Fear of college

But for half of today’s college students, college means community college - a two-year degree at a public commuter campus with open enrollment. The fastest growing institutions of higher learning, community colleges educate over half of all black college students and two-thirds of all Latino college students. Many of these are first-generation college students - children of immigrants and blue-collar workers for whom college represents a genuine chance to transform their lives. For them, a college degree is the passport to the American middle class. And more than half never graduate.

Rebecca Cox, an assistant professor of education at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, became fixated on the question of why colleges often fail those who need them most. She spent five years immersing herself in community college campuses in California and Texas, and interviewing students in multiple other states about their experiences in the classroom. In her new book, “The College Fear Factor,” (Harvard University Press), she describes a wide gulf between professors, who cling tightly to an idealized image of college and its students, and anxious students, who may harbor deep doubts that they’re college material to begin with. The result is, for many students, a paralyzing fear in this unfamiliar and intimidating new setting, and misunderstandings that often lead to failure.

Cox, a Marblehead native, majored in art history at Princeton and once taught at a Dallas prep school as well as in San Diego community colleges. She spoke to Ideas by phone from her home in Montclair, N.J.

IDEAS: How did this issue become important to you?

COX: I worked as a community college instructor for a few years in southern California....It was there where I experienced the culture clash in the classroom, where I knew I didn’t understand the expectations of my students in the classroom and where I couldn’t necessarily make my expectations of them clear either.

IDEAS: What surprised you during the course of your research?

COX: I sat in on one particular community college class for a semester{hellip}.I formed all these ideas about how [the students] were so disengaged in class and how they didn’t want to be there and how boring it was for them. People were just talking during class about parties they were going to that evening, working on homework for other classes, people coming late, and just not necessarily paying much attention to what the instructor was doing. Then I talked to the students at the end of the class, after 14 or 15 weeks, and they said they loved the English class. One student said it was the best English class he had ever taken and it was the first semester he had ever read a book.

And there was one student in particular who turned in one assignment and not any other assignments but continued to come to class consistently every session{hellip}.This woman really thought she was getting something out of class, and didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that she would be failing at the end.

IDEAS: Why wasn’t she doing the work?

COX: I had had formal chats with the instructor during the semester and understood how he perceived his students. He thought she clearly wasn’t motivated or interested and thought she should just drop the class. But she had carefully read his complicated book of policy documents and determined that she wasn’t allowed to rewrite the paper at all, while he kept expecting that she should come to see him{hellip}.She thought she couldn’t do any better. In the end, she failed{hellip}.It’s definitely not an isolated example. It’s one of many situations where students develop these ideas about what they’re supposed to do in terms of course work or a relationship to the professor that just don’t match up with what professors expect.

IDEAS: What accounts for this gap?

COX: There’s the K-12 training that students have had, and the fact that people from different cultural backgrounds have different attitudes about the authority of the teacher. Certain groups of students, depending on their cultural background, just don’t want to debate the instructor, which is something this English instructor wanted in his classroom.

IDEAS: Should we blame our secondary education system?

COX: There’s a huge gap between what’s expected at the public high school level and what’s expected at the college level. I was amazed by how many students readily admitted that in high school, their senior year, a research paper consisted of copying out of an encyclopedia. That’s a big issue.

A second issue is students have these ideas about what college teaching should look like and the role of a professor and what a good college student should be. When their ideas don’t match up with what happens in the classroom, that really leads them to some sort of paralysis. Their fear of being called out as unacceptable or inadequate is so great that it clouds their judgment.

I don’t think there is any one place where we can place the blame. There is an idea that once students come to college, they should know this or that. I’ve begun to think, why would they know these things? Why should they know these things? You don’t know what kind of education they’ve had in the past or what kind of expectations have been made explicit to them in their prior education. But these norms are so strong and come from this long tradition of what higher education has been in the past that it’s hard to question them.

IDEAS: You detail some success stories in your book. What are the circumstances under which students succeed?

COX: The instructors who I did see having success penetrating through that fear were so positive and so validating that there was just no way that the students could misunderstand their intention.

IDEAS: What can professors and colleges do to address the problem?

COX: There’s all this talk these days about improving students’ college readiness, but my perspective is the colleges need to be more ready for the students that they’re getting. The student demographics have changed, but the teaching demographics haven’t really.

IDEAS: So what are the long-term implications if we can’t fix this gulf between professors and students? What are the stakes here?

COX: In this country, we have a lot of people going to college, but we don’t have a lot of people completing a college degree. When you look at the US in comparison to other countries over the last four years, other countries have been doing a much better job increasing the overall portion of citizens who are actually graduating from college{hellip}.The big picture is we’ll continue to have a really stratified class society with the surface idea that everyone has a chance, even though they don’t really have a chance.

Tracy Jan covers higher education for the Globe. E-mail tjan@globe.com.