Elite Colleges Must Give Low-Income Students the Tools to Succeed

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By JULIO ALVES

When I graduated from high school in 1979, I applied to Princeton University because that seemed to be the dream of so many seniors in my northern New Jersey suburban high school. I had assets working for me: I had the second-highest GPA in my class, I had good references, and I was clearly motivated to succeed (although I was an immigrant who started learning English at the age of 13, I graduated from high school in three years). Disastrous SAT scores were the only blemish on my otherwise impressive record, and perhaps what led my guidance counselor to say, "Apply if you want, but we're lucky to get one or two students in a year." He made it quite clear he didn't think I could be one of the lucky ones.

Princeton rejected me, and I always thought that it was because of my weak showing on the SAT. It never occurred to me that maybe I wasn't accepted because I was poor. I didn't think of myself that way, but that's what I was on paper. These days I'm heartened that more students from poor families are gaining access to elite colleges and universities. I'm concerned about how they're doing, however, and whether elite institutions are truly willing to reinvent themselves as places where students from poor families can not only get degrees but also be happy and truly successful.

The publishing and conference industries are abuzz with books, articles, talks, and treatises on "college access" for students from poor families, usually referred to as low-income, first-generation students students like me. Unlike me, today's students are often students of color, but like me, they are often immigrants who live with and between two languages. I welcome this "college access" discussion but also often find myself annoyed by its endlessness. What's so hard to understand about welcoming low-income students to elite liberal-arts colleges and universities and supporting them in their studies? I'm among the non-tenure-track staff members who teach introductory writing courses at Smith College, where nearly a quarter of the Class of 2010 is first generation. At Smith that means that neither parent has attended college. At the risk of sounding arrogant, the situation seems quite clear to me, and not all that different from what it was 30 years ago.

For the sake of brevity, let's think small about low-income students' assets and challenges.

Here are three assets low-income students bring to elite liberal arts-colleges and universities:

• Excitement and enthusiasm about a college education.

• A strong desire to succeed.

• A great variety of life experiences.

Here are three challenges they present:

• They often can't pay much, not just for tuition, room and board, books, and laptops, but very often for basic amenities that other students take for granted, from visits and phone calls home to printing and photocopying.

• They've often had spotty, undemanding educations in public schools, sometimes in multiple languages and countries. They're smart — they have to be to make it all the way to elite liberal-arts colleges and universities — but their skills (the three R's: writing, reading, and arithmetic) are often weak.

• They often have complicated home lives that make it very difficult for them to devote themselves completely to their studies.

A case in point: Sandy is a Salvadoran immigrant. Her parents immigrated first; later she joined them. Shortly after her arrival in Springfield, Mass., her family fell apart, and she was, for a while, homeless and left to fend for herself. Eventually she went to live with a godmother, who herself had a complicated life. Sandy's life stabilized, however. She persevered and eventually enrolled at Smith, and recently graduated.

I met Sandy in her first semester in my writing class. For four years we were teacher and student, but also friends. Sandy, like Gladys and Jessica and so many other students from similar backgrounds, was a joy to be with. The specifics of her situation were unique, of course, but she had much in common with students from similar backgrounds. She was smart; observant; a great, whimsical talker; a hard worker; a kind, caring, principled individual. She had many of the qualities we look for and value in students. She belonged at Smith. I never thought otherwise.

Smith presented Sandy with challenges on many levels, however. First, financial: She was always short of money. Then she had her family back home to think about. When things went sour, she would be on the phone several times a day. Sooner or later, she knew, she would have to go down to Springfield to take care of "the girls," her godmother's children, until the situation improved.

Then there was the skills problem. Sandy had had a very spotty education, hadn't read much, and didn't know a lot about history, government, literature, etc. She lived in two languages, so she read slowly, and she had trouble understanding the readings and retaining the information. Because her context was weak, she had a hard time figuring out what was going on in many of her readings. She read; she highlighted; but afterward, Sandy felt as though she hadn't done a thing, because so little stuck. Class discussions were hard, too. Ordinarily a very chatty person, she clammed up in class. "I don't know how to talk like that. I don't know those words. I need to improve my vocabulary," she'd say.

Smith has an open curriculum, so Sandy didn't have to address the math deficit, but writing she couldn't avoid. Writing was torture for Sandy throughout all four years. Another student in one of my classes, Sandy's classmate Marissa, put Sandy's exasperation into words when I asked her how her writing was going. "My mind feels that it is never able to organize ideas so I can explain them," she said.

