Ready, Willing and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success

How can an understanding of adolescent development inform strategies and practices for supporting first-generation college goers? In Ready, Willing, and Able, Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard focus on the developmental tasks and competencies that young people need to develop in order to plan for and succeed in higher education.

These include identity development, articulating aspirations and expectations, forming and maintaining strong peer and adult relationships, motivation and goal-setting, and self-regulatory skills, such as planning.

The authors challenge the predominant approach of giving young people information and leaving it to them to figure out how to apply it. They show how well-intended college-access efforts can miss the mark—for instance, by focusing on students who already see themselves as college material, rather than working to help all students develop a “college-going identity.” In addition, most college-access programs and practices focus almost exclusively on providing academic preparation and financial support.

In Ready, Willing, and Able, Savitz-Romer and Bouffard call for a new approach: one that emphasizes the key developmental tasks and processes of adolescence and integrates them into existing college-access practices in meaningful ways. Rather than treating young people as passive recipients of services, they argue, adults can engage them as active agents in the construction of their own futures.

Mandy Savitz-Romer is a faculty member and director of the Prevention Science and Practice program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her professional experience has allowed her to link research to practice in the field of school counseling, specifically as it relates to college and career readiness for first-generation college students. She has held previous positions at the Boston Higher Education Partnership, Boston University, Boston College, Simmons College, and the Boston Public Schools. As a former urban high school counselor, Savitz-Romer is particularly interested in how schools and districts structure counseling support systems and college planning efforts to reach all students. Her research interests include college access and success for first-generation college students; school counselor training and development; youth development; and preK–16 partnerships and policy. She holds a master’s degree in school counseling from Boston University and a PhD in higher education from Boston College.

Suzanne M. Bouffard is a researcher and project manager at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she focuses on applying research on child and youth development to practice and policy. Her work has focused on social and contextual factors that support learning and educational success, including out-of-school time and youth development programs, social and emotional learning programs, and family-school-community partnerships. In her current role and her previous position at the Harvard Family Research Project, she has developed a specialty in communicating about these topics for practitioners through written publications and in-person professional development. She has taught at Boston University and Emerson College and has worked directly with children and youth from elementary school through college. She earned a PhD in developmental psychology from Duke University, where she was a J. B. Duke Fellow and a University Scholar and won an Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association.