Dedicated to student success, the College provides excellence in teaching, personal attention, and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth. Closely linked to the fabric of the community, Middlesex’s partnerships with school, business and service organizations provide leadership in economic and community development and foster a culture of civic engagement and responsive workforce development.
Mission statement of Middlesex Community College

These words from the mission statement of Middlesex Community College (MCC) form the basis for access and success at the college. Yet, defining and measuring access and success at any college can be problematic. As Sylvia Hurtado has suggested, the pipeline metaphor for education should be replaced with a transit-system model: “Students get on the bus at one point, get off again, take the train to the next stop, walk for a while?and maybe get to their destination, eventually” (Miller, 2004, p. 4). Measuring success in this transit-system model can be challenging since results will be different depending upon students’ proximity to their final destination. As Miller (2004) states, “with each movement in and out of the system comes disengagement from the collegiate experience and discouragement that can diminish the chances of graduation” (p. 4). Therefore, a critical component to access and success requires addressing the disengagement and discouragement students can experience as they stop and take detours in their educational journeys.

The focus on excellence in teaching at MCC is one way to adapt to students on the move. Through a strong emphasis on active pedagogies in the Service-Learning Program, the Teaching, Learning, and Reflection Center, and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, the culture at the college encourages faculty “to connect the dots between theory and practice, between one individual teaching strategy and the next” (Sperling, 2003, p. 596) as a way to deepen understanding of the diverse learners in our classrooms. In this essay we will provide an overview of approaches to student success at MCC and will use the case studies of Sara and George to discuss how a student’s unique needs are shaped by the context of different communities. We will suggest ways that the college’s mission of providing “personal attention and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth” is translated for each of them and show challenges and opportunities inherent in the translation process.

As open access institutions community colleges educate 45% of all undergraduates and 47% of black, 55% of Hispanic, 47% of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 57% of Native American undergraduate students (American Association of Community Colleges, 2006). In diverse classrooms one size does not fit all; professors need a toolbox of different strategies to connect with the specific needs of individual students. Programs at MCC’s Teaching, Learning, and Reflection Center provide pedagogical tools for faculty and small class sizes with extensive support from disability services and academic support centers create environments that invite student success. In the college’s Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, professors are given time to focus on questions about student learning, to research solutions and to share results in a supportive community of practice. Through this inquiry process, faculty construct knowledge that connects to broader educational issues; such connections provide important new insights for daily classroom practice.

Alexander Astin has commented that the problem in higher education is that “we value being smart much more than we do developing smartness” (Astin, 1998, p. 22), and Moore has echoed this in stating that we need to focus more on the value added by the college to the student than on the value added by the student to the college (Moore, 2004). Professors at community colleges care about teaching and strive to create classroom environments that value all learners. In his paper, “Reflections of a Community College Educator,” MCC Professor Bob Fera explains:

We may, as Astin suggests, broaden the notion of smartness. This may be accomplished in many ways, perhaps the most exciting coming from Gardner’s theory of intelligences and Goleman’s treatise on emotional intelligence. In a word, we may begin to see the value of many different talents, hidden or realized, that our students bring to class, regardless of the school’s stature. Secondly, we are invited to consider the importance of developing or unearthing the many talents that our students bring with them.
Bob Fera, 2006

Faculty at MCC approach access and success by “developing or unearthing the many talents that our students bring with them.” We focus on finding strategies for “helping underprepared students prepare, prepared students advance, and advanced students excel” (Motto of the National Association of Developmental Education). But, we need to use strategies that both fit with the context of our different local communities and are realistic for students in the transit-system model.

Like professors at colleges across the country, MCC faculty work with students who are facing a variety of obstacles to college access and success. At MCC, 61% of students are from low income and/or first generation immigrant families. Many are the first person in their family to attend college. While in school they are also raising children, caring for elderly relatives and working to help support their family and pay for their education. MCC has an additional challenge; addressing the unique needs of students on two very different campuses. In Bedford attractive brick buildings surround a traditional grassy quadrangle. The campus is located in a suburban, affluent town about 30 miles north of Boston. About fifteen miles north is City Campus, a series of multi-story buildings in downtown Lowell. With a population of slightly over 100,000, the City of Lowell has a large immigrant population with linguistic minorities comprising approximately 40% of the population. The average annual high school dropout rate in the city of Lowell is 32%; the rate is 1% in Bedford.

Faculty and staff find that in many cases, students on the two campuses have different needs, motivations and challenges. Many come to college with a career goal and no sense of its plausibility or the realities of that profession. Others come with no plan for the future. In all cases students want to see the practical applications of what they are learning in the classroom. Students’ community engagement is an important way for students to make that connection. Ideally, through lessons taught both in the classroom and in the community students will become skilled professionals and engaged citizens. As evidenced by the examples below, the college’s internal and external collaborations are critical to student success. The case studies of Sara and George are hypothetical but represent the experiences of many actual MCC students. With 50% of new nurses and close to 80% of firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical technicians credentialed at community colleges (American Association of Community Colleges, 2006), Sara and George’s interests in criminal justice and nursing also reflect “typical” students at community colleges around the country.

Sara is a second-year student who is taking classes on the Bedford campus. She is 19-years-old and came to college directly from high school. She is a criminal justice major and wants to work with juveniles when she graduates. She has lived her entire life in Billerica, MA, a small, suburban community situated between the Bedford and Lowell campuses. Sara attended Billerica High School and works 25 hours a week as a waitress in Billerica. This semester Sara has decided to enroll in Introduction to Sociology and complete a service-learning project. One option for a service-learning placement is the Lowell Juvenile Court. Sara rejects this option because her father does not want her driving her car into Lowell. She instead chooses to perform her service-learning hours at a Boys and Girls Club because it is in Billerica and therefore closer to home. She also knows two people who work at the Club.

