As a TV flickered inside 13-year-old Sandra Parks’s bedroom in the heart of Milwaukee, a series of flashes from a gun muzzle lit up the area just outside. Then the gunman ran off, having missed his target. 

Sandra took the stray bullet “like a soldier,” her sister recalls. She walked into another room and simply stated, “Mama, I’m shot.” The fire department arrived within minutes to render medical aid, but Sandra—a promising writer and an old soul, known for chiding other children to settle down in class—died the same night, November 19, 2018.

The shooting made national news because of a striking coincidence. Two years prior, Sandra had won third place in the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest for decrying the same form of violence that would claim her life. “In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost everyday,” she wrote. “Little children are victims of senseless gun violence.”

By the time Milwaukee homicide detectives sat Isaac Barnes down in Room 425C at police headquarters before sunrise the next day, they had already seen video surveillance of the fatal shots and had a witness placing him at the scene. Still, the detectives hoped to learn one thing about the shooting. He had fired blindly into a house and killed a child. Why?

Barnes pleaded the Fifth in the interview room, depriving the community of answers, at least for the moment. But after covering shootings like this one for decades, I’ve found that there is a far more important question police and policy makers are failing to ask. 

How?

Specifically, how did an AK-47-style weapon find its way into the hands of Barnes, a convicted felon who wasn’t legally allowed to own it? Behind this shooting, and thousands more across America, there is an unseen accomplice: the seller. A frequently cited study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that 90 percent of guns used in crimes can be traced to just 5 percent of firearms dealers. Often, it’s white dealers in the comparatively affluent suburbs who are illegally selling weapons to convicted felons in the so-called inner city. Police have no trouble going after those dealers when one of their own is shot. In 2015, for instance, two Milwaukee officers won a $6 million judgment against a suburban dealer who negligently sold the handgun used to wound them. It should be simple for regular citizens, like Sandra’s family, to seek accountability from the suppliers of weapons used to kill or maim their loved ones—right? 

Wrong. It used to be much easier to get information about crime guns when I was doing it in the 1990s and early 2000s. But in 2003, Republicans in Congress, pushed by National Rifle Association lobbyists, made it so that any “trace” information about crime guns could not be released to the public. They stepped up their efforts to protect the gun industry two years later, granting dealers and manufacturers blanket immunity (with a few exceptions) from civil suits. Not only do these rules prevent victims of gun crime from seeking compensation, they also leave us blind when it comes to crafting solutions. Academics can’t use this data to study how guns end up in criminals’ hands; mayors can’t obtain it to figure out how to make their cities safer. The Biden administration has taken steps in recent years to release more information about problem gun shops, and a series of lawsuits has challenged restrictions on trace information. But until Congress decides to protect the public and changes the law, weapons will continue to flow unchecked to America’s streets. 

Shortly after the shooting of Sandra Parks, I set out to answer that question of “how.” I wasn’t prepared for how much hassle would ensue, because when I cut my teeth as a crime reporter in Milwaukee, my hometown, getting information about the origin of a gun was comparatively easy. In my first big story for the Journal Sentinel, in 1996, I obtained police records showing that the AK-47 that was used in a drive-by shooting that claimed the life of another 13-year-old girl, Laquann Moore, had originally been purchased by a convicted felon at a local gun store. 

In early 2019, I asked the Milwaukee Police Department for information about the gun that took Sandra’s life. The police flatly denied the request. In order to trace a gun, local law enforcement sends a request to the ATF, which compares the firearm’s markings to a national archive of distribution and sales. Because of the laws passed in the 2000s, the federal agency must provide these trace reports to police departments confidentially, and only for criminal investigations. Giving me the report would jeopardize Milwaukee cops’ ability to trace any future guns, they told me.

It didn’t feel right that the public should be denied such basic information. So I obtained pro bono help from Godfrey & Kahn, a law firm experienced in representing journalists. When the police heard from my lawyer, Daniel Narvey, they said they had made a mistake: There was no trace report. But, as we discovered over many emails exchanged that summer, there were hundreds of pages of other records: interviews, affidavits, ballistics tests, and descriptions of evidence—including the gun. 

The weapon that claimed Sandra’s life was made by Zastava Arms, a government-owned manufacturer located in Kragujevac, Serbia, some 5,000 miles away from Milwaukee. The gun is a shrunken-down version of an AK-47 rifle, known as a PAP M92 PV. Its serial number is MA2PV060327. The cartridges it fires are 7.62 x 39 mm in caliber—about the length of an AAA battery, but a little bit thinner. 

Interestingly, Serbia does not permit its citizens to own assault weapons like this one—even though it regularly ships them here. Police records show that the gun came to the U.S. by way of Century International Arms, one of the nation’s largest importers of surplus military weapons, which was founded in Vermont and is now headquartered in Florida. Like Serbia, Vermont does not allow guns like the PAP M92 in its own jurisdiction.

But how the gun got from Vermont to the streets of Milwaukee is a government secret. That’s thanks to Congress, which—in doing the bidding of America’s powerful gun lobby—has written laws that prevent anyone from obtaining trace information except for police in the prosecution of a crime. Since 2003, lawmakers have reupped an annual rider to the Department of Justice appropriations bill called the Tiahrt Amendment, for Todd Tiahrt, the Kansas Republican who crafted it. The amendment says that gun trace data from the ATF “shall be inadmissible in evidence, and shall not be used, relied on, or disclosed in any manner” in a civil action in state or federal court. In other words, you can’t use federal gun trace data to sue gunmakers or gun dealers. 

When the bill was passed, that was a very real concern for the firearms industry. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, White House officials and the ATF began to beef up the agency’s gun tracing capabilities in response to the 1980s crime wave and Democrats’ perceived weakness on law-and-order issues. The administration launched comprehensive gun tracing efforts in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, where law enforcement began to track the origin of every crime gun. Public officials in those cities had a clearer picture of the landscape of gun violence than ever before, but they found that they couldn’t rely on the ATF to crack down on problem dealers. Because laws such as the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 shielded dealers from most federal enforcement actions, the ATF was dependent on businesses’ cooperation to uphold the law. That wasn’t enough for mayors desperate to address the violence, and they soon took matters into their own hands.

“It was out of frustration with the federal government,” Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago told The New York Times in 1999, explaining his decision to sue the firearms industry. In 1998, Chicago relied on ATF data to build a $433 million suit against 12 suburban gun stores and several wholesale dealers and gunmakers. Police identified the biggest sellers of crime guns through trace reports, then launched sting operations that caught those dealers making illegal sales to undercover officers. Detroit and at least 20 other cities followed. Accountability was finding its way to manufacturers, too: In 2000, Smith & Wesson, facing multiple federal and state lawsuits, signed a settlement brokered by Clinton under which the company agreed to institute new safety controls for its products, change its marketing practices, and cut off relationships with the biggest dealers of crime guns. 

But what communities saw as a path to safer streets, the industry saw as a threat to its bottom line. In 2005, Republican lawmakers followed up with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which says manufacturers and dealers can’t be sued when their products are used in a crime. Both of those protections remained in place when I went looking for information about the gun that killed Sandra. 

Even Isaac Barnes didn’t want to say where he got his gun. When I spoke with him while he was awaiting trial in 2019, Barnes told me he chose to honor the “street code” and not say who had supplied the weapon, which he said he bought for $400. And even though it was a crime to sell a weapon to a man with a felony conviction, Milwaukee police never investigated the gun’s origin. (According to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, only 12 states require crime guns to be traced. Wisconsin is not one of them.) 

When one of their own gets shot or killed, however, police will look into where the gun was from and sometimes set up sting operations at the store that sold it. For instance, a mere 48 hours after the Milwaukee officers Graham Kunisch and Bryan Norberg were wounded in a shooting in June 2009, police staked out Badger Guns, a store in nearby West Milwaukee where the shooter bought his gun. Over the next few months, they arrested 20 felons who visited the store. They also discovered that felons had been using the store’s shooting range for target practice.

Kunisch and Norberg were able to use information from the police investigation to win a nearly $6 million civil verdict after Badger Guns was found liable for negligence. They also called an expert witness, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University, who had documented how the gun store behaved before and after it could enjoy the secrecy and protection afforded to dealers under the Tiahrt Amendment. When federal data in 1999 showed Badger as the nation’s top seller of crime guns, it prompted the store to clean up its act.

“It got a lot of bad press for Badger Guns and Ammo, and literally within a few days they started to change their sales practices,” Webster, a longtime researcher with JHU’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told me. “Using the trace data, I documented that there was a dramatic reduction in the diversion of guns used in crime in Milwaukee solely by in essence shaming this gun dealer with the trace data.”

When the Tiahrt Amendment went into effect, Webster could no longer get trace data from the ATF to study Badger. But the Milwaukee Police Department continued to provide data to Webster on how many crime guns were coming from the shop. After the amendment, that number went up 200 percent.

In the case of the wounded Milwaukee police officers, the shooter had used a “straw buyer” to purchase the gun on his behalf, which should have been obvious to the Badger Guns employee handling the transaction, because the buyer needed coaching not to write the wrong name on the forms. The officers later settled for $1 million to avoid a lengthy appeal. But at least they had their day in court.

In summer 2019, around the time that Milwaukee police handed over the trove of documents, Barnes interrupted his trial to change his plea to guilty. He would later explain that he had been trying to shoot a man he had a beef with—because the man robbed him, or, in a conflicting story, because he was dating the mother of Barnes’s children.

I had about as much of the “why” and the “how” as I was going to get. At a local business in Milwaukee, I gave a presentation to community members about the gun and its path. Sandra’s family, who had supported my efforts, listened in. They broke out in tears when I played an audio recording I had made of Barnes explaining why he chose that particular gun. “It’s a lot of things going down in Milwaukee,” Barnes said. “It’s like with one of those you could just kill the whole situation. More bullets. More firepower. That’s just how I see it.”

But I wasn’t able to tell the broader story. The details about Serbia and Vermont were too remote to interest local and even national publications, and there was little prospect that the rules shielding illegal gun sellers might change. I kept an eye on the news, but for the time being, I had to let it go.

In recent months, new action in gun tracing inspired me to revisit the story. In December, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced plans to sue the ATF for trace information identifying the biggest sellers of crime guns in his city. The agency had denied his open records request, citing the Tiahrt Amendment, but Scott argues that its interpretation of the law is too narrow and that he should be given the list of dealers under an exception that allows the release of “statistical aggregate data” about gun sales. The past few years have seen several other legal efforts to make gun trace data public, including a 2023 lawsuit from an anti-trafficking activist named John Lindsay-Oliver and a 2020 lawsuit from The Trace, an outlet that reports on gun violence. Federal lawmakers have echoed the call for a wider interpretation of what information can be released under the amendment, which President Joe Biden could enact executively by issuing guidance through the ATF. 

The Biden administration recently has begun to release more information about crime guns. In response to a public records request from USA Today, the ATF in February chose to release a list of the nation’s biggest sellers of crime guns—information it hasn’t made public for 20 years because of the Tiahrt Amendment. Dealers like Mark Tosh, whose Virginia chain of Town Gun Shops appears on the list, defended their practices by noting that a higher number of crime gun sales could simply reflect a larger total volume of sales. “It’s the law of averages,” he told reporters. But Webster, the firearms expert, believes the high sales numbers are indicative of illegality. “I think all the signs pointed to that there was a small segment of licensed gun dealers that were making significant profits by diverting guns into the underground market,” he told me.  In any event, communities can now see the faces of dealers placing guns on their streets.

Last year, the ATF also for the first time began publicly listing gun shops that would be losing their licenses because of violations of federal law. Beyond that, the agency is now requiring gun shops to hold on to records of their transactions indefinitely, rather than for a limited time. Still, a stepped-up enforcement campaign has limits when the rules constrain how much information the ATF can disclose to the public—and when congressional Republicans consistently hold back funding for the agency.

The cleanest solution to the problem of untraceable crime gun sales would be for Congress to repeal the Tiahrt Amendment. If Democrats win back control of Congress and hold the White House this fall, they should consider taking up one of the repeal bills that are regularly introduced and languish without action. Another avenue would be to challenge the amendment in court—not probable, given a gun-friendly Supreme Court, but not impossible. Colin Miller, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, has long argued that the restrictions exceed Congress’s powers to regulate interstate commerce under the Constitution.

Once the floodgates are open, a new wave of lawsuits against dealers and manufacturers has the potential to change the landscape of American gun crime. Recall how the cases against Smith & Wesson forced the company in 2000 to adopt new safety measures and cut off problem dealers. Mass lawsuits have changed other U.S. industries, as well. Around the same time that cities were pursuing gun dealers in the 1990s, government officials and private plaintiffs across the country filed suit against the tobacco industry, using evidence that executives knew their products were addictive. In a 1998 settlement with 46 states, four of the largest tobacco companies agreed to stop marketing their products to children, pay eye-watering sums of money in compensation for health care costs (about $206 billion in the first 25 years), and dissolve three of the largest industry advocacy organizations.

Despite all that has happened in recent months, the enthusiasm for reforming gun tracing does not seem to have spread to Milwaukee. No public official I reached out to this year would comment on how gun tracing deficiencies factored into the death of Sandra Parks—not the mayor, the district attorney, the city council member for her district, or her U.S. representative. Meanwhile, through public records requests this winter, I learned that in the six years since Sandra died, Milwaukee has had a hundred incidents with Zastava guns alone. Only a few months after Sandra was killed, in February 2019, the Milwaukee police officer Matthew Rittner died while executing a search warrant, shot once through the chest with a similar Century Arms Zastava weapon. In the summer of 2023, Dondale Young, a beloved basketball coach, died in a family dispute that escalated into a shooting. Paramedics counted 15 bullet holes in Young’s body; doctors removed three fragments from his chest; and the autopsy found five more. His killer, who used a Zastava, was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison.

