Pathways to Opportunity: An Interview with Goucher College President Sanford J. Ungar

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.