Trotwood-Madison City Schools is intensifying its efforts to combat chronic absenteeism by launching new initiatives aimed at achieving 100% student success, according to a school spokesperson.
Building on last year’s progress, where the district reduced its chronic absenteeism rate by 1.2%, Trotwood-Madison is implementing the ‘Every Minute Matters’ initiative.
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The program emphasizes the importance of daily attendance through awareness, motivation, and rewards to help students and families understand the link between attendance and achievement, the spokesperson said.
“We know that with attendance comes achievement,” said Superintendent Marlon Howard. “Missing school means missing opportunities. That’s why we are so focused on reducing chronic absenteeism, to create opportunities for our kids, open doors to bright futures, and move closer to our goal of 100% student success.”
The ‘Every Minute Matters’ initiative includes posters displayed throughout school buildings that highlight the value of consistent attendance.
Additionally, a district video features students, staff, and administrators sharing personal messages about why being present matters.
To further encourage students, the district also hosts an end-of-year raffle, giving away prizes such as gaming equipment and other exciting items to celebrate those with strong attendance records.
Together, these efforts create a district-wide culture where attendance is recognized and celebrated, inspiring students to take pride in showing up every day.
With these initiatives, Trotwood-Madison City Schools aims to foster a culture of attendance that supports student success and opens doors to brighter futures.
BALLSTON SPA, N.Y., July 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– The National Dropout Prevention Center will be hosting its 34th Annual National Dropout Prevention Conference in the vibrant and culturally rich city of New Orleans from October 14-16, 2024. This year’s conference promises to be an extraordinary experience, building upon the achievements of its previous gatherings that have united hundreds of passionate professionals dedicated to enhancing graduation rates and ensuring success for all students.
Designed for educators, administrators, counselors, and all stakeholders invested in student well-being, this conference offers an unparalleled opportunity to delve into cutting-edge research, evidence-based strategies, and innovative approaches to dropout prevention. Attendees will gain invaluable insights into topics such as:
Classroom to Boardroom Strategies: Bridging the gap between educational theory and practical implementation to maximize student outcomes.
Future Challenges to Graduation Rates: Identifying emerging trends and developing proactive solutions to address potential obstacles to student success.
Supporting Resilient Educators and School Districts: Fostering a culture of support and well-being for educators, ensuring they have the tools and resources to effectively serve their students.
Creating Trauma-Skilled™ Schools: Implementing trauma-informed practices to create safe and supportive learning environments for all students.
“The challenges we face in education are not confined to our individual classrooms or districts. We are a national community of educators, united in our shared goal to ensure the success of every student,” said Dr. Bill Daggett, Founder and Executive Chair of Successful Practices Network (SPN), which includes the National Dropout Prevention Center as part of its continuum of services. “This conference is an opportunity to come together, learn from each other, and leave with renewed optimism and concrete strategies to support all students.”
Participants will also have the unique opportunity to earn credits towards National Dropout Prevention Specialist Certification and Trauma-Skilled™ Specialist Certification, further solidifying their expertise and commitment to student success. By attending this conference, educators will join a nationwide network of like-minded professionals, including superintendents, social workers, teachers, graduation coaches, and more, all committed to engaging, supporting, and sustaining students through their academic journey.
“Our hope is that attendees will return to their schools and communities equipped with actionable strategies, innovative ideas, and a renewed passion for creating positive change,” said Dr. Robert Peters, Chief Academic Officer for the National Dropout Prevention Center. By fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing, the 34th Annual National Dropout Prevention Conference will empower educators to make a lasting impact on the lives of their students and contribute to a brighter future for all.
For more information, including session details, registration information, and hotel accommodations, click HERE or visit our official event page at https://qrco.de/ndpcpr.
A University of California academic-governance panel has voted to undo a controversial admissions standard that professors fear is not preparing students for college-level math, just as it is on the cusp of being written into statewide policy for high schools.
On Friday, a systemwide faculty committee that oversees admission policies voted to stop high-school data-science courses from counting toward the UC’s math requirement, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle. Since this policy was adopted in 2020, faculty members across California have expressed concern that the UC system is rubber-stamping courses that bill themselves as “data science” but that do not impart the algebra needed to major in data science or other science, engineering, math, and technology majors, as The Chronicle reported last week.
The governance panel — called the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (Boars) — seems to have delivered a major setback to these popular courses. “Introduction to Data Science” is taught at some 165 high schools across California, claims to have been taken by 42,200 students to date, and was developed at the University of California at Los Angeles by Robert L. Gould, a statistics instructor.
Another course, “Explorations in Data Science,” is taught at more than 105 schools in the state and has been taken by more than 160,000 students, according to Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of mathematics education who helped develop the course at Youcubed, a Stanford research center. Gould and Boaler have said that their classes teach the useful skill of crunching real-world data, and engage students who might otherwise drop out of math and won’t need calculus in their careers.
But on Friday, Boars, which consists of representatives from each UC campus, voted unanimously to drop data science from its math admissions standards, two people who were present told The Chronicle.
“Those courses, especially ‘Introduction to Data Science’ and Youcubed, should not have been approved as an advanced math course or a replacement for algebra II,” said one attendee, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential deliberations. They said that none of the members tried to defend the policy.
The UC director of undergraduate admissions confirmed the vote in an internal email obtained by The Chronicle. She also wrote that Boars will establish an advisory group this fall “to address definitions of ‘advanced math.’”
The vote throws into question California’s math framework, which gives guidance to the state’s K-12 schools about how to teach math. After being in the works for three contentious years, the third and latest version was released on June 26. It currently encourages high schools to consider offering data science — and cites the UC’s data-science policy as evidence that the UC system will “value a range of mathematics courses as pathways to college.”
The California Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the framework on Wednesday morning. In a public comment submitted late last week, Barbara Knowlton, the Boars chair, indicated that her group was having “significant discussion” about whether the currently approved data-science courses would continue to count.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Boars vote to ditch the policy had not been announced. On Monday night, Knowlton told members that she did not think that the group had the authority to implement the vote. “I do not think we have the power to do this,” she wrote in an email obtained by The Chronicle.
Neither Knowlton nor a spokesperson for the UC president’s office returned requests for comment by publication time.
A spokeswoman for California’s Board of Education said it was aware of the panel’s vote. “Given the decision, the Board would consider amendments to the framework during deliberations on Wednesday to ensure framework language is correctly aligned with the UC system,” the spokeswoman, Janet Weeks, said by email.
Traditionally, the UC system requires applicants to take at least three years of high-school math, including algebra II. Its current troubles began in 2020, when it expanded its definition of acceptable advanced-math courses.
In May of that year, an advisory group of mathematicians and statisticians, convened by the UC administration, recommended allowing data science and other courses to count toward the math requirement. One of the advisers was Gould, the UCLA statistician who’d led the development of “Introduction to Data Science.” That October, the Boars members unanimously adopted the proposal.
At the time, Gould called the decision “a great relief.” “There are enough old guards out there in the UC math system that a serious challenge to revising the policy was a real possibility,” he wrote to colleagues on October 3, 2020, in an email obtained by a private citizen through a public-records request. “In fact, in our ad-hoc committee, some of the mathematicians expressed concerns that some colleague[s] would not be happy with the change.”
He also raised the question of whether Boars could revise the policy or whether the UC Academic Senate needed to vote to make it official (which, to date, it has not). “I believe that the plan is to move ahead as if BOARS has the right, and see if it is challenged, since the attempts at researching this were ambiguous,” Gould wrote.
Reached for comment on Tuesday, Gould said by email that Boars “has always had that right as far as I know.” He said that his message from 2020 was “expressing my ignorance of what happens once the ad-hoc committee makes its recommendation.”
He also said that it was not a conflict of interest for him to serve on a committee that recommended green-lighting courses like his. “It worries me when decisions are made about statistics courses without input from statisticians, just as it would worry me if a decision were made about a geometry course and only statisticians were on the committee,” he wrote. “So it seems appropriate to me that a faculty member who writes statistics and data science curriculum would be asked to weigh in with his experiences.” He said that he has been paid for the courses through grants proposed by him and awarded to UCLA, as well as by an external funding agency for work related to the grants.
When it unveiled the policy, Boars said that data-science classes must still “build upon” concepts from algebra II and be designed for juniors and seniors. But “Introduction to Data Science” and “Explorations in Data Science,” which are both UC-approved, teach only concepts from algebra II that overlap with statistics, and “Introduction to Data Science” can be taken in the first half of high school, according to criticswho call the curricula more akin to “data literacy.” Skipping or delaying algebra II, they say, threatens the likelihood that college freshmen, including those from underrepresented backgrounds, will enter calculus-ready, as quantitative majors across the UC system require. (Ryan King, a UC spokesperson, previously told The Chronicle that “many” applicants are still taking algebra II in addition to courses like data science.)
Hundreds of professors in California have signed an open letter that protests promoting data science as an alternative to algebra II. And over the past year, Boars and UC leadership have been fielding concerns from representatives on behalf of the Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine campuses; Riverside’s math department; Santa Barbara’s computer science, mechanical engineering, and physics departments; and a group of Black UC faculty in STEM fields. California State University’s Academic Senate also sent in resolutions passed earlier this year. It called “Introduction to Data Science” “inadequate preparation for college and career readiness” and also said that it would no longer automatically accept UC-approved advanced-math courses, as it had traditionally done.
Gould, who has defended his course as “considerably more complex and ‘advanced’ than algebra II,” said that he was disappointed to learn of the Boars vote.
“I fear that a pathway to college for the many who fail Algebra II or who know that they are not interested in STEM might have been shut,” he wrote.
A spokesman for Boaler, who helped create “Explorations in Data Science,” did not return a request for comment by publication time.
A growing share of high-school students say they feel unprepared for college, academically and emotionally, and are choosing not to enroll right away — suggesting that long-term effects of the pandemic are stunting college enrollment.
What’s more, some students increasingly doubt that college is worth the cost.
The findings come from a report released on Monday by the Education Advisory Board, a consulting firm focused on higher education. EAB surveys more than 20,000 high-school students each year on their college-going plans, whether or not they decide to pursue a higher education. This year, the survey results tracked a significant shift.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said they weren’t ready for college due to a lack of emotional and academic preparedness, compared with 14 percent who said so in EAB’s 2019 survey. An even larger share of first-generation and low-income students said they felt unprepared.
The pandemic disrupted students’ social and academic development, the EAB report said. That may have taken a toll on a student’s confidence in finding success or a sense of belonging at college.
“I believe there’s a pretty long hangover from Covid,” Hope Krutz, president of EAB’s enrollment division, said. “Students that are coming to us are less prepared, but it’s not their fault. This is a systemic issue, not a personal one.”
Total undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than a million students since the pandemic began, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Not Ready
First-generation students, in particular, said they felt not mentally ready for college: 28 percent shared that sentiment. The comparable figure for their non-first-generation peers was only 20 percent.
First-generation and low-income students typically lack their peers’ access to college preparation, can’t visit campuses to inform their college choice, and can’t afford such essential resources as transportation, a computer, or at-home Wi-Fi, Krutz said.
However, the study found the highest rates of indifference to college among middle- and high-income students.
I believe there’s a pretty long hangover from Covid. Students that are coming to us are less prepared.
“Affordability takes a lot of shapes and forms,” Krutz said. “The ultimate bigger question is one of value. Especially when this expands out, you’re seeing a higher rate of middle- and higher-income prospective students making the same choices.”
Alongside a lack of preparedness, students cited not feeling that college was worthwhile — a jump to 20 percent of respondents from only 8 percent in 2019.
To mitigate those problems, Krutz said, colleges should offer boot camps and bolster orientation and first-year-student programs to help students catch up academically and socially.
Regarding mental-health concerns, the EAB report suggests that colleges talk to families about their concerns, as well as available resources for academic and mental-health support, when their students arrive on campus.
Colleges should send the message that students aren’t alone in feeling unprepared, Krutz said.
“The more colleges embrace what are the stories of the typical students on their campus, they are meeting this population,” Krutz said. “Versus putting the two or three best-in-class students on a pedestal and saying everyone should be like them.”
On a Tuesday morning, Liz Franczyk sat in a windowless office at Milwaukee Area Technical College, holding her cellphone up to her chin. A student had just called seeking help: She needed to take an anatomy course this summer so that she could enroll in nursing classes during the fall. But she couldn’t register until she paid a third of her outstanding balance at the college. She needed $291 — money that she just didn’t have.
It was late April, and pre-nursing courses were filling up fast. The student sounded anxious. “I’m out of work right now,” she told Franczyk. “I’m living with my mom, she helps a little bit, but …”
“I hear ya,” Franczyk said reassuringly.
Franczyk isn’t a financial-aid officer, nor does she disburse institutional dollars. She’s an adjunct Spanish instructor at MATC’s downtown campus and executive director of the FAST Fund, which stands for Faculty and Students Together. The independently financed small-grant program began seven years ago as an experiment designed to get MATC students out of a jam without hassle or delay.
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle
Liz Franczyk answers calls in her office on the MATC downtown campus in Milwaukee.
