The young people who are the main characters in this modest essay are verbal, articulate in a somewhat narrowly defined way, with energy and positive personalities. Within their cohort, they are seen as high-achieving, blessed with attractive combinations of talent and grit. With the help of non-profit organizations and EOP or similar programs, each committed to assisting individuals who often will be the first in their family to pursue a college degree, these young people are introduced to the culture of college before they have set foot in a completely real higher education classroom.

All to the good, for sure.

However, all too frequently – after a few weeks of college, these young people discover they have a competitive deficit in their knowledge bases. Their high schools simply were neither comprehensive nor rigorous enough to provide the academic preparation which is the necessary, although not sufficient, requirement for four-year college success. The step up to the educational challenges of college is a geometric change, not arithmetic: abrupt and steep … and often demoralizing. (And the inadequacies of their high school guidance counseling are equally more clearly revealed.)

At the same time, colleges want these very students, often minority and financially challenged young people who are not well represented on the rolls of private universities in particular. They offer major financial assistance, and are willing to put aside as not a substantive impediment, the adverse comparison of the student’s SAT results and the average SAT level at the institution they are attending.

In contrast, the leader of an atypical high-performing public school serving this same constituency insists that “academic preparation is the best path to college scholarships” …and to graduation, I would add.

What should be affixed to this statement is that if a scholarship is not dominated by academic accomplishment (leaving aside athletic or special skill based scholarships) but instead is primarily predicated on a combination of soft inputs—passion, motivation, campus support services—many times that financial aid will be at risk when the deficit in content knowledge becomes apparent.

The result of this combination – good support financially but a sobering realization on the academic side, is that the student may feel the need to downshift his major,  here defined as going from a more rigorous sector, e.g., engineering, to one with less demanding specific requirements, e.g. business administration.

The assumption (perhaps misguided) when a freshman indicates an intended major is that meaningful thought has gone into his or her selection, leaving aside the dilemma that, despite having filled out those career interest sheets, sometimes the student simply does not know what skill sets are associated with a particular major. (Note that this identification of a major should not be confused with that of a much younger student who, when asked by an adult what he or she wants to be, answers with readily recognizable careers like doctor, pro athlete, lawyer [maybe less true today], rock star. Then the adult pats the kid on the head and says, “great,” while inside the former is saying, “lots of luck” or maybe, “you will change.”

Downshifting of majors once a student has had his or her initial immersion in college and its academic rigor becomes a way to hopefully maintain that crucially important scholarship support and avoid the multiple difficulties of transferring to another school to pursue the new major.

The growing use by colleges of predictive analytics (New York Times, “Will You Graduate? Ask Big Data”, February 2, 2017) will bring more attention to this issue, which might be labeled “the right major for the right student” even though that sounds like the match is more knowable than is possible in reality. Schools using analytics have found that certain grades in certain courses are above-average predictors of success and vice-versa; e.g., if a student gets below a B in a “foundational course” in their major, their chances of graduating plummet. (I wonder if the same colleges have run any academic outcome correlations relevant to professors who do little actual teaching, instead mostly telling their students to look up course-related information on the internet.)

Colleges who are using predictive analytics are adding large numbers to their academic adviser rosters. The hope is that in doing so, they will be quicker to catch situations requiring remedial action: signing up for the wrong courses, reluctance to seek tutorial assistance, difficulties with time management — each of which can be connected to identification of the right major for the student.

Again, all to the good, for sure.

At the end of the day, however, it is a struggle to envision well-meaning colleges – analytically oriented or not– and student supportive organizations being able to systemically overcome inadequate high school academic preparation. The efforts of the young people, the contributions of those who are assisting along the way, and the positive intentions of the colleges are a collective effort to patch up the broken legs of subpar high school systems with elaborate band-aids. Success becomes anecdotal, not the outcome of a structurally better preparation for higher education.