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No Admissions Impossible For Advising Corps

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By JUSTIN POPE, The Associated Press

Published: September 8, 2007

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - For Meghan Bridges, the push came from her mother, who went online to help her research the arcane world of financial aid and find her way to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For Charles Osivwemu, it was a mentor back home in Oakland, Calif., who hammered home the message that he really was college material.

'I thought, for me being a black student coming from the neighborhood I grew up in, I had to be an athlete,' said Osivwemu, who attended the University of California, Berkeley.

The pair were among a roomful of new graduates from well-known colleges who gathered recently at North Carolina.

Many talked about how, in their own lives, someone had reached out and helped them through the college application process.

Now they are trying to play that role in the lives of other students. As the school year begins, dozens are heading out to work in low-income schools in their home states with the National College Advising Corps - a nascent version of Teach for America but for guidance counselors.

'Without her I wouldn't be here right now,' Osivwemu said of his mentor. 'That's why I want to give back and be a college adviser.'

There may be no more pressing issue in higher education than the huge gaps in college achievement between wealthy and low-income students. Only 31 percent of low-income, college-age students have enrolled, compared with 75 percent of high-income students, according to figures from the Pell Institute, which conducts research on and promotes improving college access for low-income students.

Preparing students academically for college is the biggest single issue, but this group's focus is on helping them with an often overlooked challenge - playing the admissions game. Mostly, these counselors won't be working with highly selective colleges. Their focus instead will be students for whom the selection process is about going anywhere at all, and finding a place that offers the fit and financial aid that will allow them to graduate.

Many Missed Opportunities

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the national student-counselor ratio in secondary schools is 408-1. Counselors inevitably focus on the most troubled students, and perhaps the handful of most promising - but often there isn't time for the vast middle. Counselors also are increasingly their schools' point person for the standardized testing bureaucracy.

It can add up to a string of missed opportunities.

Students see the sticker price of a private college and write off the possibility, because nobody explained financial aid might be available; even the price of the SAT seems out of reach because many don't realize low-income students can get a fee waiver. Nobody reminds them of deadlines to sign up for standardized tests, which can slip by when you're working part-time and caring for family members.

No one helps with the complex FAFSA form for federal financial aid. The American Council on Education has estimated 1.5 million students who probably would have been awarded Pell Grants in 2003-04 did not apply for them.

'Sometimes the difference between going and not going isn't a difference of a mile, it's a difference of a few inches,' said Stephen Farmer, director of admissions at UNC.

Participants in the Advising Corps come from a variety of backgrounds, but have at least one thing in common: At some point - if not in high school then by college - they realized there are enormous differences between the experiences of low-income and high-income students in applying to college.

Leona Garber saw the difference by transferring to a private school after attending a public high school in Baltimore. At the private school, 'they were taking the SATs early and multiple times,' said Garber, a recent graduate of Loyola College in Maryland who is returning to work in a Baltimore public school near the one she attended.

'When I was at my public high school a lot of students didn't even know to take the SAT until the latest possible date,' Garber said. 'We only had one guidance counselor, and we had a senior class of about 300 students.'

'1-On-1 Relationships'

The Advising Corps is the brainchild of Nicole Hurd, who started it at the University of Virginia, sending out the first cohort of 14 in 2005 (nine returned to their schools for a second year). She's now relocated to UNC, where the national program will be headquartered. This year, it's expanded to 10 other universities - including Berkeley, Penn State, the University of Utah - that will send out 62 recent graduates. The goal for next year is 120.

'We want that one-on-one relationships that so many of us from another generation can remember having, that one person that can say to you, 'Have you looked at this college? Hey, have you turned in that form?'' said Hurd.

Unlike Teach for America, the popular but unrelated program in which participants are paid by school districts, the $20,000 stipends and $5,000 in loan forgiveness participants in this program receive come from their universities and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which has given $1 million over four years to each of the participating colleges.

Farmer, the North Carolina admissions director, said results from Virginia justify UNC's contribution of about $700,000. In the program's first year at UVA, the advisers held nearly 8,000 student and more than 1,000 parent meetings, went on 43 college field trips, held 156 SAT-prep classes and helped fill out 668 FAFSA forms. Applications from participating high schools to Virginia's four-year public colleges rose.

The most telling statistic may have been an acceptance to UVA from a county high school where, remarkably, only one other student had even applied to the state's flagship university in 26 years.

From the Virginia results, Farmer calculates the program could send an extra 1,300 North Carolina students to college over the next four years. Even if they don't attend UNC, the state would recoup the investment.

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