What is college? To Madison Comer, a confident 6-year-old, it is a very big place. “It’s tall,” she explained, outlining the head of Tuffy, the North Carolina State University mascot, with a gray crayon. “It’s like high school, but it’s higher.”
Elizabeth Mangan, who plans to be a veterinarian because she loves her puppy, pointed out that she, too, would attend North Carolina State. “Me and Madison are going to the same college,” she said.
And what is college? “It’s someplace where you go to get your career.”
Photo: Bloomberg/ Brent Lewin
Billy Nalls, meanwhile, was drawing curving horns and jagged teeth on Rameses the Ram on a paper pennant representing the University of North Carolina. “I’m drawing him as angry,” he said. In college, Billy wants to learn to make a Transformer (“It’s like a robot that comes from Cybertron”). And what happens at college? “You get smarter and smarter every day.”
CLASS OF 2030
Matriculation is years away for the Class of 2030, but the first graders in Kelli Rigo’s class at Johnsonville Elementary School in rural Harnett County, North Carolina, already have campuses picked out. Three have chosen the US Military Academy at West Point, and one has chosen Harvard. In a writing assignment, the children will share their choice and what career they would pursue afterward. The future Harvard applicant wants to be a doctor. She can’t wait to get to Cambridge because “my mom never lets me go anywhere.” The mock applications they’ve filled out are stapled to the bulletin board.
The age-old question is: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ You always ask kids that,“ Rigo said. ”We need to ask them, ‘How will you get there?’ Even if I am teaching preschool, the word ‘college’ has to be in there.”
Forget meandering — the messaging now is about goals and focus. “It’s sort of like, if you want your kids to be in the Olympics or to have the chance to be in the Olympics,” said Wendy Segal, a tutor and college planner in Westchester County, New York, “you don’t wait until your kid is 17 and say, ‘My kid really loves ice skating.’ You start when they are five or six.”
Credit President Barack Obama and the Common Core Standards for putting the “college and career ready” mantra on the lips of K-12 educators across the country. Or blame a competitive culture that has turned wide-open years of childhood into a checklist of readiness skills. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that college prep has hit the playground set.
CAMPUS TOURS FOR FOURTH GRADERS
One has only to search Pinterest to see the trend. Dozens of elementary school teachers share cute activities that make the road to college as clear as ABC. One cut-and-paste work sheet has students using circles and squares to sequence the steps. There are four: mail your application, get accepted, graduate high school and “move in, go to class and study hard!” “College weeks” have become as much a staple of elementary school calendars as the winter band concert. And campus tours are now popular field trips.
Charter schools have long put the college message front and center. For at least a decade, they have been taking low-income students to visit campuses, to provide incentive for hard work and offer concrete knowledge about the mysterious world of their wealthier peers. Now everyone wants to check out higher education options.
A four-year-old program in Santa Cruz County, California, takes 3,000 fourth graders on a single day in May to a local campus for tours, information sessions and a sampling of classes, including sociology and women’s studies. Rice University, which has a teacher resource page (“Picture your students at Rice”), last year led 91 elementary and middle school tours and sent out 357 classroom packets with activities, literature and iron-on transfers for making T-shirts, nearly triple the number two years earlier.
The University of Maryland has been deluged with requests. After leading 8,000 children on guided tours in 2012-13, the program director for visitor services, Betty Spengler, said they had to limit slots. “We had so many requests, we were doing tours five days a week,” she said. “It became impossible to sustain.” She hopes a new teacher-resource site unveiled last month will help those who can’t get tour dates.
A LITTLE BIT OF A PANIC
Reaching out to children years before serious college consideration can seed brand awareness for the university. Or amp up an already anxiety-laced process.
“Children need to make mistakes and find themselves in dead ends and cul-de-sacs,” said Joan Almon, a founder of the Alliance for Childhood who worries that the early focus cuts short self-exploration. “I’m concerned that we are putting so much pressure around college that by the time they get there, they are already burned out.”
