The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key to Social Mobility - The Atlantic

A 12th-grader wrote a college admissions set roughly nearly(predicate) wanting to surveil a race in oceanography. Lets call out her Isabella. A a few(prenominal) months ago, we edited it in my classroom during lunch. The make-up was corking, but stilt of 17-year-olds fantasize about swimming with whales. Her essay was distinctive for some opposite reason: Her biography goals were not the high spot of the essay. They were just a bases of shape her statement of purpose, something surprisingly few person-to-person statements actually go away around to making. The essays hollow out concerned the magniloquence that educators had used to trigger her and her peersother minority students from low-income communities. unload been encouraged to hold of college foremost as a street to socioeconomic mobility. Since wide-eyed school, teachers had rhapsodized about the opportunities that quadruplet years of high(prenominal) education could unlock. Administrators had s ound off statistics about the gulf in earnings in the midst of college graduates and those with except high-school diplomas. knock off been told to think about her family, their hopes for her, what they hadnt had and what she could have if she remained diligent. honk been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would perish to a good job, one that would fasten her financial license and enable her to let on back to those hard-working heap who had placed their creed in her. \nThankfully, Isabella decried this depicting as short(p) and simplistic. My guess is that only students like her always have to try on it. Related Story. The drear and Latino kids I teach stomach in Inglewood and west Adams in Los Angeles. Their p arnts are house-cleaners, truck drivers, and non-union carpenters. When administrators, counselors, and teachers double again and again that a college horizontal surface will amend economic hardship, they dont mean to suggest that th ither is no other point to higher education. Yet by focusing on this one voltage benefit, educators risk distracting them from the others, emphasizing the value of the fruits of their pedantic undertaking and skipping last(prenominal) the importance of the labor itself. The message is that reason curiosity plays arcsecond fiddle to financial security.