Sanford Ungar, Goucher College

Since July 2001, Sanford (“Sandy”) Ungar has been the President of Goucher College, a liberal arts college in Baltimore County, Maryland. Under Sandy’s leadership, in 2006 Goucher became the first college to require every undergraduate student to study abroad at least once before graduation. Prior to becoming the President of the College, Sandy was the Director of Voice of America, the Dean of the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., and the host of several programs on National Public Radio, including “All Things Considered.” He also authored several books, the most recent being Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in Government and from the London School of Economics and Political Science with an MSc in International History.

Goucher’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) aims to provide a liberal arts education to intellectually promising first-generation college students who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. What other avenues exist to enhance educational outcomes for these students?

We made a financial commitment to the EOP program when we started it. We said we would make it easier for these students to complete their education by making it unnecessary for them to take out loans. Many schools have said they would waive the necessity of loans for everybody below a certain income level, but we cannot afford that. Because the EOP is restricted to Maryland residents, we can single out a particular group of good students. There are state scholarships available for families with lower incomes, so the state, in effect, foots part of the bill.

Of course, we do have a Summer Bridge Program. We have specialists who serve as instructors during the summer. They tend to be high school teachers who have experience working with students who need special help. This has been a real advantage because a lot of students who are accepted to the EOP need more preparation for college. If we brought them in without special help, they might be less likely to succeed.

Another notable aspect of the EOP is the diversity of the students. They are not all inner-city Baltimore youth. We have white students from Baltimore or from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and Hispanics from the suburbs of Washington, DC. There are Pakistani immigrant students and other Asians, as well as African-Americans.

There is a distinction between attending college and completing college. How does the EOP influence completion and participation rates for students?

That is a very important question. Our completion rate of EOP students so far has been quite impressive. Now if you ask about completion within four years, it’s not quite as high. Then again, four-year graduation rates are not as high for the general population. Some students in the EOP have taken five years; one has taken an eleventh semester. One issue that has emerged for us is how long can we afford to support EOP students at an enhanced level, and what do we do if they do not complete a degree within four years? Is it fair to devote resources to them if there are so many other families who could benefit from a high level of aid? Many of these families live close to the margin and could benefit from the kind of help that is available under the EOP.

One interesting thing has been that when we first started this, we were unsure about how much students wanted to be known as part of the EOP. We feared they might feel there was a stigma attached to the program. It turns out that they were quite eager to identify as part of this special cohort. They felt proud. One reason is because they were singled out as intellectually promising.

What are the shortcomings and the strengths of Goucher’s EOP?

First, let me say that we knew going into this that we were going to make only a small contribution to closing the higher education gap between students who can afford it and those who cannot. The number of EOP students for whom state and Goucher funding is available each year is limited.

That aside, I see two weaknesses in the Goucher EOP that I would like to work on. The first is that the EOP takes in a relatively small cohort each year, maybe twelve students. In addition, they are all from Maryland, and it would be nice to be able to have a more national impact. The second weakness involves making the adjustment to college life a bit easier for EOP students. There is one program out there like the EOP called the Posse Program. It takes a cohort of ten students who are all from the same city. These students all go through the program together, so they do not face the problem of not having anyone to talk to who can relate to their experiences. I wish we could afford to do that here at Goucher. It is hard enough for most students to adjust to college life. EOP students may have a more daunting adjustment to make, academically, socially, and culturally. They eventually do adjust, but it would probably help if they saw familiar faces during their early days in the program.

To be clear, we care deeply about the state of Maryland. We take seriously Goucher’s obligations as an institutional citizen of Maryland. We can demonstrate that we are educating students from Maryland who come from low-income backgrounds and show intellectual promise. Nonetheless, I wish we could implement the EOP program on a national scale, with a national pool of students.

Being ready for college means having the cognitive and the non-cognitive skills, such as self-efficacy and grit, to succeed. How might colleges and universities that operate programs like the EOP use these measures of college-readiness to inform the design and the goals of these programs? 

