Who is Underserved?

There is some misconception about who is underserved. In short, I think about underserved in education to mean a student does not have robust access to the resources needed for success in education. That does include funding, but there are many more ways that students do not have access to these critical resources.

For example, we know that colleges are very concerned about college-level math (most likely Calculus regardless of major) and if students can write (also regardless of major). They can easily determine this from the SAT and if students have taken Calculus, AP US History, and AP Eng Lang & Comp. But, for quite a few public high schools, they do not have qualified and trained teachers to teach those courses. So unless you can demonstrate those competencies in another way, you may not be admitted to the colleges that will give you money.

We also know that students are more successful in colleges when they have professors and other support staff that look like them. Being the “only” or “first” leads to feelings of isolation that leads to dropping out. This is part of what we call social fit. Social fit ensures students stay at their universities through graduation. What’s also important to know here is that most colleges don’t graduate students on-time (four years) or at all, and this has NOTHING to do with the student. So if your heart is set on going to a university with a 10% graduation rate, you really want to make sure everything fits. Where this qualifies as an underserved student problem is that some students only have the option of attending such universities or they are working with support personnel who can only support admissions to these schools. Frankly, most of these schools have extremely high admissions rates. We also find that some students are steered to these schools with messages such as “this is just as good as” the selective school that will fund them or why go to college anyway. Overresourced students don’t receive those messages and they are typically not any more high-achieving than anyone else.

I think it’s important to spell this out to first remove the stigma of being underserved. This is something happening to you, not who you are. And we unfortunately live in a world that blames people for the circumstances they were put it as though it was in their control. The other reason it’s important to spell this out is because our services are specifically geared to students who are underserved. We make things cost-effective because we are anticipating needs of particular students and pointing all of our efforts on those things. When families who are not underserved work with us, they tend to want to steer things in a different direction to meet their particular needs. While important, it’s not what we do.

To also be transparent, I am most interested in ensuring success for underserved students in colleges because we need more professionals in fields that open doors for large swaths of other underserved students.