“A Win for All of Us”: A Counterstory on What Counts as Success in Latinx Students’ College Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper utilizes a composite counterstory to address how Latinx first-generation-to-college, low-income students describe what ‘success’ looks like within their college decision-making processes and counter traditional perspectives on what should matter as they contemplate whether and where to pursue higher education. Building upon calls within college decision-making literature that better encompass the social ecologies of marginalized students, this study centers the voices of 14 Latinx students who apply to college and, oftentimes, challenge educators and mainstream narratives about how they should select which institution to attend. What I found is that students’ decision-making processes cannot be explained through mainstream narratives such as meritocracy, undermatching theory, or the importance of school prestige; rather, these discourses, when perpetuated by educators and peers, can be incredibly discouraging and cause dissonance among students. Instead, students portray the importance of family and collective well-being when considering where to pursue college, showing the non-academic prioritizations that shape students’ perspectives on ‘success’. Overall, this study provides an essential counterstory against deficit perspectives surrounding Latinx first-generation, low-income students’ college decision-making and encourages further exploration of how government funding and initiatives can support students regardless of what institution they attend.

1. Introduction

“I’ve never taken prestige too seriously. Because sure I could apply to Harvard or Stanford, but why should I care that much about them? Will they care about me? Besides bragging rights, why should I tell them my story?” said Jackie, a low-income Latina student who was in the process of choosing where and whether to apply to college at the time of the interview. Jackie had a solid sense of why she wanted to pursue higher education. For her, making her immigrant mother proud and setting an example for her younger sisters were the key drivers for applying to college, and though she envisioned a career in computer science, college was less about the material end goal and more about what college symbolized to her and her family. As such, when I asked her to rank the importance of a series of college decision-making factors (affordability, academics, location, familial sentiments about the college, prestige/selectivity, academic offerings, and social life), she ranked all but prestige, citing that it was not even a consideration in her college decision-making process. It is not for a lack of achievement or qualifications for a selective university; Jackie had a consistently high GPA that might have made her a competitive candidate for admission into selective private schools or the University of California (UC) system that her home state provides. However, Jackie was adamant about other factors taking priority over prestige or even what institution she ultimately ended up at because, for her, as long as she went to college at a place she felt passionate about, her mom would be happy and, therefore, she now attends Sacramento State University.

Scholars on low-income, high-achieving students may cite Jackie’s decision to apply solely to the less selective public university branch of California (California State University or CSUs) as a case of undermatching. Undermatching is defined as occasions when students elect not to apply or attend more selective universities despite these colleges better matching their academic profiles than the less selective universities they opt for instead [1]. Seen as a detriment to upward mobility, undermatching theory suggests that low-income students who ‘undermatch’ by attending a less selective college are at risk of not completing college due to lower graduation rates at these schools [2,3]. Had they attended an adequate ‘match’ university, these low-income students would have better odds of graduating from college and be among more ‘academic-typical’ students rather than the students present at their less selective institutions [1,4]. In sum, undermatching theory presupposes that low-income students often attend the schools that other low-income students go to versus matches for their academic ability, may “apply to college in a manner that is not best for their interests”, and “lack information or encouragement that ‘academic-typical’ students have” [2]. Based on statistical techniques, these students may be better served through selective institutions that match their academic abilities as opposed to less selective schools that more students from a similar income bracket attend [2]. Undermatching is upheld by narratives of meritocracy and the importance of institutional prestige, and as such, these mainstream narratives may undermine students’ complex college decision-making processes and reduce them to ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ decisions [5]. According to undermatching research, the goal for these high-achieving (as defined by academic metrics like GPA and standardized testing) low-income students would be to provide them adequate information so that they can make the ‘right’ decision to go to the most selective institution they are accepted to [1]. However, undermatching and its accompanying mainstream narratives narrowly define success as being tied to a university’s selectivity as opposed to how students may actually complicate normative assumptions of success.

In my study, I complicate the mainstream narratives about ‘success’ within college decision-making by portraying counterstories [6] from 14 low-income Latinx students who largely reject the importance of selectivity in their college search due to their attention to more personally important factors that can help them thrive and challenge notions of undermatching and meritocracy. By success, I refer to how students conceptualize accomplishing their goals during the college decision-making process. Although undermatching research frames success through a measure of school selectivity, the study’s participants complicate that selectivity should be of utmost importance and instead set their own parameters for what would help them thrive in college and, ultimately, how the college they end up attending could help them accomplish that. Many of the students did not attend the most selective institution they were accepted to due to other priorities during college decision-making. They would likely be classified as ‘undermatching’ under current definitions and thereby would not have reached ‘success’. Utilizing data from 28 interviews, 20+ h of participant observation, and an analysis of students’ college admissions essays, I explore the following two research questions:

(1)

How do Latinx first-generation-to-college, low-income students conceptualize ‘success’ in their college decision-making process?

(2)

How do these students challenge mainstream, deficit narratives about their college decisions?

I argue that mainstream narratives about ‘success’ within college admissions and decision-making undermine how Latinx first-generation students set their own priorities and purpose for higher education in their college decision-making process. This study demonstrates that students are not solely looking at the academic identity or selectivity of a school when they make decisions about where to go to college. Rather, students provide powerful counterstories that articulate why going to college is not an individualistic academic endeavor but rather a journey where academics matter but so do other factors like staying connected to family, minimizing financial debt and hardship, and giving back to the community. I utilize a composite counterstory that compiles these nuanced narratives and provides an example of how students grapple with competing narratives about what is important within college decision-making versus how they define their own priorities through their understanding of education, family, and collective well-being. Their narratives demonstrate a need to go beyond localizing issues within first-generation students’ college decision-making process and rather think about ways in which the higher education system needs to shift in order to support student retention and graduation. Through the study, I also interrogate how we can uphold students’ varying needs and purposes for going to college regardless of where they decide to pursue higher education.

2. Literature Review

Before describing students’ counterstories to mainstream notions of ‘success’ within college decision-making, it is important to first establish the narratives that exist that propel hegemonic discourse within higher education. First, I begin by describing how college decision-making research has evolved over time and then transition into detailing the three mainstream narratives that were apparent in students’ dialogue and in scholarly research. Doing so allows me to position the students’ counterstories in their relative context within the U.S. higher education system, as well as portray what exactly students are challenging through their narratives.

2.1. Latinx Students and the College Decision-Making Process

The college decision-making process, commonly referred to as ‘college choice,’ describes how prospective higher education students decide whether and where to pursue higher education [7]. College decision-making is a complex undertaking, as students have to navigate multiple factors of a higher education institution, such as financial cost, location, academic profile, availability of majors/career pathways, institutional type, and social life, among other factors that constitute variation among different colleges [7,8]. The U.S. higher education system is particularly unique to that of other countries, as virtually any student can apply to any college without strict test score cut-offs or requirements that do not align with the standard high school curriculum [9]. That being said, students may decide to apply to certain schools over others based on whether they perceive they may get accepted, the proximity of the college to their home, and the cost of attendance, which thereby create conditions that students look for as they make college lists [10,11]. The impact of external actors is also important in the study of college decision-making [12,13]. Scholars assert that students who have increased access to quality college information, counselors and advisers, and connections to college-educated adults may be better suited to approach the complexity of college decision-making and craft institutional lists that best match their needs and backgrounds [14,15]. As such, much of the work on college decision-making has posed students with college-educated parents from middle-class backgrounds as the ideal for the process while not adequately representing the experiences of Latinx first-generation students [10]. Middle-class students’ direct access to college-educated adults who can guide them through the college selection and application process, as well as their social networks and access to high-quality schooling and educational resources, privilege them in a process that requires heavy research and understanding of the higher education system [16,17]. Thus, much college decision-making scholarship has elevated middle-class families as having the adequate resources to ‘choose’ the best institution for their students that meets their academic and personal needs.

