THE COLLEGE GAP

Maine has regularly catalogued and extolled the benefits of going to college, from financial to societal to the sheer joy of discovering a rewarding area of study to pursue for the rest of one’s life. And Maine residents have responded, a little bit. More young people are likely to head for college after high school now and more adults are likely to take college courses than a generation ago, but their numbers do not compare well with those in other states, especially considering Maine’s excellent national test scores and high-school graduation rate.

Why more Maine residents do not go to college has been explained previously as primarily a money question: College costs more than many Mainers think is affordable. Aspirations often are mentioned as another reason. Earlier this week the Mitchell Institute, in its study, “Barriers to Postsecondary Education in Maine,” reported that these issues are important, but the really useful answers are found on a much more specific level, which the institute dug out by talking with or surveying more than 2,500 Maine high school students, teachers, young adults and parents. The work provides not many new answers generally, but several insights into what needs to be done specifically to encourage more people to attend college. Fortunately, these solutions most often involve understanding more than money.

In fact, there is more money available for college than perceived by families, and aspirations are plenty high, too, despite what educators think, according to the Mitchell study. But what is missing is crucial. Especially for first-generation potential college students and especially for students not in honors classes, what is missing is the practical awareness among students and their parents to save for college, find the scholarships, search and select preferred colleges, arrange for campus visits, get the applications, write the essays, etc.

The disconnection between a family’s intention to send a child to college and the actual accomplishment of that student graduating two or four years later can be addressed in several practical ways. The Mitchell study makes 10 suggestions, including simple ideas like occasionally shifting guidance counselors’ hours to later in the day so parents have more opportunity to meet with them; asking community members to help guide students through the college-application process and beyond; encouraging colleges to do more to bring young students on campus to make their hypothetical ideas about college concrete. These are promising proposals that could be worked out over a few weeks rather than the months and years usually associated with changes in higher education.

Parents, according to the report, remain overwhelmingly the biggest influence over whether a student goes to college after high school, and parents overwhelmingly want their children to continue their education. The Mitchell Institute report is valuable because it shows how to bridge that desire and the reality of successfully going to college. It is a report for state policy-makers but equally so for local school boards, which can make small, important changes to significantly boost college enrollment. It deserves close attention as Maine continues to try to solve this problem.