For millions of students, this is a summer like no other in the history of American public education. The last day of the school year was followed by just a brief pause before classes started again for a wide range of programs financed by more than a billion dollars in federal funds under the American Rescue Plan. That windfall sent educators scrambling this spring to find the best ways to spend it.

Many districts are trying to focus on students who have lost the most during months of remote learning. Educators say they are especially concerned about students living in poverty, English-language learners and students with disabilities. But kids of all ages — from kindergarten to high school — suffered academically and emotionally during months of isolation.

There’s no definitive count yet of how many students are enrolled this summer in a wide range of new options, from a push to close early learning gaps in Texas to a summer program  in Oregon that helps kids learning English. A recent survey by the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that most large urban districts are offering an average of five weeks of summer learning, with many combining academics and activities like field trips or sports.

That’s the agenda in New York City, the nation’s largest district, where an estimated 200,000 students are enrolled in the Summer Rising program, a joint effort by the Department of Education, the Department of Youth & Community Development and community nonprofits. Like many programs, Summer Rising had a rocky start, with some administrators struggling to find staff and parents complaining about the sign-up process. But as classes started in early July, Rachael Gazdick, head of New York Edge, one of the participating nonprofits, said her focus was on the kids. “Our communities were hit hard,” she said, “and not every child is in the same place. We want to make sure they are absolutely supported.”

Here’s a look at how the summer is going for students around the country.

—Barbara Kantrowitz

With millions to spend, districts try to help students recover from a difficult year

SIMPSONVILLE, S.C. — About a dozen fourth and fifth grade students sat at scattered tables in Bethel Elementary School’s media center, trying to build bridges out of toothpicks and tape. Down the hall, students in small groups worked on reading and math.

It was the third week of summer school in Greenville County, the largest school district in South Carolina. Nearly 10,000 students who struggled this year were invited to attend the summer sessions, but the district estimates only about half showed up.

In a typical year, Greenville County does not have a districtwide summer school program except for a small camp required by state law for third graders who are not reading at grade level.

Flush with federal coronavirus aid dollars, about two-thirds of South Carolina school districts are using some of the funds to expand summer school this year, the state’s Department of Education estimates. South Carolina has received a total of about $3.3 billion in federal K-12 aid. Greenville County is spending $7 million of the funds on a summer program this year and another $7 million to replicate it next summer.

In Greenville County, students will spend four days a week for four weeks this summer on academics and hands-on activities. The district closed schools in March 2020 but started the 2020-21 school year allowing students to attend one day a week before gradually increasing in-person attendance. By the end of the school year, students who did not opt for full-time virtual learning were attending on a normal schedule.

Related: A new playbook for summer school

The goal of the program is to help students recover after a difficult year. More than 16,000 students in Greenville County Schools had at least one F on their fall report cards this year, or more than triple the number of students with Fs in fall of 2019.

At Bethel Elementary, just a few third graders — between three and five students —  attended the county’s summer reading camps in past years. But  45 to 50 students are taking part in the current summer program.

Principal Matthew Critell said students who attended only virtual school this year are coming to the program academically behind their in-person peers.

Students take an assessment at the beginning and end of summer to track their progress, but staff at the school are not planning to retain students based solely on their performance over the summer. “The research really goes against retention,” Critell said.

Moriah Mullen, a special education resource teacher who is leading the summer program at Bethel Elementary, said students do get a break with physical education during the day, but even those activities have a literacy component. She’s been surprised at how happy students have been to be at school, even over the summer.

“I thought they were going to come in and be all upset that they’re in summer school, but I think it’s really good for them,” Mullen said. “They’re not at home all day.”

—Ariel Gilreath

New York students get an extra dose of learning and fun

NEW YORK — Pink and purple posters adorn the third-floor hallway at University Neighborhood Middle School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They’re advertising the after-school and summer programs the school runs with Henry Street Settlement, a community organization.

Nearby is a gallery of photos taken of the summer program from pre-Covid years.

“Look at her!” said Idalia Roldan, laughing and shaking her head while looking at a girl in one of the photos. “Always with that sour face!”

Roldan, a  program coordinator for Henry Street Settlement, can name every student in the photos and share their stories. Because she knows the students so well, she has built close relationships with them and their families. This summer, after a difficult year, those relationships will matter more than ever.

“We want kids to feel comfortable going to someone they can trust,” said Maribeliz Ferrer, assistant director of after-school and camp services at Henry Street Settlement, “and they all love Idalia!”

The middle school is one of three school sites where Henry Street is providing afternoon activities through the city’s Summer Rising program, which started on July 6 and has been serving an estimated 200,000 students from kindergarten to high school.

Summer Rising, run as a partnership among the Department of Education, the Department of Youth & Community Development and local community-based organizations, is attempting to replace traditional summer school this year — and perhaps permanently. Any student living in the city — the nation’s largest school district — was eligible to attend.

Related: Counting on summer school to catch kids up after a disrupted year

The program includes morning academics led by schools, followed by recreational activities in the afternoon, mostly run by community organizations like Henry Street.

Parents have criticized the rollout of the program, but the people who run the community organizations say it could still make a big difference. One of those groups, New York Edge,  which has been organizing after-school and summer programs for over 25 years, is offering 103 summer programs this year, serving 12,000 to 15,000 students across the city. CEO Rachael Gazdick says New York Edge concentrated on providing a vast range of activities  — arts and sports, chess and robotics, cooking and career readiness. A fair at the end of the program will highlight students’ achievements.

Aaron Cummings Jr., Henry Street’s director of child programming, hopes to get students “out and about” through outdoor activities like gardening and field trips.  There will also be opportunities for kids to talk about what they have been through this year.

“Covid is still very much a reality in our community,” he said.  “They’ll process Covid and what took place and realize that there are support systems out there for them — that there are people they can lean on.”

At the end of the summer, the community organizations will ask for feedback from families. “We want to make sure that we’ve made it easier for the families,” said Cummings. “I think that’s what success looks like for us this year. It’s making sure families and children feel comfortable again.”

—Juliana Giacone

What English learners need most is to love school again

OREGON CITY, Ore. — Aylin Garcia Rosas, 9, and her 8-year-old cousin were crouched on the floor in the gymnasium at Holcomb Elementary School chattering in Spanish about how to get a Lego figure to stay on the car they were building.

The cousins are two of the 465 students enrolled in a brand-new, free summer program for students entering kindergarten through eighth grade in Oregon City, about 30 minutes’ drive south of Portland.

“It’s not really summer school,” explained Finn McDonough, 7, as he worked on a color-by-number project after finishing breakfast, which is offered free to all students here. “It’s summer camp.”

Stephanie Phelps, a summer school administrator, laughed when she heard Finn’s assessment and explained that academic skills are integrated into every activity, even if the kids don’t notice. More than 50 percent of those enrolled in the six-week program are English-language learners; 13 of them, including Aylin and her cousin, are classified as migrant students, meaning their parents are migrant agricultural workers, and they get two additional hours of math and reading in the afternoon. When asked about the afternoon, Aylin echoed Finn, insisting the group just played games.

Having some fun at school after a particularly brutal year is going to be key to long-term academic success for English learners, said Patricia Gándara, a professor of education and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Related: Opinion – Creating better post-pandemic education for English learners

“These kids have fallen behind more than other children,” Gándara said. “They need to be doing things with other children, talking with other children, and not being given worksheets to just remediate.”

Most English-learner students are the children of immigrants, a population that was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, Gándara said. Immigrant workers were more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic, and many are front-line workers.

About 15 minutes north of Oregon City, 80 students at Lot Whitcomb Elementary, in the North Clackamas School District, are spending four weeks in a dual-language summer program, reading Spanish-language stories, practicing math skills and talking to each other — a lot.

Since online classes made it hard for students to converse, this summer “our push is to work on discourse,” said Jenica Beecher, the English language development specialist for the district, which serves around 17,000 students.

The dual-language summer program at Lot Whitcomb isn’t new, but enrollment doubled and the day lengthened by several hours in 2021, said summer principal Brittany López. Districtwide, North Clackamas is serving 3,700 students in several summer programs, more than twice its typical enrollment, according to a spokesperson.

Oregon invested $195.6 million in summer school grants this year, requiring that districts provide 25 percent of the total cost for their programs. Some districts used federal emergency relief funds to cover their portion.

Back at Holcomb, Aylin used a second rubber band to strap her plastic Lego figure more securely in place and hurried out to the test track set up in the hallway.

After she failed twice to get the car through the step stool that was serving as a tunnel, her cousin, who arrived in Oregon City only a few months ago and still speaks little English, took over. He lined the car up carefully at the top of the ramp and let go.

It sailed right through.

—Lillian Mongeau

A push to close early learning gaps in Texas

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — On a Wednesday morning in late June, 12 kids were scattered around Rebecca Young’s classroom, tucked away in the back of River Bend Elementary on one of the last days of a new intensive summer school program. Four children sat across a table from Young, with whiteboards positioned in front of them and markers in their hands.

The word “fit” was written on each board. “Who can change the word ‘fit’ to ‘bit’?” Young asked, slowly enunciating each word. “Buh, buh,” one child said out loud, trying to figure out which letter he needed to write. One by one, each child erased the “f” on the whiteboard and wrote a “b.”

“Which sound is different?” Young asked.

While Young led the small group of rising first graders through more practice with phonics, four other students were sitting at desks, playing a math game on their iPads. Two students sat in the corner practicing writing sentences, while a third sat on the ground with a colorful worksheet, identifying pictures and words with the digraph “th.” Another student was walking around the room with a clipboard, immersed in a “letter search.”

While this type of individualized learning would normally take up just a small part of a typical school day, it is the whole day in College Station Independent School District’s summer school program. The program was designed after educators and administrators in this East Texas district saw gaps emerging in elementary students’ reading and math scores last fall. 

Although the district opened for in-person classes last August, some students stayed home and opted for online learning, and others were interrupted by random periods of quarantine due to exposure to the coronavirus, said Penny Tramel, chief academic officer. Tramel and her team, who in many prior years had never offered summer school, realized an intensive array of summer offerings was the best way to try to catch kids up on foundational skills in reading and math.

Related: How one district went all-in on a tutoring program to catch kids up

Almost immediately after school ended in late May, the district launched a four-week summer program, funded with federal money, which targeted students who needed the most help with math and reading skills to move to the next grade level. For four hours a day, five days a week, classes capped at 12 students met for intensive lessons at three elementary schools, cycling through small-group time with a teacher and independent work targeting learning needs.