However, in the elevation of a particular group, we run the risk of marginalizing others. Consequently, Latinx first-generation-to-college, low-income students are often framed through a deficit perspective that places them as ‘ill-prepared’ to embark on their own college decision-making processes [18]. Deficit perspectives within education constitute depictions of often-marginalized groups as ‘lacking’ or ‘missing’ traits and knowledge that are essential for success within educational institutions [19,20]. Notably, among this population, concerns over the quality of public K-12 education and available resources are quite prevalent and are seen to affect the likelihood of college-going [7]. Although deficit orientations sometimes help highlight the stark inequality that marginalized groups face, they can also damage people’s perceptions of self and justify the mistreatment and marginalization of people from marginalized groups [21,22].

College decision-making literature is not devoid of deficit perspectives of Latinx students. There have been particular concerns that first-generation students do not have the same social capital as other groups because they are less likely to have a college-educated relative or college-educated social network [23]. Additionally, the presence of ‘chain migration’ among Latinx students is particularly high, meaning that Latinx students are more likely to attend colleges where they know a friend or relative was attending, which typically constitutes community colleges [7]. In fact, the ‘overrepresentation’ of Latinxs in community colleges has been treated as worrisome due to lower graduation rates at these institutions and because even students who have the qualifications to enter more selective institutions still end up at junior colleges due to misinformation or following their peers [7]. Unlike their White, middle-class counterparts, Latinx students are seen through a lens of concern due to their college decision-making, and so are their families [11,18]. There have also been concerns about familismo, or the behavior of placing familial priorities above one’s individual needs amongst Latinx families [24,25]. Familismo is sometimes framed as a negative aspect of Latinx families, as it details how individuals may put their desires second to those of the family’s and, therefore, may miss out on opportunities, particularly surrounding work and education [25]. Within college choice, the fear is accentuated, as familismo is seen as something that limits a student’s higher education decisions because students may be more likely to prioritize staying close to home, saving money, and responding to familial needs [26]. Therefore, the family can be painted as a limiting, rather than a supportive, facet of students’ college decision-making and, therefore, may contribute to undermatching [24].

My work acknowledges the various inequalities that compound to make Latinx low-income, first-generation students’ college decision-making processes difficult but also builds upon asset-based perspectives that highlight the strengths students bring to the process rather than what they ‘lack’. Recently, scholars have pointed to how Latinx students develop powerful sources of knowledge and social networks that fill the gap in college information they experience at school [10,27,28]. Other work has pointed to the essential work of siblings in trailblazing the path of higher education for their families, often acting as key resources for their younger siblings when they embark on their own college journeys [29,30]. However, what is also needed within this scholarship is a consideration of how students approach the distinct, tangible considerations of college decision-making and how they redefine what is important to look for in higher education institutions and the college journey itself, which may be different from that of other racial and socioeconomic groups. Currently, research highlights the different aspects that students consider, yet there is not always a deep exploration into how students decide what is important to them as they approach the various factors of higher education institutions and their priorities [31,32]. Doing so can help us better understand the convergence between students’ purpose for higher education and their college decision-making considerations.

2.2. Mainstream Narratives and Perspectives on ‘Success’ in College Decision-Making

In what follows, I describe three mainstream narratives that surround college decision-making: meritocracy, undermatching, and school selectivity/prestige. Although there are many other narratives that surround U.S. higher education as well, I chose to focus on these three, and students’ interviews spoke to themes that are relevant within these research categories. In order to demonstrate how students counter mainstream narratives, I must first describe what they are, as well as why they appeal to the U.S. public.

2.2.1. The Myth of Meritocracy and Its Connection to College Decision-Making

A meritocracy is a social system where individuals’ success is based on their individual talents, abilities, and achievements rather than other factors, such as their socioeconomic status or privilege [33]. Although education is sometimes framed to be a meritocracy, scholars have demonstrated that instead, we have a ‘myth’ of meritocracy that obscures the underlying social structures and factors that shape access to opportunities [34,35]. For example, higher education institutions may be looking for students with strong academic profiles, evidence of extracurricular activity involvement, and likelihood to graduate within the institution [36]. Under the myth of meritocracy, we may think that achievement on these different metrics is based on talent alone rather than social structures that may privilege certain students over others [34,37]. However, the myth of meritocracy is troubling as it does not acknowledge the larger structural inequalities in place that shape the opportunities and resources available to students, especially those from racially and socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds [38]. As Amy Liu puts it, “There may be a tendency to view students who do not reach a higher level of educational attainment as having failed on their own terms” [39]. Therefore, within college decision-making literature, if students select institutions that are not as selective or decide not to attend college altogether, it may be easy to place blame on students and deem this as a failure rather than acknowledging the social systems and structures that may explain these outcomes [5]. Furthermore, it is also a way in which those who do gain admission into selective institutions and decide to attend them can justify their admission as one that was based on their merit alone rather than their proximity to wealth and power [38]. The veil of meritocracy is a sticky one as it legitimates current power and social structures and is reinforced by individuals in power and educational institutions in order to protect their own interests [34,38]. Therefore, the myth of meritocracy is a mainstream narrative within higher education that may undermine the college decision-making and agency of Latinx first-generation students and frame their decisions to attend their selected institutions (especially if the institutions are less selective colleges) as their own fault or ‘lack’ of merit.

2.2.2. The Upholding of Educational Prestige and School Selectivity

In the 1980s, college rankings were created in an effort to respond to an increasingly competitive and large higher education market where it was hard to find centralized information about how schools fared against one another [40]. Additionally, the growth of globalization within higher education led to an increased need for ‘customers’ to know what different higher education institutions could offer them, especially as investing in a college education is a costly process [41]. Therefore, college rankings emerged as a way of consolidating information about the thousands of higher education institutions in the country and offer a form of comparison among institutions that otherwise may look very similar from the outside [40,42]. However, ranking institutions is a very difficult endeavor. For example, a small liberal arts college may excel in its teaching and individualized support toward students but fall miles behind research-intensive universities in their research production and output. A community college may have one of the most diverse student populations in the nation but struggle in terms of graduation rates and completion. However, because of the different functions of U.S. colleges—which include teaching, research, and service—establishing metrics to compare institutions with one another is incredibly difficult [43,44]. However, it has been done. The U.S. News Best Colleges and Universities rankings list is the most popular and is viewed by thousands of students and their families as they consider what colleges to apply to [45]. The same universities have tended to dominate its main list since the list’s inception: Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the Ivy+ Universities that typically switch among each other but are more or less stable in the top 30 of the list [9]. However, this dominance stems from these institutions being poised as the ‘ideal’, given that the metrics are focused on research output, per-student spending, graduation rates, peer assessment (i.e., how peer institutions rank each other), and standardized test scores [46]. In other words, most selective institutions are strong in aspects that are rewarded in the rankings, which explains why they retain their prestige and level within college rankings year-to-year.

