"I Felt Like a Fish Without Water": First-Year Experiences of Middle College High School Alumni

• In Event: 72.022 - Queering the First-Year Experience: Hidden Hindrances to Retaining High-Performing Students of Color

Abstract

Purpose

High school students have taken the initiative to get a head start on college through accelerated programs called dual enrollment (DE). Through this high school/college partnership, students earn college credits while in high school, resulting in transferrable college credits and/or a postsecondary degree or credential. For underrepresented students, DE is viewed as a catalyst to mitigate socio-political structures that produce variation in their academic preparation and educational attainment. While this program has garnered much attention, little information is known about the first-year college experiences of these students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, that transition into taking college courses while in high school, and transition into 4-year institutions.

Given this gap in literature, the purpose of this work is to unpack the first year college experience of DE participants from underrepresented backgrounds that transitioned into college, and study the extent to which DE support structures for underrepresented students. To examine this phenomenon, I sample from a Middle College High School MCHS in Northern California that is located on a community college campus. Students begin taking college classes while in high school as early as 9th grade and are considered community college students. MCHS is unique because it is a DE program that is equity minded and geared towards recruiting and supporting the college preparation for first-generation, low-income, underrepresented minority students. By unpacking the first year college experience of MCHS Alumni, scholars gain a sense of how college readiness programs are developed through a culturally responsive lens and how equity based programs shape the high school to college transition for underrepresented students.

Theory, Methods and Data Sources

I draw on David Conley’s (2007) comprehensive college readiness framework, supplemented by a culturally responsive college readiness lens (Welton and Martinez, 2014) to analyze the educational experience of 11 MCHS Alumni involved in an equity based DE program. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), is used as a data analysis lens to examine “individual’s lived experience and explores the personal perceptions and meanings attributed to an object or an experience” (Moodley, 2009, p. 39) relative to their culturally responsive context.

Results

Preliminary results show that when MCHS Alumni transitioned into the community college, they felt they had an academic advantage over their non-college course-taking counterparts and that peer support played a role in their college experience at the 2-year community college level. Interestingly, upon transitioning into a 4-year institution, without the peer support MCHS Alumni ideally received while at MCHS, participants noted they felt alone, and “like a fish without water.”

Scholarly significance

This study is significant in that it finds that while MCHS serves as a program that provides underrepresented students with the college readiness they need, support should not end once students are accepted into college. Students from underrepresented backgrounds will need support as they venture into unfamiliar territory. Thus, first year experience support should not continue in “piecemeal” strategies (Kift, Nelson and Clarke, 2010), but rather systemic to include longitudinal support for underrepresented students experiencing the context of college for the first time.

Author

• Montrischa Money Williams, American Institutes for Research