Do special pre-college programs support students from under-represented groups or segregate them?

Student Lounge College Life
1

I have been thinking about this question, so I am throwing it out here for conversation.

When we toured colleges, we often noticed that the students in the dining halls were sitting in visually similar groups- people in sports team uniforms together at a table, a table of Asians, a table of black students, etc.

Here is a description of one college’s start-of-school procedures, which may or may not be representative of other schools.

This summer, there are special programs open only to entering freshmen who are people of color or first generation. They arrive on the campus weeks before their white peers, and they live and take classes together during the summer.

At the end of this summer, there are a variety of freshmen orientation programs. One of them is designed just for some of the athletic teams, so that they may practice together and bond together… while the other freshmen are off doing other programs.

Then, the students come together in dorm groups that are designed to be a diverse microcosm of the college.

But is it too late? You bond with the first people you get to know at college. Sure, you can bond with others later, but still. In this case, your first friends are “like” you in terms of background and race and sport.

Is this more of a good thing, because it helps prepare students for college and helps them share an experience with others of similar background, giving them emotional strength? Or does it work against the goals of integration and diversity?

I see both perspectives, and I am wondering what others think, including students who have experienced such programs.

2

My daughter’s school has programs like that too - early start, women in engineering groups, sports camps, band camps, international orientation, etc… All before the official week long freshman orientation. Personally I think it’s OK because it helps people make connections with folks who are going through a more similar experience before making broader connections. I don’t see it as a hinderance at all. I also don’t think that you don’t necessarily bond with the first people you meet, and definitely not to the extent that it would impede getting to know others.

3

I personally think it is great. Everyone wants to belong to a group, and most of the time it is with people who are similar to us, may it be race, sex, ECs, academic interest. It can be lonely for students who are first generations, URMs, etc. By offering those activities, it gives them an opportunity to bond with others who may understand better of their challenges. It can be comforting for them to have some build in friends before start of school, and give them confidence to branch out later to form other friendships.
I was one of few Asians at my LAC many years ago. The school had one Asian organization back then. I went to few functions, especially around holiday time, but I was just as happy to hang out with other students.

4

I think the orientation programs are great because they offer extra support and guidance to kids who may need help navigating college life ie; 1st gen students. And schools who make a concerted attempt to recruit and enroll 1st gen and URM students, want to make sure they set them up for success.
The Posse program was formed in part because they knew that students that have a support group in college fare better. So instead of enrolling random kids who are 1st gen or URM, the school enrolls a ‘Posse’ who meet and firm bonds months before school even starts, and then continue to meet as a group thru 4 years of college. I remember a post here saying that during a tour at Midd, they were concerned to see a group of African American kids eating together. It turned out that is was a Posse meeting.

5

I used to think it was a negative on a college tour to see students of color gathered together in the dining hall. But then I read the book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race” by Beverly Daniel Tatum. Before reading it, I viewed the concept of like groups sticking together like that as a negative. But as @wisteria100 mentions, it is actually a great support (in a formalized Posse type meeting or informally so).

Anything that can help students get acclimated and make connections on campus is a positive.

6

D2 bonded deeply with two other kids at admitted students weekend, stayed in touch over the summer. In the first days of the school year, all that evaporated. Given the larger campus community, classes starting, her EC interest in music groups, and her actual roommates, she found new friends. Her roomates were diverse in all respects. Two are among her close post college friends.

The only thing I question about some special pre college sessions is how that affects self perception. Different colleges handle it differently. Some, Ithink, more successfully. At D2’s the summer stem program was partly to give stem kids a leg up and included more than just URM, low SES, first gen.

7

Does anyone ever take notice when a table of white kids sit together in the cafeteria? It was certainly the norm when I went to college. No one ever questioned whether they were isolating themselves from the non-white kids. For most kids, lunch time gives is the opportunity to pause and decompress midday- during my time in college it was a simple time to make one of many connections. During my college years, I also bonded closely with students who were from the south or from my state, or in my major (in addition to other friend-groups). But looking at those groups from the outside, doesn’t look “obvious” because they’re not visually noticeable. My daughter will be an URM at UNC Chapel Hill, and I am comforted by the idea that, in addition to all the wonderful non-minority students she will develop friendships with , she will support of kids who also have the common experience of being an URM at a PWI. That connection was a lifeline for me 30 years ago when I left the safety net of my hometown and family.