School selectivity and prestige have a strong influence on the American perception of higher education. Year after year, the number of applications at most selective universities increases, which often drops their admission rates even further. College access programs (i.e., LEDA Scholars) and scholarship competitions (i.e., QuestBridge National College Match, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) have emerged to provide ‘pathways’ into the most selective institutions [47,48,49]. Even in research on first-generation-to-college, low-income students, studies tend to focus on the students who pursue school at the most selective universities. Although it is important to understand how first-generation college students fare within historically elite institutions, these are a minority of where first-generation students go to college [49,50]. Therefore, studies on college decision-making have the opportunity to broaden how first-generation students are seen within higher education research and not only focus on the select few who enroll in the most selective institutions. Furthermore, there is an opportunity to explore how first-generation Latinx students who are still in their college decision-making process interpret narratives surrounding prestige and school selectivity and whether it plays a role in their considerations. Especially because it is the fastest-growing racial minority group applying to college, it is essential that we delve deeper into the heterogeneity of Latinx students and how their intersectional identities (i.e., class, gender, first-generation status) shape their college decision-making as well as the role that families play in that process. As the counterstory that I present later in the paper suggests, prestige and school selectivity are dominant narratives that are perpetuated by educators and the media but do not necessarily align with what students consider to be most important in their own educational trajectories.

2.2.3. Should We Be Looking for the ‘Missing One-Offs’?: Undermatching Concerns among First-Generation Latinx Students

Undermatching is a theory popularized by the economics of education subfield to describe “when students fail to enroll at a college or university that possesses a level of selectivity their academic credentials would allow them to attend [4]”. Scholars have found various predictors that they believe contribute to undermatching, such as socioeconomic status, background, environment/context, and orientation toward college [3,4,51]. Particularly among low-income, first-generation-to-college students, undermatching is theorized to occur because of a lack of quality information about applying and choosing higher education institutions, observance of their income-similar peers attending less selective schools, and aversion toward loans and debts that drive students to pursue cheaper school options [2,24]. Reportedly, low-income, first-generation, and racial minority students tend to undermatch the most, with Hispanic low-income students seen as the most likely to enroll at a higher education institution that is below their academic profile [24]. Some research has sought to find the connection between college choice factors and undermatching, with the undermatching phenomenon among Hispanic students being connected to financial concerns as well as familismo and the desire to stay close to home [24,51]. That being said, measuring undermatching is not based on students’ college decision-making processes but rather on statistical connections between different potential college choice factors and the likelihood of undermatching [52]. Although correlations can be established between college choice factors and undermatching, the quantitative outlook cannot give full insight into how students think about their higher education decisions or the process by which they process information and ‘choices’. Therefore, we must be critical of what quantitative depictions assume of students’ decision-making and make a concerted effort also to expand qualitatively how students’ processes are influenced by race, class, and more [53].

Undermatching is difficult to operationalize, as the way studies currently calculate it is based on the likelihood that students would have gained admission to a selective university given their academic profile [52]. Although researchers cannot know for sure that the student would have obtained admission at a more selective university than the one they chose to attend, nor do they have complete insight into the student’s college choice process, the studies claim that given the pre-collegiate academic profiles of the student combined with the average academic profile of selective institution tiers, they likely would have had a more selective university option [2]. The statistical modeling utilized to establish undermatching is generally based on what Michael Bastedo and Allyson Flaster term “researcher-generated hierarchies of students and institutions”. As they state, “[undermatch studies] present the ideal social order as the attendance of higher ability students at highly selective colleges and lower ability students at low- or non-selective colleges; deviations from that order are labeled as mismatches. Mismatches are problematic not only because they represent missed educational opportunities but also because researchers presume higher ability students are best poised to capitalize on the abundant resources provided at selective colleges [52]”. As one of the few methodological and conceptual challenges to undermatching work and research, Bastedo and Flaster poignantly point us toward understanding that undermatching is essentially a researcher-created dilemma, as it is based on the classification of statistical outputs by researchers and not necessarily students, educators, or institutions.

Criticism of the theory stems from an improper consideration of the factors that influence college decision-making outside of an institution’s academic profile [52,54]. To be fair, many utilizers of undermatching theory mention that college decision-making is not necessarily part of their analysis, while it is implicated in how students make decisions on where to attend college [51]. However, the minimization of college decision-making as a concern for studies on undermatching suggests that it is not being properly considered as to why it seems students are selecting colleges below their academic achievement level. The focus on the academic entity and selectivity of a college can obscure the factors that are driving students’ college decision-making process and why students may go to college in the first place [24]. Higher education is inherently an academic endeavor, but it is also accompanied by meanings constructed by students’ perspectives, contexts, and priorities [55]. Therefore, should we read students’ ‘undermatching’ as a concern when perhaps they have other priorities beyond the academic match of an institution?

In sum, this paper attempts to portray how mainstream narratives surrounding meritocracy, undermatching, and school selectivity can obscure the complex college decision-making process of Latinx students and invalidate their own priorities for higher education. I also demonstrate how they manifest on the ground through educators and peers, as well as the effect that narratives have on students as they engage in college decision-making. What my research adds to prior research are the voices of students actively going through the college decision-making process, something that is generally absent in work on undermatching and school selectivity [52]. Through their narratives, we can learn about how students challenge traditional notions about the purpose and priorities of higher education, emphasizing their agency and power in the face of a new educational step for themselves and their families.

3. The Study and Methods

In this study, I employ grounded theory and counterstorytelling methodology to demonstrate how first-generation-to-college, low-income, Latinx students exhibit a complex college decision-making process that rejects and resists the simplification of going to college as a solely academic endeavor [6,56]. When I began the study, I sought to explore how children of Latinx immigrants considered family as they chose whether and where to pursue higher education. As my results will demonstrate, family was a heavy contributor to their higher education decision-making process, but they also pushed back on the idea that family commitments and responsibilities had to be at odds with effective college decision-making. Therefore, I opt for a counterstorytelling methodology that highlights students’ resistance to mainstream narratives about ‘success’ within college decision-making.

3.1. Counterstorytelling Methodology

Counterstorytelling is a Critical Race Theory methodology that resists deficit and dominant narratives about marginalized communities and reclaims the agency of these populations to tell their own stories [6,57]. Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso describe the power of counterstorytelling as “a tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging majoritarian stories of racial privilege [and] can shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform [6]”. Especially within higher education discourse, first-generation-to-college racialized students are often described in majoritarian narratives as being ‘late to the game’ when it comes to preparing for college, holding incorrect and incomplete knowledge about higher education, and not having the necessary skillsets or resources to develop a college-going orientation [10,27]. However, the narratives that uphold this perspective generally stem from researchers’ interpretations of students’ college decision-making process rather than the actual thinking processes students engage in [13]. The students already actively countered traditional notions of what matters in one’s college decision-making process, and therefore, the use of counterstorytelling to discuss the reductionary nature of majoritarian narratives about success seemed like an appropriate way of theorizing their stories and processes.