More and more institutions of higher education are realizing how much college readiness can vary among incoming students. Students arrive in many different states of preparedness. As the President of a liberal arts college for almost 12 years now, I can say that one of the advantages of an institution like ours is that we can look at every student holistically. We can determine how best to serve each student. One thing that has surprised me is just how many students are really not ready for college and for the responsibilities that come with being away from home.

For example, we have students who have been so pampered that they are unprepared for college in surprising, even startling, ways. Some, for example, have never shared a bathroom before—let alone co-ed bathrooms. This is not the case for all EOP students, although you might be surprised.

With regard to EOP students, they have actually impressed me with how quickly they do adjust to college life. In recent years, quite a few EOP students have become Community Assistants (our equivalent of RAs). By their junior or senior year, not only are most EOP students well adjusted, but they are also in a position to help other students adapt to college, including the majority of non-EOP students.

As time goes on, all colleges will have to find new indicators of college readiness, such as cultural and social preparedness. These things can’t be measured by the SAT. The SAT was really written by whites for whites. As such, it is an imperfect instrument for measuring how students will perform in college. That is why it is optional at Goucher; you do not need to take the SAT to gain admission.

Is there anything that you would like to add?

I think there is a conceptual difficulty in the way many people at all levels think about programs like Goucher’s EOP. They think of them as “affirmative action”—as if we were just doing a favor for the students who enroll. This is a contentious issue for me, that there are people who still have not moved beyond the old “charity mode” of diversity. Everyone needs to know how to live and learn with a broad cross-section of society. People must realize that there are many forms of diversity—not just racial, but also economic, social, cultural, lifestyle, and political diversity, for example. So, diversity is not simply a favor for the students who are diverse. It is good for everyone. The society and the culture cannot sustain itself indefinitely when there is a very obvious underclass.

We are doing an important service to the United States of America, albeit on a relatively modest scale. The EOP helps students who have the cognitive ability to succeed in school and who will be an asset to society upon graduation. So the EOP is not just about these students’ own self-improvement. We are enhancing the ability of our community, the state of Maryland, and the country to develop. It used to be that the privileged elite was very narrowly defined here in America, and that the pattern of access to schooling was not so different from that in other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom. I studied in England, and I have lived and worked in France. I saw that if someone came from the “wrong” subset of these societies and did not break out of his or her economic and social group by 7th or 8th grade, it might never happen. Many young people were tracked into an educational path that would not make college or university attainable for them. The United States purports to be different, and I think the EOP is one way to deliver on that promise.

The benefits from earning a college degree include a lower unemployment rate, increased lifetime earnings, and social and health advantages. While the percentage of high school graduates who go on to attend college has risen significantly since the 1970s, the percentage of those students who actually complete college has increased at a slower rate.

Certain students, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, are especially likely to dropout of college. One way the government has tried to address this discrepancy is by awarding monetary aid, such as Pell Grants, meant to reduce the financial burden of college and increase attendance rates. However, while research has shown that financial aid increases college enrollment rates, it is unclear whether it affects persistence — whether a student continues in college.

Sarah Goldrick-Rab and her colleagues gathered three years of data on students participating in a new program called the Wisconsin Scholars Grant, which provides a grant of $1,750 per semester to randomly selected, traditional aged college students who are also receiving Pell Grants at Wisconsin public universities. Thanks to the fact that students are not identified for the grant until after they are already enrolled in college, and that students are picked for the program at random, researchers were able to observe how a need-based aid program affects college persistence specifically.

The researchers found no statistically significant difference between students in the grant program and their peers in the rate at which students enrolled for future quarters or the number of credits for which they signed up. However, they did find that, after two years, students who received the grant were 28 percent more likely to have earned at least 60 college credits. Thus, while students signed up for the same number of credits on average, students who were awarded the grant were more likely to have completed more of their classes after two years.

Also notable was the variation in effects for students with the highest and lowest likelihoods of finishing college (based on students’ and parents’ demographic characteristics); those least likely to complete college showed the greatest increase in persistence rates, attempted credits, and study hours.

