Nineteen university systems commit to economic diversity

Elysia GloverAssistant News Editor

A new initiative to reduce the post-secondary achievement gap was announced last Wednesday, Oct. 31. The collective of 19 public college systems in 16 states and Puerto Rico announced their commitment to an eight-year program aimed at increasing the accessibility of post-secondary education.

The “Access to Success” program is led by the National Association of System Heads (NASH). The initiative will target disparities at both the secondary and post-secondary education levels, aiming for increased accessibility nationwide for minority and lower-income families to quality education. The announcement comes amidst with a increase in the number of secondary students left behind, the initiative is seen by many as a reaction to the growing global demand for an educated workforce.

“The future of our nation demands more college graduates, and I'm pleased that our partners in university systems across the country are committed to meeting this challenge,” said NASH President Thomas C. Meredith in a statement last week.

The program’s directors expect their efforts to have a significant impact. Collectively, the 19 systems educate approximately 2 million students, or 12 percent of the nation’s total, and nearly one-third of all low-income and minority undergraduates currently enrolled at four-year institutions. Participating post-secondary education systems include the City University of New York, the State University of New York, University System of Maryland, California State Universities, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and the Vermont State College system. All participants in the program will strive to reducegaps in college-going and college-completion success rates of underrepresented minorities and low-income students 50 percent by the 2015 academic year.

The task will not be an easy one. Despite a nationwide increase in the number of students entering
college, recent statistics reported by insidehighered.com revealed that only 50 percent of Americans from low-income backgrounds go on to attend college, compared to approximately 66 percent of middle-income Americans and 80 percent of those from wealthier backgrounds. Of those minority students who do continue their education beyond the secondary level, only two of five black and Hispanic freshmen earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of entering college, as opposed to the approximately 60 percent of white freshmen and 64 percent of Asian Americans.

It was also found that white Americans are twice as likely as black Americans and three times as likely as Hispanic Americans to have earned a bachelor’s degree by the age of 29.

Attempts at tackling the increasing achievement gap are not new. With the launch of the “Access to Success” program, however, participating systems hope their impact will be significantly larger, now that they will be able to learn from each other’s successes while remaining connected to the particular issues of education in their state.

The program’s directors, did not dismiss the possibility of future government support but stated that they were no longer going to wait for changes to secondary and post-secondary education that should have been made by policy makers years ago. With technical assistance from the non-profit Education Trust, a non-profit organization, the participating college systems will develop a uniform system to measure their progress over the next eight years.

Ross Wiener, the Education Trust's Vice President for Program and Policy, said that the collaboration allowed the participants to develop their own ways of tracking their success, rather than wait for those standards to be set for them by government agencies or magazines that publish college rankings.

“Many of them are frustrated with how the rankings play out and what those rankings incentivize,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. Weiner also criticized several of the measures used by ranking systems, arguing that they have the effect of punishing colleges for serving students from minority or lower-income backgrounds who may be at a disadvantage.

In addition to these initiatives, all 19 education systems have agreed to begin annual public reporting of uniform data collected through metrics developed by the Education Trust. In a press release last week, Director of the Education Trust Kati Haycock, emphasized that the data to be published over the next eight years should shed new light on the extent of the issue. She said that while the federal government and most post-secondary institutions do a good job reporting on the relative access to and success of students by race, there is little demographic information available on student financial status.

As published in the “Access to Success” brochure released October 2007, the metrics that will be used to keep track of the program’s progress “take account of all students served, not just traditional, full-time students… the metrics define a system’s success in the real context of the economic and racial/ethnic diversity of its state’s citizens.”

Just how each system will go about reducing the gap will be left largely for the individual participants to decide. Program participants will be responsible for devising a method of response to the particular needs of their state.

Along with the specialized efforts, the participating systems will commit to four initiatives set by the “Access to Success” program. Participants will continue collaboration with the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs in an effort to redirect college funds towards student programming. A slated redesign of introductory and remedial courses is to take place, with assistance from the
National Center for Academic Transformation. Participating systems will also continue the work of the American Diploma Project in an effort to better align high school and college curricula, thereby improving student preparation for college. Finally, all systems will commit to boosting the availability of need-based financial aid.

Much of the data has never before been made public by post-secondary institutions, including statistical information on the rates of minority and lower-income students who enter into and graduate from a post-secondary institution.

The participating college systems will also publish statistics outlining the proportion of new students receiving Pell Grants, and how these percentages compare with the proportion of new students from low-income backgrounds. System heads will also examine the proportion of those Pell Grant recipients who graduate within four, five or six years of beginning their program.