experiences of OneGoal’s alumni, who consistently attend schools that their ACT scores say should be out of their league and then regularly succeed at levels that their ACT scores suggest should be impossible. “Noncognitive skills like resilience and resourcefulness and grit are highly predictive of success in college,” Nelson told me. “And they can help our students compensate for some of the inequality they have faced in the education system.” A student like Kewauna, Nelson said, “will show up on campus with many important tools for success that other students do not have. And those skills are going to be more useful in getting her to graduation day than a good score on the ACT.”
7. Kewauna’s Ambitions
When Kewauna’s mother, Marla McConico, was a junior in high school, back in the late 1980s, she took the ACT with the rest of her class. She doesn’t remember her exact score, but it wasn’t very good. “After I got those scores back, I felt so like a failure,” she told me when I visited with her and Kewauna one fall day. “I thought, ‘I can’t get into college with these scores.’ So I just didn’t bother with it.”
Kewauna’s relationship with her mother was close but often fraught, and her strategy in life sometimes seemed to be to do the exact opposite of whatever her mother had done when she was Kewauna’s age. Her mother fell in love with Kewauna’s father as a teenager and made a series of shortsighted decisions as a result; Kewauna kept her boyfriend at a distance, determined not to make her college decisions based on his plans. Her mother took her eyes off her academic goals; Kewauna’s remained fixed on hers. Her mother was derailed by a bad ACT score; Kewauna was determined to overcome her own bad ACT score.
But as Kewauna proceeded through the fall of her senior year, her mood grew heavier, and when I spoke with her one afternoon in the middle of October, she sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about her future. She had started to hear back about some of the scholarships that she had applied for, and she was getting turned down for each one, she presumed because of her ACT score. “I’m getting kind of depressed about the whole situation,” she told me. “I worked so hard on all those applications, and I really do need that money for college.”
We talked a lot that day about her years at Plymouth Middle School, which she attended back when she lived in Minnesota. Kewauna traced a lot of her current academic difficulties to sixth grade, when, because of her poor grades and bad behavior, she was placed in a remedial class called WINGS. Officially, WINGS stood for Working Innovatively Now for Graduation Success, but Kewauna told me that at Plymouth, the joke was that it was called WINGS because the kids used to sit in class all day just eating chicken wings. That was an exaggeration, she said —but not much of one. “We never did
Kewauna’s other lingering regret was that during her freshman year of high school at ACE Tech, when she had had a chance to start over, she had squandered it, skipping class, goofing around, hanging out with her friends instead of studying. She got mostly Cs and Ds that year. She even failed phys ed. “I wasn’t thinking about the future,” she told me. “At that point, I just wanted to have fun.” She was only fourteen, and she didn’t think anything mattered; it wasn’t until she was a sophomore and started applying herself a little more that she learned that her GPA was cumulative all through high school, which meant that her freshman grades would directly affect her college prospects. That was why, in her junior and senior years, she became so preoccupied with keeping a near-perfect GPA—doing extra-credit work, staying after school to get help from her teachers. Still, she sometimes talked about her past like it was a stain on her record that she would never be able to erase.
The college Kewauna had set her sights on most intently was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the flagship college of the state’s university system, rated by
But by the beginning of February, Kewauna had scaled back her college ambitions a bit. She had applied to the University of Chicago, the most prestigious college in the state, but she told me she no longer wanted to go there even if she did get in. She had been admitted to a couple of her safety schools, including the University of Illinois in Chicago, but she was hoping for something better. She hadn’t given up on Urbana—that was still her first choice—but she now had a clear second choice as well: Western Illinois University, in Macomb, which was somewhat less competitive than Urbana but still had an average incoming ACT score of 21, well above Kewauna’s score. She had visited Western the previous year, and she had warm memories: “I fell in love with that school,” she told me. “I felt really comfortable there. The people were friendly. The dorm rooms—everything was perfect.”
That winter, she developed what seemed to me a more stoic, farsighted view of her college future than she had had when I met her. “If I don’t get into one of my top schools, maybe I wasn’t meant to go there,” she told me. “I would be disappointed, but I would work hard wherever I got in, and then maybe after a year or two I could transfer to one of my number-one schools.” She had decided to quit beating herself up about the mistakes she made in her freshman year too. “I can’t keep saying, ‘Oh my goodness! I messed up my freshman year,’” she told me. “It’s already done. I did what I did. It’s a lesson for me. And when I go to college, I’ll make sure that this time I don’t make the same mistakes in freshman year. I’m going to be on task. Plan things out. Have a schedule, be really organized, be focused, meet the right people.”
February was an anxious month; Kewauna kept checking the mail, calling admissions offices just to make sure they had everything they needed from her. Finally, at the end of the month, she got good news: she had been accepted to Western Illinois. Because of her low ACT score, she was enrolled in a special freshman-support program that would provide her with extra tutoring and counseling in her first year. Three of Kewauna’s close friends from ACE Tech got into Western as well, and together they made plans to head to Macomb.
8. Closing the Gap
Recently, two labor economists at the University of California, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, analyzed surveys of time use by college students from the 1920s through the present. They found that in 1961, the average full-time college student spent twenty-four hours a week studying outside of the classroom. By 1981, that had fallen to twenty hours a week, and in 2003, it was down to fourteen hours a week, not much more than half of what it had been forty years earlier. This phenomenon transcended boundaries: “Study time fell for students from all demographic subgroups,” Babcock and Marks wrote, “for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity.” And where did all those extra hours go? To socializing and recreation, mostly. A separate study of 6,300 undergraduates at the University of California found that students today spend fewer than thirteen hours a week studying, while they spend twelve hours hanging out with friends, fourteen hours consuming entertainment and pursuing various hobbies, eleven hours using “computers for fun,” and six hours exercising.
To many observers, these statistics are cause for alarm. But Jeff Nelson sees this situation as an opportunity for his students. He recalled for me his own freshman year at the University of Michigan, when he did what a lot of other upper-middle-class kids do at the beginning of their college careers: he didn’t work very hard. For some affluent students, freshman year is about drinking heavily; for others, it’s about pledging a fraternity or trying to write for the student newspaper. That time is certainly not always wasted, but it generally doesn’t contribute much to a student’s academic outcomes. And so Nelson sees freshman year as a “magical timeframe” for OneGoal students “where they can radically close the achievement gap.” As Nelson explained his theory in one of our early conversations, “Freshman year is this unique moment in time. Kids who have not had to persevere as much walk