8

I was going to recommend Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together In the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, as well. It addresses questions like this adroitly.

My take is that these programs can be especially helpful for students who need extra support to adjust to the college environment. According to the Posse Foundation, they started the scholarship organization because of a low-income student from an urban environment who’d been smart enough to get into an elite school, but dropped out after some time. He said something like “I never would’ve dropped out of college if I’d had my posse with me.” The implication was that he didn’t have many other people like him around to commiserate with, and the experience was stressful for him on top of all the normal concerns of a new student at an elite school.

There’s also a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, written by Peace’s former roommate at Yale. Peace was a young black man from Newark who got into Yale, but ended up dropping out after a year or so. The author is pretty blunt about it: Robert Peace never really felt at home on Yale’s campus; he felt ostracized and very different, and spent more time hanging out with the townies from New Haven than his own classmates.

Most students of color, or first-generation students, or students from low-income or other disadvantaged backgrounds generally make friends of many backgrounds. (Really, in most cases, they have choice: if they stuck only to their own groups, they’d have very small pools of friends.) Being in a specialized program doesn’t really prevent them from doing that. These pre-freshman summer programs usually give them a home base to touch back to and a place to go when their identity issues begin to creep up in many forms over years. But I’ve never met anyone from one of those groups who went to an elite college and came out only befriending other people who were in that pre-college summer program. (And for a more extreme example, I went to an HBCU all four years of college, but I have friends of many races and backgrounds.)

I also disagree with the idea that you “bond with the first people you get know” at college. That’s not true universally. You may decide that the first people you meet don’t have similar interests; you may meet long-term friends in your later years; you may have a mix of friends that you made across all your years. This idea that you’re going to immediately imprint on the first gang of 4-6 others you meet freshman year and become lifelong friends, I think, gives freshmen unrealistic expectations (that then go on to stress them out when it’s Thanksgiving and they haven’t found their lifelong gang yet). I met most of my “lifelong gang” in graduate school and in my first post-grad school job, in my late 20s. I barely talk to most of the people I knew in college.

9

My minority child never had many friends from her own ethnicity (Chinese). I asked her if she interacted with international students (from Taiwan or PRC) at college and she said no, the language barrier was too great.

When I was in law school, they had a program for some of the minority students. Extra tutoring and help was provided with research and writing papers, help finding jobs, etc. What I notice was that the program did isolate the students. It scheduled some of their review sessions at the same time the professors scheduled review sessions (not on purpose, I’m sure) and then didn’t reschedule. I think the students would have been better served if they’d been encouraged to go to the main review session and then had an extra session where they could ask any questions they still had. It was very noticeable when they did not show up for the main sessions, led by the professor!

10

Could it be both?

11

I think it’s both. College is the time to integrate with everyone who is different from you. Learn about new countries, languages, economic backgrounds everything. At the same time, I can definitely see that someone who comes from a group that isn’t well represented needing a support system. It’s important for them to know that while some people may appear to be different they may in fact be similar. It’s also good for new students to think that not everyone comes from the same place and the school is there to understand and support their needs.
It’s great the schools do this for incoming students. It speaks volumes about the support they are offering.

12

Most of the colleges that have these programs, – and a lot of them do, with some have been tweaking them for over 30 years, have found that the retention rates alone support them.

There are so many things for all students to navigate, but many more for kids who are outside the dominant culture (POC, not affluent, without college educated parents). Giving them a space in which to talk about that is really important as is preparing them for that.

13

Just read an article about an incoming student at Georgia Southern accidentally sending a racist text to her future roommate. I quietly worry about my daughter’s transition to college and am thankful these support networks exist.