This winter, Milwaukee announced a sister city partnership with, of all places, Kragujevac, the home of Zastava Arms. When I asked Mayor Cavalier Johnson if the relationship might be an opportunity to address the flow of weapons to Milwaukee, his spokesman replied that there was no use in “chastising” officials in Serbia. 

Ironically, the streets of Milwaukee—not the halls of Congress or City Hall—were about the only place where I could find people willing to speak about what could be done.

When I pulled up in a rental car this past February outside the North 13th Street duplex where Sandra was slain, a sign on a church across the street caught my eye. “Spiritual Warfare Ministry,” the brown vinyl banner stated in white letters with a cross on either side. At the bottom was this verse from 2 Corinthians: For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds.

I took that as another kind of sign, and came back for services the next day. The sanctuary inside the church that cold Sunday morning was small, and held just over a dozen women and men. Two girls licking chocolate from Reese’s cups off their hands fell asleep on each other in one of the pews. People gave testimonies, spoke about the goodness of God, and told stories of their humble origins. The atmosphere was communal and warm, but I wasn’t hearing the answers I had come for. The pastor, who didn’t have time for a lengthy conversation, told me he hadn’t heard about the shooting, which happened during an earlier ministry. Feeling defeated, I left.

Outside the church afterward, I couldn’t help noticing an emerald-green Hennessey Camaro parked in front of Sandra’s house. Since I had on a green jogging suit, I jokingly asked a group of men who had been inside the church whose car it was that matched my outfit so well. The car’s owner was Rickie C. Weeks, who told me that whenever he steps out into the streets of Milwaukee, he prays he never has to use his gun. Given the name of the church—Spiritual Warfare Ministry—I asked Weeks how much of the community’s problem with gun violence is a matter of spiritual warfare versus the behavior of the gun industry.

He gave me the clearest answer I have heard yet. “Of course they bear responsibility. They bear a responsibility for letting these guns get into the wrong hands. Period. And they’re sending their guns over here. Congress is allowing them to do that. That’s because they’re paying off certain people in Congress so it can be hush-hush so they can keep making money off the guns.” He added: “And the white man is letting it go on, because they don’t care about our lives, period. They don’t care because nine times out of ten, we’re killing each other. We’re not killing white folks.”

I thought about Sandra Parks, who lamented the Black-on-Black violence that she saw around her. To break the cycle, she wrote in her essay, “we need to be empathetic and try to walk in each other’s shoes.” Hers were the heartfelt words of a child—calling on us to be kinder to each other, but innocent of the impersonal, hidden systems that affect our choices. The way those systems operate now, the industry that placed a weapon of war in her killer’s hands will remain shielded from oversight. And we will remain just as vulnerable as Sandra.

When Weeks offered to show me his pistol, I didn’t know what to say. Of course, as a journalist writing about guns, I wanted to see it. But I didn’t want him to do anything that could lead to trouble with the law.

Weeks assured me that he has a concealed carry permit. He retrieved the gun from his emerald-green Camaro. I asked if I could take a picture of him with it. He said yes. And then, with Sandra’s former home in the background, he pointed the weapon toward the sky.

The post Gun Without a Trace appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Growing up in a single-parent household in Rochester, New York, Olivia Galloway dreamed of being the first in her family to attend college. She worked hard at her high school, a charter school called Young Women’s College Prep, taking no fewer than seven AP classes. But her mother, a home health aide, didn’t have the resources to splash on expensive extracurricular college prep, nor the college experience to guide her daughter. Olivia had set her sights on a nearby college with a well-regarded nursing program—she hopes to become an obstetrics nurse—but, not knowing the process, she missed the deadline to apply.

This past fall, however, a college counselor at Olivia’s school introduced her and fellow seniors to a new program that reversed the admissions process, making it easier for underprivileged students like her. Instead of filling out piles of forms and sending them to each school, Olivia simply created a profile on an online platform, which colleges pay to access. She added information about her academics and her personal interests—she enjoys reading, writing, baking, and cooking—and then waited for the acceptance letters to start rolling in. Hardly 24 hours passed before she started hearing from schools. “It was so surprising and truly amazing to see all my options open overnight,” she told me this summer. “I was contacted by 12 different colleges and all of them gave me amazing scholarships.”

Olivia ultimately accepted an offer from Daemen University, the Buffalo-area school whose regular admissions deadline she had missed. Thanks to Daemen’s offer, Olivia says, she most likely won’t have to take out student loans. “My reaction to Daemen was excitement,” she told me. “I was grateful for all of the universities that reached out to me, but Daemen was like a breath of fresh air—it was close to home, had the program I wanted, and had a beautiful dreamy campus!”

Olivia’s experience illustrates an emerging national trend known as “direct admission”—a low-cost alternative that could revolutionize the way students of lesser means apply to college. Programs like the one Olivia used, which is called Greenlight Match, have expanded dramatically in recent years, growing from one program in Idaho in 2015 to multiple states and hundreds of colleges today. Some states, such as Idaho, Hawaii, Illinois, and Connecticut, are running or developing direct admission programs themselves, while other programs are operated by private companies.

For most high school students, applying to college is an anxiety-filled game of wait-and-see that starts after they send off applications and may well end in rejection. But it’s also a game of resources, one that rich, well-connected families are primed to win. Parents with lower incomes don’t have the means for SAT tutors, application coaches, and visits to multiple schools in far-flung states. If they didn’t go to college, they may not know how to pick “reach” and “safety” schools, or fill out a financial aid application. As a result, these parents and students may apply to too few schools, or maybe, out of discouragement, none at all. In other words, not only is the college application process stressful for all students, but it is also especially ill-suited to students from lower-income, less educated families—that is, to people like Olivia.

This new approach is already producing results for students, as well as filling critical needs for colleges and the workforce more broadly. Idaho, which in 2015 became the first state to adopt direct admission, saw an 11 percent boost in undergraduate enrollment over the next four years, according to a 2019 study. That’s welcome news for universities, which are fighting even harder to attract students now amid sagging enrollment numbers that haven’t recovered since the pandemic. Meanwhile, the national job market is producing far more roles for college graduates than it has workers with degrees to fill them (although the demand for college grads has cooled somewhat as people return to the workforce post-pandemic). And college-educated workers earn a median 84 percent more than those without a postsecondary degree. Ultimately, by getting more students into college—and especially ones from low-income backgrounds—direct admission promises to help grow the economy, fight inequality, and keep higher education afloat. 

In 2010, only 45 percent of Idaho’s high school seniors enrolled in an institution of higher education—the least in the country. The Potato State also boasted lower-than-average incomes and was having trouble keeping its young people from moving away. In response, the Idaho Board of Education set an ambitious goal: It would increase the state’s overall college completion rate among 25-to-34-year-olds, which was 34.7 percent that year, to 60 percent by 2020. In 2015, in support of that goal, legislators adopted a direct admission program that notified all graduating seniors who met a preset academic threshold that they were accepted to state universities. Two years into Idaho’s new program, 48 percent of the class of 2017 immediately enrolled in college after high school graduation.

Proactively letting students know where they’re admitted reduces friction compared to traditional admission, says Jennifer Delaney, an associate professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Delaney has coauthored a handful of studies that found, among other things, that direct admission “is a low-cost and effective mechanism to increase institutional and statewide enrollment in postsecondary education.” In addition to the 11 percent rise in college enrollment that Delaney reported between 2015 and 2019, she also credits the program with helping to reverse out-of-state migration. 

Within a few years, other states began catching on. In 2017, South Dakota launched its “Proactive Admissions” program, offering high school seniors with sufficient test scores admission to the state’s public universities and technical colleges. In 2019, the Illinois legislature authorized funding to develop a pilot program for the class of 2021. (The pilot was never launched, according to Delaney, and Illinois lawmakers are still debating a proposal to fund the program.) Hawaii and Minnesota have adopted similar programs, and Connecticut is designing its own system as well. This year, the University of Michigan–Flint announced a direct admission partnership with six nearby high schools, and the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay became the first in its state to embrace direct admission from area schools.

Meanwhile, for-profit companies like Concourse, which created Greenlight Match, have gotten into the game. The program that Olivia Galloway used is a little different from “direct” admission, where students are automatically admitted to certain institutions based on their GPA and other factors. Greenlight Match is an example of “reverse admission,” where students aren’t accepted by default but they still avoid the traditional process of sending out applications in favor of creating one universal profile that schools can peruse. Colleges contract with Concourse and pay a fee to access its admissions program, which on the other side coordinates with high schools and community organizations to reach the students those universities want.

Importantly, rejection letters are never part of the process. That prevents students from getting discouraged and keeps their eyes on their goal: a better education. Michael Dannenberg, a senior fellow at College Promise, a national nonprofit that advocates for higher education access, told me this was a “game changer” for first-generation and low-income students. By proactively sending out acceptance letters, these programs preempt the danger that students won’t apply to college because they think they’re going to get rejected. “It stops students from in effect saying to themselves, ‘I reject applying to you because I think you’re going to reject accepting me,’ ” Dannenberg says. “It cuts that phenomenon off at the pass.”

Concourse was founded in 2017 by Joe Morrison, a tech entrepreneur who had previously consulted for university marketing teams and built trading platforms for banks. His ambition, according to the company’s website, was to “provide students around the world with universal access to higher education.” In 2021, the company launched its first reverse admission platform, Global Match, which helped institutions enroll international students through a similar process where colleges “apply” to students. Forty-seven international students participated in the first Global Match pilot. “They received 180 admission offers within the first week, a tremendous start,” Morrison told me.

In fall 2021, Concourse joined with EAB, a company that specializes in education research, marketing, and enrollment, to launch Greenlight Match, which essentially applied the Global Match model domestically in the U.S. “The goal was to create more college access for first-generation, low-income, and other historically underserved U.S. students,” Morrison said. The first step in that process was the launch of a pilot program in the Chicago area in which 658 students participated. Concourse coordinated with community-based organizations to find students across nearly 50 high schools who fit the underserved demographic they wanted to reach: low-income families and first-generation college applicants (about half the pool, according to a survey of the participants). That test case generated nearly 2,000 admission offers and more than $135 million in scholarship and financial aid offers, Morrison said.

In the fall of 2022, Concourse became a subsidiary of EAB and expanded to several other U.S. regions, including Rochester, New York, where Olivia Galloway grew up. Now in its second year, Greenlight Match has grown fourfold to serve some 2,600 students and has secured more than 18,000 admission offers—or about seven per student—and a total of $1.1 billion in scholarship offers, according to Morrison. This fall, Concourse is planning a full national rollout of Greenlight Match.

Delaney, the direct admission researcher, told me programs like Greenlight Match are an improvement over traditional admissions in two ways. First, by pushing information to students instead of relying on students to search for colleges, she said, it “reduces the need for social and cultural capital to navigate the college search process and likely makes the process more equitable for students of different backgrounds within the Concourse system.”

Indeed, in researching this story, I found that students like the fact that through the system, colleges search for them instead of the other way around. One student told me she likes it more than the Common Application, which enables students to apply to multiple colleges at once. “In the Common App you apply for the colleges you want, you look for the college,” Lydia, an undocumented student and aspiring dental surgeon from Chicago who used Concourse to get into Knox College, where she got a $59,000 annual scholarship to cover the $63,000 annual tuition in 2022, told me. “And in Concourse the college looks for you.”

The other advantage of direct and reverse admission, Delaney says, is that the process offers a guarantee of acceptance, which takes away uncertainty and allows students to plan ahead. “Students no longer need to guess which institutions will admit them, but instead already know where they have been admitted,” Delaney told me. “There is also value in the guarantee since it gives students ‘a bird in the hand’ and a clearly defined pathway through which they can enter a postsecondary institution.”

For all those advantages, direct admission can’t replace every aspect of the traditional college search process. For one thing, Morrison noted, most direct admission programs generate acceptance letters automatically, based on minimum GPA thresholds. But the programs don’t necessarily give students personalized guidance on the colleges that have proactively accepted them, including what major to pursue or whether the campus culture is likely to be a good fit. After the acceptance letters arrive, some students must still submit a more traditional application in order to complete the enrollment process and, often, to learn what kinds of scholarships will be available to them. 

Because of those limitations, Morrison believes that the “student-first” reverse admission strategy pioneered by his company has some advantages. Students fill out simple profiles—the process usually takes about 30 minutes, he said—with their grades, academic interests, financial details, hobbies, and personal aspirations. This allows universities to personalize offers to students, letting them know which majors might best fit their interests and abilities, which scholarships they are guaranteed to receive, and when they can start school. After that, students complete a brief form for each offer they would like to pursue, receive official admission materials, and may then chat online with the institution’s representatives before making a final decision. 

“As the ‘demographic cliff’ approaches and higher education becomes increasingly competitive, it is widely agreed that higher education institutions need to innovate and find better ways to reach and attract students in order to build their incoming classes,” Morrison told me. “Direct admission is a step in the right direction, taking some of the guesswork out of the process for students. Reverse admission takes this concept much further, enabling universities to reach out to students proactively and make personalized, informative, compelling admission offers and provide a more student-centric, welcoming admission process.”

As direct admission has grown in popularity, other players have jumped into the market. In 2019, the nonprofit-run Common Application joined the bandwagon, allowing colleges to offer “non-binding guaranteed admission” to graduating students in their states who have filled out the Common App and who meet a minimum GPA set by those schools. Last year, Sage Scholars, a student financial aid company since 1995, signed up 23 private universities for a direct admission program, including Loyola University and Washington & Jefferson College. Also in 2022, Niche, another private admission platform, launched a direct admission partnership with 15 more universities.

Experts who study direct admission praise its potential to simplify the college application process and help students who traditionally have been at a disadvantage. “We know from decades of research that the current college search and application process is too complex,” Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told me, “and that this complexity disadvantages already underserved students, especially first-generation students, students of color, those from low-income families, and those in rural areas.”