To lighten the load for teachers, the district created the curriculum and provided lesson plans and materials, including everything needed for each student’s independent activities. The district plans to follow up with a two-week camp before school begins in mid-August that will help jump-start the year for the lowest-performing students, and educators say they hope the program becomes a staple beyond the pandemic.

“I think that Covid has really highlighted the need for programs like this in general,” said Heather Sherman, assistant principal of River Bend Elementary and principal of the summer school program. “Even without the pandemic, there’s always that need for continual learning to prevent the regression that occurs.”

—Jackie Mader

Playing catch-up in districts that were already struggling

BELZONI, Miss. — Nechia Coleman noticed 8-year-old Donylen Bullock staring down at two neatly arranged rows of tiles. He had organized them by color, and she noticed he lacked enough pieces to keep the pattern going. Coleman, a veteran educator at Ida Greene Elementary in the Mississippi Delta, brought over a jar and scooped out a few more.

Moments like this were what Donylen longed for during the past year he spent learning remotely. 

His mother, Jelisia Neal, had her eye on the year ahead when she enrolled Donylen in the five-week summer school session, where he would have at least an hour of reading instruction each day starting in June.

Sometime next spring, Donylen, along with thousands of third graders in Mississippi, may be required to take a mandatory reading test that will widely determine whether they’re allowed to move up to fourth grade. More than one-fifth of third graders at Ida Greene were held back at the end of the 2018-2019 school year.

Other education statistics in Humphreys County are also alarming. Fewer than 20 percent of students in schools there were considered proficient in math or English language arts, according to data from the 2018-2019 school year.

State education officials took notice. For the past two years, the community’s schools and those in neighboring Yazoo County have been overseen by state-appointed superintendent Jermall Wright because of low academic performance. It could be years before Mississippi agrees there’s enough improvement to allow the county to run education locally again.

Before the pandemic, students who failed a course were the ones enrolled in summer school, but this year education leaders in Humphreys and Yazoo determined eligibility would not rest on report cards. A fourth grader reading on a third- or second-grade level would be asked to enroll — regardless of what grades they brought home. The district is financing the effort through federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to school systems. 

While projections vary on how the pandemic has affected educational progress, researchers have consistently found that Black and Hispanic children and kids living in poverty are more vulnerable to falling behind.

Nearly all the children attending Ida Greene are Black. And many families in the area — where 37 percent of residents live below the poverty line — suffered financial hardships before Covid-19 devastated the Mississippi Delta. 

“For us, our kids didn’t suffer learning loss necessarily because of the pandemic,”  Wright said. “They’ve been suffering learning loss for a while, for a number of reasons. All the pandemic really did was to show us not just how far our students were behind, but exactly how far behind we were in terms of being prepared to meet their needs.”

While Donylen made the principal’s honors list, the 8-year-old has asthma and his mother felt more at ease with virtual learning during the school year. He seemed to follow along OK. But Neal would review his classwork and see questions he skipped over. 

“We’re playing catch-up,” she said.

While Donylen liked the lunch his mom made and his online art class, he felt like it took more of an effort to get Coleman’s attention. He had never met her in-person, but she seemed nice. If one of his classmates needed a crayon, she would produce one. He wanted that, too.

And for a few weeks, Donylen had it.

“I like that I can meet new people and can finally see Ms. Coleman in person,” he said, “and I like math.”

—Bracey Harris

Summer programs are a lifeline for students with disabilities

Danielle Eddins spent more than a decade as a preschool teacher, but nothing had prepared her for the experience of overseeing the education of two of her sons this past year. Her 6-year-old, who has autism and an intellectual disability, lost interest in what was happening on his laptop screen almost as soon as she powered on the device each morning.

“He would be staring at the computer, but there was no cognitive connection, no understanding that, ‘Hey, I’m in school,’” she said. Her 4-year-old, who has a speech delay, had trouble paying attention, too.

The boys’ sessions with teachers and therapists often overlapped, and Eddins struggled to manage them while also caring for her 19-month-old son.

Soon Eddins, whose older children attend Boston Public Schools, noticed changes in her oldest boy. He stopped responding to physical gestures, lost the few words he’d started to say and grew moodier and more frustrated.

Then Eddins learned her boys had qualified for “extended school year,” a federally mandated summer program for eligible students with disabilities. This year, unlike last, the program would take place in person. Eddins was encouraged, particularly for her oldest son.

“It’s important for kids to get that social interaction, especially having autism,” she said. “I need him to be socialized around kids his own age, even if he doesn’t play with them.”  

Around the country, many parents of students with disabilities are counting on summer learning to help their kids recover skills they lost during the pandemic. These students often found remote education particularly challenging and in some cases went without services such as occupational and physical therapies and the socialization that comes from school.

Related: Is the pandemic our chance to reimagine education for students with disabilities?

But while some districts are stepping up their summer offerings to kids with disabilities, others are struggling to effectively serve these students amid staffing shortages and other challenges.  

“The biggest problem that we’re seeing right now across the board, which is not specific to students with disabilities, is who is actually going to run these summer programs,” said Valerie Williams, director of government relations for the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. “Teachers are completely wiped out and burned out from everything they’ve had to manage and juggle for the past year.”

Some districts have delayed summer school for kids with disabilities. Others have reduced the number of kids served. Still others are struggling to accommodate kids with less severe disabilities, who don’t qualify for extended school year programs, in general summer offerings.

“Instances I see where students are being offered more than what they had last year, or more than what they had pre-Covid, are very rare,” said Cynthia Moore, founder of Advocate Tip of the Day, which supports families of kids with disabilities in Massachusetts.           

Eddins considered herself lucky that her sons qualified for five weeks of extended school year programming. But she wasn’t leaving anything to chance. On their first day, July 12, she sent them on the bus with printouts of their Individualized Education Programs, personalized learning plans for students with disabilities. She called the school multiple times to check in. Over FaceTime, her 4-year-old’s teacher showed him playing with other kids. “He made friends right away,” she said. Her 6-year-old did well, too.

“So far, so good,” Eddins said. “I am hopeful that this summer will be good for both my boys. … I am not going to survive, not one more remote situation. It was so difficult.” 

—Caroline Preston

This story about summer school was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In the next few weeks, public schools in the U.S. will embark on a grand experiment, balancing the safety of 51 million students with their academic, social and emotional needs. The coronavirus pandemic forced schools across the country to switch to remote learning this spring. Now administrators and politicians have to figure out how to reopen this fall with the virus still raging. The result could topple the already fragile ecosystem of schools in this country and devastate public education for years.

With just days to go until the new school year starts in many places, parents and educators are realizing that there are no good choices. In-person classes pose safety concerns, given the unrealistic expectation that children will wear masks and stay six feet apart throughout the school day. Paying for the staff and equipment required to keep the virus at bay is also a huge obstacle, especially for cash-starved districts in low-income communities. A hybrid system is a logistical nightmare while remote learning will almost certainly leave the most vulnerable students behind.

This could be a watershed year in the history of American public education.

When the pandemic struck, districts around the country, especially those in low-income areas, were still recovering from economic losses sustained during the 2008 recession, when nearly 300,000 teachers and other school staff were laid off. Now administrators must figure out how to manage with even fewer resources as state and local revenues shrink in the face of yet another economic crisis.

This could be a watershed year in the history of American public education. The already growing gap between rich and poor threatens to become an unbridgeable chasm as parents with money pay for ad-hoc alternatives like private tutors, while lower-income families struggle to survive. 

Universal schooling is a bulwark of functional democracies; without it, we could become more like developing countries, where education is reserved for families who can pay for it. Before the pandemic struck, Americans generally expressed faith in their public schools. A February 2020 poll from the National School Boards Action Center found that a majority of voters had a favorable view of their local schools and teachers and were committed to investing in schools even if it meant tax increases. 

This coming school year will test that reservoir of goodwill in every way possible. What will happen if the virus outruns all attempts to contain it? What will happen to students if brick-and mortar schools are closed for another year? What will be left to salvage? Parents, students and teachers are all looking for answers. Right now, there are none.

Read the full story at CNN.com.

This story about public schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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NEW YORK — On a rainy December afternoon, Eren Ozsar sat hunched over his laptop in a crowded Starbucks on the Upper East Side. He peered intently at the screen as he clicked through the admissions office site for Columbia University’s School of General Studies.

“Is there any way to determine what your odds are of getting in?” the woman across the table from him asked.

After a few minutes, Ozsar shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he replied.

The woman, Melanie Rose, delivered some tough news.

“That is a reach school,” she said. “You need some safeties.”

Rose, a 61-year-old former magazine publisher and chocolatier, is one of the “Pushy Moms,” a group of about a half-dozen women helping LaGuardia Community College students like Ozsar, 22, make the leap to four-year schools and bachelors’ degrees.

All of the women have helped their own children apply and are using their hard-won experience to guide the LaGuardia students, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college.

When Rose’s daughter, Maris, was applying a decade ago, “I was the college-in-chief person,” Rose said. “I have been through it.” Maris didn’t get into her first-choice school, Rose said, but was very happy at New York University. She’s 27 now, working for a market research company. Ozsar, who came to the United States from Turkey three years ago to get an education, expects to graduate from LaGuardia this spring with an associate’s degree in writing and literature and is thinking about becoming a lawyer. His parents are still in Turkey, where his father lost his job as a jeweler after Ozsar left home. Ozsar now lives with his 19-year-old brother, also a LaGuardia student.

The pair meet at a Starbucks near Rose’s home and email in between sessions to make sure Ozsar is on track for all his deadlines, which extend through the spring. “As parents, we were here to help our kids through the process,” Rose said. “That’s basically the function I am serving for Eren.”

Pushy Moms is the brainchild of Karen Dubinsky, LaGuardia’s chief engagement officer and a marketing consultant. She’s on a mission to get more people involved in the community college, which annually enrolls 48,000 students from more than 150 countries. The group is one of eight Dubinsky has helped to start at the Queens school in the last few years, she said. Volunteers also help with career workshops or take students to lunch.

Dubinsky was introduced to the school in 2013, when a friend on the school’s board of directors brought her to its first-ever benefit, she recalled. She was so impressed when students talked about how much LaGuardia meant to them that she offered to volunteer. A year later, she was working at the college full time.

Related: Community colleges join the fundraising game

The Pushy Moms are all Dubinsky’s friends from Manhattan. She describes them as “women in New York who have spent a lot of time and energy getting their kids into college” and now have free time to help others.

