In "Who Gets to Graduate?" Paul Tough examines a problem: low-income students are much less likely to graduate from college than students from...

Reasons for lower graduation rates among lower-income students are multi-faceted.

In the United States, school systems are not created equally. Middle- and upper-class students have access to safe and modern schools equipped with excellent facilities, information technology, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, and classrooms with smaller student to teacher ratios. Higher-income students are also able to afford test preparation courses, which give them an advantage on the SAT. It is no wonder, then, that these students arrive at college far better prepared and more confident in their knowledge and abilities than their peers from lower-income backgrounds.

However, a lack of sound secondary school preparation does not doom a student for failure in college. Instead, Tough argues that it is the feeling of not belonging, coupled with an inability to find a support network, that leads many students -- some of whom were high-achievers in high school -- to drop out in their first or second years. 

In his essay, Tough focuses on intervention experiments conducted at the University of Texas--Austin. Though Austin is the most prestigious public university in Texas, and one of the nation's best public universities, it suffered from a 52 percent graduation rate in 2014. According to a 2012 report, only 39 percent of first-generation college students managed to graduate from the institution. 

The first intervention involved chemistry professor David Laude. Dr. Laude was the first to notice a correlation between a student's background and the student's performance in class. Lower performing students were often first-generation students from lower-income and/or minority backgrounds: black students from lower-class sections of Dallas and Houston, Latinos from the Rio Grande Valley, and white students from rural West Texas. 

Laude's solution was to offer these students more personalized help. He redirected troubled students out of his usual class of 500 and into a class of 50. He insisted that they complete the same material as his other students, but gave them additional practice exercises and paired them with tutors. This resulted in many of the students improving their grades in chemistry.

Laude went further and created the University Leadership Network, a scholarship program to assist students who are at risk of academic failure, and those who have unmet financial need. These students are thus enrolled in various internships, attend lectures on subjects such as time management, and are groomed for paid leadership positions, such as residence-hall advisers.

Psychiatrists David Yeager and Greg Walton examined how incoming students respond to negative messages. While it is true that all students face disappointment while at college. They realized that disadvantaged students were less able to cope with those messages. Yeager and Walton thus conducted an experiment in which they considered ways in which those negative messages could be less decisive on students' futures.

They found that when incoming students, particularly those who were first-generation, lower-income, and/or minority, received messages reminding them that they belonged and that everyone experiences adversity, those students' chances of completing their semesters significantly improved. It wasn't simply a matter of replacing one message with another (people are not so easily persuaded anyway), but of reminding them that they are not as isolated as they feel.

The conclusion to be drawn from Laude's efforts and Yeager and Walton's experiments is that American culture, unfortunately, still sends many students the message that they are less likely to succeed. This message is reinforced by the students' experiences in substandard schools and the common presumption, at the college-level, that they belong in remedial programs. As a result, otherwise minor failures (e.g., failing a test) can send less advantaged students into a downward spiral that often results in their dropping out of school altogether. The experiments show that when these students are given similar levels of support and reinforcement as that which is shown to their well-to-do white peers, they can be just as successful.