In a post–affirmative action world—where colleges can no longer consider the race of applicants—direct or reverse admission platforms may offer an additional advantage. Concourse already kept the race of applicants hidden—as well as their names and surnames, which also could introduce bias. As long as the programs operate in communities that serve students from historically underrepresented groups, colleges will have another way to draw applicants from diverse backgrounds. This year, Augsburg University, in Minneapolis, experimented with admitting all students through direct admission, a rousing success in terms of both increasing enrollment and attracting underprivileged students. Inside Higher Ed reported that students of color made up 73 percent of this year’s accepted class at Augsburg, up from 62 percent the prior year, and Pell Grant recipients rose from 48 to 61 percent.

Still, Odle, Delaney, and others caution that direct admission programs, and especially reverse admission platforms like Concourse, are not a panacea and do have drawbacks. These new admission systems haven’t replaced the traditional process, so if a student also wants to apply to colleges that don’t use direct admission, that’s more work, not less. The same holds true for counselors and college advisers, who must learn to navigate Concourse and the other private systems that have entered the burgeoning market. Although Concourse is constantly streamlining its system to require less and less time and effort from applicants, the emergence of competitors means that this problem won’t be going away anytime soon.

Beyond that, Odle raised questions about which colleges are participating in programs like Concourse. Among other things, he wonders: Do they offer robust financial aid? Do they have strong graduation rates? Do they serve low-income, first-generation, and students of color well? Do they offer programs that are closely aligned with the local labor market? “Connecting students to any college is generally a positive outcome if that student’s alternative was no college,” Odle said. “But connecting students to colleges that may not be prepared to serve them well or provide them with upward economic mobility could be a worse-off outcome for students.” 

At least some of Greenlight Match’s partner colleges do a creditable job of serving low-income students. The graduation rate for Pell Grant recipients at Knox College, where Lydia enrolled in 2022, is 73 percent—just one percentage point below the school’s overall graduation rate of 74 percent, and well above the national median of 58 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. Median earnings for Knox graduates are an annual $51,471, slightly above the national figure of $50,391. 

Finally, on reverse admission platforms like Concourse, what populates a student’s profile—and what assumptions will colleges make about what they see? Information that may look like an objective measure of a student’s abilities, like standardized test scores (optional on Concourse) and GPA (not optional), doesn’t include the context of a student’s background, and thus may end up reinforcing existing inequalities. “If the portfolios that colleges use to admit students mainly feature GPA and standardized test scores, we already know these pieces of information fall sharply along racial and socioeconomic lines and have led to much of the inequality we see today,” Odle said. So do extracurriculars; after all, only a certain kind of family can afford lessons in sailing or polo. 

Despite those potential snags, the school that accepted Olivia Galloway considers the experiment a success. Daemen University’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, Greg Nayor, told me Daemen adopted direct admission in hopes of finding “high-achieving, underrepresented students.” The 2022–23 school year was Daemen’s first time using Greenlight Match, so it started off slow, only admitting and enrolling a handful of students through the program. But Nayor said Daemen officials were convinced that getting access to those students, who might not otherwise hear of the school, is well worth what they pay to participate in the program. After this test run, the university has entered a long-term partnership with Concourse. “We feel the investment in increasing college access for underrepresented students is worthwhile and part of our mission,” Nayor told me. “We are pleased with our return on our investment for this first trial year and think we will be even more pleased in years to come.”

Meanwhile, at Olivia’s high school, many other students have rave reviews for the program, as does LaQuanna Sparkman, the counselor who introduced Olivia to Greenlight Match. Sparkman told me that when her students got an offer overnight, often they would stake out a spot outside her office the next morning, eager to share the good news. “It has been a joyous experience,” she said. 

The post When Colleges Apply to Students  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Illias Gomez thought he was doing pretty well for himself when he got a part-time job as a host at a local Olive Garden during his sophomore year in high school.

“It was my first job, so I thought I was making a lot of money,” Gomez recalls of the position, which paid $10 an hour.

His perspective changed when—in the summer of 2021, before his senior year—he landed an internship at IBM making $21.50 an hour, working on media and entertainment projects for the company. The higher wage not only more than doubled his salary, but also proved life-changing for Illias and his family, who reside in Mesquite, Texas, just outside of Dallas.

For starters, the job came with a $750 stipend for home office equipment. Gomez used the stipend and his salary to buy an L-shaped desk and two computers to create a home studio. The studio serves as a sanctuary where he can pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a video game developer—a dream that goes back to when he was a four-year-old playing God of War on his uncle’s PlayStation 2.

He also saved up to buy himself a car—a blue 2004 Honda Civic EX. He bought his stepdad a heat press machine for their fledgling custom T-shirt business. And he bought his mom a manicure nail table so instead of shelling out money to local nail salons, she could do her nails at home, as well as those of her family and friends.

At 32 hours a week, the IBM internship essentially made Illias a breadwinner for his family overnight, even if only for that summer.

“I never expected this early in my life to be paid that much,” Gomez told me during an interview in a second-floor conference room at Emmett J. Conrad High School, located in the city’s Vickery Meadow neighborhood, a densely populated area that is home to many immigrants and refugees from around the world.

“That money really helped out,” he said. When his mother, a building code officer for the city of Dallas, heard how much his salary was, “she was surprised, because she was like, ‘You’re close to making as much as I’m making.’ ”

Gomez landed his lucrative IBM internship through a program called P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Not only does P-TECH connect high school students to employment opportunities in promising fields, it also offers them the chance to take college courses while in high school and to earn credits toward both—a concept called dual enrollment. For Gomez it meant that, when he graduated this past May from Conrad High at the age of 18, he also had an associate’s degree in applied science in interactive simulation and game technology. He didn’t have to pay a dime. His mother was so inspired by Illias’s example that she decided to go back to college herself.

Dual enrollment is one of the most encouraging trends in higher education. Such programs have been shown to boost college attendance and reduce the time it takes for students to earn postsecondary degrees and vocational certificates. One of the abiding problems, however, is that students of color and from lower-income families tend to be underrepresented. Historically, dual enrollees have typically been whiter, wealthier, and already high achievers academically.

What makes P-TECH different is that, as a nonselective program, it serves lower-income minority students, many of whom weren’t doing well in school—like Gomez. The program does that in various innovative ways: by giving the high school students a new identity as college students capable of doing college work, by providing them with jobs in a field they’re passionate about, and by connecting them with businesses in search of an educated workforce. 

The success P-TECH has shown with students like Gomez has helped it spread rapidly—from a single school in Brooklyn, where it was launched in 2011, to 210 today throughout the United States (and many others in several countries, from Morocco to Singapore to Australia). 

But that growth pales in comparison to the potential interest. There are more than 21,000 public high schools in the United States, meaning that only about 1 percent of America’s high schools have the program. Even in Dallas, where 18 high schools participate in P-TECH, demand far outstrips supply. At Conrad High, for instance, there were twice as many applicants as there are spots at the school in the fall of 2022. 

One limiting factor, not surprisingly, is cost. High schools and colleges foot the bill for administering the program, and employers have to be persuaded to see the value in student interns’ work enough to come up with the money for their salaries. For the program to become available to all students, a national-level investment would help tremendously.

The program’s first school, known simply as P-TECH High School, launched in 2011 in Brooklyn as a collaboration between IBM, the New York City Department of Education, and the City University of New York (CUNY). It was the brainchild of Stanley Litow, then an executive at IBM, who designed P-TECH as a special education project for the company. Litow says he wanted to help improve students’ lifetime earnings and to address the “skills gap”—that is, the gulf between available jobs that require certain skills and the people who have the education necessary to fill those jobs.

“Those who go into the workforce with a postsecondary degree will earn $1 million more over their lives than those with only a high school diploma,” Litow says, using an oft-cited statistic about the value of a college degree.

From the beginning, Litow aimed to create a model that could be broadly replicated everywhere. Seeing that some similar programs had limited their own growth by restricting admissions to high-achieving students, Litow decided to avoid that pitfall with P-TECH. “For that reason we resisted suggestions to restrict admissions to only the highest-achieving students and made admissions open to all,” Litow told me recently. “Had that not been done, its success would have been marginalized because it only worked for high achievers.”

In fall 2011, 104 students dual enrolled at P-TECH High in Brooklyn and the New York City College of Technology, better known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY. Among those students, 16 became the first to take a college course in summer 2012. They took math and computer science classes and worked toward associate’s degrees in computer systems and electromechanical engineering. 

By fall 2013, there were 82 students dual enrolled and in an average of five college courses.

President Barack Obama gave P-TECH a shout-out in his 2013 State of the Union address and visited the high school later that year, praising it as “a ticket into the middle class [that’s] available to everybody who’s willing to work for it.” He added, “And that’s the way it should be.”

Another world leader toured Brooklyn P-TECH the following year: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who became the first to expand the program outside the U.S. Since then, 26 nations have followed. 

The discussion to implement P-TECH in the Dallas Independent School District began in 2015 on the sixth floor of a Bank of America building in the city’s downtown. It was Michael Hinojosa’s second stint as superintendent of schools in Dallas. Two high schools that had previously been in danger of being taken over by the state had found success by adopting an early college model, but the district hadn’t seen fit to take up P-TECH—at least not yet.

Gathered around the table with Hinojosa were representatives from the county government, the rail system, the county hospital, and the Dallas County Community College District. As Hinojosa recalls, Joe May, now chancellor emeritus of the community college district, said, “Hey, we’ve heard of this P-TECH model and we’d like to see if you’d be interested in taking this thing to scale to put it at all your high schools.” 

“And I said, ‘Well, sounds interesting. Absolutely, let me do a little investigating,’ ” Hinojosa told me. “ ‘Let me talk to my team.’ ”

Hinojosa consulted with his central office staff and had them organize a trip to New York City to learn more about the original P-TECH. Based on their research, they altered the program slightly to fit Dallas students’ needs, adopting a four-year model rather than the six-year plan used in New York. Six months later, the Dallas school district launched eight P-TECH schools for the 2016–17 school year. It launched another 10 the following year. The school district set aside $25.5 million each year to set up the infrastructure for the program, and the community college ponied up the rest through tuition waivers totaling roughly $24 million a year. 

Since 2016, the program has grown from eight schools to 18. In the 2020–21 school year, 5,835 students were on one of 36 “career pathways” that include health sciences, business administration and management, information technology, engineering, and hospitality management.

In 2021, 12th-grade Dallas P-TECH students had earned an average of roughly 56 dual credit hours apiece, along with good money from a growing roster of industry partners. “It just took off,” Hinojosa said. “It’s been nothing short of phenomenal.”

In order to become a success, Dallas P-TECH needed to build strong ties to business. Corporate partners don’t make financial contributions to P-TECH beyond paying interns’ wages. Instead, they offer mentoring and internships—or, as Hinojosa likes to say, some “love.” The Dallas school district started with about 25 industry partners, including AT&T and Microsoft, and now has close to 100, from Cisco Systems Inc. to PepsiCo/Frito-Lay. The roster includes several airlines and big banks and tech giants, a list that stands out for both the sheer number of industry partners and their diversity, which offers opportunities to kids with a wide range of interests.

Hinojosa told me students are landing great jobs at major U.S. companies. “American Airlines just hired 11 kids out of one high school making $58,000 a year with a 401k and free flights all over America,” he said. “And every one of them [is] Latino or African American.” 

So what’s the case for businesses to get involved?

In 2016, Ed Magnin, director of development at Magnin & Associates, a Dallas-based video game developer and a Conrad High School partner, joined Dallas P-TECH, motivated by the chance to help prepare and shape the workforce he needed. (Dallas College officials, for their part, say employers routinely make suggestions about what courses will benefit new hires.)

“If we can turn out students that have skills that are in demand in industry, that’s one reason for [companies] to volunteer to work with the schools,” Magnin told me. “It’s also something the Chamber of Commerce can sell to companies as to why they should move here: We have good schools and our students are earning college credit while they’re still in high school.”

Beyond that, Magnin said, businesses like his can better afford to pay fair wages when they’re hiring entry-level workers straight out of high school. Magnin & Associates takes on two interns per semester. One such intern was Gomez, who worked for Magnin as a tester finding bugs and glitches in video games before he landed the internship at IBM. 

Hinojosa observes that not all jobs require a four-year degree. P-TECH gives an advantage to high school graduates who might struggle to earn an associate’s degree if they had to do it on their own as adults rather than during high school.

“These industry partners are so happy with this because now they see a ready workforce,” Hinojosa said. “And now they’re thinking about, ‘Do you really need a full bachelor’s degree to work at American Airlines or Accenture?’ Because these kids can do all these things that they never had any idea they could do.”

Remarkably, in 2021, about a third of students who earned an associate’s degree that year in Dallas had failed their eighth-grade exam. “They shouldn’t have even been in high school,” said Hinojosa, who completed his last year with the district in June 2022. According to a recent study of the program, such turnaround stories are typical for P-TECH students. An April 2022 evaluation by MDRC—a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization—found that P-TECH schools in New York City were “particularly successful at helping students at risk of underperforming in high school achieve important academic milestones.”

The evaluation found that, “in particular, [P-TECH] increased dual enrollment for this group of students, which may be significant since prior research has found that students who take college courses while in high school are more likely to both enroll in college and complete postsecondary education degrees.” MDRC plans to release a final report on P-TECH in New York, including a cost study, in 2023.

Statistics show that Illias Gomez has plenty of company among his fellow high schoolers who benefited from P-TECH. Of all the Dallas high school students who got two-year degrees or earned 60 dual credit hours in 2020–21, 71 percent were P-TECH students. 

“This past year in the pandemic, 910 kids—actually 910 is 10 percent of our senior class—graduated from high school with an associate’s degree for free,” Hinojosa told me. “No debt.”

Today, much like Gomez, not only are Dallas high school students earning college degrees along with their high school diplomas, but they’re also making good money while still in high school. In summer 2021, more than 400 Dallas public high school students got internships in which they earned an average of $17.50 per hour. Collectively, they earned more than $1.6 million, Dallas school data shows.