Dubinsky got the idea for Pushy Moms after realizing that many LaGuardia students don’t have family members who could help with the complex transfer process. At the same time, she saw that her friends didn’t know much about community colleges and didn’t understand why she was spending so much time at LaGuardia.

That inspired her to put the students and the mothers together. The group, now in its second application season, has worked so far with about two dozen students, all of whom were members of the President’s Society, a select group of high-performing students at LaGuardia that Dubinsky also helped create. Many of the students go on to attend CUNY schools but last year, Dubinsky said, graduates also went to private institutions like Amherst College and Syracuse University, among others.

Community college students around the country face many obstacles to getting a four-year degree. According to a recent report from Teachers College, Columbia University, 80 percent of entering community college students say they intend to earn a bachelor’s degree, but only about a quarter actually make the transfer and 17 percent eventually get that degree.

Transfer applications are often daunting to students unfamiliar with the process. Family income also plays a role: According to the report, low-income students who transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions are significantly less likely to graduate than students from middle-class or wealthy families.

Related: Community colleges try innovative ways to improve retention, completion and transfer rates

The Pushy Moms can’t solve every problem but they can make the transfer process easier for the students they work with.

When Dubinsky first organized her friends, she called them the College Advisory Board. But the women were informally calling themselves Pushy Moms and that was the title that stuck. Dubinsky said she told the women: “You know how your kids wouldn’t listen to you? Well, these kids will listen to you. They will take notes on everything you say.”

Many of the mothers were initially nervous because they thought they didn’t know enough to help. Dubinsky reassured them by explaining that they weren’t expected to be guidance counselors. “Their role is to support,” she said.

That can take many forms. Rose, for instance, urges the students she works with to create a spreadsheet tracking application and test deadlines. At the start of one late December meeting, she immediately asked to see Ozsar’s spreadsheet. He didn’t have it ready.

“Just so you know,” she told him, looking grim, “that’s not good.”

She then spent a few difficult minutes trying to convince Ozsar to focus more on his applications to CUNY colleges like Queens and Hunter, where he might have a better shot than at Columbia. “You have a lot of applications to do, and Columbia is a big, time-consuming application,” she told him.

He nodded and then said, “I actually visited the school last week.”

“And what did you think?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to leave.”

Rose urged him to call the General Studies admissions office and ask for the statistical profile of accepted students. “You need to know,” she told him.

They spent the next hour discussing all the tests that Ozsar has to take, including one gauging his ability to speak English, which he has made a top priority. He spent his first nine months in New York taking English as a Second Language courses at Queens College and now speaks with just a slight accent.
Next it was on to the essays.

“When are you going to have a first draft?” Rose asked.

“Can I say in two weeks?”

They agreed on a date. “Answer the questions honestly, from your heart,” she told him. “Be succinct. Be specific. It’s the precision of thought that is more important than anything else.”

She also advised him once again to get the spreadsheet ready. “The key is creating tools to make your life easier,” Rose said. “I want to see that spreadsheet.”

Related: How often do community college students who transfer get bachelor’s degrees?

Rose works with two students a semester. Last year, she helped Min Kyung Shin, now 24, make the transition from LaGuardia to Queens College, where she is a biology major. Shin came to New York in 2013 from Korea, where she had been studying radiological science. Her father is an MRI specialist, and she was just following in his footsteps. “I didn’t have a passion for it,” she said. She wanted to take a break from radiology and learn English at LaGuardia. “I was supposed to be here for one year,” she said. “The plan changed.”

By the time she started working with Rose, Shin had decided to get a biology degree from LaGuardia and then move on to a four-year school. But, she says, she had “zero” knowledge of the college process. There was a lot of paperwork, Shin said. “It was kind of overwhelming.”

That’s where Rose came in. She helped Shin research colleges that were good for biology majors and reviewed the admissions requirements. She accompanied her to a Barnard open house for transfer students. Rose attended Shin’s graduation last spring and afterwards took her to lunch along with Rose’s daughter and a cousin of Shin’s who lives in New York.

They’ve stayed in touch even though Shin is no longer at LaGuardia. “She’s more than my mentor,” Shin said. “She’s like my mom in New York. If I hadn’t met her, I might be in Korea.”

Shin hopes to someday get a Ph.D. and become a cancer researcher. She would also like to see more Pushy Moms for LaGuardia students. “They have a lot of potential,” she said. “They need mentors. Even if we are from different countries, we all have a common goal, to get educated and be successful.”

Back at Starbucks in early January, Ozsar finally had his spreadsheet ready for Rose.

“What is your visual takeaway?” Rose asked.

“Some things are missing,” Ozsar said.

By the end of the month, he had submitted applications to three CUNY schools — Hunter, John Jay and Queens — and was working on essays for Columbia and Fordham.

“I am tough,” Rose told him.

Ozsar smiled. “I actually appreciate it.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher education.

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This is the final article in a series following five New Rochelle High School seniors on their quest for college financial aid. The project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

On a chilly Saturday in late April, Matisse Clayton faced her future.

She had turned 18 a month earlier and now, near the end of her senior year at New Rochelle High School in suburban New York City, she had to make her first adult decision: where she would spend the next four years of her life. After months of struggling through the intricacies of the college application process and weeks of anxious waiting for decisions from admissions committees, it had all come down to this moment.

Matisse had offers of admission from four of the 18 schools she applied to: American University and The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.; Temple University in Philadelphia; and Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. She was wait-listed at several schools and rejected by others.

The rejections hurt initially, but she was past that now.

“Once you get that first acceptance letter, the rejections aren’t so bad,” she said. “I’m just pleased that I got in somewhere. I have options.”

Still, she worried that she wouldn’t make the right choice and would end up at a place where she didn’t feel comfortable. All year, she had been leaning toward going to college in Washington because she liked the idea of being in a big city, just far enough away from home.

Matisse was also concerned about money.

Her parents, Alvin and Gwen, run a restaurant in downtown New Rochelle, and the endless winter had hurt business. Gwen Clayton was determined that her oldest daughter would have the best education possible, but the prospect of tuition payments haunted her. “That’s what wakes me up in the middle of the night,” she said in early March.

American and Catholic had offered Matisse partial scholarships, but Binghamton had given her a full ride – tuition and room and board. “My whole family’s rooting for Binghamton right now,” she said. Because of its reputation as a top SUNY campus, the school had always been high on Matisse’s list, but she had never seen it and wasn’t sure that she wanted to be in rural upstate New York.

So on the morning of April 26, just five days before the May 1 deadline for making her decision, Matisse, her mother, and her 14-year-old sister, Bella, got in the car and headed north.

Getting in isn’t the hardest part

For students like Matisse, getting into college is just the first step. Paying for college can be an even greater challenge. Tuition at the most expensive private four-year colleges is more than $50,000 a year, and that doesn’t include room and board. Even public universities can seem out of reach with tuition and fees for out-of-state residents approaching the price tags of many private schools.

That’s why the amount that students borrow has been steadily climbing. A study released last year by the nonprofit The Project on Student Debt found that 71 percent of students who graduated from four-year colleges in 2012 had student loans averaging $29,400. Many owe much more. The total outstanding student loan debt reached $1 trillion in 2011.

In New Rochelle, an ethnically and economically diverse city of about 78,000 just north of the Bronx, money is on the minds of most college-bound seniors. Although the city is in affluent Westchester County and there are some wealthy families, nearly half the students who attend the city’s public schools are considered “economically disadvantaged,” which means that they qualify for some form of assistance, such as free or reduced-price lunch programs or food stamps. Even families who are solidly middle class like the Clayton family struggle with soaring college tuitions – especially if there is more than one child to educate.

Indeed, Matisse’s college bills would be just the beginning for Alvin and Gwen. Their son, Oliver, age 16, attends a private school on a partial scholarship, and Bella is finishing eighth grade at a public school. So the Claytons are looking at nearly a decade of tuition payments, including a few years with two kids in college at the same time. But they are determined “to make it happen,” Gwen says. “We are not stopping the train. We are going to keep going.”

Their restaurant, Alvin & Friends, is an airy welcoming space filled with colorful paintings by Alvin, who named his oldest daughter after his favorite artist. Matisse says her father is constantly working at the restaurant and her mother is often there as well.

When Matisse needed assistance with her college or scholarship applications, she’d often sit in the backroom of the restaurant with her laptop, catching a few minutes with her mother when she could. All three kids help out in the restaurant, and Matisse often has additional duties at home, such as chauffeuring her brother and sister when her parents are working.

Alvin and Gwen were both the first in their families to go to college. Alvin is from a large family in Trinidad but went to high school in Washington. He was a star soccer player and an honors student, so schools were recruiting him throughout his senior year, he says. But by spring, he still hadn’t applied anywhere. “I was not aware of the American system,” he says. In June of his senior year, his guidance counselor finally took him to see Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Md. The soccer coach offered him a scholarship and he accepted. Gwen, who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Alvin knew from the start it wouldn’t be so simple for Matisse.

Mom’s color-coded ‘Application Central’

In the early fall, Gwen headed for Staples, where she picked up a large plastic file box and a stack of colorful file folders along with other back-to-school supplies. The box would be “Application Central” over the next few months.

Gwen had been getting advice from veterans, “really smart moms whose kids were at Vanderbilt and Yale,” and she was determined to get the college application process under control from the beginning.

Matisse jokingly called her mother “the document keeper.”

The file folders sort important material by color: red holds “critical steps in the process,” Gwen says, like Matisse’s SATs or her college essay. Purple folders contain information about New Rochelle and the high school (the school’s colors are purple, white, and black): Matisse’s Advanced Placement classes or awards. Blue folders are for the Boys & Girls Club of New Rochelle, an important part of the family’s life, and Matisse’s other community service activities going all the way back to elementary school in 2005, when she helped to raise money for victims of hurricane Katrina. Green is for financial aid and other money-related material.

Jessica Dorsett, Matisse’s guidance counselor, says she normally advises students to apply to no more than 10 schools: two or three “reach” schools that are the hardest to get into, four or five “targets” whose admissions statistics closely match the student’s, and three “safeties” where the odds are high that the student will be accepted.

But many students apply to far more.

“The reason I think students apply to so many schools is they haven’t done the research to figure out what would be a good fit,” Ms. Dorsett says. “Even though we as counselors might recommend schools that would be good for them, they don’t always listen to us.”

Four scholarships

Few students pay the full sticker price for college. Here’s how four other New Rochelle High School seniors found ways to start college in the fall without bankrupting their parents.

From left, Adaugo Ezike, Haleigh Doherty, Matisse Clayton, Esteban Acevedo, and Camille N’Diaye-Muller. (Photo: Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor) No reproduction.

