‘A National Admissions Office’ for Low-Income Strivers

September 16, 2014 1:51 PM

College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go. Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid. The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college. Continue reading the main story “Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.” - The New York Times takes a look at Questbridge, "which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions." (SL NYTIMES)
posted by beisny (27 comments total)

As a Low-Income Slacker, who's looking out for me?
posted by cacofonie at 1:53 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Any chance they'll address the hoards of fraudulent schools exploiting the federally funded financial aid system by dealing with anyone trying to get into state schools? Or do they plan on staying elite?
posted by jeffburdges at 2:51 PM on September 16, 2014

I actually applied for QuestBridge in the late aughts, though I messed up my application in a really dumb way and it's joined the long list of regrets/mistakes I've made that I have. In another universe, I would have actually completed my application and who knows what might have happened? Maybe I might've actually completed a degree in four years, rather than in (hopefully) seven split up over two institutions. For sure, a "combination of seeing what can be done and then having someone you respect telling you you can do it" would've been real nice. I'm also really pleased to see that the number of participating colleges has expanded to 35; when I was applying, it was something like 9 or so.


Crucially, the program promises a scholarship not just for one year but for four. As Mrs. McCullough, the organization’s chief executive, said, “Unless you make that kind of promise to the students and their parents, they’re going to worry, ‘Will the schools really pay for all four years?’ ”

Colleges balked at the promise at first. “What if we commit to a full scholarship and then the mom wins the lottery?” as Thomas Parker, the retired admissions dean at Amherst and an early QuestBridge supporter, put it.


Really, Thomas? That's your concern?
posted by coolname at 3:00 PM on September 16, 2014 [11 favorites]

cacofonie--assuming this captures your definition and experience as a slacker I think the best we can hope is that you are on your own. Right now lets save the resources and energy for the low income non-slackers . Perhaps your day will come. I found this article hopeful and will be passing it on and posting it. Thanks
posted by rmhsinc at 3:11 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

When I was applying to undergrad, I was desperately interested in going to MIT (and I had the chops for it, to be honest). I actually started the application process, but halfway through it, my parents talked me out of it--too much money, they said. Made just as much sense to go to a state school and graduate with no debt rather than thousands of dollars. Of course, my parents hadn't ever been to college, so how was I to know.

I consider it one of the great regrets of my life that I went to a high school in a depressed area and no one--not guidance counselors, not parents, not anyone--knew what do with someone who had serious aspirations to academia, and that that led to towards a path where I failed and floundered for a long time. I've landed on my feet now, but having an organization like this around would have been lovely back then.
posted by TypographicalError at 3:13 PM on September 16, 2014 [14 favorites]

My mother told me recently that they had a conversation with the high school guidance counselor about me twenty years ago that went like this:

"Your son should really go to MIT."

"How much would that cost?"

"About $40k per year."

"Oh."

And that was the end of that.
posted by clawsoon at 3:20 PM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

When I was applying to undergrad, I was desperately interested in going to MIT (and I had the chops for it, to be honest). I actually started the application process, but halfway through it, my parents talked me out of it--too much money, they said. Made just as much sense to go to a state school and graduate with no debt rather than thousands of dollars. Of course, my parents hadn't ever been to college, so how was I to know.

I consider it one of the great regrets of my life that I went to a high school in a depressed area and no one--not guidance counselors, not parents, not anyone--knew what do with someone who had serious aspirations to academia, and that that led to towards a path where I failed and floundered for a long time. I've landed on my feet now, but having an organization like this around would have been lovely back then.

I found out years later that on the strength of my status as a National Merit finalist alone, I would have automatically gotten free tuition at my first-choice school. The top-notch private school that the POS guidance counselor at my POS high school in the little podunk farm town in which I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks convinced me there was no point in my applying to.

Then again, I've never met nor heard of a high school guidance counselor who wasn't either evil or, at best, simply useless at giving actual guidance.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:38 PM on September 16, 2014 [6 favorites]

Ugh, there was a girl in my high school who desperately wanted to go to MIT, got accepted, and then for financial reasons ended up going elsewhere, but didn't wait for MIT to get back to her with its financial aid offer first! I always wondered what more there was to the story, since waiting to hear back from MIT wouldn't have hurt her at all.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 3:39 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

20 years ago I ended up going to MIT and I'm glad I waited for the Financial Aid offer, because all told when I got out the other side, I owed $20k and I paid that off quickly.

Of course, I was frugal and was from a poor as hell family. If we'd been more middle class, not a chance in hell.

Anyone else want to turn this into an MIT thread? :)
posted by drewbage1847 at 4:17 PM on September 16, 2014

I always wondered what more there was to the story, since waiting to hear back from MIT wouldn't have hurt her at all.

People don't always know that is going to be as generous as it may be.
posted by corb at 4:23 PM on September 16, 2014

Perhaps because I've never gone through the US university admissions process, but I don't quite get how this is different from the typical application process other than that it's earlier. I've understood that the US admissions process is crazy-complicated, but this also apparently involves a very long application and your life story, so that sounds like the same thing. Do the QuestBridge students get to skip some other part of the process like SATs or something else?

