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A broad mix of factors — financial, cultural and academic — may account for the underperformance of low-income first-generation students, the Pell Institute’s data show. The students come into college with many more of the risk factors that researchers have widely embraced as diminishing college success, including delaying entry into postsecondary education after high school, attending college part time, working full-time while enrolled, having dependent children, being a single parent, and having a GED. The average first-generation/low-income student has three such risk factors, while the average student who is neither first generation nor low income has one.

Once they are in college, they are more likely to have unmet financial need than are other students. They also work significantly more than other students, and those who work more are less likely to have earned degrees and to remain enrolled six years after entering, as seen in the table below.

There is, of course, variation. A professor with a heavy teaching load who feels that he is a slave to his students may be more interested in retiring than someone who spends the majority of the week engaged in research that reflects a lifelong passion.

"At the most selective liberal-arts colleges and research universities, many faculty members would like to stay on as long as they can," says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. That is especially true, he says, at private research universities because professors at those institutions "love what they are doing, and their whole identity is tied up with their work."

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.

But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details. We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.

A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.

But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.