Higher Education At The United States

“Who Gets to Graduate’ by Paul Tough, publish May, 2015 in the New York Times discusses. The story of a young girl’s mindset on college. It begins with her starting in college and first failure on a test. It highlighted the doubts she had in her abilities. This opening introduces the article’s man discussion, which involves low income students who want to earn a four year degree but experience “troubles” along the way. It then discusses statistics that show dropout rates are highest with low-income students. The author included ability versus economics status.

Another problem with American society is how hard it is for poor individuals to find success because “the rich are richer and the poor are poorer,” (Goode 88). The top 1% in America hold most of the money, leaving very little for those who are considered poor. This then becomes a never-ending cycle because middle and upper class kids attend very good schools and receive educations that will allow them to find success in life, and those kids who are in working and lower classes, go to over-crowded schools with very little resources. This makes it very difficult for these kids to take their educations further and go to college. I personally struggled with the transition from high school to college due to the education I received. I went to a Denver Public School which has a reputation of being “trashy” or “ghetto”. Luckily, as a whole Colorado has a good education system, but I know I wasn’t challenged enough in high

Students from low-income and first generation backgrounds often struggle in different academic subjects. Subsequently, students have lower expectations for themselves when it comes to academic achievement. The majority of first generation students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Seeing that, families work countless hours in factories and other places where they are underpaid because of the lack of educational opportunity they experienced themselves. According to Blackwell and Pinder (2014) in the United States higher education is becoming the outlet to different avenues of opportunity whether it is through social mobility or economic progress. While screening out possible topics of interest for a research proposal, one of the challenges I encountered in my field experience was the lack of college access education and funding for the families in the urban high schools. The first generation student family typically is unaware of the college process because the student’s parents have not attended an institution of higher education. Therefore, the students cannot count on their knowledge of the process. Eventually, when students reach the financial aid process it becomes difficult because parents usually cannot afford full tuition expenses and at the same time do not understand the process. In these situations, schools with a college going culture can prepare staff to provide extra support to students by developing professional training in college access, mentorship

Also, with most low income students coming from backgrounds of working parents, they are not given the privilege to see all the benefits of obtaining their education to build their life in a great career. As wonderfully stated by Bellin, “At a time when social mobility has stalled and the poorest are still suffering the effects of the last recession, investing in college access for students from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds should be a priority.” (134). When students are shown the importance of education, instead of just hearing about it, they are more likely to understand the benefits and continue on that path and pass their knowledge down to their children. All the lowest socioeconomic class needs is a boost in that positive direction to start the domino effect, so why do we choose to unethically give the cold shoulder to the class that currently has the most need for help and would benefit from it the

Everybody loves a good success story. When the underdog, usually a lower class high school age student, defies the odds and comes out on top, beating his circumstances to get where nobody thinks he should go, everyone goes crazy for it. So crazy that Hollywood gets in on the act, with movie productions such as The Blind Side, Life of A King, and Slum Dog Millionaire. Sadly, these stories are not commonplace, in fact, they are very few and far between. More often than not, students from lower class families struggle to get by, as a result putting school to the back burner. Less than 75% of students in lower income households graduate high school, and even fewer go onto college (http://nces.ed.gov). From this group, excuses began to come out, the main reason underlies them all; they have become a product of their circumstance. The position they were in restrained them, forcing only one path, a

Obtaining a degree remains one of the most important pathways to economic and social class in the United States (U.S.), regardless of rising tuition costs and the value of having a higher education coming in to question. Of the 20.6 million students enrolled in a college or university, first-generation college students represents about one-third (The Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2012). These group of individuals are more likely to encounter academic, financial, professional, cultural, and emotional difficulties (Sanez, Hurtado, Barrera, Wolf, and Yeung, 2007).

