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The Webb Schools, a private high school in Claremont, is a magnet for college recruiters from around the country and the world. This fall, 113 Ivy League and other schools sent representatives to the campus — more than the 106 students in the senior class.</p>
<p>At Jefferson High School, a low-income public school with 280 seniors in South Los Angeles, eight recruiters from local universities showed up.
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<p>While I understand many colleges' reluctance to visit LAUSD high school given how awful they are, and that most students will require near full financial aid, the disparity between college visits at a private school and public school is a bit striking. At my own suburban public high school of over 3,000, about 10 non profit colleges came to visit. At my younger brother's private school dozens of colleges from near and far come to recruit. At my school, most students didn't understand what a liberal arts college was, what merit aid was, or half a dozen other things that most students at my brother's school know from sophomore year on.</p>
<p>In sales, we always say to fish where the fish are. I don’t blame recruiters going where the most prepared and potentially competent students are to be found but its hilarious that they can’t say that that is what they are doing.</p>
<p>It is true that a few good kids at a tough inner city school may lose out because of the ill behavior of all the others at their school.</p>
<p>I wish parents would take more personal responsibility to ensure their kids get the best and safest education possible. I don’t believe that most inner city parents are trapped in the inner city except in their own minds. I grew up in the inner city and they day I wanted to leave, I left it all behind and had no money or education or career. Those things came after I left the environment, not before.</p>
<p>Basically, I see a plague of generational ignorance rampant in low income communities than any conspiracy against low income communities being hatched up by upper income communities.</p>
<p>Should a college send a young female recruiter to an inner city school for a college fair after dark? </p>
<p>Should a college send a Lexus driving recruiter to an inner city school? </p>
<p>My personal experience tells me that most of the recruiters schools send out would be afraid to visit schools in some inner city neighborhoods. My life experience says they should be afraid. I would guess that it’s not cost effective either. Schools have other programs for reaching the talented poor. They may or may not be great programs but probably more motivational for students.</p>
<p>Also, I’ve seen this in my extended family, straight A students in inner city schools that couldn’t get over 1100 on the SAT. Is it possible that many students believe they are college ready and good students but really are completely and utter unprepared? Colleges have school profiles so a lack of recruiters at certain schools may say a ton about how colleges view those schools and their ability to prepare students for college. </p>
<p>This is the biggest, most disappointing lie being told to today’s young generation of kids. They are being told that they are excellent, ready, competent and competitive when they are not. It’s all a lie that gets exposed the day they leave their coddling and corrupt high schools.</p>
<p>It strikes me (and I could be incorrect) that this article can falsely fuel the fire that somehow, colleges perpetuate the broader travesty of the dearth of college-ready kids from our inner-city schools. Whether or not a Princeton recruiter appears at the doorstep of any particular HS is supposed to mean what?</p>
<p>My alma mater urban school district only graduates 23% of 9th graders in four years. The estimate of how many are prepared for college success and graduation? Roughly 1-2% of those 9th graders. I’d be surprised of the number of HS graduates who go onto a 4 year college barely tops four figures each and every year. (in contrast, my suburban district probably sends more HS graduates to college than my alma mater school district)</p>
<p>I’m sorry but given the constant state of dysfunction, if a NU or Duke or Smith recruiter doesn’t darken the door of any high school, I don’t think it makes a single bit of difference in the aggregate. There’s an ongoing conflagration and people are wondering why a single cup of dousing water is missing?</p>
<p>For the record, I actually DO visit and recruit at the top high schools there on behalf of my HYP alma mater. In one of the largest school districts in the country, we maybe get a dozen apps. We maybe admit 0-2 people a year. City-wide college fairs exist. The lack of Ivy recruiters is a symptom, not the illness.</p>
<p>As well as their income and personal circumstances. My mother works 60+ hours a week just to pay rent and put food on the table. It isn’t as easy as one thinks when a parent has two kids, tons of debt and little to no time for rest.</p>
<p>Is it possible that the overworked (overwhelmed?) guidance counselors/administrators at public schools simply don’t have the time or inclination to request that college recruiters from the top universities visit their high schools?</p>
<p>The college recruitment visitation schedule at private schools can be fairly impressive (recruiters from 2-6 different colleges visiting everyday during the fall). Just putting together the calendar for that takes a lot of time.</p>
<p>On a related note…
I suspect that minority outreach college recruiters, on their own, will plan to visit the schools (large public, small private, everything in-between) where they’ve successfully found academically-qualified URMs in the past.</p>
<p>And the Pope is Catholic. Is this really news to anyone?</p>
<p>I went to a public Magnet high school with a 98% black enrollment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, and I don’t remember any college recruiters coming to my high school, even though Magnet students (typically 30-40 in a graduating class) and many of the resident students typically were URMs with grades and test scores good enough to get into these schools. In fact, my HS graduating class often sent people to top universities; we’re overrepresented in STEM fields, and most of my classmates have graduate degrees - remarkable for a class of first-generation students.</p>
<p>Buuut we had to find out about the colleges ourselves, or from our overburdened guidance counselors. If someone from Yale or Wellesley or Amherst had showed up and explained to me that I had a good shot at admission (I had no idea what my test scores meant, and no one explained them to me, but they were good enough to get into these schools even if I wasn’t an URM) and how financial aid worked…I may have went somewhere else for undergrad. I had never even heard of Posse in high school.</p>