The mainstream narratives I mentioned earlier generally follow deficit-oriented thinking, which claims that low-income students, particularly first-generation college students, make decisions that are antithetical to their success due to their backgrounds and lack of quality knowledge. For example, undermatching theory localizes the issue of college non-completion among low-income first-generation college applicants at the individual level, suggesting that the students’ lack of information or knowledge leads to them choosing non-selective institutions incorrectly over schools that may better ‘match’ their academic abilities. Although advocates of undermatching theory make an appropriate case for how educational inequality limits access to quality information about higher education for lower-income students their resolution oftentimes revolves around fixing students’ higher education decision-making rather than promoting a higher education system where students, regardless of where they pursue college, can be supported in obtaining their degrees [58,59]. Furthermore, the narratives reduce students’ decision-making to an academic perspective when, in reality, students make decisions based on a wide range of social and cultural factors [8]. Counterstorytelling provides a much-needed perspective that is rooted in students’ meaning-making and experiences to demonstrate why undermatching theory underestimates first-generation students’ ability to make the best higher education decisions for themselves through its deficit perspective. Additionally, it empowers applicants rather than statistical outputs to explain what factors matter in their college decision-making process and displays that academic matching may not be a primary concern. Given the use of meritocracy, undermatching theory, and institutional prestige in practice and policy, counterstorytelling may change how we think about college selectivity and academic standing as matters for students’ multifaceted needs when choosing a higher education institution.

3.2. Methods

The data leveraged in this paper stem from a yearlong qualitative study with 14 first-generation-to-college, low-income Latinx students from southeast Los Angeles during the 2021–2022 school year. The study’s broad focus looked at how Latinx students contemplated various tangible considerations as they applied to and eventually enrolled in a postsecondary institution, including factors such as finances, location, and familial input. I conducted two interviews with each participant, one as they were actively applying to postsecondary institutions (fall semester of their senior year) and one after they had decided whether and where to pursue higher education after graduation (summer after their senior year). To participate in the study, students had to identify as the child of at least one Latin American parent and be applying to at least one postsecondary educational institution (including community colleges and vocational schools). All participants from two-parent households identified that both parents were from a Latin American country, and given southeast Los Angeles’ demographics, they were unsurprisingly from Mexico and/or Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). Although not part of the formal recruitment criteria, all students in the study ended up being first-generation-to-college students and were low-income/poor socioeconomically, as well. Socioeconomic class status was determined through a combination of the highest parental education level, eligibility for free/reduced lunch, and annual familial income utilizing California’s metrics of income status at the time. The students attended Campana High School—a predominantly Latinx, Title I school in southeast Los Angeles. Notably, the school is a case of extreme racial/ethnic homogeneity, as 99% are Latinx, and over 70% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, indicating a majority low-income student body. Campana High School’s racial and socioeconomic student makeup means that most students would be within the first generation of their families to go to college and face various financial and social factors in the pursuit of higher education due to educational and social inequality. However, they also align with previous work on similar populations who strongly uphold education and whose families motivate their higher education aspirations [19,60].

Due to the longitudinal nature of the study, I was able to learn about how students’ perspectives on college decision-making changed over time from when they were idealizing where they might want to attend to ultimately having to make a final decision based on the options presented to them. All the participants had been considering higher education for several years, and most articulated that they had set college as a goal for themselves since middle school. As such, the participants had crafted long-term plans on how to get to college; 11 of the 14 participants participated in at least one college access program (i.e., AVID, College Bound), and all took at least two Advanced Placement/Honors courses to increase college readiness. Although not part of the recruitment criteria, the students in this group performed strongly in school based on academic metrics; they all completed their A–G requirements (course requisites that need to be taken for eligibility to California public university admissions), and the average unweighted GPA for the group was 3.5 out of 4.0. Therefore, this group was a particularly ideal sample to learn about how first-generation, low-income Latinx students make decisions about college, given that their strong academic performance makes them more likely to have various higher education options. Given the study’s focus on students’ meaning-making surrounding college decision-making factors, as well as learning how they came to have the perspectives they do, the research design was conducive to allowing students to counter assumptions about what should matter when selecting a college and telling their own narratives of how they make decisions. Participant observation and college essay data were collected and complements the interview findings, as they give more insight into the students’ contexts and their social ecology’s influence on their decision-making processes. For the participant observation, I was able to observe counselor-organized college application workshops, teacher-led college panels, and student-organized application working sessions. Access to the site and permission to observe was granted by the school, educators, and students present in the spaces.

3.3. The Role of Researcher Positionality in the Study

My positionality was a key factor in students’ articulating counterstories because, in a lot of ways, the participants and I are similar in terms of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds but different because of the educational institutions we ascribe to. I believe that the similarities and differences drove interesting conversations with the participants about what factors matter within the college decision-making process, as my own positionality as a student at a selective institution made it a point of discussion for the interviewees. In some ways, I share a similar background as the participants as I am the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up low-income in southeast Los Angeles, and was the first in my family to pursue college. Students often identified our similarities and used phrases like, “you know how it is” or “as you probably experienced too” to establish their understanding of how we share some background and context. The ‘insider’ status I held in data collection helped build rapport with students and established some common ground that helped students to be more vulnerable and honest in the interview process [61]. Additionally, my positionality allowed me to leverage cultural intuition—or the unique viewpoints that Chicana/Latina scholars bring to their work that help explain phenomena we are proximate to [62]. Students’ observance and response to my positionality and cultural intuition helped build genuine, honest relationships that, in turn, assisted in uncovering phenomena that may otherwise be difficult to learn about.

However, students were also quick to point out my status at an elite university and drew it as a differentiator between what they presumed to have been my school decision-making process and their own priorities. Admittedly, part of my curiosity about the students’ counterstories on meritocracy and selectivity was precisely because they seemed opposite to my own college decision-making process. I have attended two selective higher education institutions, and prestige, even if implicitly, was a driving factor behind how I chose where to attend. Therefore, I believe my positionality as an outsider in this respect was beneficial because I served as a direct foil for what the students did not uphold in their college decision-making process, making comparison a good way to draw out counterstories and also be increasingly aware of them. Students would make comments like, “no offense to Stanford but…” or “I know you go to a private school but I think they’re…”, which opened up space for them to critique what they thought might have mattered to me, and more generally, what they believed mainstream society and the educational system ascribe value to.

3.4. Data Analysis

All interview data and participant observation notes were qualitatively coded using NVivo through two rounds: an inductive round where codes were generated based on the words and phrases that the participants utilized and a thematic coding round utilizing a codebook that was composed through the inductive round [63]. One of the parent codes was ‘college factors’, which included finances, location, familial opinions about college, prestige/selectivity, academics, and social life (further explained in

Table 1. Factors and Definitions Provided to Students During Ranking Exercise.

Factor	Definition Presented to the Students
Finances	Considerations surrounding the cost of attendance, financial aid, familial expected contribution, etc.
Location	Considerations surrounding where a college is located, including proximity/distance from home, in-state vs. out-of-state, rural/urban/suburban, etc.
Academics	Considerations surrounding the academic side of a college, including availability of major, class sizes, study abroad opportunities, difficulty of coursework, etc.
Familial Opinions/Sentiments	Considerations surrounding how one’s family responds to a particular college decision, opinions shared by family members, particular desires expressed by family (i.e., staying close to home), etc.
Social Life	Considerations surrounding the social side of a college, including extracurricular activities, socializing/networking opportunities, party scene, dorm life, etc.
Prestige/School Selectivity	Considerations surrounding the status of a college, including college ranking, strength of academic programs, acceptance rate, overall name recognition of college, etc.