Jay Matthews presents a different view on college admission in his article Multiplying Benefits of College for Everybody by showing the positive impact college has had on many, specifically low-income women, to make a statement on how important equal opportunities are. Matthews says, “at the moment only about a third of American adults have graduated from college, and the economy appears to have room for many more” (143). Matthews also points out that “millions of low-income Americans, their data demonstrate, have the ability to use college to acquire new skills and capabilities that improve their lives, and their children’s lives, in significant ways” and that “higher education… still is one of

Pursuing an education in the United States is the challenge itself. As an international student I have been overcoming it each day. As a non-homogenous endless process, new unexpected things arise every day, requiring new strategies of dealing with them. My college experience has been a journey filled with trials and tribulations, which I have personally grown from in ways I never thought I could. Having a different status and way of thinking always put me on the spot and showed me how much harder I have to work.

The United States is a country where just about every one has chance to attend college. Unfirtantly not every one of those individuals has the oppurtinity to finish college. In

Pelina and Nicole were less hesitant to blame their college struggle on race directly. While they both understood that race creates barrier in the society they did not attribute that to their hardships faced in college. They listed other outside sources such as income, network, motivation, and one’s brain capacity. But both emphasize that class, not race, is the main contributor to student’s performance in college. Although it may not be direct, there is no doubt a relationship between class and race that we cannot ignore. In his article, Race, Socioeconomic Status and Health: Complexities, Ongoing Challenges and Research Opportunities, David Williams explain that while looking at the data from 1998 -2006 “Both blacks and Hispanics have levels of overall poverty that are two to three times higher than those of whites. Asians have poverty levels that are generally comparable to those of the white population” (pg. 6) . He goes further in explaining these disparities and mentions that “Among persons with income in the bottom 20% of all US households, for every dollar of

In the current model, students from working class homes often opt out of traditional universities for community college, or avoid college altogether in order to

In "A Degree is a Risky Investment But You're Still Better Off Going to College, Tim Levin (2016), he argues that all the students should go to a college rather than start a business because it’s the best way to reap the rate of return. However, Levin does not understand that for many low income students, going to a good college is high pressure. At the same time, this can limit their chances at financial success. In Levin's (2016) article, he thinks that students should go to college in order to change their environment especially low-income students, but the decision of whether to attend college is different for those who come from rich families and those who come from low income families. This is because the rich families or the upper

In the United States of America, education is a necessary component to surviving in everyday life and is the only path to success. Having an education in any country propels your chances and opportunities of success pass that of your competition. Education, especially higher education allows you to compete in the international industry that is our current and future economy. With this ability to compete then, comes the benefit of a better lifestyle opportunity. As your life then enriches from experiences and prospects afforded by your higher education your social status cultivates. Success in the United States of America develops and crafts around individual experience and yet education is a necessary component to achieve it.

“Society is stratified into social classes based on wealth, income, educational attainment, occupation, and social networks.”(Boundless) As all of the essays demonstrate there are a lot of different classes in the United States. As much as we want to believe that we live in an equal country, in reality we far from it. There are people barely hanging on to be able to eat enough and to find a place to sleep with other people on the other end of the spectrum who own multiple homes and waste enough food to feed many of the families on the opposite end of the spectrum. The thing that all of the classes have in common is the push for education and higher education specifically. There is a social pressure for everyone to become educated to the same standard. Just like the range of classes show, people are not all equal and need to be educated as so. Since we have determined that people are not truly equal why should they all be responsible for the same kind of debt? The education system should be changed to fit the variety of people that we have in this country and to decrease the amount of student loans.

The historical overview of American Higher Education in chapter one from the book “Student Services” A Handbook for Professions not only concentrates on higher education, but reflects on the nation’s social, political, legal, and administrative history. However, concerning historical centuries, undergraduate student’s attending college for the first time, really does remain a successful tradition in higher education particularly for high school students. High school students decide to attend college coming as first time undergraduate students, setting goals and working toward a degree of becoming successful and this is what I think is meant by undergraduate education remains a tradition. As the text mention “from 1700 to 1900 and between