20181219.0430

On 14 December 2018, Alia Malik's "More San Antonio ISD Grads Getting to Elite Colleges — But That’s the Easy Part" was updated in the online version of the San Antonio Express-News. The article offers brief profiles of four students from SAISD who took advantage of the district's efforts to place more students in Tier 1 universities, using their stories to highlight the successes and deficiencies of those efforts. Issue that emerge repeatedly include cultural mismatch between the SAISD students and the elite socioeconomic realities of those who "normally" go to such schools as Columbia and Brown--or even UT and Texas A&M--where the assumption is that students can afford all that is required by class and expected for "normal" socialization outside the classroom. SAISD is continuing to improve its efforts to place students and support them adequately, but the students themselves continue to struggle to adjust to the expectations of high-level university life from the often less-than-hoped preparation offered by the inner-city schools they attended.
My reaction to the piece proceeds from two parts of my own life: my own status as what might be called a Gen 1.5 college students and my work as a college educator. From the first, being a son of two people who attended but did not complete college (until recently; my mother at long last earned her baccalaureate, but it was a long time coming), neither of whom went on to graduate study, I had some adjustments to make when I went off to college each time. As an undergraduate, I did not involve myself in extracurricular activities nearly as much as, in retrospect, I ought to have done, believing that working hard on my academic coursework would be enough to see me through. In the end, it did; I could have had a job (with SAISD, interestingly) as soon as I graduated, and I did have a graduate assistantship. But I also did not make nearly the kinds of connections with others that I ought to have done and which would have allowed me to have an easier time of things afterwards. And I made much the same mistake in graduate school--hence my current life as an academic expatriate. So I am sympathetic to the students who go off to school and find themselves substantially shocked by the cultures they find there; I started out closer to them than the students profiled, and I had the trouble I did, so I cannot help but think they're facing much stiffer odds.
As an educator, as well, I have sympathy for them--though I would note that the phenomenon is far from restricted to top-tier schools. I've not done much if any teaching at such places; it is possible that the Big 12 school where I taught qualifies, but I'm not at all certain about that. The students I taught at the public and non-profit schools where I've worked have seemed in many cases to be out of their depth, partly because their prior schooling did not equip them for what they faced with me (while at the same time convincing entirely too many of them that it did), and partly because their backgrounds were not such that they had the cultural grounding that I, passing along standards les critically than I ought to have done, expected them to have. I hope I did and have done better at the for-profit schools where I have worked and still work; I have at least known that the students I've taught at them have not come from the kinds of backgrounds more traditional students have, and I've tried to adjust for that. I'm not sure I've always been successful, though, and I imagine that my counterparts at higher-prestige institutions have had similar difficulties--or more because many of them come from farther away than such students' circumstances than I do.
Knowing such things, extrapolating from them as best I can, I find myself hoping that better structures are put into place to support such students. There are a great many great minds among those who are, through no fault of their own, in poverty and far away from the ivory palaces that typically boast the tall towers of lore and legend, and they can benefit from time among those towers no less than those who enter into them more easily. But it is not only the students who must adapt or who should.