All but $3,000 per semester at Dartmouth

ESTEBAN ACEVEDO came to the United States nearly five years ago from his native Colombia and has worked hard to learn English and get top grades because he wants to become a doctor. He’ll graduate in the top 10 percent of his New Rochelle High School class in June. Financial aid is critical for Esteban, whose father is a porter and whose mother works as a home attendant (both received college educations in Colombia). He also has a younger sister who wants to go to college.

Esteban has had some disappointments: He was a finalist for a scholarship program called QuestBridge, which matches low-income students with top colleges, but did not win a scholarship. In March, his first choice, the University of Chicago, rejected him.

“It affected how I viewed things,” Esteban says. “I was more pessimistic. I kind of felt like I was seeing life in a darker light.”

But by the end of March, his hard work paid off: This September he’ll attend Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school, in New Hampshire with a generous financial aid package that will take care of all but $3,000 a semester.

“I feel so much more motivated now to do more things in my future, to just keep striving for bigger goals and keep working hard.”

$25,000 per year at Fairfield University

HALEIGH DOHERTY’s parents saved up to help send her three older siblings to college, but after each had graduated, they had to start saving again.

“It’s not like there was a college fund for me all my life,” she says. She has known from the start that money would be a major factor in her college choice, especially because her father has been diagnosed with lung cancer.

She applied to schools where she thought she would have a strong chance of getting a scholarship based on her high grades. That strategy worked well. Fairfield University in Connecticut offered Haleigh, who wants to be a teacher, like her mother, a $25,000 annual scholarship and a place in the honors program.

Some critics say that giving merit aid to middle-class students keeps out students from lower-income families. But, says Haleigh: “You can look at my parents’ income and say that they can pay full price. But then you’re not calculating the fact that I have older siblings and that my dad has been sick. If I didn’t get merit aid, then there’s no way I could have applied to these schools….”

She says her teachers at New Rochelle High School have given her new perspective on the drama of the college application process: “If you don’t get into your top school, 10 years from now you will look back and college will have been great, and it won’t have mattered that you didn’t get in.”

Almost $50,000 at Cornell University

ADAUGO EZIKE’s parents put getting into a top college high on the family’s agenda. Her two older brothers are studying engineering: Jide at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Kayode at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. When Jide was looking at schools, their father, George, and his wife, Miriam, who attended university in their native Nigeria, made all the kids come along to let them know what they were working toward.

Adaugo, who also wants to be an engineer, will graduate in the top 10 percent of her class at New Rochelle High School. But academics haven’t been the only thing on her mind as she thinks ahead to college. Her youngest brother, Dioka, age 14, has been diagnosed with autism. “He needs attention,” Adaugo says. “Being the only one at home is going to be very different for him.”

Her brothers got substantial financial aid from their schools and other scholarships. Adaugo was offered generous scholarships at some of the best engineering schools and a place on waiting lists at schools she’s still interested in. Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., gave her almost $50,000 a year in aid, and she decided to go there: “The campus was beautiful and the people were welcoming. My hunch says that Cornell is the right choice.”

A full-aid package at Harvard University

CAMILLE N’DIAYE-MULLER, a talented dancer considering a career in international law, was thrilled to learn in December that she’d been accepted to Princeton University in New Jersey with a full scholarship through the QuestBridge program, which links low-income students with top schools.

“She was very happy … jumping and crying at the same time,” recalls her mother, Marie-Ange N’Diaye, a high school teacher in the Bronx. Her mother was impressed by Camille’s independence throughout the admissions process: “She is really somebody who is doing every single step on her own…. She wants to achieve on her own.”

There were more achievements to come. In March, Camille, who will graduate in the top 10 percent of her New Rochelle High School class, was accepted at Harvard University and Wellesley College. Harvard offered a financial aid package that doesn’t require her mother to pay anything, so Ms. N’Diaye told Camille that she could make the choice herself.

Camille visited Princeton twice and was very impressed with the academics, the other students, and just about everything on the campus. Then, a few days before the May 1 decision deadline, she went to Boston to visit Harvard and Wellesley. In the end, she accepted Harvard’s offer.

“I was hesitant to give up such a great opportunity at Princeton,” she says, but after visiting Harvard, she was won over by talking with future classmates, “some of the most interesting, multifaceted people I’ve ever met.”

Until a few years ago, students had to send in a separate application for each school. Now more than 500 colleges and universities accept the Common Application, known as the Common App, which allows students to fill out one basic online form, upload their essay, and then apply to lots of schools just by checking a box for each. That is one reason the number of schools students apply to has increased dramatically. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the percentage of students submitting seven or more applications has grown from 9 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2011. Dorsett says the ease of the Common App can be deceptive. Many of the schools also require supplementary information, sometimes even more essays, and keeping track of it all isn’t easy, as the Claytons discovered with Matisse’s growing list.

Despite all their efforts to stay organized, “we were losing ourselves in all the paperwork,” Gwen says.

It was also expensive. Much of the conversation about college costs focuses – quite naturally – on tuition. But even the process of applying stretches a family budget. College application fees can be as high as $100 each. Standardized tests add to the bill; it costs $51 to register for the SAT and then there are additional fees for subject tests. Low-income students can get fee waivers that aren’t available to middle-class students.

At one point, Matisse added up all the application fees and it came to “a little over $1,000.”

Matisse used Gwen’s credit card to pay all these fees. “I felt like I was melting money,” Gwen says. Although Matisse acknowledges that “$1,000 is a lot without a guarantee of acceptance,” she felt that she had to do it. “The worst nightmare is applying to 10 schools and not getting into any of them or only getting into one and it’s not the one you want to go to.”

In the fall, Matisse thought her top choice might be Georgetown University in Washington. She knew it would be “a little bit of a reach,” but she was hopeful. Her grades were pretty good – an A-minus average – and she planned to retake the SATs in the hope of improving her score of 1550 out of 2400.

“I am not a good test taker,” she says. She decided to apply “early action” to Georgetown University, which meant that she would get a decision in December but could wait until May to make up her mind after she heard from other schools.

Georgetown  admits only about 17 percent of applicants, so Matisse also started making a list of other schools with her mother’s help.

Dorsett, her counselor, had suggested that Matisse apply to Howard University in Washington, a historically black university, but Matisse ultimately decided against it. One of the things she has always liked about New Rochelle is the diversity of the student body. The high school has about 3,400 students: 26 percent black, 40 percent Hispanic or Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 29 percent white. “We serve everyone from A to Z here,” says the principal, Reginald Richardson. “It is the world in here.”

Going to school with a diverse group of students has always been important to Matisse. In her freshman year, she thought about switching to a private school in the Bronx, because New Rochelle High School “seemed like such a big place,” she says. Although she was accepted, she didn’t get a scholarship to help with tuition, then about $40,000. By that time, she was already feeling more comfortable in New Rochelle. “I’m happy with my decision to stay,” she says.

Getting involved with lacrosse helped a lot. Like her father, she is a talented athlete; in her senior year, she was named captain of the women’s varsity lacrosse team.

“She’s the one kid I can count on,” says Natasha Vazquez, who has been her coach since freshman year. “She’s like a mini grown-up. She’s so reliable.”

Ms. Vazquez says she recently called Matisse to tell her she was delayed getting to a game. “I’ve got it,” Matisse told the coach. And she did. Vazquez says Matisse made sure everyone was in uniform and ready to play by the time the coach arrived. “We won that game,” Vazquez says.

A kid’s first adult decisions

Matisse’s college list kept growing throughout the fall. Some of the schools were clearly reaches, like Georgetown, Stanford University in California, and Duke University in Durham, N.C. But Matisse and her mother felt that the process seemed so unpredictable that it might be worth a shot at these schools, which are among the most selective in the country.

Matisse was also working hard on the application essay, which she says was a struggle. Gwen was her editor, but Matisse kept fighting back against her mother’s suggested changes.

“I wanted my essay to be my essay,” Matisse says. “I wanted it to sound like me.”

Ultimately, she decided to write about the restaurant, since it was such an important part of the family’s life. She wrote about how she and Oliver and Bella helped out, and how, as the oldest, Matisse had extra responsibilities: “The insurmountable daily request of favors ranges from taxi, tutor, to short order cook. Funny thing is, all along my parents have been giving me the favors. All this multi-tasking has brought me closer to family, aspirations, developing a stronger work ethic, being organized, and creating a game plan to be self-confident, self-reliant, and a team player.”

In December, Matisse learned that she had been deferred by Georgetown. It wasn’t an outright rejection – a deferral meant she would get another shot in the regular application pool – and she wasn’t discouraged.

“It was kind of expected because I know it’s a very difficult school to get into and early action is very competitive,” she says. A neighbor who is a Georgetown alum told her that it might actually be easier for her to get in during regular decision because if you have applied early and get deferred, “they will look at you in more depth.”

The regular decision application deadline for many schools is in early January. Matisse was working on her applications until the last minute – and even later in some cases.

Two of the schools she applied to, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had a Jan. 1 deadline. Minutes before that deadline, she tried to upload her applications only to find she was locked out of the Common App. At first, she thought it might be a problem with the Wi-Fi at her house, which is always a bit unreliable.

In the first dark hours of the new year, she took her laptop to a friend’s house, but she was still locked out.

“I had to stalk my computer until 4:30 in the morning when it finally let me sign my name and finish the payment and all that,” she says.

She felt a little better when she texted a few friends and found they were having the same problem, because the Common App itself had shut down. She e-mailed the two schools and learned that they were also aware of the problem and had extended their deadlines to Jan. 2.

In fact, the Common App had become particularly glitch-prone in the fall as it processed more than 3 million applications from 750,000 students. In mid-May, Common App officials said they had made changes that would prevent problems in the future.

With the final application deadline, Matisse should have been able to breathe a little easier as she waited for the decisions, but she was still anxious.

“I am constantly thinking abut the schools that I have applied to receiving my application, and I picture the admissions committee looking it over and making a decision, and that freaks me out,” she said in January.

But there was still another equally formidable hurdle – filling out financial aid forms and applying for scholarships. Without enough money, students’ choices can be a painful balance between desire and reality. The most important form is the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), which students now generally fill out online. To complete it, families have to sort through all kinds of financial paperwork. Colleges and the government use the FAFSA to determine aid packages after looking at a family’s income (as reported on tax returns) and other assets.

