Reconceptualizing College Knowledge: Class, Race, and Black Students in a College-Counseling Field

Past work and college-access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college-aspiring working- and middle-class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their post-high school updates. Respondents were exposed to college-going messages but faced racial constraints and unclear expectations for college preparation and help seeking. Working-class respondents drew on hopeful uncertainty-a repertoire of hope for college admissions but uncertainty in the specifics-and they waited for assistance. Twelfth-grade working-class respondents experienced the effects of counseling problems and frustrations near application time. Middle-class and some working-class respondents used a repertoire of competitive groundwork to improve their competitiveness for four-year admissions, targeting their help seeking to navigate impending deadlines and late-stage counseling problems. My findings point to the timing and process of activating repertoires of college knowledge within a high school counseling field, suggesting the need to reconceptualize college knowledge in research on racial and class inequality in college access.