“The cool thing about this is our students are saying, ‘I’m earning more than my mom. I don’t know what to do with this money,’ ” says Sibu McNeal, director of workplace learning at Dallas ISD P-TECH and Early College Programs. “These are good problems that we’re having now.”

Other school districts are looking at these results and following suit. In May 2022, on a visit to Conrad High, I met a group of education leaders from Chicago who had come to learn more about how they could implement P-TECH back in the Windy City. The group included Pedro Martinez, the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez told me he sees P-TECH in Dallas as a “very, very strong model” and he hopes to soon pilot the program at 10 to 20 schools in Chicago. The city already has one P-TECH school, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy, but Chicago’s educational leaders are thinking of greatly expanding the program. Martinez said, “I think this is the future of education.”

Despite the interest from Chicago, P-TECH is still a relatively rare model on the American educational landscape. Of the nation’s 15.3 million high school students, only about 1.5 million are in dual enrollment programs, according to researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University. Less than 10 percent of those students are in P-TECH. Of those 1.5 million dual enrollment students, the vast majority—particularly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students—do not earn anywhere near enough credits to graduate from high school with an associate’s degree the way Gomez did.

“In every state where we’ve looked at this, the average number of dual enrollment credits students take before they graduate is small—usually around 6 to 9 credits or 2 to 3 courses,” says Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. There aren’t reliable statistics for the average number of credits earned by P-TECH students—in part because the length of the program varies across the country—but in P-TECH’s birthplace, New York City, students are earning an average of 32 credits from State University of New York branches as they move from high school to college.

In fact, Litow said P-TECH should have become more prevalent in Chicago years ago. It’s not for lack of trying—this won’t be the city’s first attempt at implementing the program. A district official says five early college high schools were established to “emulate” P-TECH in 2012, but Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy—a school that Time magazine praised in 2014 as “The School That Will Get You a Job”—was the only one that managed to stay true to the model. 

Different factors, such as changes in leadership, can sometimes make it difficult to bring even successful programs to scale, Litow said. But more than that, P-TECH could use federal support. Right now, a patchwork of local school systems have adopted the model, each figuring out on their own how to find funding and adapt the program to the needs of their communities. One idea Litow would like to see: Expand eligibility for Pell Grants so they cover dual enrolled students, not just traditional college students. That move alone would “immediately” lead to more schools opening because it would take the tuition cost burden away from states and localities, Litow said. Another, similar, move would be to open up federal work study grants, which currently pay 70 to 75 percent of the wages that employers pay to students. That would bring in more industry partners to P-TECH programs. Another would be for the U.S. Labor Department to fund apprenticeships for more high school students. 

All three of those changes would not eliminate costs for states and school districts, Litow said, but they would introduce a more efficient cost-sharing model that would help the program to expand. And over the long term, he predicted, it would save money by reducing the need for remedial courses, increasing college completion, and saving tax dollars by keeping graduates out of the social safety net.

During their first two years, P-TECH students at Conrad High attend classes at their school that are taught by professors from the nearby Dallas College Richland Campus. Illias Gomez said one of his most memorable classes was a project development class taught by the adjunct game design professor Paul Lachowicz, who taught students the ins and outs of using Unreal Engine, an open 3D creation tool that people can use to make video games and movies. Gomez spent hours playing around in the engine under Lachowicz’s eye, building worlds—and problem-solving skills—in the classroom.

Conrad’s upper-level students spend more and more time independently taking college courses. Gomez told me the experience taught him important lessons about time management. “No one’s telling you, ‘You have to go to this class. You have to go to that class,’ ” he said. “It’s like, you know what time your class starts. You have to be there for your grade, your attendance, because even though you’re not paying for it, you’re having that opportunity to have that class for free that could cost thousands of dollars as an adult.” The IBM job, meanwhile, was a sweet deal for reasons that transcend how much it paid. Unlike his restaurant host job or the days when he did yard work in his neighborhood to make money, Gomez didn’t have to leave home.

“It was like working a real office job, but from the comfort of our own home,” he said. “Like it was almost a workshop. It’s like a giant workshop where we just learned different things about how it is to be a consultant, as well as problem solving for a company.”

Gomez plans to take his studies in gaming beyond the next two years at the University of North Texas. He has his eyes on Southern Methodist University. There, he hopes to join the Guildhall, which bills itself as a “premier graduate-level video game development education program in the United States.”

Gomez has a keen sense of the role that P-TECH played in positioning him where he is today.

“P-TECH is one of those things where you look at it now and it may not be so big to you, but later on it means pretty much the world, because that’s when you realize that you not only saved yourself and your family a lot of money, you saved yourself a lot of time,” he told me. “And so it’s one of the things where there’s going to be some sacrifices, but those sacrifices are what help you become the grown young adult that you will be.”  

The post A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Yen Huynh first signed up to serve in AmeriCorps in Nebraska, her goal was to become a resident so she could pay in-state tuition for graduate school.

“My original plan was to move to Nebraska, gain state residency, go to school, and work for a little bit but [then] eventually move back home to Albuquerque,” says Huyhn, a 2016 graduate of the University of New Mexico, where she got a bachelor’s degree in political science and criminology. 

The plan worked. Huyhn became a resident, and she is now getting her master’s degree in political science from the University of Nebraska Omaha, where she is paying the in-state rate. But were Huynh still in New Mexico and planning to join AmeriCorps today, she would qualify for resident tuition a different way. That’s because as of April 2021, Nebraska is granting in-state tuition to anyone who has served in AmeriCorps, even if that service took place in another state. It’s a change that could save program alumni tens of thousands of dollars.

“When I found out that the bill for in-state tuition was passed for those who had finished serving in AmeriCorps, I thought it to be a great benefit,” Huynh says. She supports the change, even though she is already a resident.

The person behind the new law in Nebraska is Democratic State Senator Tony Vargas, himself an AmeriCorps alum. Vargas met his wife a decade ago while both were working as educators for Teach for America, the education nonprofit that recruits “promising leaders” to teach for at least two years in a low-income community. (Teach for America operates under the umbrella of AmeriCorps.) Vargas taught in Brooklyn, and his wife taught in the Bronx. The couple eventually moved to Nebraska so Vargas’s wife could attend law school. But education remained a passion. Vargas served on the Omaha school board from 2013 until 2016, when he successfully ran to become a state senator.

Vargas attributes his interest in service and education to his parents, who immigrated from Peru to New York City, where Vargas was born. He recalls growing up as a “free and [reduced-price] lunch kid” in elementary through high school. He was a Pell Grant recipient, and only the second person in his family to go to college.

“My parents sacrificed a lot for us and always taught us that education was really important, but also that it was important to give back to communities like ours,” Vargas told me.

Service leaders and higher education leaders in Nebraska are excited about the change, which they say is both right on the merits and good for the state’s economy. “AmeriCorps members do so many great things for our country, and in thanks for their service, we hope to help make higher education more affordable in any way we can,” says Cathleen Plager, executive director of ServeNebraska, a commission on volunteer service in charge of coordinating federal grants for AmeriCorps projects in the state. Plager told me that since 1994, when AmeriCorps began operating, Nebraska has had 11,765 members serve in the state, and all of them have received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award—a Pell Grant–sized cash gift they can use for classes, student loans, and other additional expenses. (For 2021 to 2022, a Segal award is worth $6,495.) Citing information from the AmeriCorps federal agency, she said $37 million of all Segal awards have been paid to Nebraska colleges or loan institutions. Vargas and others hope the law will encourage even more AmeriCorps members to study in the state, bringing in fresh talent and dollars.

Ted Carter, president of the University of Nebraska system, is also excited about the new law. “The University of Nebraska system was proud to support state legislation recognizing the service of AmeriCorps alumni and expanding access for them to attend our university’s campuses,” Carter says. “With this legislation, we have new opportunities to attract talented, service-oriented students to Nebraska—a game changer for our workforce and the economic competitiveness of our state.”

It isn’t the only legislation Vargas has introduced to help AmeriCorps recipients. In August 2020, the governor signed into law a bill crafted by the state senator that excludes Segal awards from state income taxes. In doing so, Nebraska joins Iowa, which already exempts the awards. Many federal lawmakers want the national government to do the same. To that end, in June 2021, a bipartisan group of congressional representatives introduced the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award Tax Relief Act.

Shirley Sagawa, who drafted the legislation that created AmeriCorps during the Clinton administration, supports the change. She says making the Segal awards tax-exempt is a commonsense policy goal that would alleviate an unnecessary hardship for AmeriCorps volunteers. “Imagine that you have spent the year scraping by on [a] poverty-level stipend in order to serve your community and earn money for college,” Sagawa told me. “You use your education award for tuition. Then you get hit with a tax bill of hundreds or even a thousand dollars.” She argued that the resulting financial burden “undermines the ability of individuals to participate in AmeriCorps if they don’t have family money.” 

It’s not just the tax bill that has advocates upset. As Sagawa explained, AmeriCorps volunteers cannot have their taxes deducted from the award itself. “You have to come up with cash,” she said. “How is that fair?”

There’s plenty of precedent for making federal education gifts tax-exempt. The GI Bill, for example, didn’t require recipients to pay any taxes on what they received. But Congress has a long track record of trying and failing to do the same for Segal grants. Sagawa told me that when first drafting the legislation to create the program, the goal was to make the award tax-free. But doing so would have complicated the legislation’s passage by sending it to a knotty array of congressional committees. “It was not included for jurisdictional reasons,” she said.

Representatives didn’t give up. “To my knowledge, the first time federal legislation was introduced to exclude the AmeriCorps Education Award from federal income tax was in 2001,” says Jennifer Ney, the vice president for public policy at City Year and the managing director of Voices for National Service, a coalition that advocates for national service organizations. The Call to Service Act, which would have exempted Segal awards, was repeatedly introduced from 2008 to 2019 by a wide collection of representatives. Over the years, Representative John Lewis and Senators Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and Chris Dodd have all taken up the cause. Ney says she is at a loss as to why the legislation has continuously failed.

Segal recipients, meanwhile, remain frustrated. “When you’re coming out of AmeriCorps, you typically don’t get a lot of money or income,” explains Rebecca Charles, a former AmeriCorps volunteer at a K–8 school who clocked more than 50 hours a week helping students. “At the end of the year, when you’re filing your taxes, you kind of forget that this is considered income and so you don’t necessarily plan for it when it comes to paying taxes.”

Congressional legislation would have broad ramifications. Experts say that making Segal awards federally exempt would also likely make them exempt at the state level, changing the playing field. It’s part of why advocates are so keen on getting Congress to act.

But until it does, and until other states make their universities more financially accessible to AmeriCorps alums, Nebraskan policy makers appear happy to welcome more service-minded residents. 

“I brought these bills because I want to make it easier for people to serve in AmeriCorps,” Vargas said. “But I also want to make it easier to get these amazing leaders that have served to then come into the state of Nebraska and see this as a potential home.”

An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that Nebraska offers in-state tuition only to those who serve a full year in AmeriCorps. It offers in-state tuition to anyone who has served any term in AmeriCorps. The Washington Monthly regrets the error.

The post Nebraska’s Sweet Tuition Deal appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Four years ago, Christine Abate was driving the car she had just bought with $4,000 in cash to get to and from classes at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, when another driver T-boned her, sending her car careening front end first into a set of boulders. Her vehicle was badly banged up, but fortunately she wasn’t. “The doctors were surprised I walked away from the accident,” Abate recalled.

She was lucky in another way: She had a strong support system at her college. Unexpected life events, like suddenly being without a car, are a major reason students drop out of college. At Cuyahoga Community College, known locally as Tri-C, Abate was part of an experimental program called Degree in Three that was designed to help students like her stay on track. In return for agreeing to attend school full-time—going part-time is another factor linked to increased dropout rates—students in the program received tuition assistance for any costs not covered by their other financial aid, essentially making college free. They were also given $50 monthly gift cards to defray the cost of gas and groceries, and received more individual attention from academic advisers—a resource most students at financially strained community colleges sorely lack.

For Abate, the program made a huge difference. She stayed in school, finagling various ways to get to campus, at one point renting a car. She paid for the rental and other living expenses by juggling several part-time jobs—at a nursing home, a hospital, and in people’s homes as a health aid. Most of all, she credits her advisers for helping her stay in school. “Not only were they emotionally supportive and understanding of how stressful it is to be a college student, they were also there for personal life and personal struggles,” Abate told me. Other than her advisers, she said, “I didn’t have anyone tell me, ‘You’re doing a great job. We’re here for you. Good job getting an A on that test. You’re smart.’ I didn’t have that.” Her advisers became her personal boosters. When she applied for jobs, she listed one of her advisers as her reference. 

In December 2019, she graduated with an associate’s degree in nursing. That same month, she took her state nursing certification exam, and in February of this year started working in a Cleveland-area hospital, just as the COVID-19 crisis was about to heat up and her skills were most needed. She has since been accepted at Ohio University, where she hopes to earn a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. 

Abate’s experience with Degree in Three was no outlier. A carefully controlled evaluation of the program and similar ones at two other Ohio community colleges found that participating students were nearly twice as likely to graduate within three years as other students at those colleges who were also attempting to attend full-time but were not part of the program. Participating students were also more likely to transfer to a four-year college. Though the program costs more per student up front, it helped so many more students graduate that the overall cost per degree in the program was lower than it was for students attending the community colleges normally. 

In other industries, a new strategy that creates more products at a lower per-unit cost would be seen as a wild success. The company that developed it would quickly become a magnet for investors and a leader in the field—until their competitors all started copying the strategy. Not so, apparently, when it comes to American higher education. Despite rigorous evaluation, widespread acclaim from researchers, praise from Ohio Governor John Kasich, glowing write-ups in major newspapers, and powerful boosters in the philanthropic world, Degree in Three isn’t being rolled out at community colleges across the country, or even in Ohio. In fact, Tri-C itself discontinued the program in 2018 when its external funding ran out. A sister program at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College experienced the same fate. With the collapse of state revenues brought on by the pandemic, the status of the program at a third Ohio school, Lorain County Community College, remains uncertain, and a version in New York City, where the program originated, barely avoided having its budget slashed earlier this summer. 

