I Should Have Received More Help

Scores of students flow into the higher education system each year, a river of neophytes, the majority of them with their eyes wide and their minds adazzle with the thought of the careers and the lives before them. It is a heady time in their lives and many, if not most, will find within those first few days that something was missing in their life experience; guidance and a timeframe. The schools can be faulted here, too, and I’m not talking about the high schools, but the colleges and the universities.

I write from experience and now I am incorporating the experience of others (one being “The Forest for the Trees”) into this blog because older eyes need to pay attention to this growing dilemma. How many of this new cohort will be the first ones in their families to attend college?

The article in The Atlantic lays out some of the problems for these first-timers:

“Harry’s difficult adjustment is just one example of the many obstacles first-generation and minority students confront each year that don’t typically plague their second- and third-generation peers. Extensive studies show that low-income and first-generation students are more likely to be academically behind, sometimes several years in core subjects. They’re more likely to live at home or off-campus. They’re less likely to have gained AP credit and more likely to have to take…