The article mentions financial aid forms, but presumably QuestBridge collects some sort of financial data, too, since they're serving low-income students. Do they just use parents' tax returns or something?

I get how the four year scholarship would make a big difference (I made the same choice in grad school -- US State schools would only guarantee one year in writing, though they assured that in practice they provided full funding through the program. I decide put it in writing or no deal.) I just don't see how the application process part is easier.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:37 PM on September 16, 2014

This is about low income students who are very talented, If only I had a penguin.... Low income students generally don't even bother applying to selective colleges because neither they nor anyone in their life can navigate and understand the process, between the bureaucracy and the incredible cost.
posted by TypographicalError at 5:17 PM on September 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

I get that TE, he part I don't get is how this is any easier to navigate. From the NYT article it sounds very complicated. Since posting that comment, I went and look at the application itself on the QuestBridge web site and that looks pretty complicated and intimidating to me, too. I believe everyone that this is easier, I'm just looking for some insight into how this is easier, cause I can't see or imagine how.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:22 PM on September 16, 2014

We are suffering through college applications with my son right now, including the QuestBridge application, and finding the latter to be more intimidating than the others, so far.
posted by artistic verisimilitude at 5:33 PM on September 16, 2014

I'm just looking for some insight into how this is easier, cause I can't see or imagine how.

I'm not a participant in this program, but as I mentioned above, I think I would've wanted to be when I was in high school.

The real difference is just someone knowing the real scope of scholarships and how transformative they can be and letting underprivileged youth in on the secret. I literally had no idea that financial aid even really existed when I was in high school, not really--all the dollar amounts I saw on awards were on the scale of hundreds of dollars. The "big" award I got for outstanding academic achievement to go to my state school was 3.5k per year, contingent on maintaining a 3.5 GPA (which was ludicrous and I'm still angry about it). And then you have big name schools where tuition is 30k/year and that doesn't even include housing and books.

If anyone could've just told me that those prices are the starting price of a negotiation and they can all be basically waived for the truly high-achieving, my life would've been very different. And I expect that that's a lot of the service these people are providing.

You see the same thing with medical bills in the US. The underinsured and uninformed see huge bills and go into bankruptcy trying to pay them. When in fact, if they understood how to game the system, they could walk in and negotiate with the hospitals to pay a percentage of what they "owe". So now there are companies who live on assisting people reducing their hospital bills. (These people, for instance, mentioned in this Forbes article.

In any case, it's not necessarily about reducing the complexity so much as helping people understand that these things are even possible in the first place.
posted by TypographicalError at 5:53 PM on September 16, 2014 [7 favorites]

Also, it's not clear from the article, if the universities participating have used this program to increase the proportion of students who come from low-income families and increase their scholarships to low-income students, or are they distributing the same "spots" and money that they did before but by a different mechanism?

If the process is somehow simpler for the students, it's good regardless, but it would be extra double-plus good if this were actually getting more low income students into selective schools and with better funding.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:54 PM on September 16, 2014

Thanks, TE.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:55 PM on September 16, 2014

A lot of the top schools, including MIT, have had need-based merit-blind financial aid for well over a decade. In theory, they will pay tuition and estimated living expenses for all but ~5k/year of individual contributions - any scholarships the student gets apart from their aid generally count towards those contributions and it is fairly easy (by US standards) to get loans for that remaining amount.

Now whether their formula for your income-based viable family contribution is fair (or will be consistent across 4-years of school) is one story and the complexity and opaqueness of the financial aid process is an obstacle that tends to reward students who are in districts with (or have hired) experienced counsellors. But several of these schools have established clear minimum thresholds for tuition - families that earn less than 100k pay no tuition at Stanford for example.

I guess what I'm saying is (1) if you are applying don't let tuition-fears prevent you from applying to top schools and hearing their financial aid offers and (2) Questbridge sounds like a great program but the NYTimes article understates how its strength seems to be overcoming communication barriers - even without Questbridge, low-income students can get fairly certain aid for Stanford, the difficulty is letting them know (3) I hope that their efforts to raise new scholarships are targeting programmes that don't have established endowments
posted by Ktm1 at 5:58 PM on September 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

I can't share the hate for guidance counselors. When the private disciplinary academy I was forced to attend wouldn't graduate me/release my transcript even after a post-12th-grade year, my counselor somehow talked an elite women's college into accepting me anyway. He was my math/compsci instructor and oddly, all but one of us in his AP calculus and programming failed be approved for graduation as well. Yet we were the only folks accepted into Ivies. Huh.

If course, my SAT scores and being a Merit Finalist twice due to that extra year might have had something to do with it.
posted by Dreidl at 6:49 PM on September 16, 2014

Can we not derail onto a discussion of guidance counselors? Low-income students, scholarships, the application process… how about those topics?
posted by Lexica at 8:37 PM on September 16, 2014

Can we not derail onto a discussion of guidance counselors? Low-income students, scholarships, the application process… how about those topics?

