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Disadvantaged Students Stay In College If They're Told Everyone Struggles (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Lower-income and minority college students often have trouble sticking with higher education. But past studies have indicated they would be less likely to drop out of school if they receive appropriate counseling once they start experiencing academic problems. A new study published in PNAS demonstrates that if students receive this kind of intervention prior to college enrollment and during their first year at college, they are more likely to avoid having academic trouble in the first place. And the counseling can be done over the Internet. The counseling involves letting students know that it is common for students to struggle with the transition to college and that this transition will get easier with time. This is known as a "lay theory intervention."
Took the words right out of my mouth. What was once satire is now full blown reality.
"You got that right. You see, according to Cocteau's plan... I'm the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech, the freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of BBQ ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I wanna smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener." You live up top, you live Cocteau's way: what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here... and maybe starve to death." ... or oddly prescient...
I took to college like a fish to water myself. It was high school that sucked ass.
I loved the freedom and the fact that the cro-magnon bullies were, for the most part, gone (redneck idiots and ghetto thugs usually don't make it to college). To me it was like breathing for the first time. I never really learned anything in high school (except which bullies to avoid). But college was a learning paradise! And the parties were much better too. And I didn't have to live at home and listen to my parents anymore!
Shit, I would have never LEFT college if they had let me stay on after grad school.
Bullock's! Leaning to ask you help is part of maturing. Know when you need help is very important. Knowing others feel the same pressure makes asking for help less awkward.
If you think you did it alone you are the one with the problem.
No, we are going to write, "Stick to it. Never give up" 100 times...or tell them that 100 times.
Really, that's called encouragement and leadership. The Armed Forces do it all the time. Coaches do it for their teams.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Wow, a Renaissance man, your uncle. He managed to compare apes and blacks and ALSO wedged an absentee father stab in there. Truly admirable. If he could work in something about laziness or stupidity in there he could go on tour with it.
If he's still around, I think Trump's legal team has an opening.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not that it's encouragement, or else "You're going to do just fine," would suffice. It's specifically, other people struggle, too. The disadvantaged person who would end up bailing otherwise, was probably thinking that the other people make it because it is a breeze for them; it's not a breeze for me, so I'm probably not going to make it, so I might as well quit now.
When I transferred from community college to university in 1994, I applied to the Equal Opportunity Program. Being a poor white boy who was the first person in his family to go to college, I got accepted into the program. The Latino guidance counselor told me not to bother with the tutoring resources, because, you know, I was white, and didn't need that much help, and to come back next year to renew the EO&P contract.
My first year in the university ended with my girlfriend and I breaking up, leaving me depress and on academic probation. I got called into the EO&P office to explain my situation to a different guidance counselor. She demanded to know why I listened to that "idiot" from the year before and not follow the program as laid out in the contract. I pointed out the contract language that specifically stated that I must do everything that the guidance counselors told me to do. That took the wind out of her sails. Either way, I got kicked out of the program and the university. Ironically, the academic probation policy changed the following year because 10% of the student body was at risk of being kicked out (typically, it's 3%), which was too much money for the university to let walk away, and many of those students stayed.
I never went back to the university. A decade later, I went back to community college to learn computer programming and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0GPA in my major. That was the beginning of my technical career.
I know it's hard to believe, and for the longest time I actually thought this to have become outlawed, but there are allegedly still students in college trying to learn something rather than expecting something to be handed to them for crying "oppression".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm visually impaired, when I went into the Computer Systems Technology program at NAIT they hadn't really dealt with a visually impaired person before. The committee running the program at the time recommended I take semesters in halves so I wouldn't get overloaded. I took this advice and started during the summer intake. That first half semester was a bitch, they didn't have materials to help me along and the 13" monitors they had were brutal for my vision. Anyway, I got OK grades in most classes, but nothing great, in the introduction to programming I passed with a 65% (bare minimum pass) but I felt like it just wasn't for me. The instructor there at the time took me aside during one of the last days before the semester closed and told me that I had a lot of potential and that I should give it another try.
The next half-semester I re-took the introduction to programming, by now the program had purchased 17" monitors and my grade shot up 30%. Maybe it was finally having the equipment I needed, maybe it was taking the course for the second time but I know it was the words of encouragement that made me do labs as soon as I got them, try to work harder in other courses too, connecting the dots between them.
After that second half-semester I decided to go to normal semesters like everyone else and excelled. Turned out I was naturally gifted for problem solving and all sorts of other things that I didn't really think I was capable of.
Anyway I graduated in 1999 with a love of programming and a lot of confidence. Sometimes I wonder where I would have been now if I hadn't been given that little boost of encouragement from a person I respected, it's not easy to want to achieve things when you are a "minority" particularly when you have a disability because the deck is stacked against you, but then somebody tells you it doesn't matter and maybe the first time in my life I really believed it.
crazy dynamite monkey
Ooh, I love a good game of Pretend!
Is this the part where we all pretend that absentee fathers aren't actually a very serious problem in the black community, and are just some stereotype that evil white racists invented?