The failure of America’s community colleges to replicate, or even maintain, successful programs like Degree in Three illustrates a profound but underappreciated flaw in the way this country allocates funds for higher education: Students who need resources the most get the least. Community college students generally have significantly less of the social capital—parents who attended college, for instance—that can help them navigate the college setting. They tend to have less developed study skills than affluent students who attended well-funded high schools. They also carry greater personal burdens, such as having to work multiple jobs. Since some adults enroll in community college classes without intending to get a degree, and students often transfer to different institutions, graduation rates for community college can be difficult to pin down. But reports suggest that just a third of students who enter these schools receive a degree or certificate within six years—a rate that would be considered scandalous if it were happening at elite institutions that more affluent students attend.

Yet community colleges generally have far smaller budgets to spend on students than four-year schools. Public four-year schools, whose student bodies tend to be wealthier and whiter, spend on average three times more per student each year than community colleges. Private four-year schools generally spend five times as much. As long as these basic inequities continue, even the most astonishingly successful innovations to boost community college success rates are likely to languish. 

Over the course of the 2000s, various community colleges and research groups experimented with interventions designed to help more students graduate. One effort, with the goal of providing the students a sense of community, grouped them into cohorts with whom they took all of their first-year classes. Another attempt involved giving students increased access to advisers. Yet another effort gave students scholarships, in addition to whatever financial aid they were receiving, and conditioned the funds on passing grades and consistent enrollment. But all of these efforts, and many others, saw relatively modest effects.

Prompted by a report from a New York City mayoral commission on alleviating poverty, the City University of New York system began thinking ambitiously about how to increase graduation rates. CUNY devised a program that would wrap together all of the interventions that had shown a modest positive effect on graduation rates. To alleviate cost stressors, the program would provide free Metro passes, free books for classes, and waivers for any tuition that remained after financial aid. It would also assign additional academic advisers, with lower caseloads, to meet with the students, twice a month in their first semester and then once a month after that. From focus groups, researchers had learned that students also drop out when they can’t reconcile their work schedule and class schedule, so students in the program got priority enrollment. Lastly, because of the drawbacks of part-time attendance, students would be required to attend full-time, with the goal of graduating in three years. The resulting program was named CUNY Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP. 

It worked. Students in the program graduated in three years at nearly double the rate of other CUNY students attempting to attend full-time—40 percent compared to 22 percent. Students in the program also transferred to four-year colleges at a higher rate than students not in the program. And the program was evaluated with an uncommon degree of rigor. MDRC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, ran the randomized control trial, with 896 students participating, and produced a 155-page report of the results. 

The study made a splash. The New York Times wrote up the findings, and its editorial board highlighted them, too. The Obama administration cited the CUNY program’s success, calling on all community colleges to take similar steps as part of their broader proposal to increase the number of Americans getting degrees. “I’ve not seen any other interventions with as large effects as CUNY ASAP,” Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, told me. “It really stands alone.” Funds to continue the program were added to the New York City mayor’s budget. 

The question remained, though, could this work elsewhere? Community colleges across the country, most of whom operate on fine margins, weren’t rushing to implement it. A bevy of funders, such as Ascendium Education Group, the ECMC Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation (the latter four of which have given grants to this nonprofit magazine), chipped in funds to replicate the program elsewhere, for a trial period of three years. Again, it would be rigorously evaluated by MDRC. In 2014, three Ohio community colleges signed up to host the program: Lorain County Community College, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, and Cuyahoga Community College.

Christine Abate was at Tri-C during this evaluation period, as was Kevin Jones. Jones had begun taking courses at the Tri-C Eastern Campus in 2016 after deciding that his roofing job was taking too much of a toll on his body. The program connected him with advisers who he says felt like family. “They were my aunties,” said Jones, now 25 and a transfer student at Case Western Reserve University, where he is studying artificial intelligence and cultural history with an eye toward going to law school to become an attorney in intellectual property. “When you come from that Black cultural experience, it’s really nice to have someone you can latch onto and have that familial type of connection with,” he said. “And [Degree in Three] was the way they were able to interact with me. I’m appreciative [of] the program for allowing me to meet them.”

Abate and Jones weren’t the only students who benefited. MDRC released early data from 2015 and 2016 showing that students in the program were twice as likely to stay in school. After the three-year period was up in 2018, researchers crunched the numbers fully. Ohio’s version of ASAP had been just as effective as CUNY’s: Graduation rates had nearly doubled for students in the program, and students were 50 percent more likely to transfer to a four-year college. If CUNY ASAP was strong proof of concept, this new study of Ohio’s version showed that the concept could be successfully applied elsewhere—it was, in the argot of social science, replicable. And while the cost per student enrolled in the program per year was estimated by researchers to be $3,303, that amount was partially offset by extra revenue (mostly from Pell Grants) the colleges received because students in the program stayed in school longer. With all factors taken into account, MDRC calculated that the cost per graduate of the Ohio version of ASAP was $49,000 less than for similar students not in the program.

Few other community colleges, however, seem interested in even trying to replicate the ASAP model—not because they think it won’t work, but because the realities of the budgeting process in most states and municipalities make funding something like this extremely difficult. One problem, Brock pointed out, is that states budget on a year-to-year basis—a system that doesn’t take into account longer-term savings. If you’re a state legislator or college president who pushes for programs with a longer time frame, you may not get credit for positive outcomes that happen three or six years down the line, he said. On top of that, lawmakers are unlikely to take money away from four-year colleges in order to pay for innovations at community colleges, Robert Kelchen, a professor at Seton Hall University who studies higher education, said. (Kelchen is also the data manager of the Monthly’s College Guide.) To fund a program like this would “take a significant investment of new money from states to implement this program on a widespread basis. That looks to be very unlikely in the next several years,” Kelchen said.

Ohio community colleges were only able to run the program with ample grant funding from large foundations. (Another recent attempt to replicate the program in West Virginia is also being funded by Arnold Ventures.) Once the outside money for Ohio ran out, the state legislature didn’t allocate funds to continue the program. Without additional funding, said Miria Batig, who oversaw the program at Tri-C’s Western Campus, “trying to get that kind of ratio [of advisers to students] would be near to impossible.” Stephanie Davidson, vice chancellor of academic affairs at the Ohio Department of Higher Education, said as attractive and beneficial as the program may be, the state would be hard pressed to find a way to sustain it. As it stands, Ohio has no plans to expand the program at the state level, and two of the three colleges that participated have discontinued their programs. 

Tiffany Jones, the senior director of higher education policy at the Education Trust, a nonprofit that focuses on equity in education, told me that it’s not hard to figure out “how to help students from low-income families complete college—that work has been done.” What is difficult, she said, is finding college leaders and state policymakers who make student success a top priority not only in their rhetoric but also in their budgets. “This is really a question of political will.”

The struggle of the Ohio programs to survive, much less spark similar efforts across the country, tells a larger story about ambitions to make community college better. No past effort had been tested so rigorously and seen such success. Community colleges generally operate on such thin margins that, on their own, it is nearly impossible for them to come up with the additional cash to pilot new programs. But without some money to try out new strategies, it’s hard to see how these schools will ever solve the stubborn problem of low graduation rates—or really any of the problems they face. State and local lawmakers could have theoretically provided the funds to bring CUNY ASAP to their states, but as a practical matter, we now know they won’t. 

There’s another large investor, however, that could step in: the federal government. Jones argued that there should be a federal fund, either for states or for individual colleges, to scale up strategies proven to boost student success. Grants should be tiered by institution type to ensure that under-resourced schools are able to compete for the funds, and investments should target schools that enroll high proportions of historically disadvantaged students, Jones said. There are any number of ways Washington could direct more federal funds to these schools, which would allow them to adopt programs like ASAP. (Kevin Carey lays out one such proposal in this issue.) Until then, the single most promising way to help minority students and students from low-income families succeed in higher education will remain a promise unfulfilled.

Correction: This story has been updated to correctly reflect Christine Abate’s degree program at Ohio University, and the status of her car after the accident. 

Update: This story was updated on Aug. 31 to include Ascendium Education Group and ECMC Foundation as funders of the ASAP implementation in Ohio.

The post Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The problems — cited in a series of governmental investigative reports, including a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found “key weaknesses” at the agency — have led to improper payments, colleges being left in limbo about whether their student aid programs comply with the law, and students getting inadequate information about loan repayment options, the witnesses said.

As many in the nation’s higher education system strive to make student borrowing more reasonable, both in cost and in repayment plans, the agency — the Office of Federal Student Aid, or FSA – has often hampered these efforts, critics said. For example, U. S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) said that failing to inform borrowers about options, such as income-based repayment or loan rehabilitation plans, could hurt borrowers’ credit ratings.

“We’re pushing off the next generation of leaders from buying their first home and saving for the future,” Stefanik said.

The agency is responsible for the disbursement of federal student aid — $127 billion in fiscal 2015 — and for overseeing the collection of the approximately $1.2 trillion that borrowers currently owe in student loan debt.

James W. Runcie, the head of FSA, vowed to address the problems cited at the hearing, and said FSA had made progress on backlogs and some communications flaws. But some witnesses and Republican lawmakers said the agency’s failings were so entrenched that they require fundamental changes in how the agency is run.

“Despite FSA’s many assurances and despite my belief that their staff is dedicated, I also believe we’ll continue to see these problems until there are meaningful structural and cultural changes at this agency,” said Justin S. Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Draeger lamented that FSA had sent a series of “threatening letters” to colleges and universities about their alleged lack of compliance with federal student aid regulations, only for the schools to find out later that they were not in violation.

Melissa Emrey-Arras, a GAO administrator, testified that FSA was “unable” to provide most eligible borrowers who completed loan rehabilitation programs with the resulting benefits — such as the removal of defaults from their credit reports – in a timely way.

“As a result of limited planning and oversight of its system contractor, no rehabilitations were processed from October 2011 until April 2012,” Emrey-Arras said, “and FSA officials said they needed until January 2013 to clear the resulting backlog.”

The GAO report released Wednesday found that FSA had failed to monitor calls between student loan servicers and borrowers — particularly the more voluminous outgoing calls to delinquent borrowers. It said only nine percent of outgoing calls were being monitored.

Emery-Arras also said FSA needs to provide more clear and consistent guidance to loan servicers, so that they provide better service to students.

“You said there was no negative impact to students and families, but comment after comment in this room and in reports have shown negative impact,” said U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina).

Democratic lawmakers sought to deflect the negative attention by citing a series of steps the Obama Administration has taken to make college more affordable, such as increasing the Pell Grant program’s funding. They also praised the Administration’s Student Aid Bill of Rights, released earlier this year.

The testimony came at a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on government operations and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post Critics Blast Federal Agency for Shoddy Oversight of College Loans appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But New Orleans College Prep, and its partner high school, Cohen College Prep, ended up providing much more than an easy commute. Last spring a large poster of Bolton’s daughter, Imani, then a graduating senior, attested to such as it hung in the school hallway. “IMANI HAS OPTIONS,” the poster proclaimed, listing the scholarship awards that Imani had won up to that point: $4,000 to attend Jackson State University; $52,000 to attend Spring Hill College; $56,000 to attend Emory & Henry College; $32,000 for Millsaps College.

In the end, Pamela Bolton counted the unexpected help that Imani got in the college admissions process as one of the most important things the school provided.“It was a lot off me because I didn’t know much about it,”said Bolton, a baker at a downtown casino, during an impromptu interview at the school’s college counseling office. She was there filling out paperwork for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which her daughter plans to attend on a state-sponsored full scholarship this fall.

Cohen College Prep’s graduating seniors listen to a classmate speak during last spring’s graduation ceremony — the first for the charter network. (Photo courtesy of New Orleans College Prep)

Cohen College Prep’s 100 percent college acceptance rate for the Class of 2014 —its inaugural graduating class —is three times the rate at the old high school the ambitious charter displaced, school officials say. Collectively, the school’s 54 seniors won over $2 million in scholarship aid, more per student than any other open enrollment school in the city, according to an analysis of figures from the Recovery School District, which encompasses most of the city’s public schools.

Ben Kleban, the founder and director of New Orleans College Preparatory Academies, the network that runs Cohen College Prep, describes the school’s high college acceptance rate as a “major milestone”made possible by more than seven years of hard work and strategic planning.

But the real test will come over the next few years, as the students from Cohen seek to earn their college degrees.Whether they succeed will be part of a crucial reckoning not only for Cohen but more broadly, for the post-Katrina New Orleans school reinvention. This fall, the Recovery School District will be the first big-city school district made up entirely of charter schools, many of them founded on the premise that they could do a better job of sending low-income and first-generation college students to and through college than their public school predecessors.

Not everyone is convinced the students from these schools will persist to degrees once free from the watchful eyes of charter school teachers and administrators —and on college campuses where their academic fates will rest in their own hands like never before.

Charter schools’ proponents and detractors alike say it’s too early to declare the city’s schools a success or failure when it comes to college success.

“This is a marathon,”said Andre Perry, the founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich. and the former CEO of a New Orleans charter network. “Ultimately, it takes years to see if a school is successful.”

College as the inevitable destination

Destination colleges for Cohen graduates vary widely and include two-year colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, which often pride themselves on enrolling underprepared students. But they also include highly selective institutions that are as far away culturally and socioeconomically as they are geographically from the violence-prone neighborhoods from which many of Cohen’s students hail —and ardently want to escape.

Cohen College Prep has presented college as the inevitable destination for its students since its inception in 2007, when it opened with just sixth graders and added a grade each year.

When they are not wearing their standard uniforms, for instance, students don hooded college sweatshirts. College pennants hang throughout the school, and teachers emphasize the various skills and habits of mind students will have to know once they arrive on campus.

For instance, in an Advanced Placement calculus class toward the end of the school year, math teacher Elizabeth Greene chided the students for allowing other staff members to pull them out of her class for end-of-year planning and activities.