). When further dissecting the mentions of each factor during the interview (including students’ ranking and explanation of the factors), it became apparent that prestige/selectivity had several mentions in students’ interviews, but unlike the other factors, most of the students spoke negatively about that factor or rejected its importance altogether. Put differently, students spoke a lot about prestige/selectivity but rejected that it mattered in their decision-making process, suggesting that students were aware that it may be part of mainstream narratives about prestige mattering in college decision-making but not necessarily in theirs. The most prevalent factors across interviews were finances and location, which were often accompanied by conversations about family. Although these factors were associated with family, students overall ranked familial opinions as being of lower importance because they reported that their families were generally supportive of wherever they attended, yet students still thought about how proximity/distance from home and financial decisions would affect their families. Inversely, college prestige and selectivity were not ranked within the top three factors on any student’s list. Academics were primarily discussed in terms of major availability but did not have much weight in students’ final decisions of where to attend, which prompted further exploration into how non-academic factors shaped both perspectives of prestige mattering as well as priorities within college decision-making as a whole.

Given the ranking results, as well as accompanying explanations on each factor throughout the interview, I conducted narrative analysis after thematic coding to understand comprehensively how and why prestige/school selectivity was of the least concern for the students (ranked 5th or 6th amongst all students) and what in students’ perspectives and meaning-making led to the prioritization of other factors over prestige/selectivity. It is important to also note that students seemingly selected less selective institutions even if they were accepted (more information about each student’s choice is presented in Appendix A). Therefore, both their interview responses and their ultimate decisions suggest that school selectivity and even academic entity were not consequential in students’ decision-making, especially at the point of deciding between schools they were admitted to. Narrative analysis is an ideal analytical method to dissect how individuals’ personal stories connect to broader social and cultural processes and affect their interpretation of the world around them [64]. Through students’ comprehensive narratives, the counter-storytelling methodology of this paper was born, as a reading of their stories and accounts reveals a resistance to mainstream narratives that suggest school selectivity and prestige should matter, as well as how this also counteracts scholarship on undermatching and meritocracy. Therefore, the data analysis process, from inductive coding of interview transcripts to narrative analysis of students’ counterstories, leads to the structure of the paper revolving around students’ retellings of what was important to their college decision-making process and places them as the experts in what matters within that process, especially for first-generation, low-income Latinx students like themselves. In order to increase the validity of the analysis, member checks were conducted in order to ensure that I accurately depicted the students’ counterstories and perspectives [63]. Furthermore, I used the triangulation of qualitative methods (interviews, field observations, artifact analysis) in order to maximize my understanding of students’ contexts and assemble the narratives based on my multiple points of contact with each participant [65]. Although each student’s counterstory was unique and nuanced, they shared common threads about how they defined success for themselves, the importance of family and collective well-being in their college-decision making process, and the tension between their priorities and what they deemed external actors, like educators and peers, wanted them to consider. In order to condense the data into a comprehensible narrative that shows the complex process of decision-making, I present the results through a composite narrative.

3.5. Presentation of Results: The Composite Narrative

In order to present the study’s results, I opted for a composite narrative that utilizes data from all participants to construct a singular, data-driven narrative that showcases the presence of majoritarian narratives with students’ college decision-making processes as well as how they counter these mainstream projections of what should be important. Composite narratives within social science research are typically fictionalized stories that use ethnographic or interview data to narratively describe a social phenomenon [66,67]. Instead of presenting data categorically or through a series of different participants’ quotes and excerpts, the composite narrative uses data from multiple participants to tell a story that represents the phenomena we want to capture [67]. As Rebecca Willis points out in her own usage of composite narratives within sociological research, “narratives allow research to be presented in a way which acknowledges the complexities of individual motivations and outlooks, whilst drawing out more generalized learning and understanding [67]”.

The composite narrative is ideal for this study because it allows me to draw out how the majoritarian narrative plays out in students’ lived experiences, as well as how students counter and resist the mainstream assumptions about their college decision-making. Furthermore, many of the students recreated important ‘scenes’ in their college decision-making process, commonly conversations with counselors, family members, and peers. However, a single quotation or series of quotes across interviews cannot adequately capture the recreation of scenes that happened during the interviews, where the students actually mimicked voices, rehashed frustrating or difficult situations, and other storytelling tactics that demonstrated how they were countering mainstream narratives. The composite narrative also helps center thinking processes, which are central to work on decision-making but can be hard to depict without a narrative that ties in self-reflection, external opinions, and the overall decision-making that manifests as a result of the two. A narrative approach allows me to disclose the scenes they recreated as well as demonstrate their description of events, thinking processes, and after-the-matter retrospection.

Instead of choosing a singular student’s narrative, the composite narrative allows for the compilation of multiple student interviews and crafts a story that best communicates the findings across the interviews. However, it should be noted that as a writer, I had to make difficult decisions about how the narrative would be presented in a way that best captured the diversity of responses among participants. For example, one decision I had to make was choosing the ‘story arc’ of the fictitious student and their characteristics. I opted to follow the story arc of one of the study’s participants (Rose), who was a female student who was choosing between UC Santa Barbara and CSU Fullerton and was an only child in a two-parent household. I decided to follow her story, as her college decision-making journey captured many of the themes that participants talked about, including having a generally supportive family, being at odds with educators’ opinions at times, and deciding between two colleges that both have positive qualities yet one is distinguished for its increased selectivity. Rose also represents identities held by most of the participants: she is first-generation-to-college, female, low-income, and comes from a mixed-documentation-status family. Although she is the only only child in the sample, I still retained this feature in the composite narrative, as her commitment to family resounded across participants and perhaps was even further accentuated as she comes from a close-knit, small family. Because I decided to follow her characteristics and decision-making process, I was able to stay close to the data because her scenario was lived out and is part of the dataset. However, within her ‘story arc’, I also utilize data from the other participants, as I include their quotes and recreations of conversations with counselors and their families. Therefore, I utilize the fictitious character of ‘Joanna’, which is aligned with the student’s (Rose) narrative but includes stories and quotes from the other participants. Another key decision was choosing the gender of the character. With a majority-female participant sample and because I chose to follow Rose’s story arc, I opted for a female student. However, I did include the male participants’ data in the construction of the composite narrative, though the gendered dynamic of college decision-making may be collapsed through this decision. That being said, though I chose a female character, I did not make gender a particularly salient part of this narrative in order to honor that the data do not tell a singular-gender story.

For composite narratives, it is methodologically important that the story does not become too ‘fictitious’ and is actually grounded in the data [68]. To reduce the distance between the narrative and the data, the three scenes I wrote are scenarios that happened to at least four of the participants. As such, I opted for three narrative ‘scenes’ that multiple participants described: (1) a conversation with the school’s college counselor, (2) a conversation with the student’s parent, and (3) an experience from college signing day. I followed Colette Cann and Erin McCloskey’s method for constructing the composite narrative, using bolding and scene structure strategically to demonstrate how the data construct the counterstory [69]. I bolded the text that stems directly from students’ interviews. The bolded parts within quotations are verbatim from students’ interviews. The bolded parts outside of quotations stem from the data directly, paraphrasing what students said in their interviews to create the non-verbal context for the story (emotions, after-the-event thinking). The remaining text is utilized to construct a full story, still stemming from student data, but more paraphrased in order to establish continuity and narrativity in the story. Ultimately, the composite narrative allows for a more authentic recreation of students’ counterstorytelling that allows us to learn about their thoughts and feelings surrounding majoritarian narratives as well as what helps them resist and counter these hegemonic depictions of ‘success’.