Franczyk, a warm, straight-talking 41-year-old, has a way of putting people at ease. She told the woman to go online and fill out the FAST Fund’s emergency-aid application, a brief form. After receiving the application, Franczyk told the student, she would walk a check for $300 down to the mailroom, contact the Student Accounting office, and ask that they remove the hold from the woman’s account, enabling her to register.
The student’s voice softened in relief: “Thank you so much, Liz. I really appreciate it.”
“Not a problem,” Franczyk said.
The FAST Fund’s average grant amount is $275, and each day, Franczyk saw firsthand what research has shown: Just a few hundred bucks can spell the difference between dropping out and staying enrolled, between having an apartment and having nowhere to sleep, between hope and game over. But each day she confronted deeply rooted problems that no grant could ever fix. She spoke with applicant after applicant struggling to free themselves from the grip of generational poverty.
It was 10:42 a.m. Franczyk peeled a banana and pulled up the next application, among dozens waiting in the FAST Fund’s inbox. They offered keyhole glimpses into the lives of students who are often overlooked. Students who are one blown tire, one sick child, one lost job away from a crisis. Students clinging to the narrow ledge of college.
The experiment was unprecedented, even subversive. How else would you describe putting faculty and staff members in charge of a student-aid fund?
But the idea made perfect sense to the FAST Fund’s creators. After all, it drew on a core dynamic in higher education: Instructors are often well-positioned to develop relationships with students, to understand the hardships they experience, and this is especially true at two-year colleges. But those instructors are seldom empowered to help students solve outside-the-classroom challenges.
Sara Goldrick-Rab saw this as a problem — and an opportunity. In 2016, she founded a national organization called Believe in Students to help college students experiencing basic-needs insecurity. The group invested $5,000 to develop the FAST Fund model at MATC. Back then, many colleges lacked emergency-aid programs. Those that did have them typically required lengthy applications with sluggish approval processes. At the time, MATC’s two-year-old emergency-grant program had numerous restrictions that limited its usefulness (the grants could not be used to pay rent, for instance).
Goldrick-Rab, a prominent researcher and advocate for low-income students, was then a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University. She worked closely with Michael Rosen, a longtime economics professor at MATC, to develop a plan for getting money to students within 24-48 hours, the way a friend might throw another some cash. The transactions would happen outside institutional bureaucracy; the money wouldn’t affect a student’s financial-aid package.
Franczyk gives out her personal cell number, which students pass along to friends in need. Day and night the calls keep coming.
The FAST Fund model was meant to fill the void between what colleges have traditionally provided and what the most vulnerable students need, but transferring money wasn’t the only goal. Another was to create a more caring campus culture by bringing students and faculty closer together. The goal: To help instructors put concern for the well-being of those they teach at the center of their work.
Rosen was renowned for his devotion to students. Like many instructors at MATC, he knew that day-to-day expenses, such as gas, food, and utility bills, force low-income students into making tough decisions. Buy groceries or buy this textbook? Pay the rent or stay enrolled? He had seen such emergencies derail many promising students. When he retired, in 2017, he asked colleagues to contribute to the FAST Fund in lieu of gifts. He raised more than $20,000 at his retirement party and then became the program’s unpaid director.
Fundraising took off. Goldrick-Rab donated the proceeds of a $100,000 prize to expand the FAST Fund at MATC and a handful of other institutions. The program eventually would come to dozens of two- and four-year institutions, including Compton College, Miami Dade College, the Community College of Philadelphia, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Montana.
Rosen had long served as president of the American Federation of Teachers Local 212, the union representing faculty and staff at the college. The organization provided free office space and administrative support, helping the FAST Fund become a sustainable operation. Though the program and Local 212 would remain separate entities, union backing helped build support for the cause among faculty members and retirees who knew what many students were up against. And the union helped bring in contributions from Milwaukee’s professional sports teams and local businesses.
Franczyk started volunteering for the FAST Fund in 2020. By then the Milwaukee native had been teaching Spanish part-time at MATC for almost a decade while working other jobs. She had first seen educational inequities up close as a teenager studying in Honduras. There, she attended a high school where nearly all the students couldn’t afford books, paper, or pencils, so they sat listening to teachers read from textbooks, absorbing what they could.
Franczyk saw similar disadvantages and determination among MATC students she met. Many of those who took her Spanish classes seemed more engaged and invested than the affluent teenagers she previously taught at a private four-year college. Her students’ commitment made her want to become a better teacher and advocate.
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle
Liz Franczyk works with students in her Spanish class at MATC.
In 2022 Rosen hired Franczyk to replace him as the leader of MATC’s FAST Fund. Substantial donations, plus a $2-million endowment established by the family of a former MATC employee, enabled the organization to become a nonprofit and pay its new executive director a salary. Franczyk, assisted by one part-time employee and a few volunteers — all retired MATC employees — works 50-60 hours a week for FAST Fund. But it often feels insufficient.
Franczyk gives out her personal cell number, which students pass along to friends in need. Day and night the calls keep coming.
Frustration. Worry. Fear. Franczyk hears many emotions in students’ voices. But their dedication often comes through loud and clear, too. They want to become accountants and hair stylists and nurses and mechanics and paralegals. They want to get out of debt, secure good jobs, and provide for their families. But as she’s often reminded, determination isn’t necessarily enough.
From 2000 to 2021, the average unmet financial need of college students receiving aid in Wisconsin increased by 135.6 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to a recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Students attending the state’s technical colleges have an average unmet need of more than $8,000 a year.
MATC has been confronting this reality in various ways. Recently, the college announced its first-ever full-ride scholarship for low-income students, thanks to a $5-million pledge by local philanthropists. About 350 students have already received the last-dollar scholarships, which cover tuition, as well as everyday expenses such as child care, food, and housing.
In Franczyk’s office, though, the torrent of needs never stops. That Tuesday morning, she spoke on the phone with a woman who was trying to re-enroll at MATC. She had a bill stating that she owed the college $1,000, but she said it was a mistake. “I’m 27 years old, I just had a baby,” she said as her newborn chirped loudly. “I’m not lucky and rich. I’ve tried to do this so many times, and I’ve never succeeded.”
Franczyk advised her to file an appeal with the financial-aid office. She told her about MATC ReStart, which provides scholarships for returning students to pay off up to $1,500 of a past-due balance for tuition, books, and other fees. And she promised to help her navigate it all: “I’m gonna be, like, your teammate here for the next week. Let’s work together, me and you, to try to get some answers.” The student sounded encouraged.
Later, Franczyk spoke with a student at the college’s West Allis campus. Her voice shook as she described her predicament. “Um … so … my car payment is, like, an urgent need,” she said. “Right now, I’m like three months behind on it.”
“Yikes,” Franczyk said. “What is your monthly car payment?”
“$352.”
“OK. Are they threatening to repossess your vehicle at this point or what?”
“Yes. They are.”
Milwaukee’s beleaguered public-transit system has long frustrated its residents. Many students must rely on cars to get to and from campus.
“How much do they need,” Franczyk asked, “in order to not repossess it?”
“At least two payments.”
“So we’re talking $700. Are you able to contribute any of that amount?”
“Yes, but I don’t get paid until Thursday. I could make one payment.”
“OK. I can do the other one for you then, OK?”
After the call, Franczyk took a deep breath and downed some water.
Minutes later, MacKenzie Corbitt stopped by, sporting a sweatshirt that read “I Don’t F— With People Who Don’t Support Free College.”
Franczyk greeted the student by name.
Corbitt was there to pick up a check for $497.75 to pay the mechanic for some car repairs. The student was on the verge of graduating: “I’m just trying to find a stable job and get back in a position where I can pay my debt down low enough where it can be manageable, raise my credit score.”
Franczyk squinted at a copy of the bill. “Sorry, um, I’m writing this out to … Kenny?”
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle
Liz Franczyk writes a check for a FAST Fund recipient in her office.
The FAST Fund is based largely on trust, though it also asks for proof of need. Applicants must provide some documentation of their emergency, such as a car note, utility bill, or eviction notice. They’re also asked to state their income and other sources of funding, such as federal aid and scholarships. MATC’s own emergency-aid fund is open to students with a 2.0 grade-point average who’ve attended the college for more than a semester; the FAST Fund has no such requirements.
The latter’s application asks students to list an instructor as a reference, someone who can speak to their commitment to education. Franczyk and her colleagues talk with instructors to learn whatever they can. And they follow up with students to ask how much money they need, and determine if there’s really an emergency. Then they quickly decide how much to give. Without any hard-and-fast rules, they must use their judgment. Would $250 really help? $400?
Sometimes, the FAST Fund decides that an emergency requires more money to resolve than it can give. A few hundred dollars won’t help, say, a student who owes their landlord $2,500 and will likely get evicted anyway. In such cases, Franczyk tries to help by connecting them with free legal aid, or an advocate who can help find long-term solutions.
The FAST Fund pays each third party directly on a student’s behalf. As of late April, the program had given about $340,000 to help more than 1,300 students during the 2022-23 academic year. It put about 400 others on an “inactive” list, either because they didn’t respond, were no longer enrolled, or instructors gave them a poor reference. (In 2021-22, MATC approved 291 emergency grants, totaling $140,000).
Many applicants seek help paying for course materials. The FAST Fund, Franczyk says, has sent about $40,000 this academic year to the MATC bookstore to pay for books and supplies — an expense that the college’s own emergency-grant program doesn’t cover. (An MATC spokesman says that books are “an expected and necessary expense,” and not an unexpected hardship).
Some programs require costly purchases. A man had requested help paying for thousands of dollars worth of tools for his automotive-maintenance program. The FAST Fund couldn’t cover them all, so Franczyk told him to log into the Matco Tools website, select the items he needed most, and email his account information to her. Then she logged in and completed the $429 transaction using a credit card. Franczyk read the order aloud: “He’s getting a dual-action sander, an air-blow gun, and some kind of cutting tool.” Would that get him through the nine-month program?
Around 12:30 p.m., Franczyk was halfway through an egg-salad sandwich when her cellphone rang. A student whom she had already been in touch with owed $575 in rent. She said she had just $75.
“So I’ll text you my email address, and you’ll have to email me your lease,” Franczyk said, “and then I’ll send a check directly to your landlord. And then the other thing is, I know you said you’re looking for jobs, right? So I just want to make sure you have a longer-term plan here so that this doesn’t happen again. OK? OK, cool. Have a good day.”
Franczyk reflected on the conversation. “We function under the mantra ‘Believe in students,’” she said. “I’m not going to sit here and make her prove it by sending me her pay stubs, and asking her why she only has $75. That’s just, like, a bitch.”
The breathless afternoon required some manual labor. The FAST Fund has a partnership with a local nonprofit that refurbishes computers, which MATC students can later pick up for free. In between calls, Franczyk went downstairs to receive a delivery of 35 laptops, which she hauled back up to her eighth-floor office on a cart.
During one especially tense conversation, Franczyk spoke with a student who needed $990 for an emergency, but he had just $400. She told him the FAST Fund could contribute $500: “Could you and your fiancée find $90 somewhere?
“Yes, ma’am. We could try and get it from her mom.”
“I’m going to be real straightforward with you. This will probably be the last time we can help you since we just helped you with rent in October.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Have you been finding any jobs out there?”
“I’ll hopefully be starting next week.”
Franczyk loves the job, but it requires her to absorb students’ hardships. Sometimes, they express anger that the program can’t do more to meet their vast needs. And she understands it. She could patch cracks in the dam, but she couldn’t push back the river. Many afternoons, she drives home and cries.
Still, Franczyk had seen a small grant become one piece of a successful student’s story. She knew that such help can bestow something intangible, something greater than just money. And the man with the lion’s-head necklace knew it, too.
Jermaine House understood the weight of small things. On that Tuesday afternoon, he walked into MATC’s Student Resource Center and browsed the well-stocked food pantry. He took some ground beef from a fridge, a tin of nacho cheese from a shelf. He smiled when he spotted a few cans of mandarin oranges and mangoes. “My favorites,” he said. The items he carried home would ease his worries about stretching his food stamps to feed his family, helping him concentrate on wrapping up the last of his assignments and preparing for finals.
Around 4:30, House sat down at a table inside a public library where he sometimes studies. Huge windows drenched the quiet room in light.
House, thoughtful and serene, looked younger than his 38 years, save for the flecks of gray on his chin. He was fixing to graduate in May. He first enrolled back in 2007. The years in between brought many setbacks, including the death of one of his five children, the death of a grandmother with whom he was close, and struggles with bipolar disorder.
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle
Jermaine House, an MATC student, says the FAST Fund offers hope and motivation to students in need.
There were legal issues, too: After graduating from high school, House spent six months in prison for selling marijuana. He then bounced in and out of incarceration for years. All of those circumstances help explain why he defaulted on his federal student loans — and why it took him more than 15 years to finish a two-year degree in business management.
House, who has been boxing since he was a teenager, took a lesson from the ring. “If you get hit hard, it’s OK to cry,” he said. “But then you’ve got to push it in and just get back in there.”
Years ago, House experienced what he calls an awakening: One morning, after a long stretch of feeling down, he woke up feeling hopeful, certain that he could get his life together. He felt powerful, like he was roaring. So he bought a black-metal lion’s-head necklace and a matching ring. He wears them almost every day, as reminders to believe in himself.
