Jay Mathews, Washington Post columnist and author of the fantastic Harvard Schmarvard, has been preaching college admissions sanity much longer than I have. So he got my attention when he reminded his readers that only about 10% of US high schools fit into the high-pressure category like those discussed in Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids. In fact, he even points out that the far more prevalent problem in US education, especially at schools in low- to middle-income communities, is “asking students to do too little.” The problem at many schools isn’t that kids are loading up on AP classes—it’s that they don’t have any AP, or even enough solid subject, courses to take.
If you’re a student at one of those schools, there’s no cheerleading around the fact that you don’t have the same resources offered at schools in more affluent communities. But I hope you’ll remember that most colleges work very hard not just to evaluate applicants, but also environments. That means that your drive to do what you can will be recognized and appreciated.
A student who finds a way to achieve at a high school with no AP classes, no dedicated college advisors, and no college-going culture, is someone who deserves to be taken seriously as an applicant. Colleges understand this.
A student who takes a part-time job after school to contribute to her family’s finances is someone whose extracurricular time was filled with a necessary obligation. Most colleges would assign the same if not great value to that job.
I once worked pro-bono with a student who spent a total of four hours a day just getting to and from school. She had been removed from her home by the courts and assigned to live with her grandmother in a town two counties away. She didn’t want to switch schools because she was worried it might hurt her college chances if her credits didn’t transfer. So every day of her junior year, she got up at 5 a.m. to take a train and a bus to school. She wrote her essay about the commute, and how the trip home after school was a chance to do her homework and study when she previously would have spent time with her friends. That was the first time in her life that she got a 4.0 GPA. Her circumstances were far from perfect. But it was pretty clear that this kid was willing to do whatever she could to go to college.
The educational opportunities for kids at under-resourced schools is a much more serious problem than I can address effectively here. But I’ll just remind those students, parents, and counselors that the fewer resources you have, the less support you receive, the more challenges you face as a result of where you live, learn, parent, or counsel, the more laudable it will be when you find a way to do what you can, at whatever level that might be.