Being a pre-med sophomore is tough enough — but it’s doubly tough for Marquette University student Alberto Uscanga, the first in his family to go beyond high school.
College, says the 19-year-old, is “frightening. I wasn’t used to coming to a situation where I have to be very, very competitive.” His mother didn’t even understand that he was in college at first, he says. In his family, “the highest goal is to get a high school diploma. [Going to college] had to be my decision.”
Uscanga got to Marquette with help from Upward Bound, the federal college-readiness program. Now, when he’s not studying or working as a dishwasher, he coaches high school juniors in a different college-readiness initiative: CR21, from the Wisconsin Foundation for Independent Colleges.
The college-readiness movement is evolving and growing, observers say. Ann Coles, senior vice president of college access programs for The Education Resources Institute, has been working on college readiness since the 1960s. She estimates that more than 3,000 college-readiness initiatives target underserved groups. The federal government invests more than $1 billion annually in Upward Bound and related programs. California, Florida, New York and other states spend significantly as well.
Indeed, the sheer number and variety of college-readiness programs may be a shortcoming. “How well they work is an open question,” says William G. Tierney, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Higher Education. “Some of them are OK. The evaluation measures that exist are rough, to put it mildly.”
