Last summer, CARA formed a Youth Research Council (YRC) made up of current and former Peer Leaders to study and amplify young people’s perspectives on educational issues that matter to them. Since then, the team has been conducting interviews and scouring existing research to understand how young New Yorkers’ views of the value of higher education are changing. During this inquiry, the YRC noticed one issue that students kept bringing up but researchers rarely mentioned: social media.

Social media is ubiquitous in young people’s lives, but how it influences their postsecondary aspirations isn’t clear. As one YRC member shared, “Every day one of my students comes to me with a new TikTok and tells me I want to be X, Y, or Z.” In our initial surveys of young people’s feeds, we’ve seen a range of videos and perspectives, from snapshots of college life and posts that share scholarship opportunities, to warnings about student loans and claims that college is a scam. Yet few educators are aware of what students are seeing on social media, let alone feel prepared to talk with them about it.

Thanks to support from The Solon E. Summerfield Foundation, the YRC is diving deeper into this research this winter and spring. The group will be learning more about what young people are seeing about college on social media, what they think about it, and how educators can better support them with it all. We look forward to sharing our findings with the college access community in NYC and beyond.