Beyond Choosing Which College, Deciding Whether To Go At All

Xander Wynn is pretty sure he is going to college next year. He has already been accepted into numerous schools. He knows he would major in film studies. Money is a concern for him and his mother, but they’re certain they will be able to pull enough in scholarships, grants and loans to make it work.

Xander waited so long to commit because he is not sure he needs college to make his mark on the world. He is the owner of a small digital media company. He has professional mentors and peers all over the country with whom he engages through social media. And he is supported by a community-based organization that facilitates peer support among young men of color.

“If you have that drive and want to be great and want to be something, I feel like you can get everything you can need from programs, YouTube and self-learning and just going out into the field and starting,” Xander says, noting that many of his friends feel the same way. “College has not been as important as some people have made it seem. I’ve been in so many different rooms and so many different opportunities, that idea isn’t all that great to me.”

Xander is the kind of student that higher education administrators often presume they need to rescue. He is an 18-year-old, Black, high school senior at a public school near Cincinnati. He lives with a single mother who holds an associate’s degree and earns a modest income as an executive assistant. Xander is a solid student with a GPA just over 3.0. He’s a good football player but was never a sure-bet college prospect.

As institutions wrestled with racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many colleges and universities acknowledged that they have not been vigilant at recruiting, accepting and graduating students of color, particularly males. Only about one-third of Black adults have an associate degree or higher compared to nearly half of white adults, according to The Education Trust. For those who do go to college, 34 percent of Black males graduate within six years compared to 44 percent of Black women and 61 percent of white men, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some schools have created programs deliberately dedicated to Black and Latino students. At some schools, students are taking the lead.

Still, as much as institutions of higher education resolve that they are needed by these students, increasingly, the institutions need them. Demographic shifts show a decline in the percentage of white, high school graduates. That means institutions will have to enroll and graduate more underrepresented students to meet future goals. In addition, employers are demanding that colleges and universities deliver a more racially diverse, educated workforce.

However, while colleges faltered in their commitment, community-based initiatives, including ones led by young, Black and Latino college graduates, stepped in to fill the void of preparing students for future success. Their approach, focused around skills-building, peer networking and community leadership, makes higher education’s traditional offerings of scholarships and academic support programs seem inadequate and outdated.

Xander has benefitted from such efforts. His mother enrolled him in a free, summer program on filmmaking when he was in junior high school. Today, he is the owner of X.Wynn Films LLC, a company he started as a sophomore that now has enough clients to pay six other students on a project-by-project basis. He has honed his skills and business acumen through summer programs, entrepreneurship training, professional mentors, YouTube videos, a social media network of other young filmmakers, and by earning a certificate in digital media from a nearby vocational school.

Xander figures that most of the film programs he has explored would not teach him anything he does not already know until at least well into his second year. A university will want him to pick a single major, whereas Xander is blending expertise in film, business and education, a field where he has carved out a niche for his services.

And while a college will want to cocoon him on its campus and surround him with a new set of “reputable” mentors, Xander has found inspiration in the people and challenges of his urban community. He is part of a peer mentoring program for males of color called Forever Kings founded by Jordan Bankston, who, like many recent Black college graduates, has pursued social entrepreneurship as a career path.

Forever Kings doesn’t push that “college is the way” as many youth programs do, said Bankston, 26. “It’s really kind of up to them to determine what is going to be best for them. How do you feel you’re going to be most successful?”

Increasingly, his students are opting for avenues that allow them to “build their own table instead of sitting at somebody else’s,” which makes entrepreneurship attractive, said Bankston. It is a shift from the imperative to go to college that he felt just a few years ago.

“In my era it was like go for the experience. But even that, they’re like, ‘I don’t have to experience that.’ ”

Xander’s mother, Sherri Boone, began taking him on college tours soon after he began high school. However, her insistence that he pursue a college degree has been softened by his quandary: Is it worth paying thousands of dollars to take classes that will teach him what he already knows while perhaps foregoing income he could be making from his own business to earn a credential that promises some incremental value four years later that he cannot precisely determine?

If Xander does go to college, his choice will likely not be a place that views him as a URM (“underrepresented minority” in higher education parlance) who needs to be saved. He is looking for a school with academic flexibility that allows him to assemble the competencies he is pursuing through multiple disciplines; a premium on experiential learning that will affirm his company and his mentors as part of his educational experience; and an embrace of the kind of peer support network, rooted in racial identity and community service, that has motivated him.

Higher education has not lost Xander and his peers. However, colleges will have to recover from having for too long questioned whether the Xanders of the world are college-ready. They must now aggressively adapt if they are going to convince young, Black men that college is ready for them.