House, who grew up in a low-income home, always felt happiest in school. Early on, he resolved to become the first man on either side of his family to graduate from college. But simply getting to and from MATC is difficult. House lives on the north side of Milwaukee, seven miles from the college. He doesn’t own a car, so he relies on city buses to get there. Depending on traffic and the route he chooses, the one-way trip takes an hour, sometimes 90 minutes.
When your plate is already full, just the smallest thing can throw everything off.
Still, though House has in-person classes only one day a week, he comes to MATC on most days, just to catch up with his advisers, attend meetings, or, as he says, “absorb campus energy.” And he has advocated on behalf of his classmates and their basic needs as part of a paid fellowship for Believe in Students. After the termination of an MATC program that had provided free Chromebooks and hot spots to students during the pandemic, House attended a meeting of the college’s board members, where he spoke eloquently about how, in an era when many classes were still virtual, plenty of low-income students had limited access to technology. (Though MATC did not reinstate the program, it rents Chromebooks and hot spots to students.)
House has gallons of determination and a long list of supporters who work at MATC. Still, on three occasions over the last year, financial crises threatened to derail him.
The first was last fall, when he and the mother of his two young boys fell behind on rent after surgery kept her out of work for a bit. House, who then managed rental properties here and there for money, had no one to borrow from. Fearing eviction, he devised a plan to rake leaves for $20 a yard, hoping to earn just enough to tide over the landlord. He looked into donating blood but was told that it could exacerbate his bipolar disorder. He considered dropping out of MATC.
But then help arrived. As a recipient of the PepsiCo Foundation Uplift Scholarship program at MATC, which provides $2,000 scholarships to Black and Latino/a students, House learned that he was eligible for an emergency grant. He got $1,000 just in time to pay the rent he owed.
Not long after that, someone stole House’s laptop. Unable to afford a new one, he went to a public library, which had a limited supply to lend, and for just a couple weeks at a time. Often, House couldn’t get the laptops he checked out to connect to the internet. MATC has a computer lab, but it was open only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. He was falling behind on assignments. Then he contacted Franczyk, who gave him one of the FAST Fund’s free laptops after he submitted an application. He carried it home in relief.
Early in the spring semester, House used a temporary code to access an e-book required for his “Math of Business” class. Then one day, the code expired. He didn’t have $111.66 to buy the book. Daily assignments kept coming. He became anxious, worried that his instructor would think he was making excuses for falling behind. He again sought help from the FAST Fund, which paid for the book.
What was the weight of those small things? House put his hands together and rested his chin on his knuckles. He described how modest grants restored his confidence and rekindled his purpose.
“When your plate is already full,” he said, “just the smallest thing can throw everything off. But if you give somebody just a little bit of breathing room, then they can take another five to ten steps, or even one to two steps. They develop more strength to hold on just a little bit more. There’s hope you’re giving them, encouragement you’re giving them.”
But this was more than mere charity. Each grant House received strengthened his resolve to make good on those investments. “I feel accountable because I got so much help. Now, I can’t let these people down. It’s a good pressure. Like, man, I have to keep going because I don’t want their help to be for naught.”
House, who’s earning all A’s this semester, expects to graduate with at least a 2.4 grade-point average. He’s applying to prominent four-year colleges in Wisconsin. He aspires to earn a doctorate and become a businessman, a social entrepreneur who helps revitalize predominantly Black neighborhoods like his own. He imagines wearing custom-tailored suits, schmoozing with fellow C.E.O.s, talking about philanthropy. But first he must apply for a slew of internships, scholarships, and fellowships.
Around 6:30 p.m., House glanced out the library window just as a brand-new Corvette stopped at an intersection. Its burnt-orange paint sparkled in the early-evening sun. “See,” he said. “That’s going to be me in the next few years.”
Wednesday morning began with an especially urgent call. A student behind on rent had just received a five-day notice from her landlord. She had just that long to either pay up or move out.
“Are you at Berrada?” Franczyk asked.
“Yes.”
Berrada Properties Management, Inc., which owns more than 8,000 properties in Milwaukee and Racine, is known for its aggressive-eviction tactics, which prompted a recent lawsuit by the state’s Department of Justice (the company has vigorously disputed the lawsuit’s claims). Many MATC students who seek emergency aid rent properties from the company.
“How much do you owe in back rent?”
“$1,700.”
It was more than the FAST Fund could give. So Franczyk told the student to contact a personal friend of hers at Eviction Free MKE, a group that provides free legal aid to renters. And she said that she would nudge the county’s Social Development Commission, known as SDC, which was reviewing the student’s application for financial assistance.
Franczyk dashed off an email to SDC and read it aloud. “I’ve contacted you about this student once before,” it began. “She told me that her SDC application that she filled out in December currently is in supervisor review and has been for about a month, and that when she spoke with someone there in late February, she was told that SDC would be able to cover her back rent and future rent through June. She feels like it’s moving forward, but is really anxious to find out the status of the check disbursement.”
A moment later, she hit send.
Sometimes, requests for the smallest sums of money affect Franczyk the most. Like the man who asked for $54 to pay his internet bill, or the young woman who said just $20 would allow her to pay an electric bill.
Franczyk glanced at her computer screen and cussed. Shyanne Washington, a student in her 10 a.m. Spanish class, had just emailed to say she couldn’t make it today because her car was almost out of gas and she had to take her son to day care. She had written 48 hours earlier that she had no money to fill her tank, so Franczyk had mailed her one of the prepaid $50 Shell gas cards that the FAST Fund keeps on hand. Apparently, it hadn’t arrived yet.
Franczyk winced, wishing that she had just dropped it off on her way home from work.
Washington wrote back a moment later with good news: “I’ll be there my mom sent me $10 to put a little gas in the car to get to school.”
“YAYAYYYYYYYY!!!!” Franczyk replied. “See you soon!”
Franczyk felt a connection with Washington, who was excelling in her “Spanish I” course. After graduating from high school, in 2019, she took out a $4,000 loan to help pay for a cosmetology program, but dropped out after deciding it wasn’t for her. She enrolled in MATC’s medical-assistant program before deciding to study psychology. Washington, soft-spoken and reflective, wanted to understand why one person falls in love with another, why someone harms someone else. She daydreamed about having the money to travel to Bora Bora one day.
Above all, she thought about her father, a mechanic who loved her but was often tough on her. She wanted to make him proud by earning a degree, finding a career, and providing for herself.
But money was always tight. Washington had a part-time job at American Eagle, the clothing store, but couldn’t work that many hours while taking three courses and caring for her two-year-old son, Landon, by herself. Sometimes she delivered food for DoorDash after class, wheeling her 2006 Hyundai Elantra with 219,000 miles on it for $2 here, $6 there (most customers didn’t tip). Sometimes, she wondered: “Is it worth two dollars to drive this mile?”
Washington contacted the FAST Fund last winter after falling behind on her bills — gas, electric, phone, internet, all of them. She received help applying for Cares Act funding through MATC, which allowed her to catch up on her payments. And she received $433.80 from the FAST Fund to pay for child-care expenses.
On Wednesday morning, after receiving the $10 via Cash App, Washington got some gas and drove her son to day care. She was a bit late to Franczyk’s class, but she excelled in each discussion exercise.
“Me gusta el libro … me gustan los libros.”
Franczyk exuded enthusiasm, praising students for correct answers (“That’s baller! I love it!”) and gently teasing a few who made small errors (“No, you ding-dong!”). She laughed a lot. Though she had always taken an interest in her students, she had grown more confident in her ability to put them at ease and let them know that she cares about them.
Earlier this spring, Franczyk saw that one of her students had been crying, so she asked to speak with her in the hall. The student said she was depressed but reluctant to seek help. Franczyk told her there was no shame in it, describing her own experiences with anxiety and depression, for which she takes prescription medication. “Really?” the student said. Later, the student told Franczyk she was getting help. “I’m proud of you,” the instructor told her, “for recognizing a problem and finding a solution.”
After class, Franczyk checked in with Washington. She was about to start a new job driving a truck for Amazon, which would require her to deliver 190 packages a day, four days a week. She wasn’t sure how she would fit her shifts in with classes, but the money would ease her burdens. Franczyk handed her a $50 gas card. “Just in case the other one didn’t arrive in the mail,” she said.
Washington planned to study before picking up her son from day care. She knew he would be bursting with energy, hungry for mac-n-cheese, ready to sing SpongeBob SquarePants songs. She would study some more after he went to bed.
After class, Franczyk walked back to her office, where a woman stopping by to pick up a free laptop said that she needed a hard copy of a Microsoft Office manual. A six-week course she was taking required her to learn the program, the student explained in Spanish, but she couldn’t access the online version of the book available for free through MATC: She didn’t have internet service at home.
Was that an emergency? For the student — who was on her way to the class — it was. So Franczyk wrote her a note to take to the bookstore stating that the FAST Fund would buy her the $40 manual. Minutes later, the student had it in her hands.
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle
A sign directs students to the college’s FAST Fund office.
Such small moments point to larger questions about the extent to which emergency-aid programs help students stay in college and graduate. A 2021 survey of nearly 500 FAST Fund recipients at MATC found that 93 percent were still enrolled, had graduated, or had transferred to another institution. A recent analysis found that Compton College students who had received small amounts of emergency aid were twice as likely to graduate as comparable students who didn’t receive such aid.
And a 2022 study found that students who had received emergency aid from the State University of New York were significantly more likely to persist, seek out campus resources, and feel a stronger sense of belonging. Moreover, participating SUNY campuses “greatly increased their awareness and understanding of the breadth and depth of challenges students face,” underscoring the need for broader, more holistic student-support services.
There are many things that can’t be solved with an emergency-aid program. But that’s where faculty can come in and advocate, and say to the college, ‘OK, what is our systemic solution?’
Those findings echo an important idea: An emergency-grant program can provide a window into the barriers students are experiencing, which might underscore the need to make larger changes. A new report on the impact of the FAST Fund — currently active at 28 colleges — describes how the program’s leaders at Compton saw a surge in requests from low-income students who couldn’t afford the medical kits they needed for their courses. Though the FAST Fund there couldn’t cover all those costs, its director initiated a conversation with administrators about possible solutions.
At the University of Montana, a surge in transportation-related requests for aid sparked conversations between the FAST Fund’s director and the head of the campus’s basic-needs office. Now they track application trends and share them with administrators, making data-driven arguments for institutional changes. “There are many things that can’t be solved with an emergency-aid program,” says Traci Kirtley, executive director of Believe in Students, which oversees the FAST Fund. “But that’s where faculty can come in and advocate, and say to the college, ‘OK, what is our systemic solution?’”
That can lead to changes — and cause tensions. Each FAST Fund chapter, by design, represents a kind of challenge to the status quo on its campus. Colleges tend to be territorial. And institutions with layers of bureaucracy often don’t move as quickly as activists such as Franczyk do.
A while back, a survey of students at MATC revealed a widespread need for diapers and baby products, which many said they wanted to see stocked in campus food pantries. Franczyk had put the FAST Fund on a waitlist to partner with a nonprofit called the Milwaukee Diaper Mission. When the organization said it could provide 5,000 diapers a month, she contacted the coordinator of the Student Resource Center, who was all for it.
But first Franczyk had to get official approval. After meeting with administrators this spring, she says, the FAST Fund received verbal permission to put the items in the food pantry — for one month. By mid-May, a large supply of free diapers, baby wipes, and period products would be available in the food pantry at MATC’s downtown campus, but she would still be waiting for written permission to make it a permanent arrangement.
Caleb Santiago Alvarado for the Chronicle.
Liz Franczyk and Jermaine House chat in Franczyk’s office, where students seek help from the FAST Fund program.
Franczyk wasn’t content to stop there. As that Wednesday afternoon wound down, she was making plans for an on-campus rally that would kick off a drive to get toiletries and personal-hygiene products into the food pantries. Jermaine House, the business-management major, stopped by her office to discuss the details of the event. He had already lined up a band to play.
While Franczyk chatted with another student, House sat in a chair reading 212: The Extra Degree: Extraordinary Results Begin with One Small Change. At 211 degrees Fahrenheit, water is hot; at 212, it boils. He appreciated the metaphor, a reminder that one small increment of change can make a big difference in the lives of students. To get a hold of one essential textbook could mean the difference between passing and failing. To carry home one free can of Chef Boyardee ravioli could mean the difference between hunger and fullness. To unwrap one donated bar of soap could mean the difference between dignity and despair.
The next morning, five more applications were waiting in the FAST Fund inbox. One student couldn’t afford a laptop. A single father needed a car to get to and from MATC. A student on the verge of eviction had nowhere else to stay: “I do not have any family out here. … My only other option is to go back to Chicago, but I don’t want to do that because I want to finish school.”
Just before 9 a.m., Franczyk made her first call of the day. Tiffany Boyd picked up. The student said she had applied for help after receiving some unexpected news: She would have to pay back a $1,000 scholarship she had received last year.
The reason, Boyd said, was that she had withdrawn from two courses after her daughter was born prematurely last fall. That put her below the minimum number of credits required to maintain the scholarship. She was worried about paying for child care, which came to about $400 a month. The accounting major, who worked full-time at a law firm, prided herself on financial responsibility. She had a little money saved up, but she was reluctant to spend it.
