IPR Research Notes

Making a Game Plan for Applying to College

Fall 2009 , Volume 31, Number 1

James Rosenbaum

In Chicago’s public high schools, 83 percent of students plan on attending college, but less than two-thirds of those students actually make it there. If they have the grades, the scores, and the skills for higher learning, what is holding the others back?

Research by IPR Faculty Fellow James Rosenbaum points to the complexity of the admissions process. Without a certain cultural knowledge, students can become discouraged in applying to schools and eventually abandon their college plans altogether, he said.

“Fortunately, our research indicates that college coaching programs in high school might help more students successfully enter college out of high school” said Rosenbaum, a professor of education and social policy.

To this end, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) adopted a new advising model in a subset of high schools in 2005. In this program, “college coaches” are charged with identifying and reducing cultural barriers to college access for disadvantaged students. The program focuses on explaining college options and helping students assess colleges, make appropriate college choices, apply to multiple colleges, apply for scholarships, and complete the complex federal financial aid form (FAFSA).

Rosenbaum—with IPR graduate research assistants Jennifer Stephan, Michelle Naffziger, Lisbeth Goble, and Kelly Hallberg—is now embarking on a new project to estimate the impact of the program on college enrollment using a survey of all high school seniors in the district, both before and after the onset of the program. Analyzing ethnographic data, the researchers seek to understand the subtle cultural elements that impede disadvantaged students, how college coaches try to identify and overcome these cultural barriers, and how the students respond. In addition, they use the CPS senior survey to determine the extent to which individuals’ actions and specific college plans mediate coach effects and to discern whether effects vary by students’ social status, academic achievement, and race/ethnicity.

Their results so far suggest that coaches improve some types of college enrollment by helping students with general college plans to form more specific plans and take concrete steps.

“In particular, college coaches benefit students who are typically not well-served by high school counselors,” Rosenbaum said. “This finding shows potential for coaching programs to fill in this gap in student support.”

For more information about these and other IPR research projects, please visit www.northwestern.edu/ipr/.