COVID is highlighting the downsides of losing face-to-face contact in many aspects of life, including education, just as more and more research underscores how critical school relationships can be to students’ success.

The latest example is a new study of College Forward, a Texas-based program designed to help low-income, first-generation students navigate the college application process. Students who randomly gained access to the program, which embeds recent college graduates in high schools like Crockett to offer support, saw their chances of enrolling in college jump by 8 percentage points.

The research contrasts with the disappointing recent results of low-cost efforts to boost college-going, while also pointing to a concrete way to help students from low-income families in the years ahead.

College Forward embeds coaches in a number of Texas high schools, where they work with a group of first-generation or low-income students starting junior year. Not only are students in the program more likely to enroll in college — 66% versus 58% in a control group — they also are more likely to go to colleges with higher graduation rates, according to the study. Students who participated were also much more likely to have stayed consistently enrolled in college three years after high school: 45% versus 33%.

But the kind of support College Forward provides is costly. The program spends $4,000 per student served, which perhaps explains why it doesn’t exist everywhere — and why enthusiasm has focused on low-cost alternatives in recent years.

“There’s a thread: Some of the biggest impacts that we will see are from programs that are thinking about what are the root causes and what are ways we can try to help students to navigate the larger challenges,” said Dominique Baker, a higher education researcher at Southern Methodist University. “And that costs money.”

Read the full article about College Forward by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.