After Admission: From College Access to College Success

CHAPTER FOUR. THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF STIGMA-FREE REMEDIATION

66 CHAPTER FOUR THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF STIGMA-FREE REMEDIATION As Norton Grubb (1996) notes, the concept of cooling out student ambitions was generated from a study of a single junior college in the 1950s, and emphasizes the central role of counselors in this process. Since that time, little research has examined either the internal practices of faculty and counselors or the perceptions of students with regard to this issue. In the study that did attempt such an examination, the author concluded that counselors may not play a central role because students’ interactions with them are limited: “They simply do not have power or influence enough to accomplish all that they have been blamed for” (Grubb 1996, 66). Suggesting that “the mechanisms of cooling-out are probably more complex than those suggested by many critics,” Grubb (1996, 66) encourages researchers to explore factors other than lowered aspirations that may contribute to the low completion rates in community colleges. Clark’s 1960 study stressed, in addition to counselor impact, that the assignment of students to remedial classes was an important step in the cooling-out process. Research, however, has not examined this connection . Here we seek to fill this gap. Drawing from our interviews with administrators, faculty, and counselors, we consider the organizational context and cultural norms through which community colleges provide remedial education, interview students to explore the ways students perceive this process, and use multiple sources of data in examining the The Unintended Consequences of Stigma-Free Remediation 67 potential impact of these dynamics on students’ prospects for degree completion. As part of their effort to provide access to new groups of students, community colleges have developed remedial programs. Remediation is a key step toward the goal of opening access; it permits students who would be otherwise held back by specific academic deficiencies to enter colleges. However, remediation creates a dilemma. It is both necessary and stratifying , and the effects of these conflicting influences partly depend upon the ways remediation is implemented and presented to students. As noted earlier, community colleges have long been criticized for cooling out, and we commend them for their efforts to push an opposite agenda of warming up. Here, however, we illuminate some of the unintended negative consequences of these and related efforts as they pertain to remedial programs . We show that efforts to reduce the outward stigmas attached to remedial placement sometimes hide the students’ degree completion timetables, and can lead to unanticipated delays and costs, and ultimately, to dropping out. Although this approach may appear more benign than cooling out, it may be detrimental to students who often do not receive college information from family members or peers, and for whom making mistakes can be extremely costly. Nonstigmatized approaches associated with both warming up and benignly sustaining students’ high hopes may be no less harmful than the historically criticized cooling out processes. Uninformed Students Although the literature on cooling out that we reviewed in chapter 3focuses on activities during college, the reasons for changes in students’ aspirations in fact begin much earlier. In the age of college for all, overburdened high school counselors often do not offer realistic advice to students about college preparation, demands, or plans. Unlike some middle-class students at four-year universities, many community college students do not receive information about college from family members or peers. Many students therefore arrive at community colleges with unrealistic goals based on too little accurate information, a topic we address in detail in chapter 5. Their uninformed ideas are particularly susceptible to influence by college staff, who can either inflate or deflate the students’ aspirations. Two institutional aspects of high schools contribute to the low levels of information and the shifted burden of cooling out onto colleges. First, various studies have noted the extremely low ratio of high school counselors to students (McDonough 1997), which reduces student-counselor discussion of college planning. Second, guidance counselor practices favor an approach that does not interfere with students’ ambitions to attend college. Although several decades ago, high school counselors acted as gatekeepers (Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963; Rosenbaum 1976), recent research indicates that high school counselors often avoid giving unpleasant news, and advise nearly all students to try out college, even if they expect students to fail (Rosenbaum, Miller, and Krei 1996). In various ways, counselors deny the responsibility for advising students to consider modifying their plans, though some confide that they have...