Many social factors go into my project. Since culture is directly affected by culture; culture will affect the majority of my project. The project aims to do research via ethnographical methods. This means that the culture that I am apart of also has an impact on the results from the research. This will be the types of questions I ask people. For example, based on my prior experiences I may ask people about their parents and how they have affected people’s decisions about higher education. This is because generally in Hispanic culture parents have more influence on their children. Since my project is based in America, I feel like there are not huge differences in a culture like in GSIF. This can make pointing out cultural differences and their effects more difficult but, because of this, the effects of culture will be more subtle. What I wanted to focus on that included culture was online culture and how people’s online presence affects their decisions and viewpoints about higher education. Currently, I still need to decide on what questions I want to ask so the effect of culture is a bit hard to predict at the moment.
I have experienced a few of these situations by myself. For example, when I was applying to colleges my parents tried to force me to apply only to schools in New York City. Although I have explicitly stated multiple times that I didn’t want to go to school in the city for various reasons. In the end, we ended up compromising with me applying to schools both in the city and out of the city. Since I am not a first-generation student my parents always expected me to go to college. Another example that I can think of is my friend John (not his real name since he doesn’t want people to know). When John was in high school both of his parents were illegal immigrants that split up. He felt the moral obligation to help his parents and his little sister out of poverty. Originally, he didn’t plan on going to college but since he had exceptional grades our guidance counselor basically forced him into applying to college. Now he is going to a 4-year cuny on a scholarship. The last example that shows cultural differences is when young adults are either charged money to live with their parents after a certain age or are kicked out, therefore, forcing them to make money. This places a much bigger burden on the young adult because they are suddenly thrusted into full adulthood with bills. Doing this as parents essentially stunts the career growth of the young adult.
I feel that since the problems are very ingrained in many cultures there may not be a simple cultural solution. The ways that I think we can improve this situation is with more education. Educating parents about the benefits and opportunities that college can lead to. Examples of this would be more community outreach. This would include programs to expose people to the idea of college. The main mistake that the current programs that already exist is that they focus on college and grades more than the individual. An example of this is finding out how to make college help you achieve your life goals instead of going to college because of societal pressure. Although this is not a complete solution it is a good start and with this start, it may inspire some people to at least consider college as an option.