Hard truth: Loans are not scholarships

In early January, Dorsett handed Matisse a big packet of information about scholarships she could apply for. She wanted to go through the packet with her mother, but it was a busy week at the restaurant, and on Sunday, she finally hunkered down in the backroom as the front of the restaurant filled with brunch customers. She managed to grab a few minutes of her mother’s time to go through the information. “You have to do it because you need the money,” she says.

At many colleges, only a minority of students pay what schools call the “sticker price.” The “net price” can be significantly lower because the students get financial aid based on need or accomplishment. The aid is generally a combination of grants or scholarships, which don’t have to be paid back, and loans to students or parents, some subsidized by the government. Scholarships can also come from the colleges, the government, or private organizations.

The net price for an individual student depends on many things, including family income, the college’s selectivity, a student’s academic record, and the amount of money a school has for financial aid.

At the most selective schools, students from relatively wealthy families might pay the sticker price and low-income students could end up paying almost nothing; middle-class students are often left struggling. Less selective schools, especially private institutions, may give money to attract talented students in the form of “merit” scholarships. These scholarships don’t depend on need and are one way that middle-class students can reduce their costs.

New Rochelle’s 12 college counselors – each with a portfolio of 60 to 70 seniors to guide – try hard to make sure students understand all the ways they can pay for college. There’s an annual workshop on financial aid, and the school regularly sends out newsletters listing scholarship deadlines. Counselors also meet individually with students to explain the various types of scholarships and loans they’re eligible for.

But even with all that preparation, parents are often puzzled. In March, when the first round of regular decision acceptances and rejections started coming in, Michael Kenny, New Rochelle’s director of guidance, and the other college counselors were fielding money questions. It’s tricky, he says, because families don’t always realize that loans are not scholarships and the money will have to be paid back by someone – either the parents or the student.

“You have the excitement of getting into top schools, but then the financial aid package makes the top schools a little more challenging,” Mr. Kenny says. “There’s a level of disappointment and frustration that begins to impact students right now.”

Mr. Richardson, the principal, came to New Rochelle a year ago from a high school in the East New York section of Brooklyn where, he says, the student population was “100 percent at the poverty level.” It was a major achievement to get 30 percent of the graduating class into four-year colleges, but the top students could get full scholarships based on their financial need, he says.

In New Rochelle, more than 60 percent of last year’s graduating class was headed for four-year colleges, including some of the nation’s most selective. The top achievers from low-income families can still get those generous aid packages to elite schools, but middle-class families have a different problem. The gap can be “huge,” Richardson says, between the package that’s offered and the tuition.

He thinks one answer is to emphasize the high quality of the state’s public universities, like Binghamton.

“There’s very little we can do about the average college tuition,” he says. “We just have to say, ‘Here are the affordable options that exist.’ ”

18 college applications, 4 acceptances

By late April, when Matisse, her mother, and her sister headed north to see Binghamton, Matisse was philosophical about how things had turned out.

“It’s not really what I wanted,” she said, “but at the end of the day, I’ll end up where I am supposed to be.”

Of the four out of 18 schools that accepted her, she ruled out Temple and was still leaning toward Washington. “I like the idea of being where there is a lot of stuff going on,” she said.

She had hoped to visit American and Catholic before making her decision, but life intervened. She got sick just before spring break in mid-April. Then she spent a week in Trinidad with her father’s family – an 18th birthday gift from her uncle. By the time she got back home, there were only a few days left before the May 1 deadline.

Matisse thought she could do it all in a couple of days: back and forth to Washington on Friday and then a six- to eight-hour round trip to Binghamton on Saturday. But then she decided to skip the Friday visit because she didn’t want to miss her AP statistics class. The Saturday drive to Binghamton would be it.

On the drive up, she was surprised to find that the campus was not as isolated as she had heard. There was a town that had businesses she knew from home: Five Guys, Chipotle, Walgreens. During a tour of the school, Matisse thought it seemed like a pretty lively place. She also saw the buildings for engineering and business – two subjects she might major in. She knew other students from New Rochelle would be going there so she would have a group of friends at the start. Looking around at the students, she also thought the school seemed pretty diverse. She could see herself fitting in.

And money was clearly a major factor. Although American and Catholic offered her substantial aid, her parents would still have to pay part of her tuition and her room and board. She got a full ride from Binghamton. The substantial financial aid would mean that her parents would be able to pay for some perks – such as study abroad. That’s why she was hoping to love it, and she did.

As they were walking into the bookstore, Matisse turned to her mother and said, “I like this place. I really want to go here.”

“Good,” said her mother, “because I already sent in the deposit.”

This project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report. © 2014 The Christian Science Monitor and the Hechinger Report. Reproduction is not permitted.

The post Getting into college and paying for it: Landing a full ride after a year of suspense appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the fourth article in a series following five New Rochelle High School seniors on their quest for college financial aid. The project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

Two months ago, Esteban Acevedo’s hopes were high. He was waiting to hear from his top choice, the University of Chicago, and a half dozen other schools that rank among America’s most selective. He knew he wouldn’t get into all of them but he thought his chances were good at a few. Since immigrating from his native Colombia four years ago, Esteban has worked hard to learn English and become a top student at New Rochelle High School in suburban New York.

Then in mid-March, he learned that Chicago had rejected him.

“It affected how I viewed things,” Esteban says. “I was more pessimistic. I kind of felt like I was seeing life in a darker light.”

Fortunately, his world soon got a lot brighter. At the end of March, he was accepted at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Amherst College in Massachusetts, among other schools. Both offered him substantial financial aid. He needs that because his father, a porter, and his mother, a home attendant, can’t afford the annual cost for him to attend those elite schools, which can top $60,000 a year.

He visited both schools and, last weekend, settled on Dartmouth because, among other reasons, he was impressed by Dartmouth students’ passion for their school.

“I feel so much more motivated now to do more things in my future, to just keep striving for bigger goals and keep working hard,” says Esteban, who hopes to become a doctor. “It’s just great.”

This is the time of year when seniors who have been waiting all year for admission committees to determine their futures finally get to be the deciders.

The looming deadline is Thursday (May 1), when they have to accept one school’s offer. Most schools also require a deposit.

For the five New Rochelle High School seniors who are the subjects of this yearlong series, getting in was just the first step in that process. They also had to weigh financial aid packages from the schools that accepted them and find a school they like and can afford.

Interpreting the financial aid packages can be difficult – even financially risk – for families new to the process.

Michael Kenny, the director of guidance at the school, says parents sometimes ask counselors there to explain what an offer means. Many parents don’t understand that loans are not scholarships and that the money will have to be paid back by either the student or the parents. “It’s much more complex than it appears to be,” Mr. Kenny says.

He also thinks families should be looking at other numbers as well – such as the percentage of students who graduate on time. That’s usually available on a college’s website. “You don’t want to end up in debt when you are not even likely to get the degree,” he says.

One of the students, Camille N’Diaye-Muller, was making a choice available to only a tiny percentage of top-performing seniors. In December, she learned that she had been awarded a full scholarship to Princeton University through a program called QuestBridge that matches low-income students with top colleges. She visited the school twice and was impressed with the academics, the other students – just about everything on the New Jersey campus.

But at the end of March, she learned that she had also been accepted at Harvard University and Wellesley College, with generous aid packages.

Her mother, a public school teacher in the Bronx, “was really waiting for the financial aid packages,” Camille says. “But since then, she said, ‘You have to make the choice for yourself.’ ”

A week ago, she was still undecided. “I am really just looking to see which community I feel better in,” she said before she went to the Boston area for whirlwind tours of Harvard and Wellesley last weekend. Late last night, she told Harvard she would be attending in the fall. “Though I know exactly the moment I decided this weekend, I was hesitant to give up such a great opportunity at Princeton,” she says. In the end, she was won over by talking with future classmates, “some of the most interesting, multifaceted people I’ve ever met.”

Matisse Clayton was also looking for the right fit, and she knew that money might be the most important factor in her decision. She was choosing between two schools in Washington, D.C. – American University and The Catholic University of America – and Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system.

Both American and Catholic offered her substantial aid, but her parents would still have to pay part of her tuition and her room and board. She got a “full ride” from Binghamton, a top SUNY school about three hours from New Rochelle.

Even before she visited Binghamton late last week, she says her whole family was rooting for the school. The substantial financial aid means that her parents, who run a restaurant in New Rochelle, will be able to pay for some perks – such as study abroad. That’s why she was hoping to love it, and she did.

“It’s official! Binghamton University Class of 2018!” she tweeted right after she visited this weekend.

For some students, that May 1 date might not be the end of the process. In the past few decades, the number of colleges students apply to has risen dramatically, from half a dozen to twice that and more. A major reason has been increased use of the Common Application, which allows students to apply to many colleges using just one form. That has also meant constant adjustment in the way schools calculate how many students they need to accept in order to ensure a full freshman class. The percentage of students who accept admissions offers is called the yield, and it varies widely from about 80 percent at Harvard to under 25 percent at many other schools.

Unpredictable yields have led many schools to increase the number of students on their waiting lists – and that adds to the stress. A process that should be ending now might continue through the spring and even the summer as schools admit waiting list students. A student might choose a college and make the May 1 deposit – ranging from $100 to nearly $1,000 – knowing that he or she will forfeit that money if a school they like better plucks them from the waiting list later. It’s a loss some students are willing to take.

Adaugo Ezike wants to study biomedical engineering and won scholarships to some of the country’s top engineering schools, including Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.; Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill.; Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh; and Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. She knows Carnegie Mellon well because one of her older brothers is a student there. Family friends attended Cornell and urged her to accept the upstate New York school’s offer.

Adaugo took their advice. “Visiting really solidified my decision to choose Cornell,” she says. “The campus was beautiful and the people were welcoming. I didn’t have the opportunity to visit some of the schools I was accepted to because of distance and time. However, my hunch says that Cornell is the right choice.” She also thinks that Cornell has “the strongest engineering program of the schools [to which] I was accepted.”

But she was also offered a place on the waiting list at other schools that she is still interested in. Ending up on the waiting lists was disappointing, but she understands why it happened. A top student throughout most of high school, Adaugo says she “kind of slipped in my grades senior year,” especially in the second marking period. She was taking tough courses: four Advanced Placement courses and an honors course in differential equations. She also had responsibilities at home helping to care for her younger brother, Dioka, 14, who has been diagnosed with autism.

Choosing a college wasn’t the only thing on her mind. At the end of March, the family learned that her paternal grandmother in Nigeria had died, and the whole family is planning a trip to Nigeria in a few weeks for the funeral. Her parents immigrated to this country from Nigeria, but Adaugo says the trip will be “the first time all of us are going to Nigeria as a family so it will be very special.”