14

But does that actually happen on some campuses, where there is high fraternity/sorority participation, most participants pledge in their first semester, and the chapters and pledges tend to choose each other on superficial similarity (i.e. where the fraternities/sororities tend to be highly (self-)segregated)?

15

@juillet
Robert Peace is a good book suggestion, but he actually did well academically at Yale and graduated. Had other issues though.

16

My oldest participated in a bridge program when she started in 2013. They had the summer program, and then a few functions freshman year. She could have applied to be a mentor within the program after that but didn’t. Her best friends by the end of junior year were the others in her major (Anthropology, so a small department within her relatively small LAC, there were 5 in her graduating class. It gave her a chance to know who some of the other URM were on campus, and they did socialize occasionally, but it didn’t get in the way of other friendships. I don’t think they should have a separate orientation session, though perhaps some activities during orientation would be ok, though they then have to choose between those and the regular activities.

30 years earlier, I was on campus early for ROTC, as were members of various sports teams. Many of us became close friends, but that would have happened with the structure of ROTC anyway. I was glad to have that peer group, because I had another URM as a roommate who I didn’t particularly get along with and with whom I had almost nothing in common other than being black (think Black Panther wanna-be).

17

@ucbalumnus I hadn’t even thought of sororities/fraternities.

Personally, I find fraternities and sororities to be something I was never interested in and not happy if my kiddos wanted to go down that path. But for some, it’s a large and important part of college life. One of my nephews explained why he was joining one and he had his own fairly good reasons. Not for our immediate family (I hope) but yes, I agree with you.

18

@wisteria100, you’re right, I remembered that part wrong! He actually did well academically at Yale and graduated, then went back to Newark and got involved in the drug trade again before he was murdered. But I do still think he had a lot of trouble fitting in at Yale, and that was potentially a contributing factor to him going back to the streets in Newark.

19

I think is a good thing. Those programs often offer a great benefits as well as a support system of people that may understand your experiences that other people may not. I think having that network of people will always be valuable and it is not unusual to find students explore different cultural or affinity based organizations and such when they are in college. At my school it was known as the PLUS program and it had a whole ton of great perks – visits to the DC office, personal mentorship with professors, offers to get involved in research, and lots of fun day trips like bowling/Busch Gardens as a way to bond with other students.

I am going to digress and say that in a lunch room scenario with the segregated student body would make me personally a bit uncomfortable. I personally prefer having a diversity of friends and having separated lunch tables like that would make me feel like it would be difficult to try something new or remind me of a very clique-y high school, which college is a really good opportunity to break out of. Otherwise I think affinity groups are a great way to meet people.

20

This- but also, different students handle it differently: what feels welcoming and supportive to one can feel presumptuous and constricting to another.

One of my collegekids went to an LAC that is particularly proud of the diversity of the student body (including economic diversity). Of the students who did the pre-summer program, the majority later volunteered to help run it for subsequent classes- b/c they had found it so helpful. Parts students have mentioned to me include:

=knowing other students from similar backgrounds- and seeing how many other students aren’t “rich” (also heard this from students who didn’t doe a summer program, but discovered it when they turned up for on-campus student jobs & saw so many of their peers there)
=feeling comfortable with being on a college campus
=knowing where things are / how the meal system works / etc, so when the bigger crowd arrives you look like you know what’s going on/look cool
=already knowing the support systems, so you don’t have to ask: meeting/having a warm welcome from various support people makes it easier to go up to them later; knowing that the academic supports are used even by good students (eg, the writing center in the Library; the student run math Lab, etc), so it’s not a sign of failure to use them.
=introduction to ‘imposter syndrome’ and being reminded that they really did belong there

Apparently by 3rd year- when everybody is properly stuck into their major- it had become just one of their social pods: they had friend groups from their dorm (a big thing at that college), from their major, from their big ECs, from their posse group, etc- same as the rest of the student body.

Fwiw, although there was some self-segregation in the dining room (at any given time you could see an all-X table), according to my one, only 2 groups stayed truly homogenous at meals throughout the 4 years: a handful each of (international) Korean and Chinese students.