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Former students helping to guide others to college
By Justin Pope
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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- For Meghan Bridges, the push came from her mother, who went online to help her research the arcane world of financial aid and find her way to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For Charles Osivwemu, it was a mentor back home in Oakland, Calif., who hammered home the message that he really was college material.

“I thought, for me being a black student coming from the neighborhood I grew up in, I had to be an athlete,” said Osivwemu, who attended the University of California, Berkeley.

The pair were among a roomful of new graduates from well-known colleges who gathered recently at North Carolina.

Many talked about how, in their own lives, someone had reached out and helped them through the college application process.

Now, they are trying to play that role in the lives of other students. As the school year begins, dozens are heading out to work in low-income schools in their home states with the National College Advising Corps — a nascent version of Teach for America but for guidance counselors.

“Without her I wouldn’t be here right now,” Osivwemu said of his mentor. “That’s why I want to give back and be a college adviser.”

There may be no more pressing issue in higher education than the huge gaps in college achievement between wealthy and low-income students. Only 31 percent of low-income, college-age students have enrolled, compared to 75 percent of high-income students, according to figures from the Pell Institute, which conducts research on and promotes improving college access for low-income students.

Preparing students academically for college is the biggest single issue, but this group’s focus is on helping them with another, often overlooked challenge — playing the admissions game. Mostly, these counselors won’t be working with highly selective colleges. Their focus instead will be students for whom the selection process is about going anywhere at all, and finding a place that offers the fit and financial aid that will allow them to graduate.

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the national student-counselor ratio in secondary schools is 408-to-1. Counselors inevitably focus on the most troubled students, and perhaps the handful of most promising — but often there isn’t time for the vast middle. Counselors also are increasingly their schools’ point person for the standardized testing bureaucracy.

It can add up to a string of missed opportunities.

Students see the sticker price of a private college and write off the possibility, because nobody explained financial aid might be available; even the price of the SAT seems out of reach because many don’t realize low-income students can get a fee waiver. Nobody reminds them of deadlines to sign up for standardized tests, which can slip by when you’re working part-time and caring for family members.

No one helps with the complex FAFSA form for federal financial aid. The American Council on Education has estimated 1.5 million students who would probably have been awarded Pell Grants in 2003-2004 did not apply for them.

“Sometimes the difference between going and not going isn’t a difference of a mile, it’s a difference of a few inches,” says Stephen Farmer, director of admissions at UNC.

Participants in the Advising Corps come from a variety of backgrounds, but have at least one thing in common: At some point — if not in high school then by college — they realized there are enormous differences between the experiences of low-income and high-income students in applying to college.

Leona Garber saw the difference by transferring to a private school after attending a public high school in Baltimore. At the private school, “they were taking the SATs early and multiple times,” said Garber, a recent graduate of Loyola College in Maryland who is returning to work in a Baltimore public school near the one she attended.

“When I was at my (public) high school a lot of students didn’t even know to take the SAT until the latest possible date,” Garber said. “We only had one guidance counselor, and we had a senior class of about 300 students. I barely ever got to see her. A lot of the information I had to find on my own.”

The Advising Corps is the brainchild of Nicole Hurd, who started it at the University of Virginia, sending out the first cohort of 14 in 2005 (nine returned to their schools for a second year). She’s now relocated to UNC, where the national program will be headquartered. This year, it’s expanded to 10 other universities — including Berkeley, Penn State, the University of Utah — who will send out 62 recent graduates. The goal for next year is 120.

“We want that one-on-one relationships that so many of us from another generation can remember having, that one person that can say to you, ‘Have you looked at this college? Hey, have you turned in that form?”‘ said Hurd. “A lot of counselors kind of mourn that those days are over, that it’s all about accountability now.”

Unlike Teach for America, the popular but unrelated program in which participants are paid by school districts, the $20,000 stipends and $5,000 in loan forgiveness participants in this program receive come from their universities and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which has given $1 million over four years to each of the participating colleges.

Farmer, the North Carolina admissions director, says the results from Virginia justify UNC’s contribution of about $700,000. In the program’s first year at UVA, the advisers held nearly 8,000 student and more than 1,000 parent meetings, went on 43 college field trips, held 156 SAT-prep classes and helped fill out 668 FAFSA forms. Applications from participating high schools to Virginia’s four-year public colleges rose. The most telling statistic may have been an acceptance to UVA from a county high school where, remarkably, only one other student had even applied to the state’s flagship university in 26 years.

From the Virginia results, Farmer calculates the program could send an extra 1,300 North Carolina students to college over the next four years. Even if they don’t attend UNC, the state would recoup the investment. And that doesn’t include the students who, with the help of additional counseling, find a better or more affordable fit and would thus be more likely to graduate.

Helping students with the nuts-and-bolts of the transition to college perhaps “hasn’t gotten the attention it’s deserved because it’s the easiest part of this,” Farmer said. Applying to college “seems easy once you’ve done it. It’s not easy when you’re doing it for the first time. It’s not easy when you’re the first in your family to do it. Sometimes what it takes is someone who knows maybe just a little more than you answering a question right now, not a week from now or a month from now.”

During training, the Corps members got tips from last year’s participants on everything from getting students to think more about college (write to colleges and ask them to send paraphernalia to hang around school) and on working with distrustful parents (work with local ministers).

There are no illusions the work is easy. Much of it involves the tedious completion of FAFSA forms. There will be students the counselors just can’t help. And they are told to prepare for tension with colleagues who may resent a 22-year-old from an elite college parachuting in to do their job. The program hammers home the theme of “humility” and emphasizing to colleagues the Corps members are there to supplement, not replace, the system in place.

But the saving grace is that some of the problems, at least, are quite solvable, said Maggy Lewis, a UVA grad who worked at schools in rural Pittsylvania County, Va., this past year and is headed to law school in the fall to prepare for a career in education policy.

One of her students had a 3.9 GPA, but nobody had ever even spoken to him about going to college. Another assumed he could simply show up in the fall at Virginia State, just as he’d always showed up for the first day of high school. A year later, Lewis looked back with exhaustion but pride in what she accomplished, including helping one student find his way to a full scholarship from a Kentucky college where she directed him.

“Regardless of what happens the rest of my life I have completely changed the course of events and outcomes for individual students in a way that never would have happened if I hadn’t been there,” she said. “And that’s an amazing thing to take with me.”

Take a look
Meghan Bridges, right, helps senior Morgan Andrews with a college choice at Chatham Central High School in Bear Creek, N.C., Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007. Bridges and others are heading out to work in low-income schools in their home states with the National College Advising Corps - a nascent version of "Teach for America" but for guidance counselors. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
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