Until a week ago, Haleigh Doherty was the only one of the New Rochelle students who knew where she would be for the next four years. At the end of February, she sent her deposit to Fairfield University, in Connecticut, where she had won a $25,000 annual scholarship. In late March, she also learned that she would be in the honors program at the school – which means she will be taking honors seminars and will be exempt from certain core classes. The news only confirmed her belief that she had made the right choice.

The past couple of months have also given her some perspective on the college process. As students cope with rejections, she says teachers at New Rochelle are dispensing some advice that makes sense to her: “If you don’t get into your top school, 10 years from now, you will look back and college will have been great, and it won’t have mattered that you didn’t get in.”

This project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

The post Getting into college and paying for it: When the deadline came, what was the deciding factor? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the third article in a series following five New Rochelle High School seniors on their quest for college financial aid. The project is a partnership between the Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

Karen Rose still remembers the student from a few years ago who was crying hysterically after class because she hadn’t been accepted to Georgetown University. Ms. Rose, a veteran social studies teacher at New Rochelle High School in suburban New York, knew that the girl’s academic record more than qualified her for Georgetown, which was also the alma mater of the girls’ parents and other family members. And yet, inexplicably, she was rejected.

“All I could say was, ‘You know, if your parents and your grandparents and your aunts and uncles tried to get in today, they probably wouldn’t because it’s much harder,’” Rose recalls. And as it gets harder, more and more students are going to be disappointed – and bewildered. “They’ve done everything right, and yet they’re not getting what they were supposed to get,” says Rose.

Fear of dashed hopes dominates the corridors of New Rochelle High School with just six weeks until college-bound seniors have to make their first adult decision: where they will spend the next four years.

For many of these students anticipating the final round of college acceptances, rejections, and financial aid offers – the fear of making a mistake when they choose is just as great as the fear of rejection.  They’re also thinking ahead, to the fall, when they will be on their own for the first time.

“In this time between the last semester of high school and the first semester of college, there’s a lot of emotion whether it’s expressed explicitly or not,” says Karen Levin Coburn, co-author of “Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding the College Years.” “The student is thinking about identity. Will I ever find my place? Who will I be in this new school? It’s sort of starting over, which is liberating and exciting but also terrifying.”

Being accepted to the schools of their dreams isn’t the only obstacle. Their first adult decision may be about money.  More than three-quarters of current college freshmen were admitted to their first-choice schools, according to a recently released survey from the University of California at Los Angeles, but only 56.9 percent chose to attend, an all-time low for the annual survey. Students cited high costs and financial aid as the reasons they declined their top schools.

Those are very real issues for students in economically diverse New Rochelle. Wealthy students don’t have to worry, and students whose families are below the poverty level are eligible for many scholarships. It’s the middle group – including some of the five seniors this yearlong series is following – who are the most affected, says Rose, families “who cannot afford $50,000 a year, but make too much to get any money. That’s the biggest group right now.”

Haleigh Doherty, the youngest of four, has known from the start that money would be a major factor in her decision, especially because her father, Brian, has been diagnosed with lung cancer. She applied to schools where she thought she would have a strong chance of getting a scholarship based on her grades, and Fairfield University in Connecticut offered her a $25,000 annual scholarship. Last month, she spent two days at the school as part of a program for accepted students and was very impressed with Fairfield’s strong sense of community and study abroad program.

All along, Haleigh’s parents have said it was her choice – and she took that responsibility seriously. As she got ready to make her decision, she thought about her two older sisters, who both ended up transferring from their first colleges. That was something she wanted to avoid.

“I put pressure on myself to make the right decision,” she says. “I really didn’t want to have to go to a place and then end up not liking it.”

By the end of her time on the Fairfield campus, she felt comfortable enough to make that choice, which she announced to her siblings by e-mailing them a picture of her wearing a Fairfield sweat shirt.

A generation ago, the majority of colleges notified students about admissions decisions on the same day in mid-April. But now a wide range of admissions policies such as early decision and rolling admissions means that some students already know what their future holds, while others have to wait until the end of March, when many of the elite schools release their decisions.

“They have control over the process when they’re doing their applications but once they hit send, they lose control and now it’s like the great unknown until the end of the month,” says Michael Kenny, New Rochelle’s guidance coordinator.

The disparity between those who know and those who don’t exacerbates the stress.

“There’s definitely a lot of anxiety,” says senior Adaugo Ezike. “People are happy for those of their friends that did get in. There’s a shared feeling of joy.”

They are also comforting each other when bad news arrives. Two of Adaugo’s friends were accepted to the same top school, but one was not and, Adaugo says, that friend was “devastated.” When these friends get together now, they try to talk about other things, says Adaugo, who has been accepted to two State University of New York campuses, Stony Brook and Binghamton, but is still waiting to hear from a dozen other schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, the colleges her older brothers attend.

As she waits, Adaugo also worries about what will happen to her family when she leaves. Her youngest brother, Dioka, 14, has been diagnosed with autism. “He needs attention,” she says. “Being the only one at home is going to be very different for him.”

She worries about her parents as well. “Whenever they need to go out, it would usually be one of us taking care of him,” she says. “Now they would have to hire someone. That’s going to be a big adjustment in my household.”

Feeling torn between past and future is common for seniors at this time of year, says Ms. Coburn, who is also a consultant in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.  “A lot of them can’t really imagine leaving and going away to college even though they’ve been preparing for it their whole lives,” she says. “They often feel pulled between wanting to savor everything, being with their friends, being in school, and feeling like, ‘I’ve got to get this decision behind me and I’m ready to start something new.’ ”

For many students, that tension makes it hard to concentrate on classes. Matisse Clayton, who has been accepted to Temple University in Philadelphia and Catholic University of America in Washington but is waiting to hear from other schools, admits to a case of “senioritis.” “You don’t really like doing any type of work,” she says, “even homework. I have to drag myself to do it. After all the stuff applying, it’s like I’m done with school, I’m done with everything.”

And her case isn’t the worst she knows of. “For people who have already gotten in, it’s senioritis to another level,” she says. “They just don’t care at all.” She hesitates a minute. “Maybe they care a little bit because they don’t want to get a different letter saying, ‘Oh, sorry’ ” from a college if their last semester grades plummet.

“School is still on and their grades still matter,” says Mr. Kenny, the guidance coordinator. “They still need to continue to perform in the classroom.”

To get past her senioritis, Matisse tries to focus on her favorite class this semester, calculus. That helps push out anxiety, she says. “I must have thought a hundred times today ‘Am I going to get in?’ ” she says.

At the same time, she’s also thinking about what she will miss most when she leaves. Alvin & Friends, the restaurant her parents run in downtown New Rochelle, is closed on Mondays, and that’s when the family of five, including her younger brother and sister, all get together for dinner. “My dad will cook or we will pick up from our favorite restaurant, which is usually sushi,” she says. “We don’t have our phones out. We catch up on everything that has been going on. I like those moments a lot.”

Even in this era of constant texting, moving out of the house means breaking some of those close bonds, which can also be unsettling. “What’s going on psychologically is that they’re wanting to be independent and there’s this underlying fear of whether they can handle it,” says Coburn. Parents, too, are feeling the strain, she adds. “They want to know that they can send their children off, that they will be able to take care of themselves, and yet there’s still this desire to parent, to protect them, to make sure they do it right.”

Esteban Acevedo has been getting lots of advice from his parents, who attended college in their native Colombia. “They tell me to remember to eat all three meals, to always do my laundry, to sleep, to not leave my homework for the last minute.” Esteban, who hopes to be a doctor, has been accepted to three State University of New York campuses – Binghamton, Stony Brook, and Albany – and is still waiting to hear from other schools.

Leaving home will be particularly bittersweet for him. His father, the first in the family to come to this country, was living here for a decade before Esteban and his mother and younger sister joined him just four years ago. Now, they will probably be separated again.

“My dad wants me to go to NYU or a New York school,” he says. “He really liked that I got into the SUNY schools. I think that because my dad didn’t see me for so long, he actually wants me to stay in the state or nearby.” Will that affect his choice? “I understand him, but I don’t think that’s going to change my decision if I want to go far away.”

Students like Haleigh who have already been accepted are visiting campuses to see where they would feel comfortable. Camille N’Diaye Muller learned in December that she had been awarded a full scholarship to Princeton University through a program called QuestBridge, which matches high-achieving low-income students with elite colleges. But until last month, she hadn’t seen the school. In early January, the co-chairman of Princeton’s regional alumni schools committee offered to drive her to campus on Alumni Day, Feb. 22.

“It was wonderful,” says Camille, who is considering a career in international law.  A highlight was seeing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (class of 1976) receive an alumni award. Camille, a dedicated dancer, also talked to a student about Princeton’s dance program, which impressed her. At the end of the day, she felt close to a decision but says she still wants to hear from other schools.

At some point soon, Camille says she will sit down at her desk, where she labored all fall over her applications. She says she’ll probably come up with a list of pros and cons for her choices.

“I really like writing things down and seeing how it works out,” she says. But in the end, she knows that “there is no real bad choice. My college experience is what I make of it.”

As they head toward their personal finish lines, Camille and the other students should be cheered by the ultimate fate of the rejected Georgetown applicant who wept in Karen Rose’s classroom.

“She ended up at Villanova,” Rose says. “She loves it.”

This project is a partnership between the Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

The post Getting into college — and paying for it: A teen’s first adult decision appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the second article in a series following five New Rochelle High School seniors on their quest for college financial aid. The project is a partnership between the Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Matisse Clayton was hunkered down in the back room of Alvin & Friends, her parents’ restaurant in this economically diverse suburb of New York City.  The front room was packed with brunch customers and Matisse needed the quiet space of the back room, normally used for private parties, to make her way through the thick packet of information about scholarships that her college counselor had given her a couple of days earlier. She also hoped that she might be able to grab time to consult with her mother, Gwen, who had been busy at the restaurant most of the weekend.

Just a few days after she pressed the “submit” button on her last college application, Matisse faced a new pile of forms.

“You have to do it because you need the money,” she says. And Matisse understands that money will probably be the deciding factor when she makes her ultimate college choice in the spring.

“My parents are going to want me to be happy wherever I end up,” she says, “but it’s not going to be a happy time if we can’t afford for me to go to the school.”

Most college applications were due at the end of December, so January should have been a little easier for the five New Rochelle High School seniors who are the subjects of this yearlong series. But the gap between the cost of attending college and what their families can afford means that the month is filled with still more forms and applications, this time for financial aid and scholarships.