Guess we can forget about that honest dialogue about race, huh?
'scuse me, but calling a US college an "ocean with nothing but sharks", don't ever dare studying in Europe. Over here, nobody holds your hand. Nobody is dependent on your money, so they don't give half a shit about whether you drop out. Actually, you dropping out means less work with pesky students and more time to dedicate to research, so the sooner you drop out the better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I won't say you're wrong... because you're not. In the Engineering program at the university I went to, EE 221 was required for _ALL_ Engineering majors.
At the main campus (this was a university with 'satellite' campuses), it was taught in a huge lecture hall, 200+ students in there per class session, and if you fell behind, you were left behind. Roughly 15% of the class dropped it by the final drop/add day (either to take it next semester, or they would outright change majors), and roughly another 15% failed the class.
I got lucky enough to take it at one of the satellite campuses, with (at the time) the only Engineering professor at this university system who wasn't at the main campus. (Not kidding. If you were taking an Engineering class at any of the satellite campuses, it was a remote learning/professor on tape/whatever class.)
Instead of 200+ students in a lecture hall, we had 30 or so students. A third of the class got A's, and we were using the harder version of the textbook.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
What do you expect from a society that rewards attendance as if it was some kind of achievement to drag your body somewhere? We can't subject those fragile child souls to the experience of failure, can we? So let's reward them even if they suck and blow at the same time. Hurray, everyone's a winner!
And then we wonder why this creates entitled assholes who think the world owes them anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed, and in this case it's extra effective because the rest of the time they are getting lots of little subtle cues telling them that they are going to fail. Being followed around shops by the security staff, the look of mild surprise when someone finds out they are in college, the lack of interest from former teachers who seem to have decided they were going to fail anyway.
When they start to struggle it's easy to think, somewhat subconsciously, that the signs where there all along and they aren't cut out for this. Just pointing out that most people are in the same boat, that they are actually pretty normal, goes a long way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Is that it's hard to put your life on hold for 4 more years. You need a lot of money to do that. The kids work hard and that's the trouble. They get part time jobs that turn into full time and before long they're falling behind in their studies. Then they get blamed for being lazy... It doesn't help that a good percentage of the population is activity trying to keep birth control away from then either.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The first thing they told me about attendance when I went to college was literally "you paid to be here if you don't show up to classes we don't care, we have your money"
That sobered up a lot of people...
crazy dynamite monkey
It's particularly hard at the elite universities. Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
And now, their peer group consists of people who have gone through exactly the same experiences. The people teaching them are going to assume "brilliance" as a default and anything short of that as a failure. Only a tiny handful of them - and generally those who are prepared to forgo almost all of the other pleasures of college life - will manage to rise back to that "academic elite" status. For the rest, they will, for probably the first time in their lives, need to get accustomed to being in the middle, or even near the bottom of their peer group. That is a major, and difficult, self-image adjustment.
I remember going through it myself. It wasn't until my third year at university that I contented myself with the fact that I wasn't going to be among the top tier of my year-group and, more to the point, that I didn't actually need to be in order to have a perfectly good career after graduation. Ironically, the very top-tier were generally those aiming to enter academia themselves, which was definitely not on my agenda.
Compared to some of my contemporaries, I adjusted fairly well. I got to see a few spectacular self-destructions.
The only advantage I remember from college was the economic advantages some kids had.
It doesn't make more economically advantaged kids smarter, and many of them squander this advantage partying, but they also don't face the soul-sucking grind of a job or the soul-sucking money problems that come with it. And the job of course takes hours away, sometimes leaving you amotivated to study or flat-out with less hours to study.
None of this means it can be done, but it does make it harder. Harder still for those occasional emotional crises that arise in college -- a couple of bad grades, social problems, etc.
Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
I think a lot of times the problem for disadvantaged students is that while they were in the top 5% of their class or whatever, when they get to university they discover that the top 5% of their class was performing like the 75th percentile compared with a lot of their new peers. The shock isn't so much that there are a lot of other high performing kids there (though that's going to happen too); the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average.
Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
I know this is probably obvious, but for some people, money isn't everything. Also, until recent decades, going to college wasn't about maximizing lifelong profits either. (This is a big misperception of correlation vs. causation: a century or more ago, aristocrats who already had wealth sent their kids to college because that's what rich people did; at some point people made the incorrect assumption that college made people rich, rather than the reality which is that most college students were rich before they attended and likely would have stayed rich anyway.)
I remember seeing some plot of IQ vs. adult income years ago, where the highest income peaked at maybe a couple standard deviations above mean. For IQ above that, the average income descended quite a bit.
As someone who hangs out with a lot of academics, it's well worth it to most of them to be in community of like-minded people doing what they love. It also takes a certain intellectual openness to get to that point, to realize that the modern quest for more money and more "stuff" at all costs is ultimately a bit pointless.
I'm not at all criticizing people who choose other paths -- if that big salary, giant house, fancy car, boat, etc. are valuable to you, enough to do what many do (work long hours, never see their kids, never take vacations, never have time for significant hobbies or time to learn something new outside of work, etc.)... well, that's a choice. It's your life, and everyone can find their own way to maximize their own happiness.
