Matriculation is years away for the Class of 2030, but the first graders in Kelli Rigo’s class at Johnsonville Elementary School in rural Harnett County, N.C., already have campuses picked out. Three have chosen West Point and one Harvard. In a writing assignment, the children will share their choice and what career they would pursue afterward. The future Harvard applicant wants to be a doctor. She can’t wait to get to Cambridge because “my mom never lets me go anywhere.” The mock applications they’ve filled out are stapled to the bulletin board.
This may be these rural kids only opportunity to get college on their radar. I know it looks early but think about our kids. My D, who is now at Yale, has been going to Yale’s campus with me since she was 18 months. She did not need a field trip there. Also, she’s been to Harvard, Brown, University of Maryland College Park, Virginia Commonwealth and many other schools for different functions and/or sports competitions. For those kids that college is not a part of their everyday life, this just lets them know it is an option. Some may not even go to college but may go into more vocational fields such as carpentry, cosmetology or mechanics. But it gives them some perspective. I doubt they are any more making them ready for college than I was taking me kid there at 18 months.
As far as UT goes, there are reasons to cheer as the class turned out much better than I would have expected with the current crop of leaders at UT. This said, it is a glass half full or half empty situation as some real prospects disappeared to join teams where the fun of playing and being an athlete will be more tangible. Murray was a hard to land prospect with his ATM legacy, but losing the other three stars is directly attributable to the new regime.
This class is not about to change my mind about Strong being the wrong choice for UT. Many of those kids have come to Texas because of the tradition of excellence. The smartest ones have followed Soso and Mack and were not fooled.
Anyway, my feelings changed once I realized what kind of school this was and what the NYT article meant by it. NYT has also run a series of articles about the college-admissions race reaching all the way back to kindergarten in Manhattan’s tony prep schools, but it’s less of a healthy awareness of college and more of a frenzied competition that has preschoolers living ever more regimented lives to put them on the track to Harvard at age 3.
This is different, though; this is about children who maybe would’ve never otherwise been exposed to the idea of college having a teacher who is imbuing that dream in them from a young age. It’s difficult to explain - but those fancy prep school kids in Manhattan usually have college-educated parents and would never have to worry about that not being on their radar. But to a lower-class kid from rural NC, somebody has to put it into their head. I actually didn’t start thinking about college myself until I was about 16 years old, and it was also a teacher who put it into my head, and it’s hard to describe to people who didn’t experience it what it’s like not to grow up with the confidence that you will go to college. It’s not the next natural step after high school for you; maybe you never even thought about it or considered that people like you go to college. You can’t aspire to what you don’t know about. But once I started getting catalogs in the mail and seeing those pictures of grassy lawns and students chilling out reading Shakespeare and Faulkner and discussing philosophy together - the idea sounded wonderful and I was hooked.
But anyway, when I was in college I used to volunteer at an elementary school that was doing something like this, and that was part of my role there - to show the kids that people that looked like them did indeed go to college, and to talk to them about what it was like. When I was in grad school at Columbia, I noticed little elementary school field trips of urban kids in a rainbow of races trooping through campus to see what a campus was like. They always made me smile.
BUT I agree that the focus needs to always be about simple exposure, just putting the ideas in their heads - not about sowing anxiety or putting pressure on the kids. It should be a positive motivator to succeed, but fifth graders shouldn’t be worrying about whether their grades are good enough to get them into Harvard just yet. More like “I want to keep my grades up because I’d love to go to Rice someday!”
David Oladimejij, 11, plans to attend. “At first I wanted to go to Harvard,” he said. “In the news I heard that Harvard is the best college, but I think Maryland is the best.”
The focus should be on parents—on convincing parents that college is a viable option for their kids. Parents should know about financial aid very early on. They should know about programs like Questbridge.
I think that some parents will tell a 6 year old who wants to go to Harvard that H is a college for rich people or even that colleges aren’t “for people like us.” We might even convince a few parents that it’s worth it for them to go back to school.
My D did research where she wanted to go to school at age 7. She asked our local volunteer librarian for help. How she kept a straight face, I’ll never know. They looked at college guides together. Knowing our wonderful old volunteer librarian, she spent most of her time getting across the idea that if you wanted to know something, there were resources to help you. At that point my D thought she wanted a particular career. She wanted to know the best place to study for that career. D came home and told us where she was going to college and why.
Funny thing is…while her chosen career is not the one she planned on at age 7, she went to the college she chose at age 7!
