Students hear a lot of advice about the importance of what they do in high school, but they aren’t all hearing the same guidance.
At least, that’s according to a new report.
Students who don’t know that colleges prioritize calculus find themselves at a disadvantage in college admissions, according to “Integral Voices: Examining Math Experiences of Underrepresented Students,” a recent report from Just Equations, a California-based policy institute focused on making math more equitable.
When researchers asked 290 college students about what advice they’d been given in high school, the researchers found that it was stratified by race. Asian Americans were told to take calculus the most (61 percent), the report says. In contrast, Black students were told to take it the least (41 percent), with white (50 percent) and Hispanic (51 percent) students being told more often to take calculus.
The latest report is unique, according to one of its authors, in that students played a big part in producing it. Just Equations worked with Southern California College Access Network, a network of nonprofit organizations that tries to enlarge the number of underrepresented students who go to college. Two students from a subsidiary group of that network, Let’s Go to College, and another seven or eight students from around California served as regional coordinators, helping to design the data collection methods and write the report. That earned trust among student participants to really open up about their experiences, says Elisha Smith Arrillaga, the lead author of the report.
The responses recorded in the report paint a picture with very little consistency, suggesting that occasionally students were left to fend for themselves when it came to picking strong courses that would prepare them for college.
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