The issue of guidance counselors matters because for a student like me (from a family with no money but lots of cultural capital, where going to college and grad school was always the assumed minimum) guidance counselors were an ephemeral joke. But for a non-traditional student, anyone from a different background, guidance counselors are the first serious gatekeepers to higher education. Unfortunately they tend to be wildly uninformed, painfully unhelpful, and weirdly biased, so the students who need that advice the most are vulnerable to perhaps not getting what they need.

Again, using myself as an example, where going to a place like Grinnell or Amherst is the assumed path and settling for a top state school is an acceptable alternative, a guidance counselor or a program like this isn't needed at all. But my partner was from a very different kind of family, and in those kinds of situations the guidance counselors tend to perform the front-line negotiation and cultural translation service with parents who are like "What the fuck, we sacrificed everything to come to this country and now my kid is talking about going to a school thousands of miles away when Directional State College is five miles from home?" or "WTF, he is 18, time to get a job and start a family." Someone has to talk to the parents and a good counselor can work miracles.

Gatekeepers matter. These kinds of programs work to backfill all kinds of things, for the kids who don't have parents who understand the intricacies of American higher education, or who went to a mediocre school, or who aren't somehow on the radar screen of recruiters for top schools. I know a lot of people who benefitted from similar programs, and these programs do amazing things and open doors that otherwise are locked shut.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:06 PM on September 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Really just coming in to say that without guidance counselors, without college outreach programs I would have gone to my local state university instead of where I did go: Harvard.

My parents are Mexican immigrants whose education was at most 6th grade. It was my Mom that taught my Dad how to read and write after they were married. As much as they loved me, they had no advice for me. It was my guidance counselor and my teachers, especially my math and physics teachers, who sort of adopted me and tried to persuade me that I should set my sights higher.

Much of what Dip Flash writes is true for me except that my guidance counselor never spoke with my parents. It was I that had to separate myself culturally from my parents and learn to inhabit two distinct worlds. I had to negotiate the process of applying to college by myself. I researched colleges, filled out my applications and attended interviews alone. To pay for my applications I drew from my own pocket money that I earned at a part-time job delivering pizzas. It seemed a lot easier to do so than to explain to my parents that I needed the money to apply to expensive, far-away universities. Throughout the process, there was nobody to ask or to confide in. At times I thought about giving up. Many others would have, I think.

I would have loved to have more help and guidance. I did what I did out of necessity.
posted by vacapinta at 3:24 AM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The thing that always struck me was that while many colleges offered reasonable financial aid for lower income families, the entire process of applying for the aid and maintaining it was clearly geared towards the bureaucratic skillset of people from the upper middle class-- the sort of people who have accountants, a clear accounting of all their assets and liabilities, and people who are used to filing statements about these things on a regular basis and know how to deal with bureaucracy when it comes to figuring out where a random form disappeared to.

It is as though a bunch of college adminstrators and policymakers designed a system that was geared towards people like themselves, just with less money, not actual working class people.

In my father's case, he benefited from two things: first, deciding what colleges to apply to based on where students of similar class rank applied to, rather than relying on guidance counselors. And second, a tuition structure that allowed him to pay for school with a part time term job and working over the summers, rather than relying on the ability of a foreign-born teenager to get his parents' income statements and asset listings every year from people who didn't even speak English.
posted by deanc at 7:14 AM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The "big" award I got for outstanding academic achievement to go to my state school was 3.5k per year, contingent on maintaining a 3.5 GPA (which was ludicrous and I'm still angry about it).

TE, did we go to college together? I had exactly the same experience.
posted by elizilla at 9:11 AM on September 17, 2014

TE, did we go to college together? I had exactly the same experience.

Could be, although I expect that middle-tier state schools pretty much are interchangeable.

The worst part about all of that was that I was jumping into 3rd and 4th semester STEM courses immediately and by trying to actually challenge myself in my first semester, I lost the scholarship. Which I mightn't have done in the first place if I weren't desperately trying to get out in 3 years... to save money.
posted by TypographicalError at 9:48 AM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I did the same, signed up for all the hard stuff, based on advice from the college itself. I was a naive first year college student from a high school where I'd never, ever, taken a class I couldn't do as well as I wanted to in, even though I was constantly hearing how tough this class or that one was. Why would I listen to such chatter about college courses being hard? School is never hard! Bring it on. And they did.

And I went home in disgrace after one year, never to finish.
posted by elizilla at 10:00 AM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

If anyone could've just told me that those prices are the starting price of a negotiation and they can all be basically waived for the truly high-achieving, my life would've been very different. And I expect that that's a lot of the service these people are providing.


EXACTLY. Like, NOBODY ever told me that getting application fees waived was ever a possibility. I never even heard of that until a decade after I went to college. My guidance counselor knew that scraping together the one application fee I sent to the state school was an Herculean effort - even though I was working as many hours a week as I could get, wages were so low we needed all of our incomes just to keep a roof over our heads and pay medical bills - and he never breathed a word about even trying for a waiver of any kind.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:12 AM on September 18, 2014 [2 favorites]