For years, college access programs (and first-gen support programs on campuses) have been based on the premise that the path to equity is trying to replicate what affluent kids have: the test scores, the grades, the counseling and networking.
In her brilliant new essay, Cassandra Salgado reflects on her own decade of work in college access spaces:
The college access field has gotten very good at teaching students to navigate systems. We decode hidden curricula, demystify admissions processes and build bridges across information asymmetries that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
This work matters. But navigation alone accepts the system’s terms. We teach students to succeed within structures whose very logic advantages affluence, then we measure our success by how well they’ve learned to operate inside that logic. Even when navigation works, it produces individual exceptions to structural patterns while leaving the patterns intact.
And she speaks of how now, she's shifting her work with high school students to also focus on very different things.
We need to ask different questions.
Not: How do we give first-generation students what affluent students have?
But: Why does college admissions require professional navigation in the first place? Who benefits from the information asymmetries that make our programs necessary? What would it look like to transform these structures rather than help individuals escape them, one at a time?
And when I read these next words, I stood, faced Chicago from where she wrote this piece, and applauded:
The honest answer is that moving beyond affluency replication requires work at multiple levels, most of it beyond what any college access program can do alone. It means developing students’ critical consciousness about the systems shaping their lives, not just their ability to navigate those systems. It means advocating for policy shifts in how we fund early education and allocating resources to underresourced schools. It means addressing the material conditions, such as poverty, housing instability and food insecurity, that shape academic performance long before any admissions metric comes into play.
All if this, she writes, requires political will that we do not currently have. Yet we are at a crucial moment of rethinking where our political will might take us next as we rebuild. And we are at a crucial moment of deciding whether/how to educate everyone on college campuses about these structural inequalities – everyone, from those who have benefitted from inequitable systems and those who have had to be so resilient just to get in the door.
I cannot wait to learn more about how she's translating these ideas in her work at the high school she directs, where, she writes, they are "redesigning our approach in order to develop students’ understanding of the systems they’re navigating, not just their ability to move through them".
Reader, this essay is a clear and concise articulation of what I've tried to advocate for across nearly every post on this site. Please read it and share widely.
