Top Student, Top School? How Social Class Shapes Where Valedictorians Go to College
Alexandria Walton Radford
Language: English
Pages: 293
ISBN: 022604100X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Most of us think that valedictorians can write their own ticket. By reaching the top of their class they have proven their merit, so their next logical step should be to attend the nation’s very best universities. Yet in Top Student, Top School?, Alexandria Walton Radford, of RTI International, reveals that many valedictorians do not enroll in prestigious institutions. Employing an original five-state study that surveyed nine hundred public high school valedictorians, she sets out to determine when and why valedictorians end up at less selective schools, showing that social class makes all the difference.
Radford traces valedictorians’ paths to college and presents damning evidence that high schools do not provide sufficient guidance on crucial factors affecting college selection, such as reputation, financial aid, and even the application process itself. Left in a bewildering environment of seemingly similar options, many students depend on their parents for assistance—and this allows social class to rear its head and have a profound impact on where students attend. Simply put, parents from less affluent backgrounds are far less informed about differences in colleges’ quality, the college application process, and financial aid options, which significantly limits their child’s chances of attending a competitive school, even when their child has already managed to become valedictorian.
Top Student, Top School? pinpoints an overlooked yet critical juncture in the education process, one that stands as a barrier to class mobility. By focusing solely on valedictorians, it shows that students’ paths diverge by social class even when they are similarly well-prepared academically, and this divergence is traceable to specific failures by society, failures that we can and should address.
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They did not prepare for entrance exams either in a class or on their own. Students in this category did not come from a particular social class background, but they shared other characteristics. All had already taken the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) or the SAT for admission to a special academic program and so they had an idea of how they would perform. They also were confident in their test-taking abilities and/or did not aspire to attend chapter three 48 a most-selective college. As one young.
Earlier, HSVP interviews suggest that more-affluent parents were 68 chapter four more involved in the fi nancial aid process and sometimes even took over the responsibility for this process from their children. Bloom (2007) also fi nds that in low- SES households, students are primarily responsible for acquiring fi nancial aid information and that their parents know and fi nd out little about aid. A recent investigation shows that use of the new net cost calculators (which allow individuals.
Fellow church members and job supervisors also provided suggestions to a couple of valedictorians. Of course, the advice these social network members gave was based on their own experiences, which were shaped by their own social class background. And, because valedictorians’ social networks differ by socioeconomic status the suggestions received from social network members varied as well. Lastly, it is worth noting that despite reports about the growing use of private college consultants.
Four-year institution. Other high achievers appeared to give momentary thought to the idea of attending a two-year college before rejecting it for one of the following two reasons: First, the most common explanation these students provided was that they sought a four-year college degree (“there’s no way I would have stopped at the two-year”) and had heard that transferring credits from a two-year to a four-year college could be difficult. “I knew eventually I would be getting my four-year.
This chapter examine whether individual valedictorians had at least one offer of admission from a given type of institution if they applied to that type of institution. To determine how valedictorians rather than applications fare at the six types of institutions identified at the outset of this chapter, this section shifts the unit of analysis from applications back to valedictorians. This valedictorian analysis assesses whether students who submitted at least one application to a given.