Franczyk asked Boyd to send her a copy of a child-care bill. After receiving it, she said, she would send her a check. It would be made out to the day-care provider for $348.60. Boyd thanked her, feeling a surge of relief. She appreciated that she hadn’t needed to answer numerous questions, that someone who didn’t even know her had helped. Just like that, she had one less thing to worry about.
After the call ended, Boyd did what she always does when something good happens. She took a deep breath and said quietly, to no one in particular, “Thank you.”
By then, Franczyk had moved on to the next emergency.
A new report from the Common App finds that the college-transfer process, long promoted as a way to help disadvantaged students earn four-year degrees, disproportionately serves students who are already well represented across higher education.
The nonprofit, which allows undergraduate applicants to fill out one application and submit it to multiple institutions, started in 1975 with about 15 members and has since grown to more than 1,000 active members. In 2018–19, it released the Common App for transfer platform to make the often difficult process of transferring between colleges more streamlined and less confusing. In an effort to diversify the overall applicant pool, the Common App provided reduced fees and more targeted outreach to minority-serving institutions, which now make up 133 of its active members.
Our analysis reveals that the majority of applicants on the transfer platform were from traditionally well-served populations.
The hope was that the nonprofit’s efforts would increase the percentage of transfer applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, including first-generation, older, and low-income students. Those changes have made little impact in the representation of students applying to transfer, at least during the four years the Common App has collected such data. “Our analysis reveals that the majority of applicants on the transfer platform were from traditionally well-served populations,” a summary of the report concluded. “These findings are somewhat concerning given that the college-transfer process should reflect educational mobility for all students, especially for historically excluded groups.”
The trends the Common App found are consistent with reports that show minority and underrepresented students transferring at lower rates than their more privileged counterparts, said Trent Kajikawa, senior manager of data operations at the Common App.
“This is just additional evidence that there’s a ton of work in this transfer space when it comes to supporting students,” he said in an interview. Among the steps the nonprofit is taking is making sure that students are aware of transfer-guarantee programs that automatically accept students who meet certain admissions criteria.
The Common App found that over the four years it studied, only a quarter of applicants were from underrepresented minority groups, a third were the first in their families to attend or graduate from college, and just 6 percent were from ZIP codes with a median household income in the bottom quintile. Fifty-five percent of applicants came from ZIP codes in the top quintile.
A report last year from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that transfer rates took a plunge during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part because of declining enrollments at community colleges. Students also encountered more logistical hurdles getting credits transferred and tracking down transcripts. Historically Black colleges and universities were an exception. Their incoming transfer rates increased nearly 8 percent in 2020 after an 11-percent decline the previous academic year.
The colleges receiving the most transfer applications through the Common App, according to the new report, were public flagships and selective universities with large student enrollments. Among the most popular destinations were large private, nonprofit universities that admit fewer than one in four applicants. Colleges that admit at least three out of four applicants accounted for less than 30 percent of applications. The findings provided further evidence of how flagship universities are prospering at a time when public regionals are struggling to fill seats.
While the typical college applicant applies to six colleges, prospective transfers narrowed their pool to two, reflecting “a more focused and deliberate” search, the report said. Most transfer applicants came from community colleges that concentrated more on preparation for four-year degrees than on career and technical programs.
Incoming college students who completed a 30-minute online exercise intended to bolster their sense of belonging were more likely to complete their first year of college while enrolled full time, according to a groundbreaking paper published in Science Thursday.
The study involved 26,911 students at 22 diverse four-year institutions across the country, and it has the potential to help students at a variety of colleges, at little cost. Students in identity groups — based on race or ethnicity and first-generation college status — that have historically struggled more to complete the first year of college at any given institution benefitted the most from the exercise.
The social-belonging intervention improved first-year retention among students in identity groups who reported feeling medium to high levels of belonging. For example, among students whose identity groups historically struggled to complete the first year of college and who also reported medium to high levels of belonging — the group that benefitted most from the activity — the exercise increased the proportion that completed their first year of college while enrolled full time from 57.2 percent to 59.3 percent.
But for the 15 percent of students whose identity groups experienced low levels of belonging at their institutions, the exercise did not improve retention rates, indicating that colleges will have to work harder to help those students.
Higher-education leaders have devoted more resources and attention to improving sense of belonging in recent years in an effort to help students from diverse backgrounds feel welcome on campus and to improve student success.
Researchers have long known that college students’ sense of belonging is critically linked to outcomes such as persistence, engagement, and mental health. But it can be difficult to measure the specific impact of efforts to improve belonging in a college setting. More recent research has focused on what colleges can do to improve sense of belonging on campus.
For the Science study, incoming first-year students in 2015 and 2016 spent up to half an hour in the summer before starting college completing an online module on belonging. They read about a survey of older students that showed many had experienced feeling homesick, having trouble finding a lab partner, or having difficulty interacting with professors, for example. The survey explained that those feelings are normal and can improve over time. Next, the students read curated stories from older students describing how such worries eventually got better. The incoming students were then asked to write about their reflections on the stories to help future students.
The study, which has 37 authors, was conducted by the College Transition Collaborative, a partnership of researchers and practitioners who study ways to support belonging, growth, and equity in college settings. It’s now known as the Equity Accelerator.
Gregory M. Walton, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study, said the exercise works by giving students a hopeful map for the transition to college. For students who belong to groups that have struggled historically, the roadmap can provide a buffer when they hit inevitable bumps in their college career. While some students can more easily shrug off such challenges, students from underrepresented minority groups and first-generation college students are more likely to interpret them as evidence that they do not belong in college, which can negatively affect motivation and persistence. The intervention appears to provide a boost to students who have reflected on other students experiencing similar difficulties and getting through them.
“The fact that it’s effective across these widely generalizable sample institutions is incredibly important,” Walton said. “Everybody should be doing this in some form.”
Previous studies have shown similar interventions to be effective, but on a smaller scale. One such study found that an hourlong activity focused on struggles to fit in during the transition to college increased the grades of Black students over the next three years and reduced the gap in grade point averages between Black and white students by 52 percent.
But by showing that the recent social-belonging intervention is effective at a variety of colleges across the country, including public and private colleges with admission rates ranging from 6 percent to 90 percent, the study demonstrates that such exercises are potentially scalable. The authors estimate that if the social-belonging activity were implemented at 749 four-year institutions across the United States that share key characteristics with the 22 colleges in the study, an additional 12,136 students, out of about one million new students, would complete their first year of college enrolled as full-time students.
The social-belonging exercise is available for free to four-year colleges in the United States and Canada here.
A new report found that “emotional stress” remains a top reason that students consider “stopping out,” or temporarily withdrawing from higher education, highlighting a persistent issue for colleges seeking to keep students enrolled and on track academically.
Moreover, students enrolled in associate and bachelor’s programs were just as likely to consider stopping out in 2022 as they were in 2021, despite many colleges “returning to normal” and easing pandemic precautions.
The report was conducted by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, drawing on their 2022 State of Higher Education study, which distributed online surveys to 12,015 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 59.
Respondents included current students, graduates, people who never finished college, and people who never enrolled. The data collected was then adjusted to match national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, and region, using weighting targets based on the most recent American Community Survey figures for the U.S. adult population.
A similar report conducted by Gallup and Lumina in 2021 also found that students were struggling with emotional stress.
Lumina Foundation officials said they hoped their work would emphasize the important role that well-being and mental-health resources play on campuses, especially as many college leaders fret over enrollment declines.
Forty-one percent of students enrolled in a higher-education program said they had considered stopping out in the past six months, according to the report. Among students who had considered stopping out, 55 percent gave emotional stress as a reason, including 69 percent of students pursuing a bachelor’s degree.
When asked what emotional stress meant to them, many students said that coursework could be overwhelming, particularly when academic demands piled on top of work and caregiving responsibilities or issues in their personal relationships. Some students mentioned depression and anxiety specifically. Others said concerns about the ability to pay for college brought on emotional stress.
“Among students who had considered stopping out, emotional stress surged dramatically as a reason between the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021,” the report said. “However, though Covid-19 has now fallen sharply as a reason for stopping out, there has only been a modest decrease in students’ likelihood to cite emotional stress as the reason they have considered stopping their coursework.”
This year’s study allowed students to select “personal mental health reasons” as a factor affecting their ability to stay in college. This option was the second-most commonly selected reason, next to emotional stress. The top two “far exceeded the next most commonly selected reasons, including program cost and difficulty of coursework,” the report said.
Forty percent of all students, and 48 percent of bachelor’s students, “frequently” experience emotional stress, the study found. Among all students, different groups disproportionately experienced distress: Close to half of women said they frequently did, compared with 30 percent of men.
About half of all students, and 66 percent of bachelor’s students, who said that their family was poor and that they often struggled to pay monthly bills reported frequently experiencing emotional stress. In contrast, 38 percent of students from more financially secure socioeconomic groups said the same. There were also differences between race and age.
“There’s an intersectionality between all of these things, and so the stress that students are feeling is a result of who today’s students are,” said Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning for Lumina Foundation. “They are working, they are feeling discriminated against on campuses, they have children of their own … and worries about money and then you know, still some worries about Covid.”
In order to promote mental health for students, colleges need to also support the well-being of faculty and staff, said Zainab Okolo, a strategy officer at Lumina Foundation.
Okolo identified several indicators of progress that she’d like to see in the near term: policymakers putting funding toward mental health in their budgets, administrators adding well-being to strategic plans, and students advocating for their needs.
Institutions also need to identify concrete goals for progress on campus and in classrooms, Okolo said.
“Institutions have to be ready to not only be able to equip their faculty and their staff and their students to identify a crisis, they have to equip the faculty, staff and students to identify mental health,” Okolo said. “What does it look like when their campus is flourishing?”
If you are in crisis and would like to talk to someone, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 988, or text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line, at 741741. Both services are free, confidential, and available 24/7.
The number of on-campus child-care centers has declined over the last 10 years, with the steepest declines taking place in the community-college sector.
Only 45 percent of public-academic institutions offered child-care services in 2019, according to research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The pandemic likely drove down the number of on-campus child-care centers even further, with many losing revenue when they were forced to close or when parents chose to keep their children home. Meanwhile, Head Start, the collection of federal programs for young children living in poverty, has seen enrollment declines in recent years.
To combat these issues, Head Start and the Association of Community College Trustees announced a partnership on Wednesday that is meant to put more child-care facilities on campuses.
Here’s how the partnership could work: Community colleges would offer rent-free space on their campuses to Head Start providers. That exchange would allow providers to reach a 20-percent requirement of philanthropic funding they need to raise to open. The Head Start programs would be free for community-college students with children who qualify. Head Start works with local agencies to provide educational activities, wellness programs, and other services for infants, toddlers, and children up to age 5, and also offers support for parents. Federal funding makes Head Start free.
Almost half of all students who have children are enrolled in community college, according to the Association of Community College Trustees.
Child-care centers have struggled to hire enough staff since the pandemic. Carrie Warick-Smith, the association’s vice president of public policy, said moving Head Start programs onto college campuses could help alleviate that problem — because students pursuing a degree in the early-childhood field at the colleges would be able to work at these campus centers.
The partnership is in an exploratory phase, Warick-Smith said. The community-college group and Head Start have six months of funding from the ECMC Foundation and the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation to conduct focus groups with community-college students who have children and with Head Start parents, to put together lists of interested colleges and programs, and to raise more money. Next year, she hopes they’ll begin moving Head Start programs onto campuses.
The goal would be to move 100 Head Start programs onto campuses, bringing the total number to 150. Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director for the National Head Start Association, said the details of the partnership will be largely determined by the individual programs and colleges.
Nicole Lynn Lewis, the founder and chief executive of Generation Hope, a nonprofit that works with teen parents who are in college, was excited to see the announcement between the two organizations.
“If you don’t have reliable child care, you don’t go to class,” Lewis said. That’s particularly true of students who are attending college in person, but it’s a factor for students attending class online as well, she said.
While access to affordable child care is a huge concern for students who have children, Lewis said, the existence of a center is not the only thing colleges should do to support them. The centers need to be open at the times when students need them, and administrators and faculty members must know how to accommodate student parents in the classroom, so they stay on track academically.
“There’s a lot of work to do to make sure the institution is set up as a whole,” she said.
Softdocs’s new solution for Anthology Student will provide a fully integrated solution and user experience for schools that use Anthology’s Student Information System, Anthology Student, and Softdocs’s automation and document management platform.
COLUMBIA, S.C., March 13, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Softdocs, the only education-focused provider of process automation and document management solutions, today announced a new solution for Anthology, a leading provider of education solutions that support the entire learner lifecycle. The partnership will provide a fully integrated solution and user experience for schools that use Anthology’s Student Information System, Anthology Student, and Softdocs’s automation and document management platform, further increasing the value of both solutions.
“This partnership demonstrates our commitment to the Anthology customer base and our focus on constantly enhancing the user experience and eliminating the barriers that prevent schools from focusing on student success,” said Adam Park, CEO of Softdocs.
“This partnership demonstrates our commitment to providing Anthology clients with the option to integrate Softdocs solutions with Anthology Student in a supported, productized manner,” said Jason Pyle, Vice President of Integrations and Developer Relations at Anthology. “The initial integration with Anthology Student will provide scalable, responsible, and efficient document management, and we look forward to extending integration options with other Anthology solutions in the future.”