“It’s not on me to make sure no one interferes with your math time,”Greene said. “I don’t want you falling behind because that’s what’s going to happen in college. You need to be able to say, ‘I’m actually busy then, can we do it another time?’”

Over time, Cohen College Prep has also put substantial resources behind its college-for-all goal. It has two full-time staff in the college counseling office, a sizable commitment given the relatively small size of the graduating class.

One of those counselors is Paris Woods, who started over a year ago as director of alumni relations to advise the students as they progress through college.

Woods, a former financial aid and admissions officer at Harvard University, is usually the one who breaks the stark news to students regarding the cost of tuition at some of their top choices for college —and ultimately steers them away from colleges that will leave them saddled with sizable debt.

For instance, Pamela Bolton’s daughter, Imani, said she was elated this past spring when she received an acceptance offer from Millsaps, whose biology program she admired.

But that elation turned to confusion a month or so later, when the college sent along its financial aid offer promising the $32,000 in scholarship aid.

“When I opened it up, I didn’t really understand it,”Imani said.

So she brought it to Woods, who explained that Imani could wind up tens of thousands of dollars in debt if she went to Millsaps since the scholarship only covered the equivalent of one year of tuition.

“I wasn’t mad but I wasn’t really pleased,”Imani said. She began reconsidering her options, including taking a closer look at public universities in Louisiana where she could get a full state-funded scholarship. That’s why she settled on the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Although Woods’ primary job is to keep tabs on Cohen’s graduates once they start college —something a number of schools across the nation are doing to ensure their students persist to degrees —she started that work before students’ senior years.

“The idea was for me to come in early and build relationships with students because it’s hard to get someone to respond to someone they view as a stranger,”she said.

From the start, she drew heavily on her background as a financial aid advisor. When students started to get acceptance letters from colleges, Woods created color-coded Excel charts that helped show students how much they would have to borrow or pay out of pocket to attend a particular school.

Woods was also key in prodding virtually all of the students’ parents to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (known as FAFSA)—a task that is highly correlated with college enrollment. When she couldn’t persuade parents to come in and work with her on it in person, she called them and walked them through the process on the phone and completed the application online.

Overall, New Orleans public schools have FAFSA completion rates that fall significantly below the national average.

A distance marked not just in miles

Cohen’s graduating class includes several students bound for faraway —and comparatively foreign —locales.

Anton Brown, 19, one of three Cohen students participating in the Bard Early College program in New Orleans, which enables high school juniors and seniors to take college-level courses, is headed to Bates College in Maine. Brown spent a few days on the Bates campus after his college admissions essay got him selected for the school’s “fly-in”visitation program, which is designed to get high-achieving high school juniors who are minorities or the first in their family to attend college acclimated to the environment.

He liked the relative calm of the Bates campus, contrasting it to the violence-prone streets of New Orleans.

Students from Cohen College Prep hold up college sweatshirts. (Photo courtesy of New Orleans College Prep)

“In New Orleans, you can have someone walking down the street and say, ‘How you doing?’And you don’t even know them and then someone gets shot,” he explained.

At Bates, “I felt a really good vibe. I felt like that was a place I’d be comfortable with,”said Brown.

Theodore Williams IV, 19, also a Bard Early College student at Cohen, said he never thought about going to college in Wisconsin. But as soon as he set foot on the Beloit College campus, Williams said he became enamored with the school’s small classes and sense of community.

“I never felt more at home until I got there,”Williams said. “Everybody was like so warm to me.”

The more selective institutions that Cohen graduates will attend all enjoy high black graduation rates. At Bates, for instance, the graduation rate for black students is 86 percent, just shy of the school’s overall graduation rate of 88 percent. At Beloit, the graduation rate for black students is 75 percent, compared to 78 percent for the college overall. Nationally, the average college graduation rate for black students is 39.9 percent, federal data show.

Despite Cohen College Prep’s success so far, some experts say the school —and others like it —will face an uphill battle shepherding its alumni through college.

“A lot of the reformers think they’re sending kids to prestigious institutions, and they’re putting them from the frying pan into the fire, because the disconnect between schools and colleges is vast,”said Perry, who also writes a column for The Hechinger Report.

Perry said it can be particularly difficult for black students from the South to adjust to small, northern towns where most of the residents and students are white and come from very different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds than the typical Cohen College Prep alum.

Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, said most highly selective schools have graduation rates that are nearly identical for blacks and whites.

“The reason is that most blacks at highly selective schools are not from low-income families,”Gasman said, noting that the percentage of Pell Grant students at Beloit and Bates is relatively low —only 24 and 12 percent, respectively, according to a federal database.

“Income and graduate rates correlate more strongly than any other indicator,”Gasman said.

“That’s not to say that small liberal arts colleges don’t have a rich and supportive environment —they do and that helps,”she continued. “But low- income students face many factors that can prevent them from graduating. They don’t have a safety net.”

Both Brown and Williams are attending college on full scholarships.

Not all Cohen College Prep graduates are headed to rigorous, four-year colleges —the school’s stated objective. Of the seniors, 76 percent are bound for four-year universities and 19 percent for two-year colleges. (Two seniors did not graduate on time in the spring; school officials say they are scheduled to graduate in December.) Eighty-one percent are attending school in Louisiana, while 19 percent are headed out of state. Fifteen percent are headed to private colleges and universities, and 28 percent to HBCUs, the school’s figures show.

The challenges ahead

Still, Cohen educators acknowledge that the school faces myriad challenges preparing its students for the culture shock and academic demands of college.

For instance, during the 2012-2013 school year, when Cohen began offering an Advanced Placement course in U.S. history, 14 of the 17 students who took the end-of-course exam only scored one out of five on the exam —not high enough to earn college credit.

“It was a glass of cold water on our face,”said Andrew Witkins, the teacher who led the class. “The students and I were really unprepared for how much of a workload this was going to be.”

Still, Witkins says he’s glad the students had the experience and believes he’s doing a better job now —a view supported by data, which show that in the 2013-2014 school year, eight of 10 students who took the AP U.S. History exam scored a two, and two scored a four. Most colleges and universities require a score of a three or better for the exams to count for college credit, according to the College Board.

Even with the stronger showing this year, Witkins says he worries many students will struggle with writing in particular once they get to college. For some students, “the ability to formulate an argument and even a strong sentence is lacking,”he said.

Other similar charter networks have had mixed results at achieving the college graduation records they desire, suggesting Cohen College Prep may struggle as well. The Knowledge is Power Program (or KIPP), for instance, has a college graduation rate of about 44 percent for its alumni (an additional five percent of alumni have completed two-year degrees). That’s significantly higher than the rates for first-generation and minority students nationally, but well below KIPP’s target of 75 percent.

Confronting “summer melt”

The most pressing challenge Cohen College Prep faces in the short-term is avoiding “summer melt”—when students with college plans ultimately fail to enroll in college the fall after they graduate from high school.

To limit the melt, Woods said Cohen College Prep is holding a summer bridge program in collaboration with another charter school to build social bonds among students so they can provide support for each other at college in the fall.

Starting in August, Woods’ main responsibility will be to track students to see how they are performing in college and help them “problem solve”when academic, financial, or social difficulties arrive.

Despite questions about how well Cohen College Prep’s graduates will fare once in college, some parents say they are grateful for how much support the school has provided just to get their children to this point.

Bolton, Imani’s mother, credited the school’s teachers with going “above and beyond the call of duty,”tutoring Imani even on the weekends.

“Everybody seemed to be there for the children,”she said. She feels fortunate to have followed up with the school representatives who were handing out fliers for the then-fledgling charter school outside her church back in 2007.

“I made a good decision,”she said.

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post Getting Kids into College is One Thing, Getting Them Through is Another appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“I had no hope after that,”Nelzy, 18, said in the college advising office at Abraham Lincoln High School, a huge Depression-era building in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section, more than half of whose students live at or below the poverty line.

But as Nelzy brooded over the rejection, hope arrived the next day in the form of an email. It was an acceptance to Cornell University’s Class of 2018, which was later followed by an offer of a full scholarship.

“It was just the best feeling I ever felt,” recounted Nelzy, who has a 3.8 grade-point average and is 15^th in his graduating class of 537 students, and who has had his sights set on college ever since he and his mother and stepfather fled political instability and violence in their native Haiti in 2008.

Joseph Nelzy and his College Match advisor, Alysha Rashid, at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.

Stories like Nelzy’s are unfolding for a few dozen seniors at Lincoln chosen to participate in an experimental program called College Match that tries to encourage and counsel low-income, high-achieving students to apply to selective colleges that match their academic qualifications.

Research shows that most top students from low-income backgrounds don’t aim so high.

In a phenomenon called undermatching, the “vast majority”of the 25,000 to 35,000 highest scorers on the SAT and ACT who come from low-income families don’t apply to selective universities and colleges for which they’re not only qualified, but can likely get generous financial aid, according to research from Harvard and Stanford.

Instead they go to poorly chosen colleges and universities with low graduation rates, or forgo a higher education altogether, largely because of a lack of encouragement and information, the researchers found.

One outcome: less diversity among America’s future leaders.

“If you think of elite colleges as kind of the path to a lot of those positions of leadership —if you think it’s important to have people from a diverse set of backgrounds in income, race, gender, being an immigrant —then this is an important problem,”said Matthew Chingos, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

There’s a more pragmatic reason to push bright low-income students into college, too: The number of high-school graduates has been declining since 2010, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, or WICHE, which tracks this. College enrollment is down, the National Student Clearinghouse reports. Fewer of the students graduating from high school now are affluent or white and increasing numbers are ethnic minorities and the children of immigrants. By 2020, WICHE estimates, minority students will make up 45 percent of the nation’s public high-school graduates, meaning colleges will have to recruit them to fill seats.

So severe is the problem of undermatching considered among some policymakers, it got added attention at a White House summit on higher education and has become a cause of First Lady Michelle Obama.

The College Match program at Lincoln seeks to address it by bringing in advisers to help seniors with a 3.0 GPA or higher to apply to their “best-fit” colleges based on their academic records, personal situations, and financial needs.

College Match began in eight low-income schools in Chicago after research at the University of Chicago found that in the Chicago Public School system, only 59 percent of high-school seniors who said they aspired to go to college ever actually applied. Among the students who were qualified for admission to very selective colleges, only 38 percent enrolled in one.

The project, administered by the nonprofit organization MDRC, previously called the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, assigns advisers to work with the highest-achieving students.

Called near peers, the advisers at Lincoln are recent college graduates themselves, close to the high school seniors’ ages, and can give them more personal attention than they would otherwise get from school counselors with large caseloads.

School counselors in public schools nationwide are responsible for an average of 471 students apiece, according to the American School Counselor Association, which recommends a ratio of half that. Nor can low-income students always turn to parents or other relatives for help, since a growing number are the first in their families to go to college.

At Lincoln, the near peer is Alysha Rashid, a 2011 graduate of, and former admissions officer at, Adelphi University, who uses a “match list”of colleges throughout the Northeast to pair the students with institutions that match their academic profiles.

Rashid said she has been pleasantly surprised by how often students turn to her for advice and help with college essays.

“I don’t think a lot of them even realized they needed help,”she said.

Of the 630 college applications sent by seniors at Lincoln, there were 204 acceptances. Among the 80 students in the College Match program, 35 got into their “match”college, and another 16 were accepted into another college or colleges.

“I was hoping for higher,”Rashid said.

In Chicago, where College Match was first tried, 35 percent of participating students planned to enroll in highly or very selective colleges, compared with 28 percent of comparable students in previous years, MDRC reports.

At Lincoln, although there is no comparison group, College Match has started at least a few students, like Nelzy, into competitive schools.

Nelzy will major in human ecology at Cornell. He hopes to eventually become a doctor.

One of the things that struck him the most when he arrived from Haiti, he said in his college essay, was how many students in the United States seemed to lack a passion for learning.

In Haiti, “It was always a dream for children like me,” he said, “to be able to get an education.”

[Cross-posted at Hechinger Report]

The post New Program Steers Bright Poor Kids to Top Universities and Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“It’s not this vague competition that may happen one day,” Ripley told several dozen graduating seniors at the inaugural “Cap & Gown” ceremony of Capital Partners for Education, a nonprofit college prep program that serves close to 200 students in the Washington metropolitan area.

“It’s already happening,” Ripley said, noting that their college applications are being considered alongside those of students from educationally top-performing countries such as South Korea, a focal point of her book and the third largest sender of students to the U.S.

“One of the reasons it’s harder to get into an American university is because they are admitting more international students,” Ripley said, an assertion supported by statistics that show the percentage of international students in the U.S. reached a record high of 3.9 percent in the 2012-2013 academic year.

Ripley urged the students not to be daunted by competition from abroad, even though the “kids from Korea” may be the ones who “determine the curve” in their biology class in college.

“Instead of feeling intimidated by the competition, I suggest we say, ‘Bring it on,’ because all of you deserve to be in the arena and you are already,” Ripley said.

Ripley made her remarks Monday at the National Press Club during an event meant to celebrate the achievements of students participating in CPE, which seeks to “level the playing field” by providing academic support and college-educated mentors to students from families of lesser economic means.

Ripley hailed the organization for embodying the three things that she discovered were taking place in Poland, Finland and South Korea — the nations she visited to write The Smartest Kids in the World.

Those three things are:

• A greater national seriousness about education

• Networks of adults ready to “parachute in” whenever a student falls behind

• Students having a certain “comfort” with struggling to achieve academically.

“All three of those things are things that this organization aspires to cultivate and that all of you have worked to develop,” Ripley said.

Indeed, at the ceremony, it was easy to find students who embraced their academic struggles and caring adults who stepped in when students needed help.

For instance, 18-year-old Nathan Tekola related how when he began to struggle in his geometry class toward the end of his junior year, he concluded that his teacher was “out to get” him and that he should switch schools.

