In the US, a college education makes a huge difference for most people. It opens up lots of career opportunities, many of them at higher than average pay. The better economic opportunities it provides are associated with things like better health and a longer life expectancy.

Unfortunately, the US population doesn't have equal access to college. Black people attend the most selective colleges in the US at one-fifth the rate of whites, and Latinos at a third the rate of whites. There are a lot of systemic reasons for this gap—persistent poverty, poor access to good preparatory schools, discrimination, and more. But it can be corrected; a poor family moving to a wealthy neighborhood is enough to improve their children's college attendance rate, for example.

But a team of psychologists has now found there may be an easier way of boosting kids' chances of attending a good school than changing addresses. It's a simple exercise that can be done a few times over the year during middle school. Despite their simplicity, these exercises stay with minority students for years and help them get to college at the same rate as whites.

Self affirmative

The work comes from researchers scattered across North America, from Stanford to Columbia University. They've been following two cohorts of students since just before middle school. One is a group of 81 Latino students in the US West, along with a similar-sized control group of non-minorities. The second group includes 158 black people located in the Northeast, also along with a second set of controls from the same schools.

Back when the experiment started, the groups of students were assigned to write a set of essays, with the topic randomly assigned. Some of them were asked to write an essay about a neutral topic, like their afternoon routine. The rest of the students were asked to write about their core values and why they were important to them. This sort of exercise is designed to provide what psychologists call "self-affirmation."

While self-affirmation may sound like patting yourself on the back, it's really about reinforcing a sense of adequacy in people who might be plagued by self-doubt. There are a number of ways to have a self-affirmative experience—it can be as simple as a positive interaction with a teacher, or it could involve highlighting the personal relevance of their studies. However it's done, it has been found to help add a bit of resilience that allows students to perform up to their potential. The effect has been seen everywhere from middle school to college physics classes.

In this case, the students had been tracked through middle school. For both the study populations, the self-affirmation exercise improved academic performance and lowered the probability that they would end up on the remedial track. Even though the essays were written in the first year of middle school, the effects lasted throughout the remaining two years before they moved on to high school.

Since that time, however, some of the students have gone on through high school and entered college. So the new study follows up to find out how they have fared.

Long-lasting effects

The answer is: remarkably well. The cohort of Latino students had reached high school by the time of the follow up, and so the researchers looked at the sorts of classes they were taking. For the white students, the self-affirmation essays made no difference when it came to their enrollment in academically challenging classes. But for Latinos, the difference was substantial. Their risk of ending up on the remedial track was cut nearly in half, and they were more than twice as likely to end up in academically challenging classes. Enrollment in a college preparatory track went up by more than five-fold.

This didn't bring the Latino group up to the levels of their white peers, but it still marks a major improvement.

The black cohort had made it all the way through high school at the time of this most recent follow-up. And, for more than 90 percent of them who received the self-affirmation assignments, this meant college. That's higher than the rate seen in their white peers (though the difference wasn't statistically significant) and a big boost compared to the black students who hadn't done the self-affirmation exercises.

There were also gains in these students picking a four-year college as opposed to a two-year program, and the selectivity of the college they attended went up. The researchers also looked at the most selective four-year colleges and found that affirmation boosted the prospects of attending by a factor of five.

A critical window

The most striking thing about the results is that a middle-school intervention could have such long-lasting effects without any mechanisms to reinforce its impact. The obvious explanation is that the effects of the intervention became self-reinforcing. The intervention placed students in a frame of mind where they felt that they belonged at school and that college was an expected outcome. Once set with those expectations, the students would then choose classes that put them in contact with teachers and fellow students that shared those expectations.

That environment, apparently, was enough to help them overcome residual doubts, family hardships, and societal racism.

It also points to the criticality of middle school for setting these expectations. Although remedial programs are available at earlier ages, middle school tends to be where students first get choices in the types of classes they take and get to choose their peers from a broader community. Timing the intervention for this critical window appears to be essential for its success.

While it's clear that any population of students will have a range of abilities, the study also shows that a large proportion of academic success depends on our own expectations and how issues like persistent poverty and racism can skew those expectations. Not only do low expectations harm the individuals themselves, but they deprive society at large of the benefits of their achievements.

PNAS, 2017. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1617923114 (About DOIs).