Some agree. A number of colleges refuse to host tours for children in grades below high school, expressing sentiments similar to those on the Boston College website, which notes a “desire not to contribute to the college admissions frenzy.”
In some quarters, that frenzy is well underway by middle school. The perception that it’s harder to get into top colleges has parents starting earlier.
“It’s created a little bit of a panic,” said Megan Dorsey, a private counselor and founder of College Prep in Sugar Land, Texas. She points to a state law requiring public campuses to admit the top percentages of each high school class, making admission to the University of Texas, Austin, and Texas A&M particularly tough. “I see a lot of parents with junior high-age students who are really concerned,” she said. “They want to know: Before high school, what should they be doing.”
The impulse to line up achievements and to consider how a child’s record will play on a college application is contagious, said Mary Meyer, whose sons are in fifth and eighth grades in the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District near Houston. “It is the game we are playing these days. It is too much, but I don’t see it changing, so you have to join in or you will be left behind.”
When her boys join the science club, volunteer at the food bank, even serve on the elementary school safety patrol, Meyer said, she can’t help but view it as a steppingstone to college. “You have to have this resume built, or your kids will not even be looked at.”
Barbara Poole is a seventh-grade English teacher at Rachel Carson Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia, which is one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs and home to the perennially top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. She estimates that 60 percent of her students already know where they want to go to college.
Poole was among the first to pilot a middle-school version of Naviance, a college-prep subscription service that high schools offer their students. It’s known for its scattergrams, which reveal the acceptance history of the school’s students to specific colleges by test score and grade-point average. Poole said the software’s resume-building feature — it allows students to input extracurricular activities, awards, volunteer work and more — has made her students “more aware” of building that extracurricular record for college.
“We talk about endurance,” she said. “If you are in band one year, but you don’t do it eighth-grade year, it shows.” Even as Poole is “reminding them that they are just kids,” she also tells them, “It is competitive out there and what can you do and what are you doing other than going home and playing video games?” She nudges them. “You are 12 years old. Do you give back?”
OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE AFFLUENT?
This may sound overwrought, but Joan Nachman, the guidance counselor at Magnolia Elementary School, points out that colleges want Advanced Placement courses on transcripts, but high school students can’t just sign up. They must prepare with honors courses in middle school, which means strong work in elementary school. “You have to set the groundwork now,” she said.
Magnolia draws from a middle-class, African-American and Hispanic community where only about a quarter of adults have a college degree. Parents may not realize how choices now shape opportunities later, which is why last year the school added “Kids2College,” a national college-awareness program, to the curriculum.
“We want to make certain children understand that they have options” and “the criteria for those options,” Phyllis Gillens, the principal, said.
Research shows that the college advantage is growing only for students from educated, high-income families. Since 1970, the rate at which affluent students earn bachelor’s degrees has nearly doubled (from 40 percent to 77 percent) while it has barely moved (from six percent to nine percent) for low-income students, according to a report out this month from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy.
When Rigo graduated from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, in 2009, she became — and remains — the only person in her family, which includes seven siblings, to earn a college degree. It didn’t come easily. It took eight years at three institutions in two states. “I was lost,” said Rigo, who dropped out first semester, aghast to discover textbooks cost US$600. “I didn’t have anybody to talk to about that.”
A well-organized mother of three who likes colorful charts and careful work (students must draw their college pennants in pencil before using crayon), Rigo has a calm teacher voice that grows sturdy when discussing the college project she has created for her first graders at Johnsonville. She wants students to know what she did not: the effort, cost and planning required to earn a degree. “They have to understand there are lots of steps, that you can’t all of a sudden be a teacher.”
How you view the early start on college planning depends on where you sit.
Rigo became convinced of its importance after working as a teacher’s assistant in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, public schools, where parents were professors, doctors and lawyers. Census data show three-quarters of adults there have college degrees. At Johnsonville Elementary, most of her students would be the first in their families to attend college.
“When I came here,” she said, “I realized they were not getting the same message.”
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