Interestingly, the grant seems to have decreased persistence rates for students deemed most likely to complete college. Researchers are unsure if these discrepancies stemmed from differences in family involvement, interactions with aid counselors, timing, and means of communication of the initial reward, or other differences between student groups. They note that the complexity of the award’s effects points to the fact that need-based financial aid is not as straightforward a policy as it may seem. The researchers suggest that policymakers may need to more accurately target financial aid programs, but that “doing so without introducing complexity to the application for financial aid is… [a] major challenges.” They also note the importance, and difficulty, of determining whether effects are due to the monetary benefits of the grant or a result of the academic requirements (such as minimum credit hours earned or minimum GPAs required) tied to receiving the grant.

Learning more about how financial aid influences the behavior of college students is crucial to crafting more effective policy. The researchers hope to continue studying the Wisconsin Scholars Grant Program in future years, but also emphasize that additional research is needed to understand the complex relationship between scholarship money, college matriculation, and eventual college success.

UPDATE: An updated version of this paper was published in October 2012, tracking four cohorts of students over six semesters. The authors found that students who were offered the Wisconsin Scholars Grant both completed a full-time credit load and re-enrolled for a second year of college at higher rates than students who were not offered the scholarship. Interestingly, after the initial offer of the grant but before the financial resources had been dispersed, students’ academic performance and number of credits completed both increased slightly; these effects were more pronounced in students’ second semesters. Over time, however, these effects dissipated and were not observable by students’ third year.

Further, effects on retention rates were only distinguishable at universities that had room for growth: the three universities with initial retention rates over 90% were unaffected. The authors posit that this is due to a retention rate ceiling mitigating the effects of the grant. On average, however, an increase of $1,000 in a students’ first year of college was correlated with between a 2.8 and 4.1 percent increase in enrollment rates. Finally, some students experienced a “crowding out” effect where students’ other loan amounts were reduced after receiving the grant. On average, all Pell recipients had the same amount of aid after one year of college, but WSG recipients had more grant financing while Pell recipients had more loan financing; this did not appear to have an impact on retention rates.

Feature Photo: cc/Robert S. Donovan

Brian Fabes, Civic Consulting Alliance

What is the CCA specifically working on with the Reinvention of the City Colleges of Chicago?

We got involved in the Community Colleges effort several years ago when Mayor Daley called and said we needed to reform education beyond K-12 in the City of Chicago. So, we put together a steering committee including the Head of the Chicago Community Trust, the Head of the Chicago Urban League, and a cross section of public and private sector leaders. And we asked the question:  What should the role of the City Colleges be in Chicago?

Over the course of three or four months, working with the pro bono support of Boston Consulting Group, this group came up with a broad vision: the community colleges should be moving tens of thousands of Chicagoans to productive employment every year, either directly into the work force or into four-year institutions and from there to the workforce.

We also recognized the need to improve access to jobs that support families. What was amazing was that this group, composed of leaders from very different sectors, organizations and backgrounds, came up with one simple vision they all agreed with.

The mayor agreed with that vision, then went out and hired Cheryl Hyman as Chancellor of the City Colleges to make that happen. That was almost two years ago. We started talking very quickly into her tenure about how to turn the vision into reality, and together we came up with the specific goals of the reinvention:

1. Increase the number of students earning college credentials of economic value
2. Increase the rate of transfer to Bachelor’s degree programs following CCC graduation
3. Drastically improve outcomes for students needing remediation
4. Increase number and share of ABE/GED/ESL students who advance to and succeed in college-level courses

These goals really crystallized the driving force of the reinvention. Our work then went to putting together the mechanics of making this happen. We recruited McKinsey to develop, pro bono, the structure of Reinvention and help launch the initial phase. The result was the most comprehensive transformation effort of a community college system in the nation. No one else is trying to transform an entire system at one time.

How did Chicago’s private sector get involved in the specifics of Reinvention?