Because Sandy often didn't understand the readings well, and she had a lot to read, her problems with writing started with her problems with reading. To complicate matters, she had never been asked to write much in high school, and nothing very long. Most of the writing she did was personal. The questions at Smith were heady and difficult to grasp. Sandy had little idea of how to sustain a descriptive summary over a couple of pages, much less conduct lengthy, stimulating, text-based arguments in a rhetorical style unfamiliar to her. No one at home talked like she was expected to write. She didn't talk like she was expected to write. Another student, Serena, now a sophomore, put the problem as follows: "Most of the time when I write, I write how I talk and often it is grammatically incorrect." Simple enough. Sandy would agree wholeheartedly.

Spelling checkers and grammar checkers covered up many of Sandy's mistakes, but not enough. Errors abounded, and, having little conscious grasp of grammar or the kind of knowledge that allows many well-educated international students to communicate effectively with their professors, Sandy didn't respond readily to instruction. She didn't know the difference between tense and number, much less tense and voice; or sentences and ideas, much less dependent and independent clauses.

Sandy's experiences are not unique. Many low-income, first-generation students in my classes have much to learn very quickly, knowledge that many other Smith students acquired long ago. Often they have never used a library. A research library like Smith's is positively labyrinthine to them. They don't read newspapers and newsmagazines, and have never heard of journals. They have no idea what anthropology, landscape studies, neuroscience, and many other disciplines are. In many cases, they have never even heard the words before. They know only the courses taught in their high schools. I was like that, too.

In her first year, Sandy lived in a harried hazetrying to keep up; to keep her life together; to get through the day, the week, the semester. Her life got easier but never became easy. I would have to say that, discouragingly, she worked harder than most students for less payoff. She often felt stupid, like the embarrassing consequence of an admissions snafu.

And she had never been around so many white people. We underestimate the energy it takes for students of color, especially those from segregated, urban neighborhoods, to adjust to a different racial environment. A Cape Verdean student from Boston once wrote in her journal: "I grew up in Boston all my life and was used to seeing people of my kind. At Smith not only did I have to adjust to the lack of Cape Verdeans, but also exposure to Whites that I was not familiar with." As if studies were an afterthought, she added: "I also had to stay focused on my schoolwork."

What do students like San-dy (and Gladys, and Jessica, and others) need to succeed? They should be able to succeed: They're smart, enthusiastic, motivated. I think the trick is to give them what they need, and as much as they need, in their first year. Again, for the sake of brevity, let's think small:

• Skills training. I know it's not typically part of the liberal-arts curriculum, but students like Sandy need to be taught quickly what well-educated, middle-class children were taught long ago and have practiced for years before arriving at college: how to read effectively, how to take notes, how to study for a test, how to manage their time, and so on.

• Personal, individualized support. Students like Sandy need small classes (of, say, no more than 12 students) where they can be intensively supported in their efforts to learn to reason, calculate, and write like academics. They need professionally staffed (not student staffed) writing and quantitative-skills centers, and they need plentiful peer tutoring in the disciplines. This work belongs not solely to academic-support staff; faculty members need to do it as well.

• Scaffolding. They need a sensible sequence to follow. Why ask students to argue if they can't summarize? Why ask them to analyze, discuss, or compare when they have no idea about the moves involved in each of these strategies? Why ask them to do research papers when they can't write about one or two texts? Why ask them to write 10 pages when they haven't mastered the five-paragraph essay? (Faculty members disdain the five-paragraph essay, but if you ask me, the student who can write a great five-paragraph essay can write anything.)

Allow me one more:

• Alternative means of evaluation. If writing is a weakness for Sandy, why not also give her an oral exam? Why not ask her how she thinks she can best demonstrate what she knows?

Elite colleges and universities need to make up their minds about how they want to conceptualize low-income students. Are they burdens or assets? Deficient or eager learners? I have doubts about whether elite liberal-arts colleges and universities are willing to do what it takes to enable all students to succeed, and do it quickly enough. Doing it means swift curricular revolution and radical resource reallocation. Admitting low-income students to elite colleges and universities without the will to reimagine the educational experience is, in my humble opinion, cruel and defeating, a feeble gesture to assuage historical guilt. It ought not to be done.

Julio Alves is director of the Jacobson Center for Writing, Teaching, and Learning at Smith College.