete are killing this kid’s chances to go to a great college.</p>
<p>As Soozie alludes, this extends to basic financial information as well. The idea that a high-priced private college can net out at a lower cost than community college is nowhere on the radar screens of many and if you try to explain this to them they may look at you as if you had a squid dangling from your mouth.</p>
<p>I agree that there is a lot of information missing in that editorial. It’s not the best I’ve read by a long shot, but I thought it might stimulate discussion–which it has.</p>
<p>I also agree that in many cases, what is lacking is lack of awareness of opportunities and knowledge about the admission process and about financial aid.</p>
<p>The tuition and fees for UMass-Boston amount to $9-11K+ (the higher figure includes “optional” fees).</p>
<p>What is even more unbelievable to me is that even in the most overcrowded, weakest public school some guidance counselor would not be watching a val/sal. That message either tells me that there is no value anymore to the concept of val/sal or that in these schools the GCs are spending time with “other” students which might not be a bad thing. Harsh as it sounds but if a val/sal can’t figure out how to find some college, any college that can put a package together that they can live with in the college crowded ne corridor then they have bigger problems that are probably precluding them from even attending a college and that’s not the tone of the article. Really, it’s just a bad piece of journalism.</p>
<p>The problems for these kids don’t even stop if and when they get to college. The whole chaos of poverty can pull down even the strongest and brightest among them. Example: Recent graduate, working in her field starts having problems with attendance and tardiness - gets an official reprimand in file, gets closed to being fired. Problem: family! Brother, parolee moves into her apartment. Her mother needs to be taken to the doctor because mom doesn’t have a car. Since she has “made it”, family members turn to her for help when they are desperate - and they are often desperate! They need bail money, or their electricity turned back on, or their phone deposit paid, or their clunker car breaks and they need it fixes, and grandma needs an operation or nephew needs diapers… it is VERY hard to break away from this, unless the individual literally moves halfway across the country and breaks all ties to family. There are no simple answers… :(</p>
<p>Working full time with these students has made me realize how complex the issues are; not unsolvable, but the issues all need to be recognized to be successfully tackled. The Globe writers would do a better service to the students of Boston (vals and others) if they really looked into the whole spectrum of challenges.</p>
<p>(the one post I disagree with is that if they’re vals, they should be more capable of figuring all this out on their own. My kids were very much supported by their parents in all facets of college admissions; as smart as they are, if they didn’t even know what information they needed to make it work, they wouldn’t have found it.)</p>
<p>Thirty years ago I was the kid with the widowed mom whose chronic illness had more impact on my college options than my stats, aptitude, or interests. It’s tough to run a household, or have responsibilities beyond your years, when you are a kid trying to juggle college. But it’s doable, as garland knows from working with the have-nots. The money is there. The services are there. It’s a heavily ingrained “college is for other people” attitude that must be overcome. I at least didn’t have to face that, as it was always assumed we kids would attend college. We just had to rein in our expectations when family circumstances dictated.</p>
<p>Several years ago I was asked to pilot a mentor program for kids at the local wrong side of the tracks high school. Now this wasn’t our poorest high school, but it was close. Grad rate below 50%, not counting the neighborhood’s huge undocumented population. I had asked to meet with ten kids. The administration, wanting to put there best foot forward, sent me kids ranked 1-10. (Remember in Texas there are no ties for #1 in public schools.)</p>
<p>It was long ago enough that my memory fades but I distinctly remember the val-father of one with one on the way and working fulltime hours as an auto mechanic at his father’s shop. Mom was #3. There were other stories, too but that one threw me for a loop. </p>
<p>I had the conversation with them about financial aid and the possibilities. I talked about going away to school. I even talked about large scholarships for URM’s. I may as well have been asking them to set themselves on fire.</p>
<p>SS–another child of widowed mom with overwhelming responsibilities (though not chronic illness)posting here. It was, nevertheless, different for me compared to these students because at least my parents had been college educated, so I had somewhat of an idea of how to go about it, though still I made a hash of the initial college experience cuz Mom just really didn’t know how to help (she’d gone to the local CUNY).</p>
<p>Let me caveat here–there is money there for most kids, but not usually enough to keep it from being difficult. It’s possible, but like I said above, many do not have informed support at home. My life, tenuous middle class with parents who’d gone to college (albeit commuting) and one parent left who could figure out the FA forms, was eons different from my students’ lives. That’s why I say an additional support system is needed, so they can find what money is available, find a suitable college they can afford, and learn the skills necessary to stay and graduate.</p>