According to the U.S Census, there are around 655,000 current African American high school seniors. Yet, when reading the statistics of the Ron Brown scholarship applicant pool, there were only 4,000 students who applied. These 4,000 merely makeup .006 percent of the black seniors in this country, and they shine a light on an area that the Ron Brown Scholar program needs to address. Today, the modern education system is tainted with bureaucratic and oligarchical tendencies that prevents students of color, and low socioeconomic backgrounds from excelling in this highly competitive field.…
" Journal of College Student Development, vol. 57, no. 4, 01 May 2016, pp. 465-471. EBSCOhost, proxylib.msjc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1103146&site=eds-live. Peer, Justin W., Stephen B. Hillman, and Emma Van Hoet.…
Cultural Competence Self-Assessment This paper will examine how to recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create or enhance privilege and power, and how to recognize and manage personal values in a way that allows professional values to guide practice. By using self-assessment tools such as the Cultural Paradigm Survey and the Project Implicit Attitudes Tests (IATs) the author identified the strengths that she wish to enhance, and the improvement opportunities for the weaknesses that she wish to reduce or eliminate. The author is a 44-year-old African American female attending Edinboro University obtaining her master’s degree after completing her bachelor’s degree late in life.…
Institutions are recruiting athletes that aren’t mentally prepared for the hardship of college academics. Athletes who are recruited only think on a small scale which is the fact they can continue to play the sport they love and not the actual role of an athlete being a student first. Although, the NCAA and its member institutions tout the collective success and personal development of student-athletes, there is evidence that Black male student-athletes persistently face challenges, limiting their ability to achieve academic and personal success (Baker & Hawkins, 2016). As one glaring example of the potential impact of social support on the matriculation and experience of Black student-athletes, it is also necessary to acknowledge that social…
My junior year in high school, I became a student mentor in our campus’s peer counseling program. This was an incredibly rewarding experience as I had the opportunity to help freshman students assimilate into our high school dynamic. As a peer mentor, I assisted students with personal problems and mediated issues with teachers in order to maximize their learning experience. I also acted as a role model for my mentees by talking frequently about AP and Honors courses and how to be successful in such programs. I put effort into learning about each individual's interests and goals so that I could expose them to clubs and academic courses that they may appreciate such as the Biomedical Academy or our school’s robotics team.…
College Athletes : Analysis on Student’s Priorities Many college students walk onto campus and know exactly what they want to do when they graduate. For many this changes and for many reasons too such as disinterest. But it has been reoccuring that many student athletes are changing their majors for a different reason. College athletes are getting too caught up in their athletics that they do not have enough time to work on a major that is more difficult.…
First, getting involved on campus by any means necessary. When thinking of getting involved on campus, it may seem overwhelming at first due to heavy emotional ties with feeling not belonged, but it is imperative for a 1st generation student to challenge these afflictions with affirmative action. With the growing number of 1st generation college students, there are programs now enacted as such the EOP (Educational Opportunity Program) that tends primarily to the 1st generation college student. Such programs are not utilized enough, but when doing so access to a counselor is available additionally providing guidance for the student through their college journey. While these counselors are there for the purpose of guiding the students to academic success, they are well versed among the communities low-income 1st generation college students come from; thus further allowing them to produce support that the student lacks from family and friends.…
One last precedent of athletes prioritizing athletics over academics is that the reason for all of the low grades is because of college athletic departments being motivated by greed. “A culture of greed is at the roots of those pitiful graduation rates. Basketball and football programs produce the most revenue in most athletic departments, which have placed a severe strain on education priorities” (Lewis). A Thabiti Lewis explains, it’s not just the athletes’ faults that they favor athletics more. Part of the problem is the programs they are involved in.…
Whether it was taking time out of my day to attend the first general body meeting of debate team or filling out the application for National Society of Collegiate Scholars, I began my success by putting my foot out into the unknown without fully expecting what I was going to get out of it. Having the adventurous mind to try out new things has opened my mind greatly to leadership opportunities, service, scholarship, and social justice. Topics and initiatives that I would have never thought to be conversing about or partaking in are now major parts of my everyday life. Through NSCS and every other organization or club I’m a part of, I have become a more active, accommodating, and out spoken person. To a first generation college student, obtaining success in college can often seem like a daunting task and many might shrivel in fear of the expectations.…
To improve graduation rates, the Ohio State University and Florida State University have created programs to improve the rate of minority graduation at their institutions. Both programs, although different have showed great progress and improvement for graduation rates of underrepresented students. “At Florida State, the Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement (C.A.R.E.) has been credited with helping improve graduation rates among minority students.” Founded in 2002, C.A.R.E. supports minority students all along the pipeline to college. Its programs reach out to high school students seeking help in the admissions and financial aid processes and include orientation, advising, and tutoring for those who enroll.…
I am Gary Yanez Jr., a Hispanic-American college student born in Laredo, Texas. I come from a below average income family who is striving to get the best education out there possible. My family’s blood strives only for the best. In my time in high school, I was really devoted and involved in extracurricular activities. I was part of my high school’s football team for four years.…
I then returned to New York City where I decided to attend Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, The City University of New York’s first new community college in more than 40 years. I was apart of the inaugural class of 300 students, which with regards to race/ethnicity was composed of 25% of Black students and 55% of Hispanic students. As a student here, there was much emphasis on the importance of diversity and on building relationships within the community. Here at Guttman, I was editor for the fashion section of the digital newspaper. I also became a peer-mentor, which meant I was doing well academically.…
Data on the topic of the achievement gap were collected such as political and societal factors. The political factors included such subsets as legislative decisions, voting, and getting the right representatives in place to make the students’ concerns known. The societal factors were advancements in technology, environment, and exposure to the wrong influences. However because content analysis was used, these topics were not discussed enough to emerge into a theme (Merriam, 2009). In laymen’s terminology, political and societal factors were mentioned as possible causes for the achievement gap, but were not mentioned enough to warrant rising to the level of a theme.…
In the United States, poverty strikes against more and more students every year. Whether this was caused by financial downfall, or by an unexpected crisis, students are finding themselves on the streets. These homeless students not only have to cope with the idea of finding food for the night, they also have to worry about physical and mental health in school. There is still hope for these students, however, as the future can prove bright for even the darkest of moments. This comes in the form of an athletic program, a simple, but often overlooked and undermined by academics, program to aid students.…
Introduction My internship is at the Children’s Safety Center in Springdale Arkansas. The population that the center serves are children 18 and under in Washington county when there is allegation of abuse. They can also provide curtesy services for other counties if needed.…