College Ready at a Cost: Underrepresented Students Overwhelmed, Scared, Increasingly Stressed, and Coping

Abstract

As the push and expectation to attend college continues to increase, making the process of getting into college more competitive than ever before, there is a need to interrogate whether and how efforts to create a college-going culture and increase college readiness among students, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds, might have an adverse impact on students. This study illuminates 59 students’ voices who participated in a multisite descriptive case study examining the strong college-going culture and college readiness efforts at three racially and economically diverse urban public high schools in different regions of Texas. Although students revealed positive aspects of their schools’ efforts, this study focuses on some of the negative, unintended consequences related to how students felt and coped with being overwhelmed, scared, and increasingly stressed as a result of the narrow focus on college readiness. Such findings must be considered by scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike.

A Critical Civic Praxis Approach to Empowering Urban Youth Leaders in a Community-Based Organization

“…Yet, this aim fails to consider how the pursuit to higher education is often built on the false premise of meritocracy (Sampson et al, 2019; Baldridge, 2014; Lardier et al, 2019, 2020). Moreover, this negates the fact that many colleges and universities might not open necessary opportunities for these youth to create change, and in some cases, may even cause unnecessary stress and trauma on youth that already experience multiple barriers (Martinez & Huerta, 2020; Martinez et al, 2020). Additionally, as youth identify problems to solve within their communities, they also run the risk of seeing their communities from a deficit lens.…”

“…Several studies explore why disparities exist in these college-going trends. Research suggests contributing factors include deficit narratives and myths concerning meritocracy (Lardier et al, 2019), stress associated with college-going expectations (Martinez et al, 2020), pressure to meet familial expectations (Carey, 2018), and more feasible alternatives such as the military (Martinez & Huerta, 2020). Studies also demonstrate the benefits of increased college-going support (Tichavakunda & Galan, 2020) and high schools with strong college going cultures (Martinez et al, 2020) to combat disparities.…”

The Postsecondary Future Selves of Black and Latinx Boys: A Case for Cultivating More Expansive Supports in College-Going Schools

“…When analyzing the effectiveness of college-going cultures, two issues emerge. First, while these cultures support students to see themselves as potential collegians, schools that overwhelm students with college messaging may obscure the nuanced ways students interpret college-going information and apply it in their decision-making (Bryan et al, 2023; Gast, 2022; Martinez et al, 2020). Hence, college-going cultures are starting points for widening students’ ambitions, not definitive solutions to the challenges some youth face in determining future pathways.…”

“…Yet within these “college-for-all” schools, scholars also find negative unintended consequences of such intense efforts. In these schools, racially and ethnically marginalized students report clashes between their worldviews and those of their school (Noll, 2022) and describe feeling stressed and fearful of retribution from educators for not meeting college-going expectations (Martinez et al, 2020). In addition, attending college is but one domain of a broader interconnected adult life that drives adolescents to make future choices (Cooper, 2011; Nurmi, 1991; Oyserman, 2015).…”

“I get Emotional About it”: Teachers’ (Com)Passion in College-Going Efforts at Three Urban High Schools

“…Other avenues to consider in future research are the various ways in which not only teachers but other stakeholders exhibit emotions in the process of building a college-going culture. Martinez et al (2019) identified how students from the multi-site case study from which this one is based exhibited anxiety, fear, and stress as they prepared for college, despite what students described as a strong college-going culture on their campuses. These feelings were described as an unanticipated, negative consequence associated with the pressures to be college ready.…”