From the Reservation: What happens when you’ve only heard about one college and you really don’t want to go there?
Years ago, I received an email from a mom whose daughter had literally never left their reservation in Oklahoma. Most young people never left this reservation and the highest paying job there was waitress at the diner. This student was a STEM phenom, blowing through Calculus and Physics and all other math and science offerings by the time she finished tenth grade. They only heard about one college and they thought that was just for football. So the daughter thought, why not drop out of high school now to start working at the diner? But mom thought there might be something more out there.
This case is especially near to my heart because the email came at a time when I thought I had cracked much of the code for financial and academic fit. So I give much of the credit for igniting our building around social fit to this email and the later conversations. When we did the matching for this student, she was immediately matched to highly selective STEM campuses such as MIT and Georgia Tech. But if you’ve never left home, mostly because you couldn’t, what’s to say that you would survive so far away from your physical and emotional home?
This question seemed specific to this one student, but we quickly learned that a majority of underserved students grapple with the same issues that she did. For first generation students, we know from research that the top reasons why they do not graduate on-time or at all have to do with push and pull factors related to home. They want to maintain ties to home. They want to help out. They don’t know how to navigate a college campus. They don’t have networks that allow them to do so. We also know that a lot of college campuses are not set up to catch students who have yet to figure these things out. While we know these students tend to do much better in college because of their resilience, we also know that some campuses do a better job of encouraging that.
So in this case, we knew that this student would fair better at a smaller campus that was closer to home and culturally more aligned to the community where she was coming from. For her, this was Cal Tech.
After working that matching by hand, we figured it out digitally, especially noting the types of questions the mom asked and what got her to reach out to me. In many ways, we had to find ways to code empathy and that curiosity around there being something more out there. That’s a heavy lift because if you’ve ever been on a reservation, empathy and curiosity for the outside or from the outside, does not exist. Reservations were created because of the absence of both. Such is the case for poor neighborhoods across the country. So what we were doing was especially important because we were asking people to have hope in systems that have only failed them before.
And that is something that we all experience.
