By Elissa Nadworny (NPR).
When Anna Neuman was applying to college, there weren’t a lot of people around to help her. Students from her high school in Maryland rarely went on to competitive colleges, the school counselor worked at several schools and was hard to pin down for meetings and neither of her parents had been through the application process before.
The only thing her parents told her was that she would have to pay for it herself.
“It was really stressful,” Neuman recalls. “I was like: ‘What is going on?’ None of my friends knew anything — their parents didn’t go. It was just us Googling stuff.”
Neuman’s experience isn’t isolated: Nearly 1 in 4 high-achieving, low-income students apply to college completely on their own, according to a new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation (which is a financial supporter of NPR).
