Founded upon its “Freshman Year for Free” slogan, the non-profit Modern States is helping students shed the socio-economic disadvantages that often follow them from K-12 to higher ed.
While the transition from high school to college may give the impression of a clean slate, many students are in for a rude awakening. Inadequacies within our K-12 system mean that incoming students are starting from a far-from-level playing field.
Remedial courses
As GenFKD has previously documented, waves of unprepared students heading to higher ed has resulted in a truly stunning proliferation of remedial course requirements that come at a huge cost to students. According to an Education Reform Now report, more than five hundred thousand families ponied up $1.5 billion in 2011 alone for remedial coursework that should have been sufficiently covered at the K-12 level.
At an average cost of $1,500 per course, remedial courses are effectively charging students and their families to cover the gaps between high-school outcomes and college requirements. Moreover, remedial courses extend the student’s time to graduation – therefore driving up both the hard price tag and the opportunity cost of lost earnings – and shrink retention rates.
The unequal impact of rising costs
The extension of remedial courses to bridge K-12 shortcomings affects students from all socio-economic levels, across public, private and community colleges. Still, it is hard to argue with the notion that college’s ever-increasing price tag has disproportionate consequences upon financially vulnerable students, whose resources and financing options are drastically different compared to more affluent peers.
On a general level, a recent report in Race and Social Problems showed that young adults of color hold an average of 68.2 percent more student debt than their white peers. The problem comes into sharper focus when examining data from the Demos Institute, which showed that student borrowers of color are dropping out at a higher rate than white borrowers, and that low-income borrowers of any race are dropping out at higher rates than higher-income borrowers.
Transferrable credit
We have yet to even take into account the fact that graduating high-school students can, and should, be able to actually reduce the length and cost of their collegiate careers through transferrable credits, like AP courses.
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Beyond having more freedom when choosing collegiate courses, students with a large number of transferable credits are oftentimes even able to graduate ahead of schedule – saving thousands upon thousands of dollars in the process.
Unfortunately, disparities within the system mean that students of color are significantly less likely to take AP exams. According to College Board, only 21 percent of high-school graduates of color took at least one AP exam, compared to 31.7 percent for white students and 60.4 percent for Asian students. Perhaps even more damning, College Board also reports that, in 2013, less than half of students of color determined to have AP potential took an AP course, despite AP courses being available in half of those cases.
In sum, the systemic failures within our K-12 system are setting up higher education institutions to exacerbate socio-economic disparities as much as solve them.
Building an onramp to higher ed
It is in the advantages offered by college-accepted credits that Modern States aims to help students defray costs and bridge the gap between K-12 outcomes and higher ed expectations.
In a partnership with edX, Modern States claims to have created a free database of comprehensive online courses to “prepare students for the major ‘Advanced Placement’ (AP) or ‘College Level Examination Program’ (CLEP) tests offered by the College Board, including subjects such as History, Computer Science, Math, English and Economics.”
“It’s not meant to attack the traditional system,” Modern States founder Steven Klinsky said to Wired. “What we’re trying to do is have an onramp that helps you with the initial costs.”
One person excited by Modern States’ possibilities is Caroline Levander, vice president of strategic initiatives in digital education at Rice University, who commented in the same Wired piece:
[Students who took AP courses before college] have a strategic advantage that I hope our AP courses will help to equalize. It’s our goal to get all students through the undergraduate degree in a timely fashion and not perpetuate inequalities of access or hierarchies of privilege.
What is important to note about Modern States is that it is not pretending to be something it isn’t: an actual educational institution.
Klinsky and co. have no ambition to overthrow colleges or even to become some kind of nebulous, degree-factory scheme. The entire aim is to allow prospective students the chance to cut into credit requirements and costs at their own pace, and then get them into school with a better chance at a successful outcome.
Takeaway
As an entirely free, open resource, Modern States is helping to level the vastly unequal resources that play a large role in dictating educational outcomes. By effectively allowing students another chance to collect the credits they should have been able to acquire in K-12, the platform is making college more affordable and, in turn, more accessible to students of every stripe.
The organization would be well-advised to next turn it sights on other standardized exams like SAT’s and ACT’s, which measure how much the test taker can afford to pay for a private tutor as much as anything else.
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