4. Results

In what follows, I depict a composite counterstory in three scenes. The counterstory revolves around the fictitious character, Joanna, who is an academically strong, first-generation-to-college, low-income Latina student attending Campana High School. She is part of the AVID program, which is a college access program that helped her throughout her four years of high school learn about higher education and eventually craft her college list. Joanna has been admitted to several universities, including UC Santa Barbara, CSU Fullerton, CSU Los Angeles, and CSU Long Beach. Her main academic consideration was the availability of her prospective major, Psychology, and she was sure to apply only to colleges that had a Psychology major. At the time of application, she was only going to apply to universities that were a one-hour commute or less from her home in Campana, and she solely considered schools where she could live at home. However, her AVID teacher and college counselor encouraged her to apply to UC Santa Barbara because of Joanna’s GPA, which ‘matches’ the academic profile of the institution. Despite wanting to attend a UC, as UC Los Angeles was her dream school, her rejection from that institution meant that the only UC option she had was UC Santa Barbara. She was well-informed about UC Santa Barbara; she and her family visited the campus after her acceptance and she had spoken with fellow Campana High alums who attended UC Santa Barbara. Particularly appealing about UC Santa Barbara was its picturesque campus, as well as financial aid opportunities for Joanna. However, CSU Fullerton was considerably more appealing to Joanna, as the one-hour distance from home meant she would be able to commute, whereas a two-hour drive would mean that Joanna had to live in a dorm on campus. The narrative begins with Joanna deciding between her university acceptances, primarily contemplating UC Santa Barbara and CSU Fullerton.

Scene 1 describes Joanna’s conversation with her college counselor about her higher education decisions. Scene 1 is meant to represent the majoritarian narratives that students often face, particularly from educators like college counselors. As detailed below, Joanna experiences assumptions about what should be important in her decision-making process, including the difference in selectivity between the two schools, as well as the idea of college being a space to grow independent from the family. Joanna experiences emotional turmoil, which is meant to demonstrate the effect of majoritarian narratives being utilized to undermine students’ priorities and self-definitions of ‘success’.

Scene 2 describes Joanna’s reactions after the conversation with the counselor and transitions into a discussion with her mom. This scene articulates how students’ families play an important role in contextualizing what matters to the student and how their priorities are shaped through an understanding of collective well-being and familial cohesion. The scene also serves as part of the counterstory, as the conversation portrays how students define their own ‘success’ within college decision-making, as well as how their priorities may not align with mainstream narratives yet still may be powerful anchors in the higher education trajectory.

Finally, scene 3 describes Joanna going through college signing day—a new Campana High School tradition where the senior class shares where they will be attending college in the fall with their peers. Although meant to be a celebratory event, the story tells how it can be a nerve-wracking experience, as students have to share decisions that others may not understand. However, as many of the students in the study share, Joanna comes to peace with, regardless of others not understanding, her decision to attend CSU Fullerton instead of UC Santa Barbara; she knows that she made the best decision for her and her family.

4.1. Scene 1: Santa Barbara Isn’t That Far—How Majoritarian Narratives of ‘Success’ within College Decision-Making Manifest amongst Educators

Joanna was nervous as her mandatory appointment with the college counselor approached. She had acceptance letters from UC Santa Barbara, CSU Fullerton, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, and CSU Dominguez Hills. Joanna had already narrowed down her list to UC Santa Barbara and CSU Fullerton; she visited both campuses and really liked the environments in both. Plus, they each had several majors in the social sciences that she could explore, including Psychology, her ideal major. However, the reality was that even as Joanna presented two options to her counselor, she had already contemplated for a long time that UC Santa Barbara did not seem feasible given its two-hour distance from her home. At the time of applying, she did not realize just how heavy the piece about leaving home for college would be in her decision-making process. She applied to UC Santa Barbara because of a recommendation from her teacher, who stated, “[you] have really good grades [Joanna], I see you’re applying to UCLA but why don’t you also apply to UC Santa Barbara or UC San Diego?”. Joanna had already been hesitant to apply to UCSB and UCSD because they were a two-hour commute from home, meaning she would have to live in a dorm at these institutions and perhaps not get to visit her family as frequently due to a lack of car transportation. That being said, she added UC Santa Barbara to appease her teacher and try her luck at being admitted to a UC.

As part of the AVID program, she had a mandatory meeting with the college counselor before she selected which institution to attend. The AVID program is a school-based college access program designed for college-aspiring students. A large part of the participants in the study were a part of AVID during their 4 years of high school. Through the program, they took a yearly course that covered college application requirements, preparation for necessary application components, i.e., college application essays and standardized tests, individualized college list crafting support, and field trips to local colleges/universities. At Campana High School, it primarily supports students with unweighted GPAs of 3.0 and above and who take AP/honors level courses regularly. She looked forward to meeting with the college counselor to chat about how to submit her enrollment deposit to CSU Fullerton. However, before Joanna could even disclose what she wanted to get out of the meeting, Ms. Lenteria (the college counselor) asked her what schools she had narrowed down to and what the financial aid packages looked like. Joanna shared which institutions she was admitted to, handed over the financial aid letters, and told her she was ultimately considering UC Santa Barbara or CSU Fullerton.

The counselor stated, “After reviewing your choices, UC Santa Barbara seems clear to me, right? The loans are minimal, especially considering that your grants pay almost everything, including the dorm. And you got to visit, so that’s great, you’re familiar with the campus, that’s a big head start. I’m sure you’ve already seen they have a great psychology program. So you’re going to pick UC Santa Barbara, right? It’s the best college you got into; the Cal States are nice, but it’s not the same as going straight to a UC, it’s more competitive to get in, and your financial aid looks pretty good”.

Joanna started to get teary-eyed because she did not really know what to do. Still, she told Ms. Lenteria, “I don’t think so. I’m leaning toward Cal State Fullerton; it’s closer to home, and as you know, I’m really close to my family, so I think a two-hour commute would be too much for us”. Joanna tried to keep her composure, but she could tell that the counselor was perplexed, placing her hand on her chin as she thought about what Joanna just said.

Ms. Lenteria responded, with a heavy sigh in her voice, “You’re gonna have to leave your family eventually, and Santa Barbara is not that far. Joanna, it’s a very prestigious school, and I can promise you that many students would like to have the success that you do”. Joanna nodded, taking several seconds to respond. Ms. Lenteria was right; many of her peers had expressed that Joanna should feel lucky that she had the options she did. Additionally, she had received counterarguments from friends and educators about UC Santa Barbara being far away. They insisted that a two-hour drive was actually quite close; however, Joanna’s conceptualization of ‘distance’ was informed by the fact that as an only child, she felt like an essential member of her small family, and therefore she conceived of proximity in a different way. Consequently, Joanna experienced a lot of distress, given what she thought she wanted versus what external actors were communicating.

“But what if something happens to me and I need my family? What if I don’t have mom around? I don’t know what I’d do without my family members, they’re my support system. They are my rock and have supported me my whole life”, Joanna stated, professing her fear of being distant from integral familial support should she choose to attend UC Santa Barbara.

The counselor sighed and told Joanna that it seemed like she had made up her mind, so their conversation was just going in circles. The counselor ended with, “Come back to me if you change your mind, you’ve got a good option here”. Joanna tried to hold her composure until she left the room, crying because she felt like she’d been misunderstood and judged for her commitment to staying close to home. For Joanna, her commitment to family involved being present in the home space and supporting her parents where she could, even if she was a student full-time. Joanna never returned to the counselor’s office, even when she needed help submitting her enrollment deposit or requesting her final high school transcript.