The Softdocs suite includes document management, electronic forms, workflow automation, eSignatures, and integrations to core systems on campus to drive student and staff success.
About Softdocs Softdocs is the only education-focused provider of process automation and document management to enable schools to modernize campus & district operations and drive institutional success. Softdocs’s suite of solutions empowers institutions to work more efficiently, communicate more effectively and collaborate more freely. Cloud-first, browser agnostic, and SOC 2 Type I and II compliant, Softdocs is a trusted partner of over 700 organizations.
About Anthology
Anthology offers the largest EdTech ecosystem on a global scale for education, supporting more than 150 million users in 80 countries. With a mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community through Anthology Intelligent Experiences™, we help learners, leaders, and educators achieve their goals by offering over 60 SaaS products and services designed to advance learning. Discover more about how we are fulfilling our mission for education, business, and government institutions at www.anthology.com.
The internet was in its infancy when Carmelo Ortiz went to prison in the 1980s. Personal computers still felt like futuristic marvels, and cell phones were clunky, two-pound “bricks” that took 10 hours to charge and cost $4,000. The pager was king.
When Ortiz maxed out of prison 30 years later, in 2016, he entered a world of smart phones and social media. He had no ID, no birth certificate, and nowhere to go but to his mother’s home in public housing, where he had to remain indoors, away from windows, because his mother worried she’d be evicted for housing a felon. It was, he recalled, “worse than prison.”
Earlier that year, Ortiz had been part of the first cohort at Northern State Prison to earn associate degrees through a collaboration between New Jersey colleges and the state Department of Corrections and Parole Board. He and the other graduates paraded through the prison yard while their fellow inmates applauded.
Now, he hoped to get his bachelor’s on the outside — an achievement that would require him to overcome a host of technological and psychological challenges. But first, he needed stable housing.
Since 2015, more than 22,000 incarcerated people have taken college courses through a federal experiment that has offered Pell Grants to inmates in select programs. Thousands more will become eligible for the grants this summer, when a law lifting a 1994 ban on awarding Pell funds to prisoners takes effect. That expansion is expected to lead to a boom in the number of colleges offering prison-education programs, and the number of students participating in them.
Like Ortiz, many of these students will leave prison with the drive and talent to continue their education on campus, as regular students. For colleges, their arrival will be an opportunity to expand enrollment, diversify their student bodies, and serve their social-justice missions.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Carmelo Ortiz leads a support group for formerly incarcerated students.
There are clear links between education and recidivism, with college graduates far less likely to return to prison than those without degrees. Completing college, post-incarceration, correlates with higher wages and lower unemployment rates.
Yet a majority of prison-ed programs aren’t doing much to support their students when they get out. Of the 374 prison-ed programs surveyed by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison in the 2019-20 academic year, less than one in five offered direct pathways to a campus program, and even fewer — 14 percent — provided re-entry services. Among those that did, the most common supports were admission and financial-aid counseling, a 2021 report by the Alliance showed. Fewer than 20 percent offered technology or housing support.
Some advocates worry that without more robust supports from colleges, many formerly incarcerated students won’t finish their degrees, blunting the impact of the Pell restoration. They argue that colleges’ duty to these students doesn’t end at the prison gate.
“Higher education in prison is the start of a lot of people’s academic journey, but it shouldn’t be the end,” said Mary Gould, a former director of the alliance. “There is a real responsibility for colleges and universities to be clear on that.”
Under new rules that take effect July 1, programs seeking to award Pell Grants in prison will need to show that they provide academic and career advising to incarcerated students that are “substantially similar” to those offered to other students, both in the prison, and upon release. They’ll also need to demonstrate that formerly incarcerated students can fully transfer their credits to any campus of the college that offers the program they were enrolled in. But they still won’t be required to provide re-entry services.
Romarilyn Ralston, who runs one of the oldest support programs for formerly incarcerated students, Project Rebound, said she’s been hearing from a growing number colleges seeking to “build that bridge” to on-campus learning. But relatively few have followed through. She thinks they’re worried about “opening the door” to trouble.
Historically, colleges that had programs tried to fly under the radar, worried about the optics of welcoming formerly incarcerated people on campus, Gould said.
“It was, Let’s not draw any attention, let’s not make any noise,” she said. Now, with all the attention being paid to the Pell restoration, “that’s really hard to do.”
Formerly incarcerated people face numerous hurdles when it comes to continuing their college educations, including a lack of resources and competing family demands. Those with debt, or children to support, often feel internal and external pressure to put work over school, Gould said. Some are required to work full time as a condition of parole.
People on parole may also have travel restrictions that prevent them from attending college in another county or too many miles from home.
Other would-be students are priced out of college. In prison, most students pay little or nothing for their courses, which are subsidized by the college or the state. But once they’re released, they’re expected to pay regular tuition.
Still others are derailed by admissions forms that ask applicants to check a box if they have a criminal history. Research shows the question sows fear and confusion among people who were formerly incarcerated, discouraging them from completing an application.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
The program that provided prison courses to Carmelo Ortiz also helped him win a scholarship and a spot in the honors dorm at Rutgers University at Newark.
But the biggest barrier for many students is housing, advocates and students said. Some states won’t admit convicted felons into public housing, and some colleges don’t allow them in dorms. Many landlords are reluctant to rent to them, too. As a group, formerly incarcerated people are 10 times as likely as members of the general public to be homeless.
“It’s easier to get a job than it is to get a residence in your name if you have a felony,” said Brandon Warren, director of re-entry services at Lee College Huntsville Center, in Texas. “I’ve been out 18 years now, and I have a doctoral degree, but none of that matters to an apartment manager. All they see is that 27 years ago, I had a felony.”
Ortiz got lucky. The program that provided his prison courses, New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP), offers wraparound support to students seeking to finish their degrees, or earn new ones, when they get out. In 2017, NJ-STEP’s Mountainview Communities project awarded Ortiz a scholarship and a spot in the honors dorm at Rutgers University at Newark. After a year of bouncing among his mother’s, his sister’s, and his girlfriend’s homes, Ortiz finally had the stability he needed to focus on his studies.
But dorms aren’t always ideal homes for people who’ve been in prison. Students who are out on parole may find visits from parole officers awkward, and older students may feel out of place among younger, traditional ones, said Ralston, the executive director of Project Rebound, a support program that started at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and has spread to 15 California State University campuses.
Living amid young partiers can also be risky: If campus security officers find drugs in a formerly incarcerated student’s room, that student could be cited for a parole violation, even if the drugs belonged to a roommate.
Students living in “halfway houses” confront other challenges, including strict curfews and check-in requirements. If they stay too late working on a group project, or miss a check-in while chatting with a professor, they risk a return to prison.
In New Jersey, many halfway houses lack internet access and prohibit cellphones, so students who live in them have to squeeze all their homework and group projects into however many hours they’re allowed to be on campus.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Regina Diamond-Rodriguez (seated) says it’s important for students who are formerly incarcerated to spend time on campus.
Typically, halfway-house staff members want students to return as soon as their classes end, said Regina Diamond-Rodriguez, director of transitions for NJ-STEP. She tells them it’s crucial that students stay all day, so they can take advantage of everything that happens outside class — things like office hours, career fairs, and community events.
“All the networking that happens on campus is especially important for students who don’t have the same social capital as traditional students,” said Diamond-Rodriguez. “Our students want to absorb it all.”
“Their priority is safety and our priority is education. We have to find a way to meet in the middle.”
Students who start their college educations in prison tend to be highly motivated and serious about their schoolwork. Professors often describe them as their most engaged students.
“We’re hungry,” explained Ortiz. “We know not everything is handed to us.”
Ortiz arrived at Rutgers determined not to squander the opportunity he’d earned. Still, he struggled with self-doubt, wondering if, as a 50-year old, he could keep up with the 20-somethings.
“I didn’t have the confidence kids have,” he said. “And I thought they were smarter.”
Technology was another challenge: Learning-management systems, Microsoft Word, and Excel confounded him. Figuring them out took more time than the assignments themselves, he said.
Feelings of “impostor syndrome” are common among formerly incarcerated students, said Ralston, who has to remind her students that they deserve to be at Cal State. While Project Rebound might have eased the way — securing an extension on an application deadline, or persuading a parole officer to permit travel to campus — “they made the grades themselves.”
“This is not a handout,” she tells them. “You have the brains, you earned your spot.”
Coming to a college campus after prison can be a culture shock, said Diamond-Rodriguez. After years of being told to “mind your business” and “keep your head down,” it can be disorienting to hear, “Come join us,” she said.
Along with acculturation, formerly incarcerated students often need help navigating the academic ecosystem. In prison, their course options were limited, and materials were provided by professors. Prison staff or volunteers helped them fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. Most never had to apply for financial aid on their own, choose from among hundreds of courses, or order textbooks for their classes.
To build their confidence and increase their sense of belonging, college-support programs often hire staff who have served time themselves.
“Inside prison, the messaging you get is that ‘you’ll never amount to anything,’” said Ralston, who spent 23 years in prison and took her first college course there. “It takes someone with similar lived experience to help you get free of all that garbage.”
Diamond-Rodriguez, who was incarcerated for five years, believes that her background gives her some credibility with her students. Even so, “I’m still part of an institution and can be seen as someone in authority.”
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
“I’ve never trusted any institution — it doesn’t matter what name you put behind it,” says Sammy Quiles, now a student at Rutgers U. at Newark.
And convincing students with a deep distrust of authority that the college is there to help them can be difficult, program directors say.
“We explain that there’s this whole group of people who are paid 40 hours a week to help them, and they have a hard time understanding that, because everyone they’ve encountered for the past 30 years has been paid by the state to push them down,” said David Zuckerman, acting director of the Transforming Outcomes Project at Sacramento State University.
At Rutgers Newark, formerly incarcerated students said they know Diamond-Rodriguez and other Mountainview staff care about their success. But they’re not so sure about the institution.
“I’ve never trusted any institution — it doesn’t matter what name you put behind it,” said Sammy Quiles in a recent meeting of the Mountainview seminar, a required three-credit course. “An institution is a cop waiting to whip my ass.”
Mindful of this mistrust, Rutgers’ tries to involve formerly incarcerated students in shaping its services. Students in the weekly seminar study best practices in re-entry and retention and then design a solution — a dorm or a mentorship program, perhaps — for formerly incarcerated students.
“Rather than create an institutional structure and say, ‘Fit into it,’ we’re working with students to generate solutions collectively, said Chris Agans, executive director of NJ-STEP. “The class is a space for them to think about what they need, and tell us what that is.”
In some states, most notably California, formerly incarcerated students have mobilized to call attention to those needs and push for policy changes on campus and in the legislature. For students who feel out of place among traditional undergraduates, the groups provide comfort and community, said Azadeh Zohrabi, executive director of Berkeley Underground Scholars, a support program that grew out of a student-led group that started a decade ago.
“Some blend in, but some are older, with lots of tattoos,” said Zohrabi. “A lot get asked to show their ID cards, to prove they’re students.”
Rutgers doesn’t have a student-run group currently — Agans said they come and go — but its seminar creates a cohort, and a place where students can share their stories of stigma and process the politics of disclosure.
“Some people aren’t ready for the idea of second chances,” says Christopher (Talib) Charriez, the Mountainview counselor for the Newark campus. As a student at Rutgers, he practiced what he calls “strategic disclosure,” telling liberal-minded professors that he’d been in prison but keeping quiet around his younger peers. In class, he hesitated every time he raised his hand, worried not “about giving the wrong answer, but about giving a window into my past.”
Efren Mercado said he shares his history of incarceration on a “need to know basis.” Until recently, when he was in places that called for a cellphone, he’d sometimes lie and say he left his in the office, to avoid explaining that he wasn’t allowed one at the halfway house where he was living. But sometimes, fellow students wanted to do a group chat, or work on a project virtually over the weekend, when he didn’t have internet access. In those cases, he was “forced to disclose,” he said.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Efren Mercado says he doesn’t tell professors he served time, because he doesn’t want to be treated differently from other students.
Mercado said he never tells professors about his past, not wanting to be treated differently from other students.
Discussion in the seminar is animated and lively, the students more vocal than the typical undergraduate. In a recent class, students discussed two texts: an article on redemption in America, and a white paper on how colleges can remove barriers to enrollment for formerly incarcerated people.
Diamond-Rodriguez began by asking the students what they took from the article, titled “The End of Second Acts?”
Sammy Quiles said it bothered him that the authors chose to highlight the plight of a low-level offender who is white. Most of the students in the class are Black or Latino, and several committed violent crimes.
“We’ve seen progress, but there’s still a taboo connected to violent offenders,” he argued.
Dwayne Knight, who admitted at the start of class that he hadn’t done the readings — he’s working two and a half jobs to cover rent and didn’t have time — surmised that the authors picked the white guy because “it’s easier to sell to the larger society.”
“Maybe redemption is reserved for the select few,” said Quiles. “I’m exceptional because of higher education, but before that, I was a high-school dropout.”
“What happens to the unexceptional?” he wondered. “I’m not ok with leaving my comrades behind, because I know what ‘sink or swim’ looks like.”
