Fictive Kin and Social Capital: The Role of Peer Groups in Applying and Paying for College

Headnote

In this article, the authors suggest that peers have the potential to create fictive kin networks, and in this role, peers become a social support that helps enable a culture of success. Discussing peer counselors and their role in helping students understand financial aid, the authors' purpose is to suggest that peer groups-as social relationships that cut across classroom connections-create a viable solution that helps youth attain access to college. Findings from focus groups, observations, and interviews suggest that students benefit from the socioemotional and informational aspects of participating in peer counseling programs.

Keywords: peer counseling; financial aid; fictive kin; social capital

As noted elsewhere in this issue, a great deal of research outlines the seemingly intransigent problems that low-income urban youth face in the transition to college. The analysis of the problems in urban schools and the concomitant solutions that are proposed typically center on the nature of the school and what takes place in the classroom (McDonough, 2004). For close to 50 years, individuals have proposed organizational changes to the schools and classrooms that might resolve the dilemma of low rates of access to college. A host of suggestions about what needs to change in the classroom focus on logical issues-class size, subject matter, teacher content knowledge, testing, and the like (Rothstein, 2004). Although we do not doubt that many of the proposed solutions are based on common sense and a modicum of research, we wish to point out that the most recent structural solutions-charter schools, small schools, and school vouchers-fit within a long history of similar organizational suggestions that ultimately failed to resolve what has become an enduring problem (Rothstein, 2004).

One study that has stood the test of the time is the Coleman Report first published in 1961. Based on a massive national survey of more than 569,000 students, Coleman concluded that schools did not matter very much. Instead, the determining factors that led to academic success and college opportunity were characteristics such as parents' level of education, access to adequate information, access to adequate preparation, mentoring, and good counseling (Astin, 1993; Fordham, 1988; Kahlenberg, 2004; Rothstein, 2004; Tierney & Hagedorn, 2002). Since the Coleman Report was issued, individuals have taken issue with one or another aspect of the report,...