#aimhighruc

The above video appeared on the New York Times website last week. The clip, along with the Laura Pappono article it accompanies, “First Generation Students Unite,” reveals insights into the under-reported lives of first-generation college students. This group of young people are diverse, creative, smart, and proud. (By no coincidence, so are Aim High students and alumni – most of whom are or will be first-generation college students). Now, as the article reports, first-generation students are finding each other on campuses, supporting one another, organizing and creating change.

Watch for the end of the video. A few of the students interviewed drop some really profound points: 1. First-generation student are transforming the institutions of higher education, 2. Their presence, their efforts, their perspectives are closing America’s empathy gap, and helping to bring about a more just society.

This American Life just aired a radio story, by Channa Joffe-Walt, that compares the high school experiences of very different students who faced very different sets of advantages, disadvantages, and pressures. The piece, called “Three Miles” (embedded below) tells us a lot of what we already know about how different people respond to differently to adversity. The piece leaves us with a lot of what we already feel about those around us who face adversity – both hope and fear. 

What's new however, is how ordinary the story makes its protagonists sound. Many of us have known people who are victims of circumstance, of injustice, of an unequal society. Many of us have also know people who triumph in the face of adversity – people who persevere, despite a deck that is stacked against them like some impenetrable border fence. Yet, out of an innate resilience or some encounters with great mentors, they succeed. Pretty powerful stuff.

A Frank Bruni piece in Friday’s NYTimes – “How to Survive the College Admissions Process” – encapsulates the pressure-cooker, winner-take-all, high-stakes, make-or-break world that the college application process has become. And, Bruni bemoans this world:

What madness. And what nonsense.

FOR one thing, the admissions game is too flawed to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it.

The op-ed profiles a few students, most from well-to-do backgrounds, who persevered through the adversity of landing on their second, third, or fourth choice institutions. Bruni argues that the ‘quality’ of college that accepts you says nothing about your value as a person, nor about the heights you can reach, “Education happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways, and college has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional achievement or a life well lived.”

Nevertheless, our culture’s praise, its hagiography, of the ‘elite’ institutions subverts the very purpose of higher education. “College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that’s lost in the admissions mania, which sends the message that college is a sanctum to be breached — a border to be crossed — rather than a land to be inhabited and tilled for all that it’s worth.”

The piece ultimately makes a point that is too seldom made: you can succeed, you are valuable, you can discover ideas, you can have new experiences at a lot of different colleges – not just the ‘top-tier,’ three-hundred-year-old, $50k/year universities. 

But, some important questions remain. First, maybe the elite institutions are not the only places where students can succeed, but what are the places? How do students identify the places that have the right mix of support, academic rigor, and opportunity?

The students that Bruni profiles, students from relatively well-to-do backgrounds, had some freedom to explore and try things. While those students might have faced some disappointment when they were not accepted to their top-choice schools, they had options. Students from lower income and minority backgrounds, however, feel high stakes not simply based on peer pressure, but also because, if they land in the ‘wrong’ school, they do not have as much to fall back on.

The take home message is this: You should aspire to schools that are right for you, not those that are right in the eyes of our consumerist culture. How to find those schools, however, is a process of discernment and introspection and a process of dialogue with parents, teachers, counselors, friends, and, hopefully, Rutgers–Camden Aim High.

Attention to all: Aim High lives on!

For the past few months the life of the  Rutgers-Camden Aim High Academy hung in the balance. We were uncertain whether the program's funding would be renewed for a fifth year. Since 2010, our program has been providing New Jersey's rising high-school juniors with an unparalleled summer experience, designed to prepare them to be successful, inquisitive, creative, great college students. This year, as time marched forward however, our concern grew that the program would not survive the political and governmental budgetary decision process. But, much to our excitement, one week ago, we received word that the the program would, in fact, be renewed for 2015.  

Rejoice! Aim High has nine (or, at least five) lives!

OK, now that that's out of our system, we need to get to work building an incredible program for forty students this summer. Because we received word on funding later than normal, we are a little behind schedule getting the application process underway. But, stay tuned – that is coming soon.