This past week’s ( 5/15/14) NYT magazine had a fascinating article on college dropouts by Paul Tough. However I raise the question, if it works in college… why wait?

Image

 “There are thousands of students like Vanessa at the University of Texas, and millions like her throughout the country — high-achieving students from low-income families who want desperately to earn a four-year degree but who run into trouble along the way. Many are derailed before they ever set foot on a campus, tripped up by complicated financial-aid forms or held back by the powerful tug of family obligations. Some don’t know how to choose the right college, so they drift into a mediocre school that produces more dropouts than graduates. Many are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans. And some do what Vanessa was on the verge of doing: They get to a good college and encounter what should be a minor obstacle, and they freak out. They don’t want to ask for help, or they don’t know how. Things spiral, and before they know it, they’re back at home, resentful, demoralized and in debt.

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.”

How do we solve this?

David Laude, at the University of Texas, Austin has found a way. It isn’t rocket science.

“If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside the mind of a college student.”

“[Laude] was a lousy college student. As a freshman at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., Laude felt bewildered and out of place, the son of a working-class, Italian-American family from Modesto, Calif., trying to find his way at a college steeped in Southern tradition, where students joined secret societies and wore academic gowns to class. “It was a massive culture shock,” Laude told me. “I was completely at a loss on how to fit in socially. And I was tremendously bad at studying. Everything was just overwhelming.” He spent most of his freshman year on the brink of dropping out.

But he didn’t drop out. He figured out college, then he figured out chemistry, then he got really good at both, until he wound up, 20 years later, a tenured professor at U.T. teaching Chemistry 301, the same introductory course in which he got a C as a freshman in Sewanee. Perhaps because of his own precarious college experience, Laude paid special attention as a professor to how students were doing in his class.”

Often, it takes one to know one. Those who came from similar backgrounds, regardless of race, who found the “secrets” to success in college and will go out of their way to share them with students, can make a huge difference. Add research and wrap around services and the results can be very impressive. Then it becomes time for those new successful students to pay forward from their experiences. They need to go back and become teachers in public schools.

“Rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material” as other students. “He supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered [these] students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with them one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to [them] a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.”

When he received the opportunity to do this University wide, he made sure his cadre received: “small classes, peer mentoring, extra tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and community-building exercises.”

Laude teamed with another UT instructor, David Yeager, to create a successful program.

“Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the Ivy League.”

“Many students…when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I can’t get smarter?”

“Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.”

HELLO? IN HOW MANY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE WE SEEN THIS EXACT SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY?

Some ideas that have worked:

“Messages were also more effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a sense of autonomy.”

As in EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING.

“[S]elf-persuasion”: if students watch a video or read an essay with a particular message and then write their own essay or make their own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more deeply.”

As in JOURNAL WRITING.

“[F]irst-year students read brief essays by upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The upperclassmen conveyed in their own words a simple message about belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only one who felt left out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and everyone gets over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays, the students in the experiment then wrote their own essays and made videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the white students who took part in the experiment. But it had a transformative effect on the college careers of the African-American students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment tripled the percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top quarter of their class, and it cut in half the black-white achievement gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health — the black students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer doctor visits three years after the intervention.”

Proof that you don’t have to and shouldn’t wait until college. This was done in 9th grade:

“Students read scientific articles and testimonials from older students with another simple message: People change. If someone is being mean to you or excluding you, the essays explained, it was most likely a temporary thing; it wasn’t because of any permanent trait in him or you. Yeager chose ninth grade because it is well known as a particularly bad time for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over the transition to high school. Among the group who had received the message that people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive symptoms. The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other words, but it did stop the appearance of depressive symptoms during a traditionally depressive period.”

Imagine if this was done in conjunction with MENTOR.

During the past two decades, a trend “emerged: American higher education became more stratified; most well-off students now do very well in college, and most middle- and low-income students struggle to complete a degree.”

To reverse this “will take some sustained work, on a national level, on a number of fronts. But a big part of the solution lies at colleges like the University of Texas at Austin, selective but not super elite, that are able to perform, on a large scale, what used to be a central mission — arguably the central mission — of American universities: to take large numbers of highly motivated working-class teenagers and give them the tools they need to become successful professionals. The U.T. experiment reminds us that that process isn’t easy; it never has been. But it also reminds us that it is possible.”

So why wait for college?

What if we did these exact things in public schools?

What if high schools all across the nation allowed all of their students to learn experientially with a mentor at their side to gain the confidence necessary to succeed in college?

What if the new wave of successful poor and minority college graduates went back to their communities and used these same tactics as permanent (not transient TFA) K-12 teachers?

Perhaps if those happened, universities like UT Austin wouldn’t have the problem anymore and people like David Laude can go back to teaching.

 

 

Advertisement