4.2. Scene 2: “I Want a Win for All of Us”—The Family as a Fundamental Priority within College Decision-Making

Joanna, still shaken up from the tumultuous conversation with her counselor, was in distress as she sat around the dinner table with her parents that evening. Her mom noticed Joanna looking down as Joanna helped set the table and asked her what was going on.

“Ms. Lenteria is saying I should go to UC Santa Barbara. She says it’s the best school I got into so that I’d basically be wrong if I chose to go somewhere else. And if I had gotten into UCLA, I’d have a good UC option that is near us but that just didn’t happen for me”, Joanna shared, contemplating how much to reveal to her mom, as she didn’t want to alarm her. Joanna often held back telling her parents hard details from school because she did not want to worry them or cause them any anguish. They were predominantly supportive of whatever educational decisions Joanna made, but she often considered how her issues would impact their mental health, as both of her parents worked physically arduous jobs that already made them stressed. So, she considered how her decisions would impact her family’s well-being, even if she did not always tell them directly. That being said, her family also tapped into their social networks to ensure that Joanna had access to college students and alums; her mom’s brother-in-law had attended CSU Fullerton, and her dad’s co-worker had a daughter who went to UC Santa Barbara. Joanna had used her family’s connections, even if they were not immediate family, to learn more about each college and make an informed decision. Despite her family’s help, Joanna still found it hard to communicate all her predicaments with her already stressed family, but she took them into her college considerations very seriously. Today in particular, it was hard to keep in the sentiments she was experiencing, especially because a lot of her decision-making was based around the family.

“Mija, do you want to go to UC Santa Barbara? We can pay for it, me and your dad, we’ll get another job or whatever it takes to get your school paid for. You can go wherever you want, we’ll find a way to get you there”, Joanna’s mom shared. The thing was, Joanna could not even find the words to explain why she did not want to go to UC Santa Barbara. She knew that financially, it could be viable. She could work, she could get the CalGrant and the Pell Grant and even could take out loans if needed so that her family did not have to contribute financially. Yet, in Joanna’s gut, it was still not the right decision for her. The images of missing out on family dinners, doing homework in a library instead of the familial kitchen table, and not sharing everything she learned in class with her parents were extremely present and not worth missing out on for the prestige of a university. Should she go to UC Santa Barbara, Joanna felt like even that two-hour drive away from home would create both a literal and emotional distance between her family and herself, despite her parents’ unconditional support to follow her dreams. Yet, she questioned her decision.

“Well, she kept telling me that Santa Barbara isn’t that far and that maybe I’m too attached to family and that I should start being independent. That eventually I’m going to have to leave home so I might as well do it because a UC is too good to pass up”, Joanna expressed.

Sympathetically, her mom shared, “Mija, your dad and me don’t care what college you go to, we just want you to be happy. For us, we’re just happy that you go to college, whether that’s Cal State LA or Harvard. If you go to college, it makes me feel good that our sacrifices and journey to this country have been worth it. We don’t care if you go to a UC or a Cal State, we just want what you feel is best, no matter how much we have to pay, we’ll figure it out”.

Joanna realized that what would make her happy is not the prestige of UC Santa Barbara or how competitive it is to get in. Instead, what would make her joyous is being able to share college experiences with her family, as opposed to moving away from home. As she articulated, “I want a win for all of us. I think that’s why Cal State Fullerton is better because then you can see how I’m doing in college. I want you guys to live through me. I know how much you’ve struggled with your immigration. So I want you to live that experience of being a college student through me. You’re going through this with me and I don’t want you to feel lesser than because I have an education. When I graduate, you can put my graduation regalia on and see that we did it together”.

“I think you have your decision, Joanna”. Her mom smiled, and Joanna realized that she had been fighting for CSU Fullerton precisely because it was the right decision for her. Joanna never returned to Ms. Lenteria to tell her her decision, but she successfully declared her intent to attend CSU Fullerton ahead of her college signing day.

4.3. Scene 3: At Peace in the Midst of the Fire—Coming to Terms with One’s Decision-Making Process

College signing day was relatively new at Campana High School but one all students were expected to participate in. In a school-wide assembly, all the seniors would gather and stand at the podium, declaring what university or college they would attend in the fall. It was supposed to be a day of celebration. The gymnasium walls were adorned with the flags of the colleges represented in the graduating class: UCLA, UC Riverside, CSU Los Angeles, East Los Angeles Community College, and many more institutions. Joanna gathered with the other students who would attend CSU Fullerton and stood for a photo. Some of her peers told her she was in the wrong spot, that the UC Santa Barbara flag was down the aisle. However, she told them she had selected CSU Fullerton, to which those peers nodded with some perplexion. Following Ms. Lenteria’s meeting, Joanna had not shared with many peers where she had decided to attend and was quite nervous about sharing in front of her classmates. However, as she stood with her other peers who similarly chose CSU Fullerton, she felt more comfortable with her decision. In fact, she met three other girls who chose CSU Fullerton over their UC options and they bonded over not feeling heard or supported within their educational settings.

The students were interestingly lined up. They went from community colleges to CSUs to UCs to some other private colleges. Whose idea that was was unclear to the students, but nonetheless, students grouped up with their respective institutions and announced their decisions. Joanna and her group of CSU Fullerton peers were up at around the halfway point of the ceremony and, one by one, declared their intention to attend CSU Fullerton. Joanna trembled as she went up to the microphone and proudly stated, “My name is Joanna Reyes, and I will be attending California State University Fullerton to study Psychology!” Claps ensued, but so did conversations. Among the crowd were Joanna’s AVID classmates, who exchanged some whispers about why Joanna had picked CSU Fullerton over UC Santa Barbara. Some of the comments that Joanna’s friend shared with her were, “Oh, I thought she should’ve picked [UCSB] because it’s a better school”, “She had good grades, so I’m surprised she went with a Cal State”, and “I wish I had her set of options, then I could’ve taken her spot at a UC”.

Although Joanna felt some unease about her peers talking about her decision like that, she ultimately came to peace with what was important in her own college decision. She told her friend, “I am the one who has to live with my decision. Nobody else is going to go to college for me. I am the one who’s going to have to go to class every day and be okay with the school I chose. Maybe it’s the decision people think was wrong but at the end of the day, they aren’t living that with me. My family and I will have to bear with my decision, so I’m gonna choose where I’ll be happy. My family is happy for me, and their opinion is the only one that matters to me”.

Two years after signing day, she envisions becoming a social worker or a teacher in order to help her community. Her commute from Los Angeles to Fullerton is “no joke”, as she puts it, but it has allowed her family to be involved in her college experience, from visiting campus with her to inviting her college friends to their home over school breaks. All that has helped Joanna persist through some of the toughest academic experiences of her life, but the determination to see her parents wear her cap and gown on her graduation day keeps her motivated. CSU Fullerton ultimately allows her parents to be intimately involved in the college-going process and, thus, helps Joanna keep pushing through difficult obstacles.

