Cars and Cash: Why Access to Both Can Make or Break a Student’s Success at College

Families without cars or much disposable income are penalized when it comes time to move their kids to college. (Photo: Meriel Jane Waissman/Getty Images)

My wife and I moved our first born, Henry, to college last weekend. We engaged in the same rituals and felt the surprisingly bereft emotions shared by tens of thousands of other parents and their children at this time of year as we checked him in, found his room, schlepped his bags, made his bed, met his roommate, dashed to Target over and over again, navigated the orientation sessions, and finally embraced and said goodbye, with trembling words and quivering chins.

STORY: Why Unschooling Is the Next Wave of Home-Based Education for Kids

I experienced the move-in weekend simultaneously on two levels: as a parent and as the CEO and co-founder of College Summit whose mission is to increase the college enrollment and success rates of low-income students. At its core, College Summit recognizes that the possession of cultural capital – college knowledge, or knowing how to navigate the process for attaining a post-secondary degree or credential – is the distinguishing element between those who achieve college success and those who do not.

STORY: This Is When Your College Student Is Most Likely to Experiment With Drugs

The fact that less than 10 percent of all low-income 8th graders will complete a 4-year degree is not due to a lack of talent or hopes, dreams, and aspirations. It is not due to a lack of tenacity or grit. It is due to a gap in understanding the secondary school achievement to college to career continuum and know how to navigate its overt and covert systems and rituals.

The author, Keith Frome, with his son, Henry. (Photo: Courtesy of Keith Frome)

As I moved my own son to college, I could not help but be alert to what assumptions were in place by both the families, including my own, and the college itself that lubricated the process of launching our students successfully. In other words, I began to identify and to interrogate these assumptions, which operated in the way our most basic assumptions do in that they are not noticed by those who possess them and thus not appreciated as indeed contingent gifts that serve to include those “in-the-know” and exclude all others.

My wife, a first-generation American and the first in her family to attend high school and college and graduate school, was also, throughout the weekend, comparing her family’s experience moving her to college and our own, privileged vantage point.

We noticed two basic assumptions: cars and cash.

STORY: University Will Tattle to Parents If Students Drink

First, before a student can move to college, he or she has to get there. I am not referring to the whole college application and selection process, which College Summit and many other programs work to demystify. I mean literally “get there,” i.e. transportation. And, once there, lodge there for a day or two or three. You don’t necessarily need a car to move your child to a residential campus, but either having one or renting one is really helpful. In fact, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to settle Henry in without a car. It would be unfathomably complex.

It is seldom acknowledged in the school reform world how the lack of access to a car inhibits school choice and participation in extra-curricular and enrichment activities, all of which are essential building blocks of the applications my son and his new classmates successfully submitted. Most of our urban and rural communities do not have adequate or reliable or frequent public transportation. Having worked in schools in both New York City, which has extraordinary access to many modes of public transportation and Buffalo, NY, which has a limited rail line and bus service that is cumbersome and slow, I know first-hand how lack of access to easy public transportation or a car thwarts the best educational and social service programs. 

The same is true for attending college. It certainly is possible to move to a residential college without a car (ship your stuff and take a bus or a train or a plane to get near to the campus and then take a cab) but that would fundamentally obstruct the process and the experience of launching your child and then saying a tearful and heartfelt farewell. Every family last weekend had a vehicle, the necessity and privilege of which went as unnoticed and unappreciated as the air.

And then there is cash. My wife’s family had little disposable income. Their family car was too fragile to survive the nearly 800-mile round trip to Cambridge, so they rented a car. They had just enough money to keep the car for 24 hours and spend one night in a cheap motel. The car rental and the cheap motel were luxuries for the family, which they afforded through careful financial planning. Because they had to return the car the next day, they were not able to spend days with their daughter, settling her in, discovering the campus, meeting other students and their families, running to a department store for last minute dorm room supplies and sundries. They drove up to the dorm, unloaded her luggage, wept and left, still weeping.

Last weekend, my wife and I were able to spend multiple days in a comfortable hotel. We attended orientation sessions, met many families, and had deep conversations with them. I had a good talk with Henry’s soccer coach, met some of the upper classmen, and had great conversations with some of the lead college administrators. We learned about all about potential internships and study abroad opportunities and intricate dual and double majors and other academic sequences.

Here’s what happens when you can spend several days moving your son or daughter to school - you [1] amass a new set of college knowledge elements about the particular college which you pass along to your kid and [2] you develop a peer network of other families and their sons and daughters with whom you trade discoveries and know-how, thus multiplying the accumulation of even more cultural capital.

For example, the college informed us that because our kids were 18 years old, the college could not share any medical records with us. Our son would have to decide for himself whether or not to tell us if he was hospitalized. This was unwelcome news to most parents but one savvy parent, who was an expert on medical law, showed us how to download a medical consent form. Another parent found the site, downloaded the documents, we made copies, and then we all decided to make our kids sign the form before we left. When we discovered that the form had to be notarized, we brainstormed a work-around. Notice in this one picayune anecdote the power of peer networks in the transmission of college knowledge. My in-laws would never have known about the medical consent form because they were racing back to Rochester to return their car. (Indeed, as a college student, my wife broke her leg, had an operation, and never informed her parents until after the fact because they would not have been able to travel that far to be with her and she did not want them to fret unnecessarily.)

STORY: ‘Sexist’? Or ‘Fun’? College Under Fire for Outrageous Banners

Cash and cars pave the way to expanded access, which opens up exclusive networks for the multiplication of navigational know-how that only furthers the inequity in college attainment in this country. We can attack this inequity by one shining a light on the assumptions that undergird it and helping under-resourced communities develop their own peer networks to teach each other how to navigate their kids to and through college. Low-income families are already brilliant navigators of byzantine systems and bureaucracies; we just need to give them the opportunity to apply and share their exquisite skillset to the post-secondary pathway.

Keith Frome is the co-founder and CEO of College Summit, the nation’s largest nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of low-income youth by connecting them to college and career. He is also the author of How’s My Kid Doing? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Schools and Education and What Not to Expect: A Meditation on Spirituality and Parenting.

Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? Email us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com.