For Matisse and the other seniors, the results are critical. A year at the most expensive private universities now tops the US median household income of just over $51,000. Harvard University estimates that costs for the current school year could be as high as $65,000. Even public universities have hefty price tags. At the University of Michigan, the full price for state residents is more than $26,000 for freshman year, while the bill for out-of-staters can be nearly $54,000.

But most students do not pay that “sticker price.” The College Board estimates that two-thirds of undergraduates get some financial aid, so their “net price” is lower. Applying for that aid means plowing through what may seem like a labyrinth of forms. Low-income students – who need money the most – can struggle to navigate the daunting process without the guidance so in abundance at New Rochelle High School.

Financial aid is generally a combination of grants or scholarships, which don’t have to be paid back, and loans to students or parents, some subsidized by the federal government. Scholarships can come from the colleges themselves, governments, or private organizations. Students can also get money through the federal work-study program, which pays for short-term jobs on campus.

The net price for an individual student depends on many things, including family income, the college’s selectivity, a student’s academic record, and the amount of money a school has for financial aid. At the most selective schools, students from relatively wealthy families might pay the full sticker price while low-income students could end up paying almost nothing – which often leaves middle-class students struggling. Less selective schools, especially private institutions, may give out money to attract talented students in the form of “merit” scholarships. These scholarships don’t depend on need and are one way that middle-class students can reduce their costs.

One of the New Rochelle students, Haleigh Doherty, made getting a merit scholarship a major goal by applying to schools where her strong academic record would stand out. So far, Fairfield University in Connecticut has awarded her a $25,000 annual scholarship, and the University of Vermont has offered $12,000 a year. She doesn’t have to decide until spring and is still waiting to hear from other schools.

Some critics say that giving merit aid to middle-class students like Haleigh keeps out students from lower income families. But Haleigh says that getting merit aid is the only way she can go to colleges like the ones she applied to.

“You can look at my parents’ income and say that they can pay full price,” she said. “But then you’re not calculating the fact that I have older siblings, that my dad has been sick” with lung cancer. “If I didn’t think I could get merit aid, then there’s no way I would have applied to these schools because I couldn’t have afforded it or I would have ended up in a lot of debt, which I don’t want to do.”

New Rochelle’s college counselors try hard to make sure students understand all the ways they can pay for college. There’s an annual workshop run by Michael Tedesco, a retired New Rochelle counselor who is an expert on financial aid. The school regularly sends out newsletters listing scholarship deadlines. Counselors also meet individually with students to help them understand the various types of scholarships and loans they’re eligible for.

Mr. Tedesco, who now works as a college adviser at Westchester (N.Y.) Orthodox Hebrew High School, says the recent recession made financial aid even more important for middle class families.

“More than ever, parents are talking about the cost of college with their children before they’re allowing them to apply to school,” he says.

A good first step, Mr. Tedesco says, is the Federal Student Aid web site, where seniors go this month to download the 2014-15 version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form that colleges require to determine aid packages. The site has a net-price calculator that gives a rough idea of how much aid to expect. The federal government requires schools to place net price calculators somewhere on their websites but Mr. Tedesco says user-friendliness varies. The College Board also offers a net-price calculator, which many schools use; other colleges create their own. All the calculators, Mr. Tedesco says, provide only “a guesstimate.” That’s because schools might see something in an individual financial aid application that makes them think a student deserves more or less money.

Filling out the FAFSA form is a major task this month for the New Rochelle students because the financial aid deadline for many colleges is in the next few weeks.

Esteban Acevedo, who immigrated to this country four years ago from Colombia and hopes to become a doctor, says his parents haven’t been sure how to respond to some of the questions. His mother, a home attendant, and his father, a porter, don’t work the same number of hours every year, so Esteban worries that their income tax returns won’t reflect the true amount of money they’ll be able to contribute.

He says he and his parents usually try to figure out the best answer together. “If it’s a question that we really believe we should get help on, I ask my counselor.”

Esteban’s family income and his good grades qualified him for a program called QuestBridge, which matches high-achieving students with full scholarships from some of the nation’s most selective schools. Esteban was a finalist, but didn’t get admitted in the first round last month. Because of his strong academic record, he still has a good chance of ultimately getting the money he needs. He’s also applying to several other scholarship programs this month, including one from his father’s union and another for students of Colombian origin.

“I’m hopeful but I am kind of nervous,” he says.

Esteban’s classmate Camille N’Diaye-Muller also applied through the QuestBridge program. One evening in mid-December, after she had opened her e-mail, she walked into the kitchen to tell her mother, Marie-Ange N’Diaye, and her older sister, Ella, some amazing news: She had been accepted to Princeton with a full scholarship.

“She was very happy,” recalls her mother, a high school teacher in the Bronx. “She was jumping and crying at the same time.” Two years ago, Ella had also been accepted at several private colleges she liked, but the financial aid offers fell short of what the family needed. Fortunately, Ella was able to enroll at Hunter College, a New York public institution where she says she pays about $5,000 a year.

Camille learned from her sister’s experience and started thinking about financial aid very early in the process, when QuestBridge first contacted her after she took the PSATs in ninth grade. She has learned about other scholarships through online alerts, her counselor, and the high school’s scholarship newsletter.

After working hard all through high school, Camille is grateful for the Princeton scholarship.

“For me,” she says, “it is affirmation that my hard work and things I passed up were worth something.”

Her mother, Ms. N’Diaye, is impressed with Camille’s independence: “She is really somebody who is doing every single step on her own. She’s that type of person. She wants to achieve on her own.”

Adaugo Ezike also learned from her older siblings’ experiences. Adaugo hopes to study engineering like her older brothers, Jide at Carnegie Mellon University and Kayode at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who both received substantial financial aid from their schools and other scholarships. She has spent a lot of time working on scholarship applications, including the Archdiocese of New York’s Pierre Toussaint Scholarship Program, which both her brothers won. She’s also a semi-finalist for a National Achievement Scholarship, a program for African-American students that’s part of the National Merit Scholarship program. She’ll find out later this month if she’s a finalist.

Because her family income is solidly middle class (her father is a civil servant in New York City and her mother is a financial aid administrator at a local college), Adaugo says she has been at a disadvantage for many scholarships.

“A lot of them don’t ask you for additional information, like family size, or how many in your family are going to college,” she says. “That’s why I look at the ones that are mainly merit or service-based … I feel that the middle class gets the short end of the stick with a lot of these scholarships.”

Adaugo says money isn’t the only reason she’s applying for scholarships. Many of them create a network for recipients, she says, and that could be useful in the future. Even now, she knows that getting in is just the first step.

The post Getting into college — and paying for it: Most students can avoid full sticker price appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Then, there’s nothing left to do but wait…and hope.

Michael Kenny, the school’s veteran guidance coordinator, says college anxiety hits its peak around the same time that the leaves begin to fall: the last week in October.

That’s when seniors have to buckle down and make sure they’ve got the right mix on their lists: “reach” schools where admission is far from certain, match schools where their grades and test scores are within the average range of entering freshmen, and safety schools where their chances of getting in are high.

The tension continues until students have pressed “send” on their last applications. “You’re looking forward to the first semester of senior year being a celebration and it’s such a stressor,” Mr. Kenny says.

During this school year, Hechinger – in partnership with The Christian Science Monitor – will follow five New Rochelle seniors as they figure out what college they’ll attend and wrestle with an even more difficult question: How they’re going to pay for it.

Tuition at the most expensive private four-year colleges is now close to $50,000 a year and that doesn’t include room and board. Public universities can be pricey as well. That’s why the amount that students borrow has been steadily climbing for more than a decade. A study released Dec. 4 by the nonprofit Project on Student Debt found that 71 percent of students who graduated from four-year colleges in 2012 had student loans averaging $29,400.

In New Rochelle, an ethnically and economically diverse city just north of the Bronx, money is on the minds of most college-bound seniors. Along with the applications, families must negotiate the labyrinth of government financial aid, scholarships, and private loans. Their choices are a sometimes painful balance of desire and reality.

Haleigh Doherty

Haleigh Doherty’s parents saved up to send each of her three older siblings to college, but had to start over again after each graduated. “It’s not like there was a college fund for me all my life,” says Haleigh, 17.

Her mother, Margaret, a teacher, has already told Haleigh that she will have to take out loans. When Haleigh was compiling her list of schools, she made sure that her grade point average of 99 put her in the top range of each college’s successful applicants to increase her odds of getting merit aid, scholarships based on a student’s academic ability rather than simply financial need. (New Rochelle uses a 1 to 100, so Haleigh is in the top 10 percent of her class.)

By mid-November, she had applied to four New England schools: Providence College, Fairfield University, Sacred Heart University, and the University of Vermont along with Fordham University in New York. She wants to be a teacher, so she picked schools with strong education programs. Most are Catholic institutions because religion is an important part of her life.

All the schools on her list are also within driving distance of New Rochelle. When Haleigh was in 10^th grade, her father, Brian, a purchasing director, was diagnosed with lung cancer. At the time of his diagnosis, the doctor said he might live five more years. Whatever happens, Haleigh doesn’t want to be too far away from home.

Esteban Acevedo

Esteban Acevedo came to this country a little more than four years ago from his native Colombia. His father was the first to head north a decade ago. When Esteban, now 17, and his mother and younger sister, Anna, 14, joined him, the adjustment was rough. They initially stayed in a family friend’s garage on Long Island where, Esteban says, “the schools were good but the garage was not very comfortable for four people.”

Moving to an apartment in New Rochelle was a huge improvement. His father now works as a porter in New York, and his mother is a home attendant. Both parents attended university in Colombia, but Esteban’s father, who had been studying computer science, dropped out because of the uncertain political situation in the country during the mid-1980s. “I feel that he regrets not finishing,” Esteban says. His mother graduated with a nursing degree.

After initially struggling to learn in his new language, Esteban has done well. He wants to be a doctor, and hopes to major in biology or biochemistry. His grade point average is 100.55 (the school’s point system allows for higher than 100 GPA because it gives extra weight for honors or Advanced Placement courses) and he’s president of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, among other activities. With that record, he’s applying to highly selective schools, including the University of Chicago, the Ivy League schools University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Columbia along with some public universities.

In late October, Esteban learned he was a finalist for a scholarship program called QuestBridge, which matches low-income students with colleges. He texted his mother to tell her, and when she called him back a few minutes later, she was crying. Last week, Esteban found out he didn’t win a full scholarship in that early round, but he’s hoping for better news soon. “I’m staying positive,” he says.