5. Discussion

The composite narrative demonstrates how students face different opinions and responses from a variety of actors around them about their college decision-making process. Evidently, the college decision-making process is seldom an individualistic endeavor. Rather, input from educators, peers, college access programs, families, and other actors can shape students’ understanding of their institutional ‘options’. Students’ processes are mediated through their social interactions, as how they conceptualize what is important to them and their prioritization of different decision-making factors are socially constructed. The process of deciding whether and where to go to college is not simply one about going to the school that is seen as most ‘meritorious’ or as the ‘best academic match’. Rather, the complexity of students’ decisions and priorities means that we need to look beyond the purpose of higher education as one that is solely academic. Mainstream narratives about meritocracy and academic matching within higher education obscure the multifaceted reasons people go to college, as they emphasize the academic function of the university rather than what it comes to represent for students. Students carry their meanings for college into the decision-making process, which helps them concretize what their tangible considerations are (i.e., the priority of familial cohesion drives Joanna’s decision to pursue college at an institution that she can commute to). Furthermore, mainstream narratives underscore the individual student’s decision-making process while ignoring the social and cultural contexts that guide their thinking [8]. Especially as Latinx students constitute the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group within higher education, mainstream narratives fail to represent the new ‘face’ of college-going, which is shown to hold high levels of collectivism and familial commitment [18]. Therefore, upholding meritocracy, academic ‘matching’, and individualistic perspectives on college decision-making can ostracize our racialized and socioeconomically marginalized students, creating tension between them and the higher education system they wish to enter. These mainstream narratives are not solely tied to media depictions, but as the composite narrative shows, socializing institutions like college access programs and actors like counselors can further perpetuate these dominant ideals. The students’ counterstories portray the reality of college decision-making, which is often messy and complicated yet sometimes empowering. Unlike the deficit perspectives articulated through mainstream narratives, students’ testimonies about how they navigate the difficult process with hopes and aspirations for a collective ‘better future’ demonstrate that our students know what they need and expect from institutions.

One pivotal finding across interviews was the centering of family within college decision-making. However, students do not frame their families as inhibiting the range of colleges they can apply to. Rather, as Joanna’s story demonstrates, family is an empowering source of care that gives students increased confidence about their postsecondary educational options. Notably, students do not frame their families as pressuring them to attend a certain school or select a specific major. The families instead carry unconditional support that empowers students to make the decisions that are best for them. Unlike the mainstream narratives that invalidate students’ decision-making, families are a source of comfort that inspires students to take agency and autonomy over their decisions. Family, in a lot of ways, shapes students’ thinking about the purpose of college and certain priorities like staying close to home, but they do not signal strict pressure to abide by certain expectations or regulations. However, for this group, having an accentuated worry for familial dynamics and relationships, how college finances would affect familial economics, and restriction in movement due to undocumented parent status are all stressors that students juggle as they make their college decisions. Oftentimes, these stressors are both motivators for students to do well in school but also hold considerable weight in college decision-making. Additionally, in Joanna’s narrative, we see that she does not reveal every issue or consideration to her family despite their unconditional support. It is important to note that many of the participants chose this strategy in order to reduce stress and worry among their already labor-burdened parents. Therefore, we see how familial considerations are classed and racialized processes that students construct based on their lived experiences. Although qualitative studies are not representative of every population member, the students in this study largely counter concerns of family being a source of constraint within college decision-making and are rather a unit that liberates students from mainstream narrative expectations. As students decide whether and where to pursue college, holding the family at the forefront can be a motivating factor to persist within higher education, even when challenges and obstacles arise, as their families and their pedagogies can inform their sense of resilience [70].

Furthermore, the students and their families exhibit a great sense of flexibility and malleability when it comes to their college decision-making. As exhibited through Joanna’s ability to adapt from her dream school of UCLA to her ultimate institution of CSU Fullerton and the familial support that followed her, Latinx first-generation students remain motivated to achieve their aspirations because they are flexible in where they can do so. The ability to adapt to their circumstances demonstrates resilience that will serve them well in their higher education journeys, as setbacks and critiques did not stop them from fulfilling their dreams. On the contrary, their determination to prioritize collective well-being in their college decisions can help them persist during college as they do not necessarily have to sacrifice one over the other when they embark on the higher education journey. It may help explain why all of the students have remained in college two years after the study and have persevered through various types of academic, social, and financial challenges. While we cannot prove the counterfactual to be true (i.e., if Joanna would have done well had she attended UC Santa Barbara), we do know that the malleability of achieving their goals regardless of institutional type demonstrates a great sense of resilience that is undermined in mainstream narrative about undermatching and institutional selectivity. Additionally, there is an increased presence of Latinx students at ‘less selective’ institutions, and therefore, the cultural affirmation that students receive in settings like regional universities and community colleges may also increase their retention.

Lastly, the findings suggest that the emphasis on getting academically talented, first-generation students into selective institutions as a form of ‘equity’ undermines the complex decision-making process that students go through that extends beyond academics. In conversations about undermatching and college access, it is common for interventions to revolve around getting academically qualified marginalized students into selective institutions, emphasizing that if they are given quality information or granted ‘pathways’ toward these colleges, then the access to opportunity gap can be reduced [2]. However, these types of interventions and strategies undermine other important factors that matter in college decision-making beyond the academic profile of the school, as well as create a narrow sense of what ‘success’ within decision-making looks like. By classifying the more selective institutions students get into as the ‘right’ choice in models of academic matching, it sets up a researcher-based hierarchy that discounts students’ other priorities in their college decision-making process [52].

As the student interviews demonstrate, academic profile and school selectivity is one dimension of consideration, but it is not the only one, nor is it always the most important. For many Latinx first-generation students, priorities about familial cohesion, proximity to home, ability to support one’s family members and community, and collective well-being may supersede the importance of academic ‘matching’ to an institution. Furthermore, even if college access interventions are to provide pathways toward selective institutions, they will always be limited to a select few, as that is the nature of selective admissions [36]. Therefore, instead of focusing on how we can move a few first-generation Latinx students into selective institutions, what can be done to support students regardless of their institutional choice? How can we provide support structures and initiatives so that, regardless of the school’s selectivity, students will be adequately propelled into college degree completion? How can we reframe conversations about the ‘overrepresentation’ of Latinx students within community colleges and less selective institutions into ones that acknowledge and uphold these institutions as truly ‘Hispanic-serving institutions’ that enable our Latinx population to pursue higher education [71]? That being said, we also need to acknowledge the structural constraints that currently limit less selective institutions’ ability to afford more retention strategies, such as adviser-to-student ratios and specialized programs for vulnerable populations (i.e., student parents, full-time working students), and rethink government funding so that money is reaching the institutions serving the most first-generation-to-college, low-income students [72]. Future work should explore how changes in government funding for universities can support Latinx first-generation, low-income students at any institution they elect to attend [73]. How can additional funding toward student retention help the institutions with the highest proportions of Latinx first-generation, low-income students and what programs can be enacted in order to be able to do so? Furthermore, work within college access can also further investigate how we can move beyond an individualistic take on college decision-making into ways we can best recognize students’ varying commitments and priorities for higher education. Especially because changes to government funding take a long time, college access programs and university initiatives can be essential in supporting students in the meantime. For example, college access programs may further integrate families into their programming and provide increased information to family units about decision-making, reducing the emotional burden on students to explain all their considerations to their parents. Furthermore, university programs may consider additional family outreach, such as parent orientations and virtual discussions designed specifically for the parents of first-generation-to-college students, so that they are further connected to the school, and the distance between universities and families is reduced. This can also help with student retention, especially among students who hold family to be of utmost importance.

As previous scholars and this study underscore, Latinx first-generation, low-income students often make college decisions based on familial circumstances and, therefore, how can we move our educational practices to better accommodate collective thinking [13,74,75]? Working toward supporting the family through the college decision-making process instead of just the student can reduce the dissonance some students experience from educators and uphold parents, siblings, and other loved ones as partners in the higher education journey of students [75].