<p>People argue that they don’t want to go to small inner-city schools because maybe 1-2% of the graduating class is prepared for top schools. But at a large inner-city high school of 2,000 students, 1% of the school might be larger than the graduating class of some of the small private high schools these recruiters visit often.</p>
<p>That’s one of the reasons I volunteer with low-income first-generation students now (regardless of race, although most of them are of color). I want them to be armed with the information I didn’t really have in high school.</p>
<p>You know who DID show up a lot? Military recruiters.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that most inner city parents are trapped in the inner city except in their own minds.</p>
<p>Oh, come on, please. This shows ignorance of the way class and money and economics works in the U.S. (and most Western societies). There are so many societal structures that make it very difficult for poor people (regardless of where they live) to rise to the middle-class.</p>
<p>Not to mention that recruiters who visit high-income and private schools get to know the staff, hear about particular kids, build up a relationship w/guidance, know what the grading system at the school means, etc. And kids who get in from that school provide a track record that lets recruiters know how other students are going to do from the school, which means a comfort level with students from that school. Don’t ever get the impression that the admissions process provides an equal playing field to everyone–it never has.</p>
<p>Nobody is saying the playing field is equal. I’ve never seen an equal playing field anywhere in life except in sports and games. In the real world, people seek advantages, higher ground, better luck and God’s blessings. Nobody wants just an equal playing field. And nobody is about creating one. Nobody.</p>
<p>My statement about not being trapped in the inner city is not a statement borne out of ignorance. It’s from experience. I understand that people hate change and hate the idea of having to change. People won’t leave their homes even when a hurricane or forest fire or tornado is headed their way. I read a stat once that about 80% of people around the world live and die their entire lives within 10-20 miles of where they were born. I also understand that its gets harder to move the older, sicker and more dependent a person becomes.</p>
<p>They aren’t forced to stay and it’s not wrong to stay however its a choice that has consequences. The poor are so much more mobile than they know but they have to be taught to seek independence to become mobile. So many are holding so tightly to what they have that they can’t reach for anything more. I don’t think I made a controversial statement. I just had a family member who has been poor all his adult life move from west Philly to Texas. He and his family left with nothing lined up, just sick of being poor at 50yo and he now has the best job of his life, a clean slate and the best residence of his life. I did that kind of thing when I was 17 so it was easier. I wasn’t emotionally and socially trapped. I just wanted out, left home and found a way. More need to do that but I counsel people and most are terrified of the idea of going out on their own. I don’t judge people but I do see the predictable life situations those choices may lead to. Just being real.</p>
<p>@Juillet: that describes my HS. I was fortunate enough that local alumni clubs from top schools hosted info sessions, spefically aimed at inner-city, minority students and families. I NEVER would have applied to my eventual HYP college w/o one of these sessions. Decades later, I can retn the favor by ensuring my college’s voice is heard at the top schools in my former school district. I wish your former HS was in my area – I’d visit it for sure. Sometimes these sources of legitimate viable applicants just cruise beneath the radar. Can you alert your college admissions office to include them on any recruiting trips or notifications to their guidance staff?</p>
<p>At the college fair I attended with my daughter (from the suburbs) in the city, many city schools brought bus loads of kids, with their counselors. Many of the groups had matching shirts so their chaperones could identify them and help them. I think the kids were better served in this environment than having the colleges visit the schools one by one when the counselors may not have been available to help.</p>
<p>My daughters attend schools in the suburbs. Yes, lots of schools come, usually over a lunch hour. Sometimes the kids have to miss class to attend. My daughter missed a presentation she signed up for as she thought it was ‘first lunch’ and it was ‘first period’ (I don’t think she really wanted to go). The counselors aren’t there so don’t hear the pitch. The kids can’t go to every presentation, or even 1/4 of them, because they’d miss too much class time. </p>
<p>Visiting schools isn’t the only recruiting option, and often not the best option.</p>
<p>I think Madaboutx is right, because his observations cross classes, ethnicity, and nationalities. There’s something about a local culture – be that geographical, economic, religious, or Other, that reinforces assumptions and is its own living organism. I say that neutrally, not negatively, as some settings are positive, but the dynamic of a “local” culture is very real. The “chain” charter schools set up in urban neighborhoods discovered this long ago, and their discovery is still operative. It’s visible in the fact that enormous energy must be spent within the walls of such schools to provide a counter-culture to the neighborhood, and the battle is ongoing. It’s so extreme that such schools are unwilling to risk the futures of the brightest of such students, and thus often heavily persuade them to “expatriate” to East Coast boarding schools where the dominant inbred culture is unquestionably academic.</p>
<p>That’s the situation at my kids’ school. They do see a fair number of college reps visit (upper middle class rural-suburban district) but it’s hard to miss a class to go and they are never at lunchtime or after school.</p>
<p>What are students really missing(other than their classes)if they don’t have exposure to these visits anyway? Aren’t they just traveling salesmen?</p>
<p>Ummmm no. Having excellent college recruiters go into less served populations is essential. You’ll have dozens and dozens of valedictorians and other great candidates who may have certainly heard of Harvard, Stanford or Yale – but in their mind, it’s just for “rich white kids”.</p>
<p>It makes a big difference if someone can tell them about the generous Fin Aid and that a school like that isn’t akin to travelling to Mars.</p>