Matisse Clayton

Life for Matisse Clayton’s family revolves around her father’s restaurant, Alvin & Friends, in downtown New Rochelle. Her father (he’s the Alvin in the restaurant’s name) works so hard, she says, “sometimes I won’t see him all week,” so her mother has been more involved in her college applications.

Matisse, 17, is the oldest of three and says she’s the “guinea pig” in her family. If she gets into a good school, then there’s hope for her younger brother and sister. But she’s frustrated by what she thinks is an arbitrary selection process. She has applied early to Georgetown University along with one of her close friends, who, Matisse says, has a similar academic record and activities. How does a college choose? She should find out in the next week whether either has been accepted.

If the answer is no, Matisse is prepared. Her long list includes 11 schools, some public and some private. Among them is a late addition, the University of Southern California, her mother’s alma mater. For much of the fall, her mother had told her to stick to schools within five hours of home by car or plane. Matisse was thrilled when her mother finally relented because she has relatives in California.

Matisse’s family income is too high to qualify her for the application fee waiver offered by many colleges. She estimates she has spent more than $1,000 so far, which, she says, “is a lot without a guarantee of acceptance.” But she wants choices. “The worst nightmare,” she says, “is applying to 10 schools and not getting into any of them, or getting into only one and it’s not the one you want to go to.”

Adaugo Ezike

When Adaugo Ezike’s oldest brother, Jide, 19, was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, her father, George, said he felt like he had won the lottery. Then the next brother, Kayode, 17, got into MIT. “That was like winning the Mega Lottery,” says George Ezike, who has a civil service job in New York City. Now, it’s Adaugo’s turn and the Ezike family’s hopes are high.

Adaugo, 16, is a top student with a grade point average of 100.12 and strong SAT scores. She wants to study engineering like her brothers and is applying to nearly a dozen schools, including Columbia, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. Several schools have offered her application fee waivers, which are welcome because the family already spends about $20,000 a year on education for the two older siblings.

Getting the kids into a top college has always been high on the family agenda. When Jide was looking at schools, Adaugo’s parents – who both attended university in their native Nigeria – made all the kids come along just to let them see what they were working for.

Kayode and Adaugo also took part in a program at Columbia called S-PREP that helps academically talented minority students prepare for college and careers in medicine and science. Adaugo says the program has reinforced her already strong interest in research. One possible topic: how music affects the brains of people with autism. Adaugo’s youngest brother, Dioka, 14, has autism and Adaugo says, “He loves music. If you play music for him, he’s in another world.”

Her older brothers received generous scholarships, and Adaugo hopes to as well. But her father also wants her to take out a loan, as her brothers have, to develop a sense of financial responsibility. “It inspires you to work a little harder to graduate and get that degree and actually pay it off,” she says.

Camille N’Diaye-Muller

Camille N’Diaye-Muller’s family is small – just her mother, her older sister, and her. Her parents separated when she was three and she has no contact with her father. Her sister Ella, 19, applied to several private colleges but didn’t get enough money, and in late spring of her senior year, applied to Hunter College, part of the City University of New York system, where she is now a sophomore. Camille is determined to do better.

With stellar grades (a grade point average of 101.2) and top test scores (2230 on her SATs), she’s aiming at the most selective schools in the country and would like to study international law.

Paying for that education is definitely a major issue. Her mother, who is French and Senegalese, is a public school teacher in the Bronx. “My mom will not let me take out loans,” she says. “She doesn’t want me to be indebted because of my education.”

Like Esteban, Camille is a QuestBridge finalist. Earlier this month, she found out she had been awarded a full four-year scholarship to Princeton through the program. That would have been enough for most seniors, but Camille is still waiting to hear from Yale and finishing up her application to Harvard. She hasn’t seen Princeton, which is about a two-hour drive from her home, and, she says, “I want to keep my options open.”

This project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.

The post Getting into college — and paying for it: A look at five students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Tennessee has been at the epicenter of national education reform efforts in recent years, but there’s still debate about how much these changes have improved student learning. Test scores have been rising, according to the state Department of Education, but some teachers and administrators feel that the rapid pace of change has led to low morale.

Now there’s a new player in town, the Common Core standards. While many educators have embraced them, others worry that their impact won’t be clear until 2015 or later. That’s because this school year, schools will still use the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) whose tests weren’t designed to reflect material in the Common Core.

Some teachers and administrators are already concerned about how to negotiate differences between the old testing program and the new standards. Fifth-grade math teacher Holly Gailey, who has been at Nashville’s Rose Park Magnet Middle School for 15 years, has seen the curriculum change dramatically since her first days in the classroom. Many of those changes have been good ones, she says, but she’s worried that the TCAP will test concepts not in the Common Core. “Who is going to fill that gap?”

The TCAP “has to be relevant because our school and our teachers are judged and evaluated on those tests,” says Sarah Shepherd, an instructional coach at Rose Park. “You have to make sure for the kids that they get what they need.”

Emily Barton, assistant commissioner of curriculum and instruction for the state Department of Education, thinks that the gap won’t be as great as some educators fear. Barton, who is in charge of the transition to the Common Core, says that the state has been “narrowing” the TCAP “to mimic only the content that is on the Common Core.”

“If you teach Common Core, you will cover everything that is on the TCAP,” Barton says.
Any gap that does exist should disappear by the 2014-15 school year, when the state switches over to a test aligned with Common Core standards.

That testing system was created by a group called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Like the Common Core, it is a consortium of states—in this case, 19 including Tennessee—that educate about 22 million students.

Tennessee was a founding member of PARCC, and state education officials say the state has been involved in the test’s design since the beginning. PARCC will replace TCAP in math, reading and writing for grades 3-11, state officials say.

The PARCC tests in math and English are designed to reinforce the philosophy behind the Common Core—more critical thinking, a deeper understanding of math concepts and a greater use of evidence by students in their writing.

One of the big obstacles in switching to the PARCC test has been the fact that it’ll be administered online, which means every school must have enough computers for use by all students.

In the last budget season, Gov. Bill Haslam set aside $51 million for schools to upgrade their technology, which state education department spokesperson Kelli Gauthier says should be enough to meet PARCC’s requirement of one computer for every six or seven students.

But this year, some states that jumped ahead to adopt online tests experienced major technical glitches that interrupted the administration of tests to thousands of students.

Several states—including Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Utah—have recently backed away from using the Common Core tests because of concern over costs.

The current cost of administering tests varies widely among states, but the new tests will cost from $22.50 to $29.50 per student. Gauthier says that the PARCC test will cost the state $21-25 million, compared to an estimated $20 million that TCAP would cost if the state were to continue using it.

Another hurdle when the scores for the new tests come out will be managing expectations. States that have already launched tests aligned to the Common Core have reported significant dips.

Teachers in Tennessee, whose evaluations depend in part on test scores, are also concerned. Leaders of both national teachers unions have asked states to slow down the process. In April, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called on policymakers “to put our foot on the accelerator of high-quality implementation and put the brakes on the stakes.”

But Gauthier says teachers shouldn’t worry because the state evaluation system is based on a number of measures, including classroom observations. She said that the portion dependent on test scores will use data from both tests for a while since it’s based on three years of results.

Even if Common Core does indeed fulfill its promise, indicators of student performance might get worse before they get better. But at least this time, Tennessee won’t be alone since all of the states that have adopted the Common Core standards are likely to experience the same problem.

“I think it’s going to be a positive,” says Gailey. “But it’s going to be a positive after several years of trial and error.”

The post Testing the Common Core in Tennessee appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Cicely Woodard was growing up in Memphis, math class was fairly straightforward. “My teachers got up there and they lectured and we took notes, and we practiced and then the next day, we came back and did it all over again,” she says. Perhaps because of that rote instruction, Woodard says she wasn’t a great math student.

“It was very challenging for me,” she says. “I studied a lot.”

Ultimately, Woodard did well enough to major in mathematical sciences at the University of Memphis before earning a master’s degree in education from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Now an eighth-grade math teacher at Rose Park Magnet Middle School in Nashville, Woodard has special empathy for students who struggle with math. “There are some kids [who] math comes easy to and I tell my kids that for me, it didn’t. I had to do my homework and really think about it.”

That’s why Woodard doesn’t agree with critics who say the Common Core is too hard for struggling students. In fact, she thinks the Common Core’s focus on fewer concepts, in greater depth, may even help them. “The goal is for me not to talk a lot, but to ask a lot of questions so I am advancing their thinking,” she says.

Rose Park students who didn’t do well on the state’s standardized tests get an extra math class every day called Focus Seminar. They were Woodard’s first students on a recent weekday to enter her third-floor classroom quietly and settle down immediately to work at groups of tables arranged around the room.

For the next 50 minutes, Woodard turned class into more of a conversation than a lecture. At one point, she gave her students a problem about two cousins who collected stamps. Before the calculations started, she asked her students if they collect anything.

“Stadium cups,” one student answered.

“Model sports cars,” said another.

“Money,” said a boy who got Woodard and the rest of the class laughing.

Woodard read the problem aloud, and then asked how long it would take both cousins to have the same number of stamps. The students had to provide more than one approach for arriving at the answer.

She gave them a minute for “private think time” before they broke into groups, using small handheld whiteboards for their computations. There was a low murmur in the room, barely audible above the sound of the air-conditioners.

Woodard walked from group to group, checking on progress and gently guiding students. They explained their strategies for solving the problem, and sometimes suggested other ways to look at the question. Before long, the whiteboards were full of calculations.

When the time for group work was up, Woodard asked one girl to present her solution, a table. Woodard and the class were impressed. “I think she deserves some fireworks,” Woodard said.

The other students waved their hands in the air and called out, “Whoosh!” and “Boom!”

Then another student got up and showed how he had solved the same problem using an equation. A third student demonstrated how he’d begun working on a new problem: how many stamps each cousin would have by the end of the year.

Woodard believes the Common Core approach will be effective for students at all levels; for now, there are no data to back up that belief since students won’t take tests aligned to the new standards until next school year.

“It was effective the first day,” Woodard says. “They were excited, and they were arguing. They were upset with me because I wouldn’t tell them who was right and who was wrong.”

At the end of the class, she often distributes Post-It notes and asks students to write something that fits into one of three categories: “What did you learn? What questions do you have? What stopped your learning today?”

Students stick their answers on a display at the door as they leave the room—the first category on green paper, the second on yellow and the third on red.

Woodard’s goal? She wants all of her students to love math as much as she does.

The post Helping struggling students: A view from one math teacher’s classroom appeared first on The Hechinger Report.