From access to achievement: Closing the gap in higher education

Anne: Right. So, there's a ton of work and I've been doing work in the space of college knowledge, especially with rural students. So think about, and I know you grew up in a rural community, so think about your rural community and the messages you received starting in eighth grade, you may not remember this, but eighth grade, we know that eighth grade is about the year, we really need to start talking about post-secondary options. What are all your options in building capacity? Because what happens, especially in rural communities where we have a large number of lower income and first-generation college students, is we're not building college-going capacity. We're not building, not college knowledge is really what we call it. So, I think about my own kids who were incredibly privileged to live in a home where both their parents have a doctoral degree. So, all we talked about was college, starting in eighth grade. I mean, this is what do you want to do? We never said, what do you want to do when you grow up, because it's a terrifying question to anybody who's below the age of 25, but let's talk about. They grew up on college campuses. It was just always what they were going to do. It was just the fabric of our home. That's not the case for most of our students, especially that arrive here where a third of our students are first-generation college students. Access is also about getting in those spaces and creating that culture so that students when they do get on a college campus as a first generation student, can decode the hidden curriculum. They can walk around campus and feel like they belong in this space, that they belong walking into a residence hall and then going to class and they can go to, they understand what student office hours are, that it's perfectly within their purview and should to go to a faculty member's office or stay after class and talk to a faculty member, they do know, what they know is important. Those are also access. Those are maybe not barriers that we institutionally have put up, but those are barriers to success that live in this work, in this space. 

Adam: I think that's a really interesting thing to bring up when it comes to that accessibility, that equity is, it's getting here. Getting here can be tough because depending on the stress of the school system that you're in, you may or may not be getting pushed towards college. You may be getting pushed towards college in a way that doesn't address your financial accessibility to the college. And then depending on the type of preparation you're getting in that school, once you get here, you may not know how to operate, particularly if you don't have parents or immediate family members who have kind of walked the walk before. I know I can speak for myself on that where it was like I had no idea at the time I went to college. By the time I went to college, my mother worked at a Ford dealership. My father worked in the steel industry. He was a factory worker. I think by the time I was in college, I think he was in the purchasing department, but they didn't have a lot to offer me for that. And it was really working here in hindsight because back when I went to college, nobody was talking about first-generation students then. We've become aware of this thing and I think students have benefited from it.  

Adam: I have to imagine that tuition cost is also a massive factor when it comes to equity and education. How do you view that? 

Anne: Yeah, so one, I wish I could just yell this from every summit, the top of every building is, we have to get every single student, regardless of the first time they said no, is to fill out the FAFSA. We have to have every single student from every student you were just talking about. That has means, our full-paying students to our lowest-income students. Now we do a pretty good job in some sectors. There's higher return rates. And the reason I say that is the student, my coworker that I was just talking about, that's going to run out of money and needs rent money, needs to get an emergency loan. We know that a subsidized loan through the federal government are way better than predatory private loans. We don't want our students going to the local bank and getting a loan. That is a terrible idea, but you cannot get an emergency loan on a college campus without a FAFSA filled out, and it doesn't happen overnight. It's not an instant. It's not instant thing. So that is the biggest, if I were to give any advice and what I learned from this study is that is the simplest. It's so easy to do. We have to build that capacity. We do a better job actually in high schools that are well-resourced. So, where the college-going capacity is really high because their college knowledge, we know that there's also so many merit scholarships that are tied to the FAFSA, so the FAFSA isn't just tied to the Pell Grant. There's all kinds of merit scholarships. Test optional has also created a little bit of an interesting barrier in terms of accessing some of this funding because we tie test scores to merit money. Well, if you're going to go test-optional and think about, I mean, we could have a whole podcast about testing, standardized testing, we won't do that, but if you opt not to or you take it once, because I had to for in the state of Michigan, you have to take the SAT. It's part of the state standards and don't do particularly well. We know that students do better each time they take it, and part of it's just learning how to take the test is that may not be, that's not accessible to everyone, then you're on your own dime after that and the cost of it. But we have some high schools.  

Adam: A three-hour test too. 