But I don't find it ironic at all that people who demonstrate greater intellectual aptitude might value a life of intellectual activity higher than maximizing monetary gain.
... is the very same need in telling oneself "I am weak, I can't stand on my own"
Maybe not. Maybe it means, "I need a little help getting started."
When I was an MIT undergrad way back in the late 60s, MIT was just beginning to try to identify high-potential students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. They would be offered a preparatory summer session to prepare them for the rigors of freshman year. While there were some flaws in the initial execution, the program had some real successes.
There were a number of black kids brought in under this program, and they soon formed their own affinity group, the Black Students Union (BSU). (There were other similar groups for Chinese students, etc.) A year or so later, the BSU did something that has me respecting them to this very day.
MIT was offering four years of full scholarship for the disadvantaged students--- very generous indeed. The BSU went to the administration and said that one year is fine, to help students get started, but more than that is sending a message to the student that you're incapable of making it on your own. So here we have a minority group offered something for nothing, turning it down because they were wise enough to realize that it could be harmful in the long run. Hats off to them.
The poor and disadvantaged don't have relatives that have made it through college. They don't know anyone to encourage them generally because the people they know have no experience with university. Many won't even realize the kids they think are doing great are struggling as hard as they are. Study groups can help this if they join them and most don't but it's better to be told by someone that's done it that it was hard for everyone, not just them.
Look at this from a macroeconomic point of view. Especially in mid-tier large state universities (like the one I went to a million years ago,) it is super-common to have students fail out after their first year for a number of reasons. Some weren't meant to be there but get pushed in by the "everyone must go to college" rhetoric. Some fall prey to the Greek life or other constant party atmosphere and just neglect doing any work. Some aren't emotionally ready to handle the huge shot of independence they get. Whatever the reason, many (most?) of these students are paying for their education at least partially with loans that must be paid back regardless of the outcome. Going to college and not getting the degree is way worse than not going -- you get no benefits career-wise and are stuck with lifelong debt. Wouldn't it make sense to provide some help and encouragement, especially to a population that really is at a disadvantage?
The state university system I graduated from has something like this - extra help, remedial classes, etc. for truly disadvantaged students to try to give them a leg up, and keep them there once they've made it in. And they need it; going where I went, as a freshman you really are an anonymous number. It's a whole lot like dealing with a state agency in terms of personal attention and "customer service." It wasn't until I got into the end of sophomore year in a relatively small department that I started to lose that sense of anonymity. Going from a 4,000 student random freshman class to about 300 focused chemistry students with good faculty support was a big change. If I had been in the engineering school (~8,000 students) or business (10,000+) that would've been way different. Point being, Joe Random Freshman in a 300-person lecture class might be having a hard time, but have very little in the way of avenues to get help. I do feel that part of the value I got out of my degree was learning to do things for myself, deal with crappy bureaucracies without throwing up my hands, etc. It's allowed me to work for big companies with stupid rules and advance pretty far in my career compared to people who just whine and complain when things won't bend to their will.
Elite universities may have a different problem, in that you have people in the top 5% of their high school classes merging into a population where _everyone_ graduated at the top of their class. That said, elite universities have plenty of support in place...they just don't let you fall out of the club once you've made it in. Having that Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, whatever degree qualifies you for the rarified worlds of investment banking, management consulting and other professions that only hire Ivy League/elite university grads as part of their culture. After that, Easy Street for life, If you're smart, and work really hard in high school, the tuition you pay at any of those places is a worthwhile investment. If you're driven but not rich or super brilliant, going through the state system is still a very valid way to go.
Don't forget the profs telling them that the system rigged against them and that some mystery "they" are racist out to oppress them.
When the message you are getting every day is that your efforts are in vain, anyone would become discouraged.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
MIT was offering four years of full scholarship for the disadvantaged students-.... The BSU went to the administration and said that one year is fine, to help students get started, but more than that is sending a message to the student that you're incapable of making it on your own.
There is another strategic angle to this approach: spreading the risk, and hopefully multiplying the reward. (4x) students get that opportunity to "get started" for the same money instead of just (x) students getting all four years. There will be more winners, all around.
the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average
That's what he is saying and every single person there is experiencing the same thing. Every person present was extremely highly performing in their high school class and are now distributed around the new (much higher) average. The level of performance didn't really change much, but the average is now based on the subset of very high performers. The only difference is their ranking relative to their peers.
In fact, if the disadvantaged students are finding themselves at the 75th percentile of all highly performing students, then their "disadvantage" was really more of an advantage. They're significantly outperforming most of their "advantaged" peers.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Freshman Orientation, the Mean Dean said: "Over 90% of you were in the top 10% of your class at high school. Exactly 50% of you will be in the BOTTOM half of your class here . . . if you survive." I was in classes with multiple valedictorians from county high schools; OTOH their entire graduating class was less than 1/10th of my graduating class from a New York City specialized (magnet) school, so their competition pool had been a bit narrow.