Making College More Accessible for Hawaii’s Public School Students

Damien Chang | September 1, 2024

Each fall, high school seniors set forth on the grueling task of applying to college. In Hawaii, however, the most important determinant for a student’s college application experience is whether they attend a public or private high school. 

Shwe Win, a 2021 Hilo High graduate and Harvard senior, describes her college application experience as “overwhelming.” While her high school college counselor—the only one serving a student body of 1,300—did the best she could in offering guidance, she was spread extremely thin. 

Shwe attributes part of her success to a college admissions panel over Zoom, through which she met Harvard students who—to her surprise––came from public Big Island high schools. They offered to review her essays and served as sources of encouragement that kept her going when she felt isolated in the process.

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Public High Schools Struggle to Prepare Seniors for Life After Graduation

Shwe’s story is a common one among her Hawaii public school peers at Harvard—the bulk of college guidance came from resources outside of school. While the college application process is no cakewalk for graduates public or private, there are added challenges that come with a public school upbringing.

Hawaii’s private school students thrive with access to state-of-the-art facilities, small class sizes, large administrative and staff support networks, and rich learning environments that foster a culture of achievement. 

For Ye Won Ham, a 2022 Punahou graduate and Harvard junior, the college application process was a supportive process that prepped her and her peers for success starting from her junior year of high school.

“Each student was assigned one of eight college counselors who worked with them during a designated junior-year class called College Guidance and the months leading up to application deadlines. There was a college counseling office that students could go to to ask questions, get interview prep, and follow up on document processing.” 

Meanwhile, public school students suffer from a dearth of all of the above—and while their alumni leave with fierce pride and love for their institutions, we all can agree HIDOE can do much more to support its students. We don’t claim the disparity to be the result of a strict “rich Punahou, poor Hilo High” divide. But there is a strict divide in that Punahou students choose between colleges, while Hilo High students question whether to apply, whether they will be able to pay, and whether they can get into any college at all. 

The pandemic has especially taken its toll on public education. Absenteeism persists among HIDOE students as a result of pandemic-fueled disengagement in classrooms. With a 2023 college-going rate of 50 percent—a four percent drop that has persisted post-pandemic —college and career counselors in public schools increasingly struggle to ensure high school seniors apply to any college at all. 

For most, this means a school in the UH system. What about those considering mainland colleges or T-20 universities? 

Shwe recounts that “very few” of her Hilo High peers “were vying for mainland colleges. Most were the first in their family to graduate high school.”

With only 20 percent of 2023 HIDOE graduates enrolled in mainland colleges, public schools lack cultures of support and exploration—qualities central to a meaningful college application process. Most public school students would be surprised to learn that they would pay less—likely nothing at all—to attend Harvard than they would to attend an in-state college. 

Filling in the Gap in Public School College and Career Guidance

Recognizing the need to bridge the college guidance gap between public and private schools, Shwe established Kūlia College Pathways, a program she formed with peers like Yewon, to help under-served public high school students navigate the college admissions process. A non-profit organization led by Hawaii students at Harvard, Kūlia enlists college students and recent college graduates from across the nation to facilitate peer-to-peer mentorship. 

The fact is that Hawaii public schools are ill-equipped to prepare students for life after graduation. Take a private school like Punahou, which has eight college counselors for a 2023 graduating class of 432 students and boasts a four-year college enrollment rate of 99 percent. Contrast that with a public school like Kapolei High, which, with 1 college counselor for 470 seniors, has a college enrollment rate of 41% and much less support for many of its hopeful graduates. A third of public high schools do not even have a college or post-high school counselor. 

By matching high school students with recent graduates, our program aims to individualize support according to students’ needs and mentors’ strengths to mitigate this disparity in college prep. The peer mentorship format provides students with relevant college guidance that speaks to recent changes and current trajectories in college admissions. 

Current board members draw from their personal experiences to help shape Kulia’s services. Jason Rodrigues, a 2023 Honokaa High graduate and Harvard sophomore, benefited from college workshops during his junior year and his high school college counselor, who went the extra mile to meet with each senior to discuss post-high school plans and offer essay writing support. 

Jason wants to help public school students understand that “although colleges like Harvard are quite competitive, the admissions process isn’t as what the media makes it out to be–that you must have a perfect SAT, a perfect GPA, or even have multiple national awards. Rather, I learned that in a holistic admission process, your circumstances are considered allowing me to see that Ivy League institutions are within reach.” 

Another core part of Kulia’s vision is to offer its students the equivalent of a condensed private school college-preparatory curriculum. Damien Chang, a 2020 McKinley High graduate and Harvard senior, suggests the Clarence T.C. Ching PUEO Program at Punahou School serves as a model program. Himself a former PUEO scholar, Damien believes Kulia could reach a greater audience of public school students with similar services. 

“Although we can’t replicate all aspects of the PUEO program, which takes place over the course of seven summers, its greatest merit was to get us thinking about college before we even entered our senior year. That’s what we want to do with Kulia by including high school juniors as our target audience. Like PUEO, we want the mentorship process to be deliberate and intimate. Whether it’s college essay-coaching, standardized test prep, or FAFSA guidance, we want to give public high school students the confidence of knowing that we’re in this together.”

Other key services include financial aid and scholarship workshops, and speaker events where students can hear from educational professionals. Kulia’s mentorship model allows for 1:1 meetings between experienced mentors and mentees, conducted over Zoom. For low-income students, first-generation high school graduates, and those in households where English is not the primary language, these services are especially helpful.

Not Your Typical College Counseling Service 

Similar nonprofit programs in the past like College Key have operated over past summers but have since disbanded. Other college counseling services are otherwise prohibitively expensive. By contrast, Kūlia College Pathways offers our mentorship services and programming for free over the course of the fall semester, in alignment with college application and financial aid deadlines. 

What our program aims to address, however, is a concern that lies at the heart of Hawaii’s future. Over the past few decades, local media outlets have drawn attention to Hawaii’s “brain drain” problem. Wouldn’t programs like Kūlia, staffed by students at top mainland colleges, exacerbate the outflow of local talent? 

We say it shouldn’t. Our program unites Hawaii students attending colleges across the nation who volunteer to serve as mentors because we care about Hawaii and our younger peers back home. By furthering students’ post-secondary educational aspirations, we empower each other to take charge of our futures. Instead of being priced out of the local housing market or driven out of the islands for better job opportunities on the mainland, we aim to create a pipeline for our youth to make Hawaii a place in which we want, and are able to, stay. 

Whether this pipeline might include internship partnerships or employment opportunities with local companies back home remains a question for our long-term goals. We wholeheartedly believe, however, that (1) positive change for Hawaii starts with education, and (2) public secondary education should not impede leadership potential nor bar students from academic and professional pursuits.

What we want to do with Kūlia College Pathways is to help public school students articulate what they want to do and where they want to be. The University of Hawaii system is a great set of institutions. So are schools like Harvard, Georgetown, and Creighton. Should any HIDOE high schooler be even remotely interested in schools like the latter, we testify to the fact that they are great schools. They are well within reach of public school students. And they are places where public school students belong.

Join Us

All Hawaii public high school juniors and seniors are invited to apply. To learn more about Kūlia College Pathways, visit our website at kuliacollegepathways.org. You can reach us via email at kuliacollegepathways@gmail.com or on Instagram (@kuliacollegepathways).