“CPE and my mentor helped me understand that [the teacher] wasn’t ‘out to get me,’” Tekola said. “I just needed to work harder and prioritize.”

Tekola ended up getting an A in geometry and abandoned his plans to switch schools. Now, Tekola is headed to Frostburg State University, where he plans to study biochemistry.

Tekola’s mentor, Devon Rollins, a senior information systems engineer at a Virginia-based firm, said he felt compelled to become a mentor as a matter of “giving back to kids who come from similar social environments that you came from.”

“There are huge disparities that exist in D.C. and all across the country,” Rollins said. “If you have the opportunity to put your hand in the pot and make a difference, you’re required to.”

Khari Brown, executive director at CPE, said more than 70 percent of CPE graduates complete college — several times what research has found to be the rate of 9 percent for the lowest-income students, and higher than the national average of 57.2 percent, according to federal data.

Brown said CPE helps students develop a sense of agency as they navigate the world of higher education. He said the work of college prep organizations such as CPE is important because if students drop out of college, it will leave them saddled with debt and unable to get good jobs.

“We need to prepare the next generation of leaders to be able to compete nationally,” Brown said.

Or, as Ripley suggested, to compete globally. “You can look at it like, ‘Oh, it’s this fight for a fixed pie,” Ripley said. “But I actually see it as something that raises everybody’s game.”

[Cross-posted at Diverse Education]

The post Author Tells College-Bound Students to Embrace International Challenge appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Back when I worked part-time as a crime reporter for the old Milwaukee Sentinel during my years as an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), one of my regular duties was to check the log at the county morgue. In cases where a death was demarcated by a red-encircled H, for homicide, I’d obtain a copy of the medical examiner’s report to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the person’s untimely demise.

During a return visit to UWM one rainy week this past April, I discovered records for a morgue of a different sort. These records were located in room 170A of Bolton Hall in the office of African American Student Academic Services (AASAS). There, amid stacks of printer paper, a microwave, and a sign that says “Your Mama Don’t Work Here: Keep the Area Clean or Go Home!,” a pair of black three-drawer file cabinets stood filled with transcripts of black students who’d dropped out of UWM.

“We have a file cabinet designated specifically for ‘almost-made-it’ graduates,” a confidential university source told me, referring to the file cabinet labeled “CLOSE TO GRADUATION.” “These are shoulda, woulda, couldas. They’re like three and six credits away, but they don’t come back.”

The other cabinet, labeled “INACTIVE FILES,” contains records for students who’ve withdrawn in recent years but needed significantly more credits to graduate. AASAS keeps these records, the source explained, so if the students return, the college’s advisers won’t have to create their files anew.

In many ways, these transcripts are akin to the medical examiner’s files I used to retrieve from the county morgue. Instead of reporting how individuals departed the physical world, however, these records tell of how students departed from the university without their bachelor’s degrees—of academic lives cut short before graduation. In three out of the five transcripts randomly reviewed at this writer’s request, students had not completed the university’s math requirement, which is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for students at UWM.

The transcripts represent a rare behind-the-scenes look at some of the circumstances behind the abysmal graduation rate for black students at UWM: only 19 percent graduate within six years. (The university’s overall graduation rate isn’t much better, at 40 percent.) The point of my return visit this past spring was to answer this question: Why are those numbers so low?

One answer, which I heard early and often, is that UWM is a nonselective, “access” institution: more than 90 percent of those who apply are admitted, which means that many incoming students may not be adequately prepared for the demands of college. “We need to create equal opportunity for everybody,” said Johannes Britz, the university’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. “But we cannot guarantee that if we create an opportunity they will be successful.”

But UWM’s graduation rates are not only low in absolute terms, they’re low even compared to other nonselective, access institutions. Bowling Green State University in Ohio, for instance, is almost as open access as UWM (admissions rate: 80.1 percent). But it has a six-year graduation rate of 50.1 percent for black students, compared to 19 percent at UWM. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 31.2 percent of black students graduate within six years from other four-year institutions with similar admissions rates—a dismal showing that’s still 12 percentage points higher than it is at UWM. (The national average six-year graduate rate for all students at similar access institutions is 45.4 percent.) UWM was cited in a 2010 Education Trust study for being sixth in the nation (at 28.2 percent) among public colleges and universities with the largest white-black graduation rate gaps.

Robert Lowe, an education professor at Marquette University who focuses on issues of race and class, said the low graduation rates at UWM are suggestive of a “massive failure aside from the factors that may have made students less prepared for higher education.” And merely providing access to higher education, without providing a pathway to graduation, does a disservice to those the institution is intending to serve. “If students end up in debt, end up without a degree, they end up damaged by the experience rather than expanded by it,” he said.

The university is by no means oblivious to its low graduation rates. UWM Chancellor Michael Lovell said the university hopes to increase its graduation rate to 50 percent in the next five to seven years by pursing an array of long-standing, new, and future initiatives, from summer bridge programs to special scholarships.

That’s a worthy goal, and an urgent one considering the growing national attention being focused on degree attainment rates. But to reach it will require asking an uncomfortable question: Why have UWM and its students so far fallen so short of the mark?

The first place I went to search for answers was an area of the student union dubbed “Little Africa” because of the number of black students who tend to congregate there to socialize and study. Indeed, when I was an undergrad, from 1991 to 1996, my fellow black students and I frequented the place. There I found Princeton Jackson-Hampton, a twenty-two-year-old information and science technology major known as P.J.—who was the president of the local chapter of Phi Beta Sigma. P.J. barely got admitted to UWM.

He credits his admission to a best friend’s father, who “knew some people” in the Academic Opportunity Center (AOC), a long-standing UWM institution that “educates and empowers a diverse group of students whose prior education and experiences may not have adequately prepared them for college, but who possess a commitment to higher learning,” according to the university Web site. In the fall 2012 semester, 101 of the 250 incoming black freshmen entered UWM through the AOC.

“When I graduated, I had about a 2.1,” P.J. explained of his high school GPA. “Part of the reason why I struggled in school is because my home situation was all messed up.” P.J. grew up on Fourteenth Street and Atkinson Avenue, in the middle of a diagonal business and residential corridor that slices through about a dozen blocks in some of Milwaukee’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. My most vivid recollection of the area is when I went there to interview the father of a seventeen-year-old boy accused in the fatal carjacking of a black U.S. Marine. I watched as firefighters hosed the dead man’s blood off a school playground, where he had been forced to lie down before being shot by another seventeen-year-old boy in the back of the head, execution style. Homicide also claimed the life of P.J.’s father, whom P.J. met only twice—the first time when he was too young to really know what was going on, and the second as the man lay in a casket.

Raised by his mother and grandparents, P.J. attended Dominican High School, a Catholic college preparatory school in the village of Whitefish Bay, an affluent suburban enclave that is sometimes contemptuously called “White Folks Bay” because of the homogenous nature of the affluent white families who call the village home. For P.J., traveling from his neighborhood in Milwaukee to school in Whitefish Bay meant traversing between “two different cultures.”

“I had to struggle there trying to identify myself with the people who went there,” P.J. said. “It was real hard for me having to catch the bus from Fourteenth and Atkinson and go into the suburbs and that’s my school, and go back to the reality of where I’m really from. Back to the violence and drugs and ran-down neighborhoods.”

When I asked P.J., as I asked others throughout my visit, if he thought the problem of low on-time graduation rates for black students at UWM was due to some systemic shortcoming at the institutional level, or various socioeconomic issues at the individual and family levels, P.J. had plenty to say.

“I think it’s a combination of everything you just mentioned,” P.J. said. “I would also say that a lot of black students come into college with the wrong mind-set in terms of what they want to do. They don’t come into this college knowing what they want to do, what career path to follow. They have their priorities mixed up. A lot of them do the partying more than school.”

As we spoke, a student named Lester Kern Jr., a dreadlocked twenty-three-year-old psychology major, entered the conversation and related a personal story that lent credence to everything P.J. had just said.

“I was partying too much for my first two semesters,” Kern said when I asked him why he was still a junior after having started at UWM in spring of 2008. He said he failed courses and wound up on academic probation. “The biggest factor for why I didn’t do well is I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” Kern explained. “I figured there was no big goal I was working toward so I felt if I messed up, no big deal.” Kern said he is still struggling to find his direction in life but realizes that “wasting time isn’t going to get me there.” He added, “I can’t blame anybody else but myself for why it’s taken so long.”

If there is anything to which I owe my own successful matriculation at UWM, at the top of the list would be something that many of the black students I met at UWM told me they lacked during their childhoods: strong familial and financial support, which I enjoyed growing up with both my parents in Sherman Park, a Milwaukee neighborhood that was experiencing white flight when my parents moved there in the late 1970s.

My father, who grew up in the Roger Williams Housing Projects in Mobile, Alabama, migrated to Milwaukee at the tail end of the Great Migration and worked for Wisconsin Bell (which later became Ameritech under AT&T by the time he retired). From the earliest days of my childhood, I remember my father talking about the need for me to “go further” than he did educationally, how he enrolled in a technical college once but was distracted by wanting to hang out with his buddies in a pool hall in his hometown.

My mother, a woman of Polish descent from Milwaukee’s South Side, investigated insurance claims for Blue Cross Blue Shield. She was always taking me on trips to museums and the like and exposed me to a wide variety of books, such as Manchild in the Promised Land, which she required her only son to read once he started to veer toward trouble in school and in the streets. I had my own desk and shelves full of books for as far back as I can remember. My parents earned enough to invest in a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for me back when encyclopedia salesmen still went door to door.

Despite the mostly positive influences inside my home, however, I was not immune to the negative influences that lurked just outside. As the city’s manufacturing industry began its precipitous decline just at the onset of the crack cocaine epidemic, street gangs with Chicago origins had risen to a new level of prominence in Milwaukee, and many young black boys—whether fatherless or not—wound up defaulting to whatever gang dominated their neighborhood. In my case, it was the Black Gangster Disciples, or BGD.

Though I professed allegiance to the imprisoned leader of the BGD, Larry Hoover—or “King Hoover,” as we referred to him—I was never a hard-core member, and I was lucky to be absent during most of the gang’s fights and various crimes. But I wrote my gang name—Imperial “G”—in Magic Marker graffiti on garages, and after school I participated in an activity called “gettin’ roguish,” which essentially meant breaking windows and setting plastic garbage carts on fire.

Several of my BGD associates wound up in Wales, the juvenile correctional facility for Milwaukee boys who ran afoul of the law. I could have easily been sent to Wales myself: at one point, I took my father’s .22 to school to stave off would-be attackers who had made threats during a mysterious call; in another incident, I participated (albeit unwillingly) in a strong-arm robbery of some white boys on Center Street with an older BGD member named Tony New York. He is currently serving seven years in prison for robbery.

My parents married and divorced twice, the second time when I was in middle school. By then I was having relationship problems of my own. Although I managed to avoid becoming a teenage father, unlike several of my close friends, the first time I feared that I had gotten a girl pregnant was in seventh grade. (I could easily be a grandfather by now, and I just turned forty.)

My high school years were split between my parents’ homes and two different high schools. I spent my freshman year at John Marshall High School in Milwaukee, which had a broadcasting and journalism career specialty program. I wasn’t as interested in journalism at the time as I was in spinning records. This was during the Golden Age of Hip Hop, and like many basement-party DJs of the era, I kept my records in milk crates that I took from behind the nearby grocery store.

Class of ’96: The author, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, delivered pizzas and wrote crime stories for the Milwaukee Sentinel while an undergraduate at UWM. He credits his supportive family and the editors at the Sentinel, who said they would not hire him without a college degree, for motivating him to graduate.

As a DJ, I formed a rap group with my stepbrother, the son of my father’s new wife. When I saw my stepbrother’s homework, I noticed that it seemed more involved than what we had at Marshall. So I transferred to the school he went to, Greendale High School, in order to get a better education. Truth be told, the curriculum at Greendale was so rigorous that I couldn’t hack it, particularly when it came to geometry and biology. My GPA must have barely been above a 1.0. I felt estranged at the predominantly white school. I remember one episode of storming out of class when the other students began to laugh at a reference to roaches during a reading of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. Though they were ostensibly laughing at the plight of the black family that was the focus of the book, it felt as if they were laughing at black people in general.

It was during that time that I became enthralled with recordings of the fiery speeches of Malcolm X and Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, samplings of which I first heard through the music of Public Enemy. What resonated most with me was when they would speak about how educationally estranged black people had become in the United States because black history is not reflected in the schools.

After transferring from Greendale back to John Marshall, I emulated the oratory of Malcolm X and Minister Farrakhan in my English essays and a column I wrote for the high school newspaper under the pen name Jason X. When I was sixteen I converted to Islam and changed my name.

Having left the influence of gang life behind, I was the type of high school student who carried a black briefcase, and I once circulated a petition to get a class on black authors to replace the ones we had on British and American authors. The class was ultimately implemented and eventually became so popular that the school had to offer three sections.

Two chance things transpired in high school that led me to pursue a career as a journalist, and one of them took place as a direct result of UWM. First, during my junior year, I won first place in an essay contest sponsored by the old Milwaukee Journal. The essay, about how to end violence in the inner city, fetched $100 and was published in the paper. I thought about that $100 as I found myself cleaning bathrooms the summer after high school graduation. I figured if I had gotten $100 for one essay that I wrote at the last minute, I might as well try to find a way to write an article a day five days a week and try to get $100 for each one instead of scrubbing toilets for minimum wage.

The second thing that led me to become a journalist was a visit from a black journalism instructor at UWM. Her name was Linda Presberry, and at the time she served as the UWM journalism department’s “liaison” when it came to speaking to largely black high schools, such as John Marshall. After Ms. Presberry spoke to us at John Marshall for career day or some similar event, I followed up with her on how to enroll in UWM. Enamored with Ms. Presberry for reasons that transcended journalism, I used to go visit her on campus in order to get a feel for what it was like, especially during the last semester of my senior year, when I only had to go to school half a day because I had enough credits to graduate.

