The Splintering of the American Mind by William Egginton

Author:William Egginton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

DIVERSITY IN HIGHER ED

I cannot say it often enough: the single greatest predictor of success in our society today is the four-year college degree, at least in part because of what that degree says about a student’s socioeconomic status even before going to college. While there is room for debate about whether it makes more sense to address this problem by increasing the numbers of people who complete college or trying to reverse the trends that seem to make college indispensable—for example, by emphasizing trade schools rather than college—it remains a demographic fact that the college degree is today the clearest border between the haves and the have-nots. Given this state of affairs, we need to be asking what factors determine who gets a college degree and who doesn’t.

Despite his Germanic name, Erwin Hesse is a U.S.-born Latino. His father is a construction worker from Peru, and his mother is a Salvadoran immigrant who cleans homes for a living. Hesse grew up in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a large Latino population. I was curious to hear his story. How did the son of working-class, Latin American immigrants who grew up in a blue-collar, immigrant neighborhood become the first person in his family to earn a college degree? More than that, Hesse is now finishing the research that will lead to his PhD at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. The topic of his research: how college admission officers can work to increase diversity on college campuses. In other words, here is someone who knows, both from the research and from personal experience, the challenges that face minority and immigrant children who are trying to get a college degree.

Hesse attended the public schools in his neighborhood and, like most of his friends, barely scraped the grades together to get from one year to the next. Far more interested in hanging out and playing basketball than in studying, he had no idea when he finally graduated what he would do next and had not even begun to think about looking for a job. One day on his way to the courts with his friends he was passing the local community college when the thought occurred to him—to this day he’s still not sure why it did—to go in and ask some questions. He asked his friends to hold on while he went in, but they laughed and continued on their way to the courts. So he went inside on his own, found the admissions office, and asked what he needed to do to go to college.

Hesse had talked to people about college before. The previous year he, like all the other rising seniors in his school, had had a meeting with his school’s college counselor. The man, whom Hesse had never met before, scanned his grades and told him that college was not an option for him. Hesse recalls not being particularly surprised. “I mean, the guy told me college was not for me, and I figured, he’s probably right.

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