Brian O'Camb O'Camb wants to hear your small town stories too. E-mail him at bo_camb@yahoo.com. Click Here for more articles by Brian O'Camb
I don’t know about you, but the holidays often depress me.
The problem is that I can’t stand running into people I went
to school with, people that haven’t done much of anything
with themselves in the last five years.
But maybe the holidays won’t be so bad this year thanks to the UC’s decision to use comprehensive admissions standards. Finally, I can go home and hold my head high when I see my former classmates. Let me explain.
First of all, I’m from Beaumont, California, out on the edge of the desert. With a population of 10,000, it’s a small cow-town containing simple people with simple problems. It’s a conservative blue-collar community with lots of churches and ‘antique’ stores.
But despite Beaumont’s small stature, it does have its own school district and a high school that numbers around 800 students. At such a small school, everyone knows everybody else – and that isn’t always a good thing.
When I attended school there, the district was classified as a Chapter One on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being the poorest. And according to the Academic Performance Index, 68 percent of the students questioned at Beaumont High in 1999 were socioeconomically disadvantaged and 35 percent of the students were on free or reduced lunches. Also, in 1997, only five AP classes, none of them in the sciences or mathematics, were offered, and it was just the year before that CD ROMs were added to the school’s computers.
Anyone who has grown up in a small town will tell you that everyone wants out. But when the time comes, hardly anyone leaves. One of my classmates is now in her fifth year at a local junior college; she still doesn’t have her associate’s degree. Another guy I knew has been dishonorably discharged from the Marines for drug use after having been dismissed from Cal Poly Pomona for the same offense. And let’s not forget the 10 people I know who are married with children and working 9-to-5 jobs.
The problem is that small schools with limited resources – and crappy counselors – don’t offer kids something better. Upon seeing my “astounding” PSAT score of 1120, both of my high school counselors advised me to join the military. When I balked at the idea, they encouraged me to attend a junior college, even though I scored over a 1200 on the SAT and had a 4.0 plus GPA.
Neither counselor thought I was “ready” to attend a big university. It’s no wonder that out of a graduating class of 165, four students, including myself, applied to UCLA. I was the only one to get in. One of us applied to Berkeley (he got in, but opted for UCSB); another to Stanford (she was rejected). Nearly everyone else was content to remain close to home, attending UC Riverside, Cal State San Bernadino, University of LaVerne, University of Redlands or a junior college. A few made it up to UCSB.
This is exactly the reason that comprehensive review, which according to the UC evaluates students in terms of academic performance, personal achievement – such as leadership and extracurricular activities – and life challenges, including socioeconomic background and family contexts, is needed.
Critics dismiss the admissions criteria as subjective, and others claim that the process will attempt to circumvent Proposition 209, the measure banning affirmative action in California institutions.
What those critics fail to realize is that comprehensive review is a two-way street. The university has told students that they will be judged in a more holistic fashion, and students from small schools like Beaumont may actually opt to apply to the larger state universities if they know that their chances of getting in aren’t next to none.
Think about it: many students from small towns and schools don’t know of anything outside of their community. How can they conceive of going to a large city like Los Angeles or New York when all they know is the lay of the land in a 60-mile radius?
Admissions packets should also be judged not just by what is written, but by what isn’t said. If a student has never been outside of their community, can we judge them by their life experience? I say judge them on their inexperience. For many students from small towns and underfunded schools, going to college is as much about forming a life experience as it is applying their own life experience to university life. I know this was the case with me. My girlfriend, whom I met here at UCLA, is Armenian. I didn’t even know what an Armenian was when I got out of high school!
The UC has finally assured students in the same situation I was once in that they can realistically aim higher without being written off. I know that Beaumont High has a history of either one, at most two, students who are admitted to UCLA each year. Maybe under comprehensive review, that number will continue to increase.
I certainly hope so. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about running into people who never escaped small-town life for something potentially better.