Diamond-Rodriguez asked them about the white paper, on the role of universities. A student named Base, whose last name is being withheld because he lives in a halfway house and is not authorized to speak to the news media, suggested that colleges help students apply for food stamps before they’re released, noting that “if I can’t put food on the table, the rage will return.”
Formerly incarcerated students “can have the will and the drive, but you need to have resources in place,” said a student named Kabir, who also lives in a halfway house. “A lot of people in prison have changed and don’t want to go back to their old lives.”
Carmelo Ortiz is one of them.
When he was 20, he was the getaway driver in an armed robbery gone wrong and was sentenced to 30 years for felony murder. Today, with the help of Mountainview Communities, he’s a college graduate — magna cum laude — and a leader in Newark’s robust re-entry network. He helps other ex-offenders set a fresh course for their lives, reminding them, as he did at a recent meeting of the Returning Citizens Support Group he started with his brother, that “the prison path doesn’t define you.”
“Once you come home, you need to define yourself,” he said.
Ortiz’s desire to “give back” and “help others avoid my mistakes” is extremely common among formerly incarcerated students, Agans said. By helping them find internships, jobs, and research opportunities in the field, the program is able to retain students “who otherwise drop out to take on these jobs and activities which feel urgent to them.”
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Students who were formerly incarcerated meet up in Newark.
Still, enrolling in college right out of prison isn’t right for everyone, Agans and other program directors said. Some students need time to sort out housing, child care and work — and re-acclimate to freedom — first.
“In prison, decisions are made for you — where to sleep, what to eat — it’s very prescribed,” said Pat Seibert-Love, policy associate for corrections education in Washington State. “It takes time to get your feet under you.”
Agans argues that colleges should pay less attention to traditional measures of academic success, like GPA and on-time graduation, when it comes to formerly incarcerated students. He doesn’t care how quickly they progress, or if their C average brings down the median.
“One of our best students took 10 years to get a degree,” he said. “We didn’t care, but he is a failure in the traditional model. It took him too long, and cost too much. But by our measures, he’s an ultimate success.”
After the support group meeting, two participants who were part of the NJ-STEP program in prison approached Agans to say they were embarrassed to have “fallen off” and wanted to visit campus. He told them they were welcome when they were ready.
Now, with thousands of people with college credit set to leave prison in the coming years, the question is: Will colleges be ready when they are?
RMIT Online selects Pathify to drive student engagement via a customized communications portal
Press Release –
Feb 23, 2023 08:00 MST
DENVER, February 23, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Pathify, an Australian-founded higher ed tech company and the only provider of a centralized higher education Engagement Hub, proudly welcomes a new partnership withRMIT Online, the premier Australian university’s digital extension, into its growing roster of customers who share in the mission of improving the college experience.
Dedicated to offering students high-quality digital education, RMIT Online willamplify itssupport with a unifying platform tailored to its large and complex student population.
“At RMIT Online, we are passionate about making online learning as engaging, innovative, and fun as the on-campus experience RMIT is globally renowned for delivering,” says Director of Technology and Enablement, Will Calvert. “We chose Pathify as our platform to help us achieve this goal and provide our students a single home to consolidate and easily access all their systems and services. This is particularly important for the lifelong learner audience RMIT Online services.”
He continued to say, “We see Pathify playing a major role in helping students access, plan, and understand their learning journey and enjoy all the social and support services one would expect on campus. We’re very excited for what 2023 has in store for our student experience!”
Pathify’s Engagement Hub fills the void at the center of the higher education digital ecosystem. It creates a centralized user experience unifying all things digital. Offering highly personalized experiences for users at every point in their journey, the Engagement Hub encourages system-agnostic integrations, collaborative social groups, personalized tasks, and multi-channel communication across web and mobile.
RMIT Online joins existing Pathify customers such as Utah State University, Alabama A&M University, Johnson & Wales University—and many more.
About RMIT Online
RMIT Online is a subsidiary of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which serves as the university’s digital learning platform providing a variety of short courses and accreditation courses designed for professionals seeking to upskill and progress in their careers.
Obsessed with making great technology while developing incredible long-term relationships with customers, Pathify remains hyper-focused on creating stellar experiences across the entire student lifecycle—from prospects to alumni. Delivering cloud-based, integration-friendly technology designed to drive engagement, Pathify pushes personalized information, content, and resources to the right people, at the right time—on any device. Led by a team of former higher ed executives, builders, and technology leaders, the team at Pathify focuses every day on serving the needs of learners everywhere.
Eric Enriquez is a determined student. But some days, his mental-health challenges make it difficult for him to participate in class.
“There are some days for me, personally, where I’ve struggled with mental health and it’s hard to get out of bed,” said the junior psychological-sciences major at the University of California at Irvine. “My anxiety is so bad.”
When he’s feeling overwhelmed, he appreciates instructors who are flexible with attendance and assignments, or who provide remote-learning options.
Enriquez is one of many students who believe that colleges should scale up such accommodations for academic-related distress.
Across higher ed, there’s a growing recognition of the connection between students’ well-being and their success in the classroom. “Mental health affects how students perform academically, and the stress of academics, and certainly disappointments academically, affect students’ mental health,” said Sarah Lipson, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Some colleges and faculty members are creating or considering new policies to support students when they need a day to tend to their mental health. But providing the kinds of academic accommodations that many students are calling for –– such as reforms to extension and attendance guidelines –– requires instructors to shoulder new responsibilities and change old habits and standards that some of them value.
Lipson said she’s happy to see that colleges and professors are thinking about ways to make academics more accommodating to those experiencing mental-health challenges, but landing on the right solution is complicated. She recommended that colleges form their plans with student feedback.
“There’s going to be different solutions for different institutions,” Lipson said.
‘I Was Worrying the Entire Day’
Last summer, Northeastern University started a new program, in response to student advocacy, that gives students two excused absences per semester for any reason. But some students say the program doesn’t go far enough.
The idea for the program, called Wellness Days, came from the campus chapter of Active Minds, a mental-health awareness group. “The importance of a wellness day is if you’re having a mental-health crisis, you should probably be taking the time to come back from that,” said Jack Ognibene, a junior and psychology major who’s vice president of the group. “It’s a similar thing to if you are sick.”
Ed Gavaghan, a spokesperson for Northeastern, wrote in an email that student feedback in a recent university survey was “overwhelmingly positive.”
While Ognibene is pleased that Northeastern officials have embraced the program, he said that Active Minds had to make compromises on its design. The group conducted its own student survey about wellness days, and one common issue students brought up was a lack of accompanying accommodations, according to Ognibene.
“There isn’t much of a difference between taking a wellness day and skipping class,” Ognibene said. “All your assignments are still due on the same day, so you don’t really have the time to rest. You also have to play catch-up because you’re missing class, and professors aren’t really providing students with the notes from class that day.”
“Thinking about all the assignments I would miss started getting me really nervous,” Umansky-Castro said in an interview. “I was worrying the entire day.”
Ognibene and Umansky-Castro said some instructors at Northeastern provide accommodations for students taking a wellness day, but others don’t.
But Ognibene said Active Minds pushed hard for students to be able to choose their days off.
“You can’t really choose a day to have a mental-health crisis,” Ognibene said.
He said Active Minds would ask university officials to consider requiring professors to offer deadline extensions and to send copies of class notes when students take a wellness day, so all students have access to the same accommodations, regardless of their instructor.
Traditional grading … focuses on sorting and ranking students. This type of approach tends to both produce enormous amounts of stress and anxiety for students.
Weighing Accommodations
At Rice University, students have advocated for a rule that would require faculty members to spell out a mental-health-accommodation policy in their course syllabi. The change would provide clarity and ensure that students in the same class received the same flexibility, said Alison Qiu, a computer-science major and student-government leader at Rice.
Faculty, however, worry that the measure would force them to make decisions they don’t feel qualified to make.
Last fall, Qiu helped author a student-government resolution recommending a mandatory-accommodation policy, as well as two other additions to the syllabi: a mental-health statement and a list of campus resources. Those two measures were endorsed by Rice’s Faculty Senate, but the accommodation policy was omitted.
An editorial in The Rice Thresher, Rice’s student newspaper, criticized the Faculty Senate’s decision and argued that explicit policies would “reduce the stigma around students asking for accommodations.”
Qiu said she believes including policies in the syllabus would hold instructors accountable. Lipson agrees.
“There’s also a lot of evidence that if a policy isn’t made explicit to students –– like how to request an extension or what the protocols are for accommodations –– there’s systematically certain students who do not feel comfortable asking those questions,” Lipson said.
Alexandra Kieffer, an associate professor of musicology and speaker of Rice’s Faculty Senate, said faculty care about their students’ mental health. But they’re concerned, Kieffer said, that requiring mental-health-accommodation policies in syllabi would put instructors in a position where they’d need to make their own assessments about students’ mental health.
“That would have required the instructor of a course to essentially make a determination in a particular case as to whether or not the student met some kind of criteria for the mental-health accommodation, as opposed to some kind of other blanket attendance policy or extension policy,” Kieffer said in an interview.
Kieffer wrote in a follow-up email that if students experience mental-health challenges, the Faculty Senate encourages them to seek resources at Rice’s counseling center and to request formal academic accommodations through the disability-resource center.
Qiu said she’ll continue to advocate for accommodation policies. “My goal is to continue to communicate with the Faculty Senate about either passing the third requirement or modifying it in a way that makes the most sense for both faculty and students,” Qiu said.
Lipson said that although most instructors aren’t trained mental-health professionals, they have a responsibility to understand campus protocols and resources and how they can best support students.
The University of California at Irvine hired someone last year to help faculty do just that.
‘Flexibility With Guardrails’
Called a pedagogical wellness specialist, the UC-Irvine position involves training instructors to incorporate wellness into their classroom policies and procedures. Theresa Duong, who was hired for the role, said her responsibilities include creating workshops, consulting with professors, and doing research.
“My job involves supporting faculty wellness through pedagogy, but also supporting students’ wellness through the practice of pedagogy,” Duong said. “So that means training the faculty to think about wellness in their courses and to integrate well-being strategies into their course design.”
Duong said she encourages instructors to apply a mind-set she calls “flexibility with guardrails.” Duong created a digital guide that includes advice on rethinking high-stakes exams, assessing workloads, clarifying deadlines, and providing assignment choices, among other things.
During her workshops, Duong has instructors brainstorm how their class could be a barrier or facilitator to their students’ wellness and then create an action plan.
Angela Jenks, an associate professor of teaching in anthropology at UC-Irvine and the vice associate dean of faculty development and diversity in the School of Social Sciences, works with Duong to help professors revamp their courses. In her own classes, Jenks said she has created “menus” that allow students to choose assignments, with a reduced emphasis on traditional-grading practices.
“By traditional grading, I think about an approach to grading that really focuses on sorting and ranking students,” Jenks said. “This type of approach tends to both produce enormous amounts of stress and anxiety for students.”
Instead of high-stakes assignments that receive letter grades, Jenks focuses on feedback, self-reflection, and opportunities to resubmit. “In my everyday job,” Jenks said, “nobody grades me.”
Pathify closed a new funding deal with Brex Asset Management to help universities drive greater student engagement via its Engagement Hub
Press Release –
updated: Feb 2, 2023 08:44 MST
DENVER, February 2, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Pathify, a leading provider of student portals for colleges and universities, today announced it has recently received funding from Brex Asset Management. This new capital will help Pathify expand its student portal offering throughout the United States and beyond. The funding from Brex Asset Management came in tandem with further investment from Pathify’s existing shareholders.
The Pathify Engagement Hub fills the void at the center of the higher education digital ecosystem, creating a centralized user experience unifying all things digital. Pathify has achieved a greater than 100% compound annual growth rate on recurring revenue over the past four years, as the Engagement Hub gains traction at institutions across the country.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Chase, James, and the team at Pathify that has reimagined the student experience and modernized the university tech stack,” said Benjamin Wu, CEO of Brex Asset Management. “Pathify is a great addition to our portfolio. They provide a mission-critical service to an underserved market with a capital-efficient business model. Our mission is to support our customers at every stage of growth, and we are excited to support Pathify through this next phase.”
This deal marks continued momentum for Brex Asset Management and its affiliated fund, which U.S. fintech company Brex launched as a way to provide companies with growth capital and help founders take their business to the next level. Brex Asset Management selectively provides capital to scaleable, high-growth startups with strong recurring revenue in expanding sectors.
“We’re excited to partner with the team at Brex to further strengthen Pathify’s Balance Sheet, particularly in the current tech environment,” said Pathify Chief Financial Officer and co-founder James McCubbin. “Brex met all the key criteria we were looking for in a financial partner and we look forward to our ongoing relationship with them.”
The Brex funding will help Pathify continue to scale its product suite and deepen integrations with strategic partners, all while maintaining its industry-best customer success and support.
“We experienced rapid growth last year and this capital allows us to continue our expansion plans this year and beyond,” said Pathify Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Chase Williams.
About Brex Asset Management
Brex Asset Management (“BAM”), Brex’s asset manager focusing on supporting companies with venture debt and growth capital, leverages Brex’s reach within the venture fund-backed startup industry and offers alternative investment opportunities to investors around the world — including institutional investors, endowments and foundations, financial institutions, and private wealth investors. BAM is a wholly owned subsidiary of Brex Inc.
