Is College for Everyone?

In this weekend's New York Times, we heard about several very (monetarily) successful college drop outs. The author fails to point out, however, that many of these people came from already successful situations. Bill Gates, for example, went to a fancy private school in Seattle before dropping out of Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg spent time at an elite public schools in Westchester, NY and at Exeter before doing the same. These examples already had funding, networking, and critical thinking skills that colleges often sharpen for kids who may not already have them.

Among many progressively-minded educators, it seems fashionable to say that not everyone needs to go to college. College isn't for everyone. I agree with that statement, but it invites some questions: Then who is college for? If your child came to you and said he or she didn't intend to go to college, would you allow it? I'm fine with the expectation that college isn't for everyone. But in a meritocracy, it should be for virtually everyone who wants to go. And we should not be making assumptions about who it is for based on race or income level any more than we should have made those assumptions based on gender forty and fifty years ago. Unfortunately, when people say that college isn't for everyone, they often mean kids who no one has ever encouraged to go to college any way.


This idea that we shouldn't privilege graduation, college attendance, and other markers of middle class life in the US is a difficult one for me. I do see an alienating factor in saying XYZ is the best thing to do. There's an implicit "What's wrong with your family that they haven't been doing XYZ for generations?" that college-focused educators haven't really figured out how to address. But we aren't going to address it by saying we're okay with not sending kids to college for circumstantial reasons. Arguments about kids coming out of college without a job or tons of debt says to me that we need structural economic and student aid reforms, not fewer people who love learning for learning's sake. To complicate things even further, we're also not going to address the alienation problem by pretending it doesn't exist, either. 

The college for all issue gets thornier when we think about it outside of economic terms (are you feeling my conflict on this issue yet, dear reader?). What about learning for the sake of loving learning? I have not had a fundamental impact on the fields of ecology, astronomy, or religious studies. But not only can I speak knowledgeably at them a cocktail party where I may meet someone to fund a grant for my classroom, I am better at thinking for having spent some time considering their complexities.

If a kid wants to be a mechanic or own a restaurant or build things or go directly in the military, that's great. But every kid deserves a plan for some sort of post-secondary education. And I think we owe it to our kids to make sure those plans have nothing to do with race, income-level, or parental involvement. To do otherwise keeps public schools from being the great equalizer they aspire to be.

What is an Achievement Gap?

A couple of weeks ago, a teacher named Camika Royal wrote an essay asking us to stop talking about achievement gaps. By achievement gaps, she meant the often wide differences between in test scores between kids who are white and kids who are not (except for kids who are Asian. That's a whole other blog post).

Royale suggests that labeling these gaps as such suggest that kids who are white have smarts that kids of color don't have. The phrase, according to Royale, normalizes white achievement and makes it the standard for all other racial groups. But should we hold kids to different standards based on race?

Here in Virginia, the state department of education recently came under fire for creating standardized test goals that are different for every race and ethnicity. The creators of the varied goals said they were trying to be honest about where kids are and not set up schools to fail by expecting them to overcome the deficiencies in learning.

I don't think that white kids are smarter than black kids. I do think that kids who come from homes with higher incomes tend to do better in terms of graduation, college attendance and completion, and health. I do think that kids who are white are more likely to come from homes with higher incomes than kids who are not. I don't think we're privileging whiteness. We're privileging an upper-middle class existence that is most readily available to white people (although many of them struggle, too).

Royale seems to argue these aren't deficiencies. They just are facts of society's inability to prepare kids from minority backgrounds for scholastic success. She starts to make some sense to me when she talks about calling these differences not in achievement (obligatory point out that what we're using to measure this achievement is a questionable measure at best and harmful at worst), but in opportunity. I think introducing the idea of opportunity gaps and what they do to people on the bottom of them is the main point of Royale's argument. It just takes her awhile to get there, and we have to wade through some semi-questionable ideas to get there. Once we're talking about opportunity gaps, however, I am on board.

It is fundamentally unfair to expect schools, teachers, and other educators to pick up the slack for other community resources. That sort of expectation also sets students up to fail. But that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and go home. We should account for the fact that schools can't make up these gaps in opportunity now, and then create ways for them to do so going forward.