What College Preparation Should Be
The college preparation industry rakes in roughly 1 billion dollars per year. This is mostly made up of prep courses that help students boost their standardized test scores for the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT. The rest of the industry is made up of subject-specific tutoring. One takeaway from this is that the college prep industry is not really about preparing students for college but about helping them gain entrance to college. Students and their parents should rethink what “college preparation” actually means and where they might want to invest their time and resources. College preparation ought to be about more than simply getting in, it ought to include the matter of fitting in, a matter of giving students a real fighting chance. We must actually prepare students for college life and learning.
Preparation for College Admittance Versus Preparation for College Itself
As any professor can attest, the overwhelming majority of college students — bright, smart, promising, conscientious, and kind as they maybe — don’t really know how to play the academic game, don’t understand their role in the classroom, and haven’t figured that the culture of higher education. In other words, students don't understand the culture of their gatekeeping professors and TAs or even what a flourishing student’s approach to the classroom is. Put simply, college preparation should equip students with the social and cultural knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the university context.
The status quo of college prep is important, but inadequate on its own. Relying only on the college-prep-industrial-complex to prepare students for higher education is like securing all the permits and materials for a house without knowing how to build one or becoming fast and strong enough to join the NFL without knowing how to play football. It’s a lot of time, money, and attention paid to the wrong details or, at least, too little investment in essential considerations. It’s an unfortunate product of what happens when the metric (e.g. SAT scores) becomes the target in higher education preparation.
The current system doesn't prepare students for what lies ahead even if it does do a relatively good job of enabling them to move forward. Getting young people into college, especially if it gains one entry into a top school, is obviously a valuable investment. The income gap between college and non-college-educated individuals is over $17,000 per year among workers who are 25–32. The gap no doubt widens as workers age.
Learning to Play the Academic Game
Evidence of the disjunct between college prep as a key to college admittance and college prep as legitimate preparation for college (which is all but absent) can be gleaned from the fact that most students are bored, frustrated, don’t perform well, suffer from poor mental health, don’t graduate on time (if at all), and generally feel dislocated when they are in the college classroom. In part, these troubles can be attributed to the fact that students are thrust into a strange milieu without understanding what exactly they are supposed to be doing but sensing very strongly that the stakes are high.
Students must be instructed on the fundamentals of how to navigate institutions of higher education. Things such as regular participation, visiting office hours, body language, or even knowing the dos and don’ts of basic interactions with professors. Some of these shortcomings are known to students and, frankly, they don’t care because there is a rift between what they see as important and what actually counts. Many more of these shortcomings are totally opaque to students who, through no fault of their own, are simply unaware of the unwritten rules of the game.
Preparing for Online Learning
As classes migrate from in-person to online in light of COVID-19, knowing how to play the academic game — command of the soft skills and cultural knowledge needed to thrive in higher ed — will become more important, not less so.
If students treat their online college classes in the same way they would approach a youtube or twitch, which may be their default mode of engagement, they will be victims of the way in which we throw them into the high-stakes environment of higher education without properly preparing them first. When visiting a foreign country we know it’s best to learn about the local culture. Leaving for college is no different — even if “leaving” this Fall simply means logging on.
College prep, a massive industry, is a misnomer. Actual college prep is something we must take seriously in order to give students the best chances for success. This is especially the case for first-generation and minority students who are less likely to have picked up bits and pieces of academic culture from their parents or others in their social network.
For more on how to get the most out of the college classroom (online or off), check out www.habitusedu.com, @habitus_edu on Twitter, habitus_edu on Instagram, or like Habitus on Facebook.