About Brex
Brex empowers the next generation of businesses with an integrated corporate card and spend management software. We make it easy for our customers to manage every aspect of spending and empower their employees to make better financial decisions from anywhere they live or work. Brex proudly serves tens of thousands of growing businesses, from early-stage startups to enterprise leaders. Learn more.
About Pathify
Obsessed with making great technology while developing incredible long-term relationships with customers, Pathify remains hyper-focused on creating stellar experiences across the entire student lifecycle — from prospects to alumni. Delivering cloud-based, integration-friendly technology designed to drive engagement, Pathify pushes personalized information, content, and resources to the right people, at the right time — on any device. Led by a team of former higher ed executives, builders, and technology leaders, the team at Pathify focuses every day on serving the needs of learners everywhere. Learn more at pathify.com.
Racial and gender-based disparities in college-going rates disappear when students receive similar levels of academic preparation in high school, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution. The findings highlight a potential path forward for college leaders who are eager for solutions to their enrollment problems.
Over all, Black students typically enroll in college at lower rates than Asian, white, and Hispanic students. But Black students enroll at higher rates than all of those groups when they receive the same level of academic preparation, with Hispanic students second highest.
Socioeconomic status is also a major factor influencing the likelihood that students will go to college. According to the analysis, though, socioeconomic status isn’t the primary driver; academic preparation is.
Although college-enrollment gaps for students in different socioeconomic brackets are alleviated when they receive the same level of academic preparation, wide disparities still exist.
The analysis also looked at gender disparities; it’s been well documented that women are more likely than men to go to college. Among students with similar levels of academic preparation, men and women enrolled in college at similar rates.
The study comes from Brookings’s Center on Children and Families , which analyzed data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009 , a survey of over 23,000 students who were in ninth grade that year. Students were surveyed several times during high school and early adulthood, and took a standardized math exam in their expected ninth- and 11th-grade years.
The survey records were linked to data from high-school transcripts and college enrollment records, as well as surveys completed by the students’ parents or guardians, school administrators, counselors, and teachers, according to the report.
Sarah Reber , a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report, said that the report’s findings show that closing gaps in academic preparation during high school is key to making progress on college-enrollment disparities.
“Public discussions about inequality in access to college often center around admissions and cost,” Reber wrote in the report. “While these issues are important, our findings suggest that policy makers should also pay careful attention to disparities in academic preparation earlier in students’ educational careers, which are important determinants of college enrollment.”
For students from different economic backgrounds, improving academic preparation is a key way to tackle college-enrollment gaps, Reber said, as is reducing the cost of attendance and making the admissions process less confusing.
Reber said in an interview that Brookings determined “academic preparation” using factors including overall grade-point average from high school, separate grade-point averages for math and English, the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses taken, the highest-level math course taken, and the math score students received on the standardized test administered as a part of the survey.
Overall grade-point average was the most important factor in predicting college enrollment, Reber said.
Reber emphasized that the report is silent about the source of the gaps in academic preparation. But other research has shown that students’ academic-preparation levels are determined by factors outside of school as well as within it, she said.
“From a policy perspective, it’s not clear whether you want to be focused on in-school or out-of-school factors,” Reber said. “Things like family income, violence, racism, environmental toxins in the community — all of these things could be contributing. So it’s important to keep that in mind.”
Nathan Grawe , a professor of economics at Carleton College who studies the connections between family background and educational outcomes, said the Brookings report is important because it reveals information about the causes of racial and gender enrollment disparities.
“If we’re going to make progress on mitigating those gaps, we need to fully understand where they occur,” Grawe said. “This research, for instance, makes clear that it’s not that the differences emerge at the very last moment in the process, when students are age 18.”
College leaders shouldn’t draw the conclusion that these academic gaps are K-12 problems, Grawe said. In order to reduce enrollment disparities, he said, college administrators should collaborate with primary and secondary educators to expand access to academic preparation earlier on.
“A better conclusion would be one that underscores the importance of higher education collaborating with K-12 in all sorts of ways,” Grawe said.
Colleges have to focus on adapting and meeting students where they are, Grawe said, “so that even if they don’t have the preparation that we might ideally hope for, they nevertheless can find a path into and through higher education.”
Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?
And what does it mean for professors if the answer to those questions is “yes”?
These and other questions have flooded news sites and social media since the nonprofit OpenAI released a tool called ChatGPT, which promises to revolutionize how we write. Enter a prompt and in seconds it will produce an essay, a poem, or other text that ranges in quality, users say, from mediocre to pretty good. It can do so because it has been trained on endless amounts of digital text pulled from the internet.
Scholars of teaching, writing, and digital literacy say there’s no doubt that tools like ChatGPT will, in some shape or form, become part of everyday writing, the way calculators and computers have become integral to math and science. It is critical, they say, to begin conversations with students and colleagues about how to shape and harness these AI tools as an aide, rather than a substitute, for learning.
Academia really has to look at itself in the mirror and decide what it’s going to be.
In doing so, they say, academics must also recognize that this initial public reaction says as much about our darkest fears for higher education as it does about the threats and promises of a new technology. In this vision, college is a transactional experience where getting work done has become more important than challenging ourselves to learn. Assignments and assessments are so formulaic that nobody could tell if a computer completed them. And faculty members are too overworked to engage and motivate their students.
“Academia really has to look at itself in the mirror and decide what it’s going to be,” said Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, who has criticized the “moral panic” he has seen in response to ChatGPT. “Is it going to be more concerned with compliance and policing behaviors and trying to get out in front of cheating, without any evidence to support whether or not that’s actually going to happen? Or does it want to think about trust in students as its first reaction and building that trust into its response and its pedagogy?”
There is some truth underlying that nightmare vision of higher ed, of course. Budget constraints that lead to large-enrollment classes and a reliance on part-time instructors can fuel teaching that feels rote. Such problems aren’t readily solved. But others can be mitigated. Students might cheat because the value of the work of education is not apparent to them. Or their courses or curriculum don’t make any sense. Those, said Eyler, “are totally in our power to correct.”
So how does a writing instructor, or a professor in a writing-intensive course, reduce the likelihood that students will use these AI tools? Faculty members have already come up with several ideas. Flip your teaching so that seminal pieces of work are done in class. Focus more on multimedia assignments or oral presentations. Double down on feedback and revision. Ask students to write about topics of genuine interest to them, in which their voices come through and their opinions are valued.
If you can create an atmosphere where students are invested in learning, they are not going to reach for a workaround.
All of those strategies may work, but underlying them, teaching experts said, is a need to talk to students about why they write. For most professors, writing represents a form of thinking. But for some students, writing is simply a product, an assemblage of words repeated back to the teacher. It’s tempting to blame them, but that’s how many students were taught to write in high school.
Generations of students “have been trained to write simulations like an algorithm in school,” only to arrive at college to be told that writing is more than that, said John Warner, a blogger and author of two books on writing. “It feels like a bait and switch to students.”
The challenge of creating authentic assessments — evaluations that measure true learning — has been longstanding, he noted, recalling his days as an undergraduate cramming for exams in large classes. “I forget everything I learned within hours.”
But the vast majority of students don’t come to college wanting to bluff their way to a degree, Warner said. “If you can create an atmosphere where students are invested in learning, they are not going to reach for a workaround. They are not going to plagiarize. They are not going to copy, they are not going to dodge the work. But the work has to be worth doing on some level, beyond getting the grade.”
At Purdue University, Melinda Zook, a history professor who runs Cornerstone, an undergraduate program that focuses on understanding and interpreting transformative texts, has advised her colleagues to “keep doing what you’re doing.” That’s because the courses are small and built around frequent feedback and discussion focused on the value and purpose of the liberal arts. ChatGPT is much less of a threat to that kind of project-based learning, she said, than to traditional humanities courses. “The fact is the professoriate cannot teach the way we used to,” she said in an email. “Today’s students have to take ownership over every step of the learning experience. No more traditional 5 paragraph essays, no more ‘read the book and write about it.’”
Some faculty members have tried to meet the potential challenges of AI tools by incorporating them into their discussions and assignments.
Anna Mills teaches English at the College of Marin, a community college in California that draws a lot of first-generation and lower-income students, as well as those for whom English is a second language.
The fact is the professoriate cannot teach the way we used to. Today’s students have to take ownership over every step of the learning experience.
In June, she began experimenting with GPT-3, an earlier version of the program on which ChatGPT was built, to test the software and read up on where it’s headed. Mills, for one, does not think using a text-producing chatbot is going to pose the same ethical quandary to students as plagiarism or contract cheating, in which you pay someone else to do the work. “They think, ‘this is a new technology. These are tools available to me. So why not use them?’ And they’re going to be doing that in a hybrid way. Some of it’s theirs and some of it’s the generators.”
But students are also puzzled and sometimes unsettled about how this technology does what it does. That’s one reason digital literacy has to include AI language tools, she said. Mills has shown her students how Elicit, an AI research assistant, can be an effective search tool. And she assigns readings on how AI can amplify biases, such as racism and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
She is concerned, too, that responses to ChatGPT and other AI might be inequitable. Students who are less fluent in English may be more likely to be accused of using such tools, for example, if they turn in fluid prose. Similarly, if instructors switch to oral presentations, writing in class only, or writing by hand, that could be a challenge for students with learning disabilities.
Mills has started putting together resourcelists and begun conversations with others in higher education. The Modern Language Association and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, for example, are putting together a joint task force in hopes of providing professional guidance for instructors and departments.
“We need to become part of a societal process of thinking about, how do we want to roll this out? How should such a powerful tool be constructed?” she said. For example, “Should we just trust the tech companies to figure out how to prevent harm? Or should there be more involvement from government and from academia?”
In August at the University of Mississippi, faculty members from the department of writing and rhetoric started holding workshops for colleagues across campus on AI’s potential impact. They are also discussing how tools such as Elicit and Fermat can help students brainstorm, design research questions, and explore different points of view.
Preservice teacher candidates in Dave Cormier’s course at the University of Windsor will be spending the spring term looking at how AI tools will affect the future classroom. Cormier, a learning specialist for digital strategy and special projects in the Office of Open Learning, is going to ask them to consider a range of possibilities. Some might choose to incorporate such tools, others might want to dampen access to the internet in their classrooms.
Like others, Cormier said digital literacy has to include an understanding of how AI works. One way to do that might be to ask students to run a writing prompt through a program several times over, and look for patterns in those responses. Those patterns could then lead to a discussion of where and how the tool gathers and processes data. “Getting to the next part of the story is the literacy that I’m constantly trying to bring across with my students,” he said.
Of course, any strategy to deal with AI takes place against a backdrop of scarcity. Warner, for example, noted that first-year writing programs are often staffed by graduate students and adjunct faculty members, and that large class sizes make more intensive writing assignments a challenge.
Alternative assignments and assessments take an investment of time, too, that some faculty members feel like they can’t spare. “There are not a lot of incentives in the structure of higher education to spend time on those things,” said Warner. In a large course, “you get locked into having to do prompts that can be assessed quickly along a limited set of criteria. Otherwise you can’t work through the stuff you have to grade.”
Whether AI chatbots become a faculty nightmare or just another teaching tool may ultimately come down to this: Not the state of the technology, but whether professors are allowed the time to create meaningful work for their students.
A lawsuit filed last week against Yale University has reignited a debate about how colleges should best help students who are going through serious mental-health crises.
The complaint against Yale reflects a larger shift in which colleges are under increasing pressure — from the federal government, court rulings, advocacy groups, and students themselves — to accommodate students with mental-health conditions so they can stay enrolled while they receive treatment.
The new lawsuit centers on colleges’ withdrawal policies, which have been the subject of scrutiny by mental-health advocacy groups in recent years. The plaintiffs, two current students and a nonprofit that’s pushing for mental-health reform at the university, argue that Yale’s policies are punitive and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by depriving students of access to an education.
The complaint recounts students’ “traumatic” experiences of being pushed out of college after disclosing symptoms of distress and facing barriers to reinstatement. (According to a joint filing on Wednesday, the lawsuit had been put on hold while the parties try to come to an agreement out of court.)
A similar lawsuit filed against Stanford University in 2018 resulted in a settlement and policy changes that were hailed as a model of student-centered, compassionate, and transparent practices. At Stanford, forced mental-health leaves are now supposed to be a last resort, and students can apply to stay in campus housing even if they do go on leave.
The Stanford and Yale lawsuits are part of a broader push in recent years to make campus mental-health policies more flexible and student-centered.
College officials say that involuntary leaves are rare, and that most students are accommodated and stay enrolled while they’re going through mental-health treatment. But in some severe cases, administrators say it’s best for students to pause their studies until they’re ready to return to campus. Drawing that line, however, is a challenge.
Colleges and universities need to explore all potential reasonable accommodations that might enable the student to safely remain on campus and meet the college’s academic standards without resorting to exclusion.
Mental-health advocates say colleges often don’t get it right. Colleges should — and are legally obligated to, the lawsuit against Yale argues — provide reasonable accommodations to students with mental-health diagnoses so they can continue their education. And if withdrawal is necessary, advocates stress that the process for a student to re-enroll should not present financial and academic roadblocks.