I remember the elation I felt when I got my acceptance letter in the spring of 1991; one of the first things I did was tell Jihad, co-owner of the King Drive Deli, a Muslim-owned deli where I used to work as a cashier in the afternoons during my senior year before my evening job as a janitor. “Ah, that’s nothing,” Jihad responded. “Everybody gets accepted there.”

Even though he was basically right, I hadn’t known it at the time, and his comment made me feel deflated. Nevertheless, I began my studies at UWM that fall.

The most dangerous detour on the road to a college degree, especially for black students, typically arises freshman year, when students take placement tests to determine whether they’re ready for college-level courses or need non-credit “remediation.” According to a study of public universities by the nonprofit group Complete College America, 39.1 percent of African American students at four-year schools were assigned in 2006 to remedial math and English courses, versus 13.6 percent of whites. Two years later, 69.5 percent of African Americans had not completed the course or courses for which they were remediated; the noncompletion rate for whites wasn’t much better, at 63 percent.

Math is an especially big stumbling block, particularly for students whose high schools didn’t properly prepare them. I fell into that category, as did Mark Briggs, a fellow John Marshall and UWM alumni who now works for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. “We could have tested out of 090, 095, 105 [UWM’s remedial and basic college-level math courses] if we had taken algebra 1 and 2, calculus, and trig,” Briggs explained to me. “But the guidance department [at John Marshall] didn’t tell us.” Research has shown that students do worse on math placement exams when they don’t take math during their senior year in high school—a mistake I made myself.

At UWM, I ended up having to take a remedial course known as the Essentials of Algebra. I barely got out, with a C+; anything less than a C would not have counted. I then tried to take introductory for-credit algebra three times. Twice I withdrew because I found the courses too difficult. Once I earned a big fat F.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1993 that I took a transferable college algebra course at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), and passed with a C.

So what was different about algebra at MATC versus UWM? Beyond the fact that the MATC class was an intensive summer course that I treated like a part-time job, there was one important distinction. Unlike my college algebra classes at UWM, the one I took at MATC was led by an instructor who was born in the United States. The college algebra classes at UWM, on the other hand, were taught by foreign nationals who spoke with thick accents that made an already difficult subject even more difficult for me to understand (roughly half the teaching assistants at UWM are foreign nationals).

The struggles I had with math at UWM are extremely common. Consider, for instance, the story of Shakara Robinson, a twenty-three-year-old Milwaukee newspaper reporter who earned all the credits she needs for a journalism degree last year—except for the three necessary to satisfy her math requirement. Robinson donned a cap and gown and posed for photographs with her parents at UWM’s graduation ceremony in May 2012, but the university withheld the actual degree. Last spring she tried an online math course at MATC to fulfill her requirement but was unsuccessful. She said she plans to try an in-person course again this fall. In the meantime, her bachelor’s degree from UWM remains in abeyance while she begins to make payments on $34,000 in student loan debt.

Then there is twenty-four-year-old James Grays, who required two tries at UWM to make it out of remedial math, a struggle made harder, he says, by the same problem I encountered: a language gap with his foreign-born instructor. “If you didn’t understand she’d repeat it, but she didn’t understand sometimes that we didn’t understand the things she would say,” Grays recalled. “I think that was a handicap with us because we’re trying to understand the material but [also] understand her. So a disconnect was there.”

Many UWM faculty and administrators I spoke to know that the university has a problem when it comes to math completion rates. It’s not clear, though, whether their heads are sufficiently in the game when it comes to the tough task of changing the institution to better serve at-risk students. For instance, a decade ago, the UW Board of Regents, aware of studies showing that students who complete remedial math during the first year do better overall, passed a rule requiring students to complete remedial math within the first thirty credits. Only now does the UWM administration say it plans to start enforcing that rule. “I don’t know why it wasn’t enforced,” Britz, the UWM provost, told me. Research also shows that careful measurement of academic outcomes is key to improving graduation rates. But the math department at UWM cannot tell you what the pass rates are for its introductory algebra course overall, much less by race and ethnicity.

To help students like Grays, the UWM math department has been trying some new approaches. One is a Web-based course called ALEKS that uses artificial intelligence to enable students to work online at their own pace and keep track of their progress in various areas using a pie chart called “My Pie.” When I met Grays in his college algebra class at UWM this past April, he seemed fairly confident that he would finally satisfy the college’s math requirement.

“I think I’ll pass it,” Grays said as he sat in front of a flat-screen Dell computer in room E375 of the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Building. “I feel more confident in this because it’s more hands-on and it’s your doing,” Grays said. “You can’t fault the teacher too much for saying you didn’t pass. If you didn’t pass, it was more on your end.”

Education reformers have great hopes that ALEKS and similar computerized learning systems can help struggling students like Grays, but studies of such systems so far show mixed results. When I checked back in late May to see how Grays had done in the course, I had really hoped to hear that the young man—who, incidentally, once came within six-tenths of a second of the Wisconsin high school state record in the 400 meter event (he ran it in 49.83 seconds)—had cleared this particular hurdle. But it was not to be.
Solve for X: Briana Bearden, an incoming freshman at UWM, works on her math skills in a summer prep program. Failing to pass basic math requirements is one reason why more than 80 percent of African American students fail to graduate from UWM.

“The final didn’t go as well as I had hoped,” Grays told me over the phone. He said he earned a D in the course—a non-passing grade—and planned to meet with his adviser before attempting the class again. “I guess I made little mistakes,” Grays said. “I didn’t really grasp everything.”

Aside from struggles with math, the most common problems I heard about in my interviews with students at UWM—too much partying, a lack of focus and discipline—seemed to stem from what P. J. Hampton and Lester Kern Jr. had told me in Little Africa: a lack of direction, of knowing what career you want and thus why, exactly, you’re in college.

Fortunately, I knew quite early in college exactly what career I wanted to pursue: journalism. I started writing part-time for the old Milwaukee Sentinel before I even declared my major in journalism. The only reason I stuck it out at UWM was that my editors at the Sentinel made it clear from the very beginning that, even though I was considered a “natural,” the only way I would ever get hired at the paper as a full-time staff writer was if I earned my bachelor’s degree.

Nick Robinson, a twenty-four-year-old 2010 UWM graduate who works at Uihlien/Wilson Architects, has a similar story. He first landed an internship at the firm back when he was still a senior in high school at Bradley Tech, Milwaukee’s technology and trade high school.

“I would come here two hours a day a couple times a week, update the materials library,” Robinson said during an interview at the firm. “One day someone asked me, ‘Do you know [the computer-aided drafting and design program] AutoCAD?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know AutoCAD.’” The firm eventually offered him a paid job working full-time during the summer after high school graduation, and he continued to work there as he made his way through architecture school at UWM. He said he never worried much about whether he would graduate on time. He earned his master’s degree in architecture from UWM this past December after two and a half years.

“I’m a very goal-oriented person,” Robinson said. “I hate to do stuff and not know why I’m doing it. I wanted to become an architect. I looked backward and said, ‘What do I have to do to become an architect?’ ” he explained. “It involved school, so I said, ‘I guess I’ll do school.’”

Robinson’s educational and career success was also largely a by-product of his upbringing and family background, as it was with me. “My dad, he’s an engineer. My mom is a court reporter, so I had a very strong intellectual base.” Other kids from less fortunate backgrounds, he noted, don’t have that base. “They don’t know that if they want to accomplish something, the only thing between them and accomplishing that goal is themselves,” said Robinson, who has been doing his part as a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. “They don’t understand that concept of, if you want something go get it. They think it’s some mystery. Like it has to work out in the universe. No, you put it in the universe.”

College students who are struggling—with math, with a lack of academic focus, with the myriad other problems common to campus life—and who are the first in their families to go to college (as I was) must rely, more than other students, on college counselors and advisers. I know I benefited from good college counseling—it was my UWM adviser, for example, who recommended I take that summer math course at MATC.

When I went recently to try to find the office of UWM’s African American Student Academic Services, I learned that it had been relocated from the basement of a relatively quiet building on campus to the main corridor of Bolton Hall, a more central and heavily trafficked building that virtually all students pass through. There is a still-simmering debate at UWM over the merits of offering students of different races and backgrounds separate—or, as critics say, “segregated”—academic advising. Provost Britz told me during my visit that he sees both advantages and disadvantages for students and says that “the best approach is giving them choice.” The fact that the black advisers’ office has been moved from the bowels of a relatively remote building on campus to a much more prominent place seems to signify a certain institutional confidence in the merits of culturally centered student advising.

Some things about the office hadn’t changed. My former AASAS adviser, Diana Lawrence-Edwards, was still there (though about to retire). And the same inspirational poster I remember as an undergraduate still hung on her wall. The poster, which is laminated and has an African kente-style border, features twenty-seven business cards of black UWM graduates who went on to land careers ranging from an FBI supervisory agent to a CEO.

“SUCCESS IS IN THE CARDS,” the poster declares in black letters over a gold background (black and gold are UWM’s colors). “ASK OUR AFRICAN AMERICAN GRADUATES.” As we spoke, I kept eyeing the poster, remembering how, when I was a student, I wanted my business card as a newspaper reporter to be on the next iteration of the poster, if ever they made another one.

I asked Lawrence-Edwards why she thinks UWM’s graduation rates for black students are so low. “A lot of students are ill-prepared to come to college unless they go to the college-oriented high schools or suburban schools,” she said. “When they get here, I think it’s a lack of preparedness, and they aren’t really serious about college.”

One who is serious is twenty-two-year-old Austin Sellers, a finance major (and a Phi Beta Sigma) who’s hoping to become a corporate CFO someday. Sellers grew up in a violence-prone Milwaukee neighborhood, but his mother enrolled him in a high-performing high school in the nearby village of Brown Deer by putting down on the forms the address of a relative who lives in that suburb. “Moms wanted me to get the best education possible,” Sellers said. But the subterfuge was eventually discovered, and Sellers was forced to spend his senior year at his neighborhood high school, which by all known indicators was bad by comparison. “I didn’t have any motivation to take AP classes, any English or math,” Sellers recalls.

The decision not to take any math during his senior year ended up hurting Sellers—like me, he was put in a remedial math class. “Before college my last math class was my junior year in high school,” Sellers said. “I literally forgot a lot of the stuff … that I had to so-call relearn.” He has struggled with college calculus, a prerequisite for business majors.

For college advising at UWM, Sellers chose AASAS. “I’ve heard stories about people going to advisers that were white and other races and they gave them the wrong advice. They took classes they didn’t need to take or took the wrong class,” he said. “I felt like going to somebody of color that knows we’re not just a statistic by being in school, they were not just an adviser but a bigger brother or bigger sister.” AASAS, he said, gave him moral support and practical advice, recommending that he take some easy courses along with the hard ones in order to balance out the workload and thus better enable him to maintain a decent GPA.

But it’s the advice he didn’t get that has hurt him the most. Sellers graduated this spring, but it took him five and a half years to get there. The remedial math detour didn’t help, but the big reason, he said, is that he was only taking twelve credits per semester. No one pointed out that a semester course load of twelve credits, while considered full-time, essentially put him on the five-year plan. “Taking twelve credits a semester, you’re not going to graduate in four years,” Sellers said. “There’s no possible way.”

I asked him if the university did anything to get him connected to “real-world” experiences, as it brags in its promotional materials. “They didn’t talk about jobs until senior year,” Sellers said. “They didn’t give us these talks. They didn’t tell us, ‘Get your foot in the door.’ It was always ‘Graduate’ or ‘Pass this class.’ ” He recalled going to one “career-building” event where students were told to hand out resumes and network. I asked Sellers if the career fair paid off. “No,” he said. “But something is better than nothing. Going is better than not.”

When I reflect on my years at UWM and my recent return visit, I’m of the mind that the low graduation rate for black students is, as I suspected from the beginning, a complex combination of both systemic issues at the institutional level and an array of socioeconomic factors at the individual, family, and community levels.

I personally am resistant to the push within the so-called college access movement and among others to judge colleges and universities strictly by their graduation rates. I know of too many success stories among black UWM alumni—longtime Washington Post editor Milton Coleman, award-winning Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson, Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor, and Wisconsin Black Historical Society founder Clayborn Benson, the two latter of whom entered UWM through alternative programs—to discount what it means to have the opportunity to make something of yourself at UWM.

At the same time, though, even if UWM is serving some students well, the institution’s leaders should not be content to sit by and watch as preventable academic casualties take place year after year. An open-access college like UWM can be expected to have more students fail than highly selective schools, but there’s no good reason that its graduation rate is more than 12 points lower than the average for colleges with similar admissions criteria. UWM Chancellor Mike Lovell is clearly concerned with making UWM a better institution. For instance, he recently spoke of how, when UWM wanted to launch an entrepreneurship initiative, he had university representatives pay a visit to Babson College to learn how that school has managed to take first place in entrepreneurship in the U.S. News & World Report rankings for the past two decades. Why not make a similar study of how, say, Bowling Green State has managed to achieve remarkably high graduation rates, particularly for black students?

When I look in particular at how algebra nearly derailed my college career and has, in fact, upended the college hopes of untold numbers of black students, it becomes evident that the university could solve the problem if it gave it a little more attention and effort. To its credit, UWM recently hired a coordinator to examine what other math departments are doing throughout the nation in order to learn from those that are having success. One program this person might want to look into is Statway, used by thirty community colleges around the country and developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Instead of trying to help remedial students pass college algebra—which, frankly, is useful only for those going into STEM fields—Statway helps those students pass college-level statistics, a course with far more direct applications to both social sciences and real life. With Statway, pass rates in developmental math were raised from 15 percent to 51 percent within one year.

With remarkable consistency, the students I met at UWM who were struggling or failing to graduate blamed themselves almost entirely for their fate. That willingness to take personal responsibility is admirable, and very American, and something to be encouraged, not undermined. But the truth is that the fault isn’t all with them.

Image credit: Gary Porter, Jamaal Abdul-Alim

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