Anne: It's a three-hour test. It's time. Some high schools are really well-resourced in those hundred-dollar manuals or access to test prep sites, and their students do really well. And then there's other high schools that can barely purchase textbooks to teach an algebra class. The inequity in that is how shows up when our students arrive on campus, it shows up in how they navigate campus. It shows up in how they think about resources and access to resources. And so we have to decode all those for our students because they didn't have those in high school necessarily. We have those opportunities here. We have to help connect those, and that's what the first-generation collaborative does, is decodes those and helps. Is it always perfect? No. I mean there's things we don't know. 

Adam: And there's students we miss. I think that's one of the things that despite everyone's best intention, and we were talking about how I try to put value on my students and listen to their experiences. I'm not an educator. I don't teach courses here. So, I guess what I'm kind of getting at is who's doing it and who's choosing to bring that information forward is sometimes hard to manage when you're looking at an institution of this size too. It's like there are really great things there, but they're only going to work for people who show up to them. And showing up isn't always a choice, it's just a matter of knowing. When you were talking about doing your research and working as a server with other community college students, I was interested to tie that to your FAFSA. Did you talk about the FAFSA? Were there people, students there who are not filling it out, who are still working the late shifts and going to class full-time? 

Anne: My coworker that's going to run out of rent money filled out the FAFSA and was waiting for, so had not filled out the FAFSA and here's why. And I think I get, I mean I totally understand this, filled out the FAFSA years before and wasn't eligible for the Pell Grant. And I think most people just think the FAFSA leads to the Pell Grant and I don't want to take out loans. Now this individual does have loans, but this was more of an emergency and was better prepared this year. Their financial situation going into the academic year was a little bit different until it wasn't, until all of a sudden, I'm out of money. But it goes to healthcare too. So we have tons of students that don't have healthcare. I had conversations with students that I would, for some reason they, so they didn't know what I was doing, but I was kind of this old lady working the night shift at this. I worked mostly at night and vowed I would never, part of the ethics of me doing this project was I wasn't going to tell an untruth. So when they asked me, “Hey, have you ever served before?” I said, no. And they're like, “why did you decide to take this job?” And I said, “oh, I'm just taking a break from education,” which technically is not an untruth. I was on sabbatical. So I thought, well, that's kind of a good way. And then they found out along the way that I was also taking classes at a community college. So they thought that was kind of cool. And I said to just kind of better myself. So they probably just thought I was a returning adult student. So they would come to me with really interesting dilemmas and stuff, and one was health-related and I was able to say, have you thought about the county sliding scale? Have you thought about there's a clinic on campus, even just access to that kind of information for so many of our low income students or students that aren't necessarily classified as low-income. I actually think I call, I actually like to study the students that are financially strapped. So they're kind of just barely getting by. They don't necessarily qualify in the lowest levels but have moments of not being, they're one flat tire away from actually just not making it. And they're literally week to week, but yet they have their tuition paid and stuff like that. But one of my textbooks was $200. I mean they're $200 away from not being able to participate in class. And there was no choice not to buy this textbook. I mean, I had to have it or there was no way I was going to be successful. The other thing that I found out with, and this is if I were to speak to faculty, is it's so important to know this because sometimes faculty will have the syllabus and everything's kind of laid out. We have when everything's due and then all of a sudden we'll add something like maybe an extra zoom session that's mandatory. And that is such a burden and barrier for our students that work and especially work in jobs where they can't call in. So if you've ever worked in a restaurant, there's no calling in, there's no leaving, no. I mean, you're there. You don't want to let your team down. So there were times when I had coworkers that had to walk around with their Zoom because of this mandatory, “you're going to fail the class if you don't attend this” added thing. And we all helped with tables and stuff, but I mean the stress of watching these young individuals. I always knew I had a car that was going to start. I had a home that was safe and warm and there was always food at my home. I mean, I always had a financial safety net, but still the stress of thinking about like, oh my gosh, I've spent all this money on tuition and I have to make, and I never did it. I never made enough money to pay all the tuition. I'm sorry. I made all the money to pay the tuition and fees and the books, but I never made it to pay for my gas and my uniforms that I needed to work.  

