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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."
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.
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'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
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.
... 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.