In addition to our work and McKinsey’s pro bono effort, Accenture made a big pro bono investment assessing the technology—not just students’ technology but back office technology. What kinds of IT will the colleges need in the future?

We realized there are a lot of meaty educational questions—when 90% of students need remediation how do you deal with that? At the same time, other things were imminently fixable. A music teacher couldn’t get a piano tuned for months because the procurement process was so complicated. KPG helped us, again pro bono, to sort out procurement. Mayor Daley was getting tweets from people saying, “I had to take two days off of work to register for classes.” In response, we assigned our own staff to help improve the registration process.

A lot of research surrounding college and career pathways discusses a successful transition into adulthood. Did a definition for ‘a successful transition into adulthood’ come up in this process?

The short answer is we have not discussed transitioning into adulthood because these students are adults. The average age is 29. Now, there’s a big spread there. But by any reasonable definition, they’re adults. The question we should be talking about is how do we get people into mainstream society? How do we help them improve economic mobility and prepare them to be productive citizens in a democratic society?

The tough discussions the colleges have are around topics like, ‘how do you transition someone from English as a Second Language courses into credit bearing programs?’ Or, ‘how do you transition someone from an Associate’s degree into a four year college?’ Or ‘from an occupational program into the first rung of a career?’ Those are the transitions we talk about.

It’s interesting that in all three of those transitions, one of the keys is to always be working with the next step up the ladder. Every bit of evidence, experience, and research suggests that successful occupational programs work with industry partners where students will start their careers. Successful remediation programs have remediation faculty working with the credit faculty so when students show up in credit courses they’re ready.

Similarly this is the case with transitions into four-year institutions. The colleges need to work directly with four-year institutions. It’s organizationally difficult to do this though; there are natural barriers that have to be worked through between these sectors.

What are the biggest potential challenges to collaborations between the City Colleges and companies in Chicago, like the partnership between Rush Medical Center and Malcom X College, actually leading to jobs for students?

I’m sure we’re on the right track. I have every confidence it’s going to work out. It’s going to take a lot of work. We have the right leadership and right civic folks who are willing to pitch in, because they know it’s in their long-term interest as well.

But there are other questions. What are the right career paths? Those are changing. How do people come in and out of careers? If we’re doing this right, you go through an occupational program, get into a career, then come back and get more education down the road. It takes thoughtfulness and hard work redesigning curricula. The colleges used to boast, ‘we have 200 programs!’ But that was very confusing. We need to simplify the paths and communicate to people what their options are and how they can get there.

Is there a strong effort within the City Colleges for career counseling? Are they making sure we have the students to fill these new programs?

There is an 11% unemployment rate in Chicago. For some segments of the population unemployment approaches 50%. There is no shortage of people who need these jobs. There is a supply and demand mismatch.

On the supply side there are a couple of big problems. One we’re talking about: people don’t know where the careers are. The federal government publishes labor data no average citizen can figure out. Those data are a very nice place to start, but then there’s the other 98% of the answer when you actually talk to employers. The Colleges must look at different the career paths out there, then work to communicate and disseminate

Recent research has come out saying that by 2018 30% of jobs will only require an Associate’s degree. How do we balance the ‘college is for everyone’ mentality with workforce training and creating a more-educated and well-trained workforce, which may not always translate to four-year college degrees?

That’s a very good question and it’s a very emotional one. There is no question that the more education you have the more options you will have.  But that doesn’t mean everyone needs or wants a Ph.D. Is there a tipping point or break point in all this?

The data suggest those with just a high school diploma, even if it’s from a very good high school or good technical program, are unlikely to have the option to participate in our society fully. It turns out those with a high school diploma plus a post-secondary credential have significantly more options, and can usually access further education. This is what President Obama has talked about, and what Advance Illinois has set as a goal for Illinois: high school plus a credential for everyone. Personally, I see that goal as what needs to be the minimum societal commitment.

We can get you there, and if people want to go on further they should have those options.

Feature photo:  cc/Jeff Wilcox