Getting a shot to attend college

By Joe Arce and Tony Balandran, KC Hispanic News

April 1, 2010

College can be an emotional decision, sometimes an overwhelming decision for a high school student who is the first in a family to think about a college degree. For a student whose parents are immigrants or whose parents have little formal education, the idea of attending a university may seem like an unreachable goal.

The details are numerous. What college to attend? What will be my major? How do I apply? How do I pay tuition? Where do I live?
With no one to provide guidance or to explain the college experience, high school students sometimes set aside the college dream.

That’s where a new program – Missouri College Advising Corps (MCAC) – is trying to help by implanting a college mindset into high school seniors who are first-generation, low-income or underrepresented students.

“We believe in college. We believe going to college is so important,” said Beth Tankersley-Bankhead, executive director of MCAC.

“Whatever we can do to help young people go to college is the whole focus of the program – helping many who might not otherwise have a chance to attend college.”

The two-year-old state program, which has been in some selected Kansas City area schools, is based at the University of Missouri-Columbia and is one of 10 state programs nationwide that is funded by a private philanthropic grant.

The program is at Grandview High School, Northeast High School, Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts Schools, Van Horn high School and Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley.

The advisers, or counselors, in the Missouri College Advising Corps spend time with students to show them how to prepare for a four-year college – from taking entrance exams, applying for admission, seeking scholarships, navigating financial aid forms to visiting area campuses.

“This is not a program to recruit students to MU, but to attend college anywhere. We are helping student find their best-fit institution and go there,” Bankhead said.

The 13 advisers in Missouri are split into three clusters – one group in St. Louis, another in Kansas City and the third focused on the state’s rural areas.

About 9,000 students, of whom 1,700 are seniors, have had access to the advisers. Another 12,000 community college students also have access to the program’s counselors. Last year, the students advised in the program enrolled at or attended 73 institutions of higher learning in 14 states. Only 13 of those students choose to attend MU. Most of the Kansas City area students advised enrolled in regional universities.

The Missouri College Advising Corps is part of the National College Advising Corps, which began in 2005 at the University of Virginia.
Officials at that time acknowledged that a disproportionate number of first-generation or low-income students were not seeking higher education. The statistics were heartbreaking, said Nicole Farmer Hurd, executive director of the National College Advising Corps.

In Virginia, 79 percent of the students were graduating from high school, and only 3 percent were going to college. The amount of guidance counseling in high school was a concern as well to officials. The national average counselor-to-student ratio is about 1-to-380 (Missouri is closer to 1-to-450 students).

The high school guidance counselor spends an average of 20 minutes the whole year talking to seniors about college, said Hurd, whose national office is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Think about how many decisions you have to make about financial aid, about which school to attend, about scholarships. Twenty minutes in the whole year just baffles the mind,” Hurd said.

What became the National College Advising Corps was born after the program received private support from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Fourteen recent college graduates were hired and assigned to Virginia high schools and the program began. Its initial year had such great success that the foundation granted $10 million more so 10 other institutions of higher learning could start an identical program. MU was one of those institutions, Hurd said.

“The model is really simple,” she said. “We take really bright recent college graduates and put them into the high schools and community colleges to help young people not only think about college but attain a degree. We can’t just be about access; we have to be about success.”

Hurd said one strong component of the program is how the demographics of the advisers match the demographics of their high schools. “So there are young people who can say, ‘Hey, I know what it’s like that mom and dad didn’t go to college because my parents didn’t go either, but this is how we are going to convince mom and dad to send you.’

“They understand what the barriers are, whether they are cultural barriers, social barriers or financial barriers. They lived it themselves and they can say, ‘If I can graduate from Mizzou, then you can graduate from a great institution too, so let’s sit down and fill out this form.”
She said the connection is instant because high school students are talking to someone close to them in age and experience.

Adam Higgins is the college adviser assigned to Van Horn High School in the Independence School District. Originally from Sugar Creek, he grew up in Raytown.

“I know what it’s like to come from an economically disadvantaged home,” he said. His father did not finish high school, and his mother worked several jobs to help support the family.

“It’s my job to help students make decisions about what to do after high school,” Higgins said. “Our goal is to get in that thought-process and help them make the right choices.”

Higgins, an MU graduate, said he spends his days helping Van Horn High School students through the college application process and completing scholarship and financial aid forms. And he has guided students on tours that demonstrate life on a college campus.

The college option is often not getting a fair shot, Higgins said, because there is a cultural gap among first-generation and low income families that plays too large a role in deciding what student should do after high school.

He said his job is not to prescribe college to every student, “but my goal is to debunk the myths that go into this process so students can really make informed decisions so all options are being weighed equally.”

Greg Netzer, principal at Van Horn High School, said he has noticed a change in how students think about college because of the Missouri College Advising Corps. There are 117 seniors at Van Horn this year, and 90 have made submitted an application to a college.

“I don’t know what that number would have been had he (Higgins) not been there, but I suspect it would have been significantly fewer,” Netzer said.

Van Horn has two counselors for about 650 students. The counselors work with those students on a variety of issues – scheduling problems, attendance concerns to academic performance, Netzer said. Some also work with students to address social and emotional issues.

But Higgins’ job is to urge students to think about and plan for the college option, he said.

Hurd said the MCAC wants to increase the number of advisers in Kansas City and provide more workshops for families and their students who are thinking of attending college.

She said the MCAC program is not trying to disparage high school counselors “because they have a lot on their plates already.” Instead, the program is trying to empower students and provide more emphasis on college planning.

“As higher education institutions, we are guilty of not giving high school counselors enough professional development,” she said. “We change forms, we change rules, we change procedures, and we change deadlines. And it’s not fair to counselors because we don’t always inform them about those changes.”

MCAC guides also can provide a direct link between the student and the college admission officials, she said.

“So it’s really about leveraging resources,” Hurd said. “There are no silver bullets in education. If there were, we would have cracked this by now.”