A University Helps Prepare Low Income Youths for College
Tracking School Success Introduction Over the last decade various programs that have helped boost enrollment in higher education have come under attack or have been eliminated. One response to the problem of maintaining access to postsecondary education in an era when policies and programs such as affirmative action and remedial education are terminated is to turn renewed attention to the public schools. A public clamor continues to be heard that the schools need to turn out students who are better prepared for college-level work. The assumption is that if the schools improve, then those who graduate from them will not need affirmative action or remedial education. Although such an assumption is debatable and broad agreement exists that the public schools can improve, such a generic long-term solution falls short with regard to what should be done immediately to help those students who desire access to postsecondary education. The transformation of the American public school system is a massive undertaking that has no clear singular solution in sight and is surely not an immediate cure-all. What might be done on a more concrete and immediate level to ensure that more students gain access to postsecondary education? In this article we discuss college preparation programs for low-income urban minority youths. Such programs assume that postsecondary institutions have a responsibility to the larger society and that this responsibility gets played out via the relationships that colleges and universities develop with public schools. We begin by offering an overview of models of college preparation that are in use by describing the kind of student who might participate in such a program. We then turn to an analysis of one program--the Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI)--and discuss the theoretical framework on which this program is based. NAI developed in large part due to a university's assumption that an institution has a social responsibility to the students and families in whose neighborhood the institution resides. The data derive from a three-year study that included interviews, focus groups, observations, life histories, and an analysis of the students' college-going patterns. As we will discuss, close to 60% of those students who began the NAI program are currently in a four-year university. Accordingly, we suggest that a program based on what we will call "cultural integrity" has significant implications for increasing access to postsecondary education for those students who are most "at risk" of otherwise not being able to gain access to a college education. Models of College Preparation Programs We define college preparation programs as enhancement programs aimed at increasing access to college for low-income youths who attend public schools. The programs take place during an individual's middle school and/or high-school years and are classes or activities that occur in addition to the regular school day. Frequently, the programs involve relationships between schools and postsecondary institutions. Over the last three years we have developed a preliminary way of categorizing programs with regard to program characteristics and instructional processes (see Appendix A). Our purpose has been to try to make objective sense of the myriad of programs that currently exist. First we offer three of the most common approaches that are targeted to specific clienteles and then turn to an elaborated discussion about the fourth program. Test preparation. The goal here is relatively straightforward and has been most widely employed in California. The approach reflects the concern of a public system of higher education for maintaining access in a post-affirmative action era. When the University of California (UC) Regents banned affirmative action, there was a dramatic drop in the enrollment of African American and Hispanic students. Many assert that the central cause for the drop off was that African American and Hispanic youths did not test as well as their Caucasian and Asian American counterparts on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). …