Adam: It's hard to see how they're doing it.

Adam: What motivates these students to keep, because it seems so hard. I mean, that's the thing too, is again, wanting to get back to how inequitable this can seem. If you're listening to this and you got through college, even if it was a little bit tough, but if you never had to stop, and I know from talking to folks here and in other universities, there's students all the time that stop and you're just hoping maybe they come back like, well, I'm just going to pause. But what keeps that student going? What's the motivation for them? What did you find? 

Anne: I think the motivation is that there's something else. There's something better. There's going to be an economic opportunity. I have to do this for that economic opportunity. And so many of the students that I met and talked to day after day after day were, it was also about their families. This was a communal, this wasn't just about me going out and getting a big fancy job and then being able to pay my own bills, but it was lifting my family circumstances and not from a dependent perspective, but their nuclear family. And the pride in that, and I think mean some of that comes from rurality. We know that breaking out of some of those rural cycles of poverty, but it's not just limited to rurality. The other really interesting thing I found that relates to this that I really want to share is we also lose track of some of these students. So a lot of these students are self-paying, so they don't take credit hours in the same way that a lot of our students that we see on campus, 12, 15, 18. We had this big push to get students out in four years, but getting students out in four years also means that every semester costs more. I know we've reduced the number of credit hours for a lot of degrees and made that more manageable, but it costs more than to take 12 credit hours. We don't have. So I'm at a number of students who are self-paying and they take classes as they can. So one student said to me in kind of a shameful way, and I had to sort of unpack this with them is, “oh, I'm still at the community college and I'm X number of years old.” And I'm like, there's no shame in that. And they said, “oh, I only take one or two classes a year, and I'm way outside of what my age contemporaries are doing and where they're at and stuff.” And I said, there's no shame in that. Nobody's going to judge your college degree on how long it took you to get it. A degree is a degree. I mean, it was a really pretty powerful conversation. But then it was even more powerful when they said, and I don't really get tracked anymore. Community colleges measure transfer on two years and three years, and then we measure graduation rates on three and four years at a community college and five and six. And I said, it's true. We lose track of these students and they're not part of our metrics of success. We do capture them in our census data, but we don't capture. 

Adam: But they kind of get pulled out of that cohort that they came in there with and we go, all right, they're here. They're dabbling. That financial access, it's such a crazy thing to me. My first interaction in higher education was working as an adjunct at a for-profit college. You want to hear some horror stories. And the thing that sticks with me the most, the thing that I'll never forget the most out of working there was how money, and I hate to be the guy who looks like the way I do and just be like the middle-aged hippie at a college institution. But man, money felt like the root of all evil when I was there a lot. I had some really great students, but there's two things that really stuck with me, and one was that some students weren't prepared to be there at all, to the point that I felt like they should have had some remedial help before they were in my classroom because I was having issues with spelling and punctuation that needed to be addressed. I don't mean you shouldn't be at the institution. The institution should have addressed that a little bit earlier in that process. And then the second thing that I, and that was all of that was some students, the second thing I ran into is the institution was the lender. And if you're teaching a three-and-a-half-hour class and all of a sudden somebody from financial aid would come into the classroom to seek out the student, they would pull them out of the class. And I'm like, so now you're punishing them educationally by being behind on some kind of a bill. So I eventually started lying when they would come and ask, this is kind of led to the end of my work at this institution, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I think when it no longer exists, as it was becoming defunct, I was early in the cuts for it. And I think it was in part because I had been found out to have been lying to the financial aid office about attendance. They'd be like, oh, is John Smith here? And I would be like, no, he's not. As I made eye contact with John Smith, 

Adam: Well, because for me, I don't care about your bills. And I think that's the thing that is tough to wrap your head around about education is, I think we talk about how expensive it is and what a burden it is on people, and we're not, rather than realize that we need to find a way to make it more accessible. And maybe that's finding ways to reduce the cost, the conversation, the zeitgeist is more like, well, is it even worth it? Well, that doesn't mean don't go to college. It means how do we make college cheaper because we do see that the outcomes can be tremendous, right?