Monica Porter, the policy and legal advocacy attorney with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which is one of the law firms involved in suing Yale, said students and their families are becoming more aware of their rights for reasonable accommodations.
Part of the shift, too, is that mental health is becoming less stigmatized, said Asia Wong, director of counseling and health services at Loyola University New Orleans. For students, instead of feeling the need to hide their mental-health conditions, there’s been a shift to “this is an illness I’m living with, and I believe that it’s within my rights to be accommodated for that,” Wong said.
Exclusion as ‘Last Resort’
There has been renewed interest from the Biden administration’s Education and Justice Departments in protecting the legal rights of students with mental-health conditions, as well as from lawmakers.
Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent a letter to the two departments last week, encouraging federal officials to scrutinize colleges’ use of involuntary leaves and issue guidance on the matter.
Federal investigations have forced several colleges to change their mental-health protocols. Recent landmark settlements include Brown University’s from August 2021, which required the university to modify its leave of absence and readmission policies. It also required the school to pay more than $600,000 in damages to students who had been denied readmission.
In 2018, Northern Michigan University had to overhaul a policy that threatened to punish students if they discussed thoughts of self harm with their peers as part of a Justice Department settlement. And in 2016, the department reached an agreement with Princeton, requiring the university to communicate the accommodations available to students before going on leave.
“Before resorting to exclusion or putting a pause on a student’s formal relationship with the university, colleges and universities need to explore all potential reasonable accommodations that might enable the student to safely remain on campus and meet the college’s academic standards without resorting to exclusion,” Porter said. “Exclusion should be a last resort and only resorted to in extremely rare cases if no reasonable accommodation can be identified.”
Victor Schwartz, a psychiatrist and the senior associate dean for wellness and student life at the City University of New York School of Medicine, spent eight years as medical director of the Jed Foundation, a suicide-prevention organization, advising colleges on how to handle students who might pose a threat to their own or others’ safety.
As the mental-health landscape has changed, Schwartz said there’s a sense among critics that colleges’ policies have not followed the larger cultural shift toward becoming more transparent and student-friendly. He thinks that in the last 15 to 20 years, as advocacy around the issue has increased, more colleges are seeing the virtue in being as reasonably flexible as possible.
Still, “it’s a complicated balancing act,” he said.
Sometimes, it is in a student’s best interest to take a break from college, Schwartz said — especially if they can’t get access to the treatment they need on or around campus, or if they can’t keep up with their academic work. There are also rare instances where students pose a risk to the community. But there are other scenarios in which returning home would have a negative impact on a student, he said.
“Ideally, you need to be taking a holistic picture,” he said.
Finding That Balance
Wong, the counseling director at Loyola New Orleans, said the question of whether a student should take a leave of absence boils down to a key issue: Can the university reasonably accommodate the student? Or is the student better served by taking some time off?
“If the second case is the case, then the university should be working to make it as easy as possible for the student to return,” Wong said.
Schwartz thinks reinstatement policies like Yale’s — which was updated in the past year but previously required coursework, an interview, and letters of recommendation — were created in good faith. Colleges want to make sure that students are in a position to succeed in terms of their health and academics when they return to campus.
For many students, the loss of tuition dollars can end their higher-education opportunities.
But when the bar is too high, rigid policies have the unintended consequences of making students hesitant to take leave, and frightened about the implications of alerting their university when they are experiencing a crisis, Schwartz said.
“When students believe it’ll be costly and hinder their academic progress to leave school, or if there will be hurdles to coming back, they might not leave when they ought to,” he said. Ideally, there should be a flexible system of tuition reimbursement or making students aware of tuition insurance, he said. Because “for many students, the loss of tuition dollars can end their higher-education opportunities.”
The recommendations made by Elis for Rachael, the nonprofit involved in the lawsuit against Yale, include eliminating roadblocks to reinstatement and allowing for the possibility of continued access to campus healthcare, facilities, and housing while a student is on leave. Schwartz said these recommendations are by and large sensible and in line with what a lot of colleges are doing.
Ben Locke, chief clinical officer at Togetherall, a peer-to-peer forum for students that’s monitored by mental-health professionals, worked in counseling services at Pennsylvania State University for two decades. It’s a good thing, Locke said, that colleges are rethinking their mental-health policies to have more parity with general health leave, and eliminating some of the barriers to re-enrollment.
But he stressed that involuntary-leave policies exist for a reason. There are severe instances, he said, where keeping a student enrolled — or in student housing — poses a danger or disruption to other students and their learning.
“One of the huge challenges in reporting on and understanding these things is that due to confidentiality rules, you’re generally going to be missing the entire side of the story that holds much of the detail,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that institutions haven’t done things wrong and should be held accountable, but it does mean we need to be really cautious about drawing very firm conclusions that institution has done X, Y or Z wrong, and we have no idea what actually happened with the student.”
He also said that calls for continuity of healthcare and housing for students on leave are contractually complicated.
“The school’s responsibility to a student who is no longer a student changes dramatically,” he said. “And I think that that really does complicate some of these requests.”
With the release of preliminary federal data in November, a clearer picture is starting to emerge of how two years of pandemic-era operations have affected colleges’ graduation rates.
The Chronicle analyzed U.S. Department of Education data for more than 1,300 public and private four-year institutions and found that six-year graduation rates in 2020 and 2021 were 1.26 percent higher, on average, than they were in 2018 and 2019. That incremental rate of increase from year to year has been fairly consistent in recent decades.
In the new data set, nearly 90 institutions had increases in graduation rates in 2020 and 2021 that were five percentage points or more above average relative to 2018 and 2019. More than 140 fell five or more points below average.
Here are details on those institutions:
Methodology: This analysis looked at degree-granting four-year institutions with Carnegie Classifications of doctoral, master’s, or baccalaureate. Only those institutions with a six-year cohort of 50 or more were included. Institutions were defined as degree-granting if they were eligible to participate in Title IV federal financial-aid programs and were within the United States.
Nearly three-quarters of the students whose colleges closed between 2004 and 2020 were stranded without adequate warning or plans to help them finish their degrees, and fewer than half of those students ended up re-enrolling in any postsecondary programs, according to a report released Tuesday.
Hardest hit were Black and Hispanic students enrolled in for-profit institutions. “Their schools’ closing effectively closed the doors on the students’ educational dreams,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, said in a briefing with reporters.
The research center worked with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, also known as SHEEO, on a series of three reports that will examine the impact of college closures on students and how states can better protect those whose education plans are disrupted.
For 70 percent of the 143,000 students affected, the colleges shut their doors abruptly, without adequate notice or teach-out plans to help students finish their degrees or other credentials.
A 2019 Chronicle analysis found that many of those whose lives have been plunged into chaos by campus closures were working adults living paycheck to paycheck. College, to them, was a way to provide enough money to support families and attain a middle-class lifestyle.
Instead, they’ve joined the ranks of the more than 36 million Americans with some college and no degree, a population that has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. Colleges that are struggling to maintain their enrollments are stepping up efforts to find and re-enroll many of them.
“This study shows that any college closure is damaging to student success, leaving too many learners — more than half — without a viable path to fulfilling their educational dreams,“ Shapiro said in a prepared statement. “But the extremely poor outcomes for students who experienced abrupt closures are particularly worrisome.”
The findings reinforce the need to strengthen how states monitor higher-education institutions to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to college closures,” Rob Anderson, president of SHEEO, said in a prepared statement.
The colleges most likely to close — for-profit institutions — serve disproportionately large numbers of students of color, veterans, and adult students with children.
In upcoming reports, the researchers will look at how students fared in states that offer more, or less, protection for stranded students.
The study reinforced the need for states to do a better job monitoring the financial health of colleges, the report notes. “Once it becomes likely an institution will close, states need to ensure teach-out agreements are in place to provide all students with a pathway for completing their credentials,” it says.
Financially struggling colleges should plan ahead to find colleges willing to take on their students, and the credits they’ve earned, if they close their doors, the researchers said. In a few extreme examples, students showed up for classes to find doors locked and no way for them to retrieve records of the classes they had taken.
Students whose for-profit campuses have closed often re-enroll in another branch of the same college, which often then also closes, the researchers said. They’d be better going with “an outside partner who’s not going to be struggling with the same financial-viability factors,” Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, said during the briefing.
Students who re-enrolled in college within four months of a campus closure were the most likely to earn a credential, and their odds of doing so doubled if they re-enrolled within a year, the report found. Students who were younger, white, and female were the most likely to re-enroll; of students who did re-enroll after their campuses closed, 38 percent received a postsecondary credential.
Community-college enrollment took a nosedive during the pandemic, and many institutions have since struggled to recover. At a recent gathering in New York, college leaders discussed a variety of strategies to recruit and retain more students, including ramping up sports programs, enhancing marketing material, providing more student support, and being more explicit with prospective students about how their college degrees can lead directly to a job.
“Community colleges were designed to be receivers of students; now it’s time for them to be recruiters of students,” Tom Green, director of strategic enrollment management for the technology company Salesforce, said during one panel discussion.
Even with the proper strategies, however, it’s not clear that the colleges can overcome the long-term economic and mental-health impacts of the pandemic, the overall decline in high-school graduates, and a growing skepticism about the value of postsecondary education.
The annual leadership conference of the Association of Community College Trustees, which met last week in New York City, was titled “Improving the Lives of Entire Families” to underscore the idea that open-access public colleges are vital educational and economic ladders for millions of students, particularly low-income, first-generation students, as well as for working adults.
A strong economy and other factors led to a slow decline in community-college enrollment since it peaked in the fall of 2011, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, presented by Green. Things got much worse during the pandemic, though it’s not entirely clear why, since community-college enrollment typically increases during economic downturns. Higher-education experts have theorized that a lack of access to the internet, the absence of child care for working adults, as well as the loss of service-sector jobs kept many students from pursuing college at the time.
The improving economy since then has compounded the enrollment challenges, as students opt for higher-paying jobs over the price of tuition. In the spring semester of 2022, community-college enrollment was nearly 8 percent less than in the spring of 2021. It had fallen 10 percent the year before.
When institutions ask how they can afford investments in student support, we ask, how can they not?
For some colleges, a combination of factors has decimated enrollment over the past decade. At North Shore Community College, in Massachusetts, the declining number of high-school graduates, the impact of the pandemic, and the more recent high demand for entry-level workers have led to a 50-percent decline in students over the past decade, said J.D. LaRock, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees.
“This is a reality we’ve been living with in New England for a while,” LaRock said.
Community colleges can no longer afford to be passive about enrollment management, said administrators and industry consultants who recommended a variety of ways to enhance student recruitment and retention.
Green, who is also a former enrollment-management administrator, recommended that colleges develop more-sophisticated marketing and communications plans to ensure students understand the opportunities at the institution. For instance, they might hire someone specifically to recruit military personnel if the college is near a base, or make sure that high-school students attending “dual enrollment” programs have “authentic” opportunities to interact with college faculty and students.
Iowa Western has also added an e-sports program, Kinney said, and that has coincided with a more than 40 percent increase in computer-information-technology students.
At Cuyahoga Community College, in Ohio, the focus has been on re-enrolling students who dropped out in recent years, said Angela Johnson, vice president for access and completion. Cuyahoga used federal Covid-relief money to pay off the past-due balances for 3,100 students, Johnson told attendees, and nearly a quarter of that group has re-enrolled.
Short-term programs that last only eight weeks are also very popular this year, said Johnson, and have grown by more than 20 percent.
One big challenge to putting new programs and marketing in place is how community colleges will afford such efforts, given the ongoing declines in tuition and typically lower level of state support, compared with public universities.
Institutions have, in some cases, found some creative ways to cover their expenses. When the federal government suspended student-loan payments, Cuyahoga Community College repurposed the money it had budgeted for collecting student debts and put it toward marketing to get students to re-enroll, Johnson said.
Even a small investment in student success can have a profound impact, said Larry Hogan, vice president for partnerships at Edquity, a technology company that helps colleges distribute emergency cash grants. An emergency grant of just $250 doubled the completion rates for high-school students in dual-enrolled courses, said Hogan.
“When institutions ask how they can afford investments in student support, we ask, how can they not?” he said.
Another unanswered question for many conference attendees was whether their efforts can help students and families overcome the long-term financial, physical, and mental impacts of the pandemic that are keeping them from succeeding in college or from attending at all.
“Many students are underprepared, unengaged, and unmotivated post-pandemic,” was one finding of a survey of association members taken before the meeting.
Margaret McMenamin, president of Union County College, in New Jersey, said she is worried that isolation during the pandemic has caused potential students to avoid any engagement with society: “Our biggest competition is, they’re not going anywhere.”
Michael A. Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College, said low unemployment and rising wages remain the primary reasons for enrollment challenges at so many community colleges. “There used to be a time when people would work around school,” Baston said, but now they’re fitting their school schedules around work.
But beneath that, he said, is a new and troubling skepticism about the value of higher education — one that undermines the message that college helps whole families. Gen Z and millennials are seeing what their parents and siblings have endured by amassing student debt, Baston said, and deciding that for now, work is the better option.
Baston said younger generations are asking: “Why would I take on all those loans for a four-year degree that didn’t pay off?”