Sara is a typical Bedford student; she has limited real world experience and does not have a clear idea of the needs and challenges facing her community. Her first civic engagement choice is made based on convenience rather than true interest.

George walks from his apartment in Lowell to the City campus. He is 25 and works a full-time job in a warehouse while attending college. He came to the United States with his family from Haiti when he was ten. He graduated from Lowell High School and worked for a few years before returning to school. He has a wife and a 6-month-old baby. George is a liberal arts major doing a service-learning project for his cultural anthropology class at the homeless shelter within walking distance of the college. He thinks he would like to eventually attend nursing school and work in an urban hospital.

In contrast, George’s service-learning placement is connected to his career goals; he will start to get a sense of one of the populations he may be working with in an urban health career setting. George’s more focused experience is not unusual. In general, service-learning has been embraced more fully by the Lowell campus community. There seem to be a number of reasons for this difference; proximity to appropriate sites, average student age (older in Lowell) and a sense that Lowell students have a much clearer sense of the needs within their community. Community needs tend to be out in the open in a city and are often more hidden in suburban areas.

At MCC, student success is enhanced through civic engagement in at least four ways. First, as mentioned earlier, work in the community helps students make important connections between classroom learning and the real world. Service-learning helps to create a more permeable classroom, a place where “knowledge generated within it is extended beyond its boundaries” and “one into which outside knowledge is assimilated” (Sandy, 1998). Through her interactions at the Billerica Boys and Girls Club and study of sociology, Sara expanded her vision of community needs and became more open to multiple perspectives. She initially entered a service-learning site based on her comfort level; success for her was a willingness to try a less comfortable site in the next semester. In comparison, George discovered that his own multicultural background and bilingual skills were viewed as real assets at the homeless shelter; this awareness fostered increased perseverance to stay the course and manage challenges of balancing work, study, and family demands.

Second, civic engagement helps students explore potential career pathways. This is often achieved simply by the student’s first hand experience at a community placement. For example, MCC criminal justice students such as Sara have an opportunity to do their service-learning work in the courts, probation departments, battered women’s shelters and in local schools. These placements often help students see that there are a variety of career pathways that can be developed based on an interest in the field of criminal justice. Anecdotally, students tell us that their community work has opened their eyes to professional options they did not know were possible. Armed with a realistic career goal, students return to the classroom with added motivation. MCC takes this a step further by encouraging collaborations between faculty, Service-Learning, and the Career Services staff. Following her experience at the Boys and Girls Club Sara spent another semester at a preschool center for low income children. She realized that she loved working with young children and wondered about switching her major to early childhood education. She met with a career counselor to explore concrete options for early childhood jobs. The Career staff plans events specifically geared to students who may have developed a particular career interest through their community work. For example, this year, Service-Learning and Career Services co-sponsored two events; “Supporting Katrina Recovery” featuring women in public service who responded to Hurricane Katrina and “Foreign Service as a Career”.

Third, not all skills are best taught in the classroom; many are best learned in the community. Students who are engaged in the community develop stronger workplace skills which are critical to future success. Students working in the community learn how to listen and communicate more effectively both in writing and verbally. They also have opportunities to work in groups and on teams and be supervised and evaluated by professionals in the field. More importantly perhaps, the skills developed at service-learning sites are critical to the development of an articulate, compassionate and engaged democratic citizenry. Our student, George, moved forward with his planned nursing major. As part of his coursework he participated as a team serving veterans with serious mental illness at the Bedford Veterans’ Hospital. Marie Ryder, the course instructor, has collaborated with the hospital for many years. She and her students have engaged in studies to explore experiences for health care professionals that reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward those with mental illness (Sadow, Ryder, & Webster, 2002). As a member of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at MCC, Marie actively engages in research to explore how her students learn from the community and then modifies her teaching approaches based on results. This ongoing inquiry into teaching practice will benefit George and his classmates on a daily basis and it will serve as a model to them of the importance of reflective practice. Marie’s sustained partnership with staff at the VA Hospital demonstrates clearly the win-win results for college and community when professionals collaborate across institutional settings.

Fourth, not all students shine in the classroom; some have language issues that make class participation challenging, others have disabilities that present barriers to traditional college success, for many older students it has been several years since they opened a textbook. Civic engagement is an opportunity for those students to find a place where learning comes more easily and where they can be successful. The confidence developed in the community is then brought back to the classroom. The college is taking service work a step further by creating an Engaged Scholar distinction for students who perform a significant amount of service in a number of courses and includes a mention of this honor on student transcripts and at graduation. Such acknowledgement provides an opportunity for MCC to publicly honor students who have distinguished themselves through service in some of the same ways we honor academic success.

The case studies of Sara and George help to show that fostering success in students does require “excellence in teaching, personal attention, and extensive opportunities for exploration and growth.” Student success however is not the result of the college’s efforts alone; it also requires partnerships between the college, and its larger community. Student learning and by extension student success is enhanced through the relationships that develop when a college sees itself as part of the fabric of the local community. A natural and productive collaboration occurs when members of the college community are engaged in the community and the community has needs this vital and creative group can meet. These collaborations inevitably lead to deeper and more meaningful learning which itself represents student success. During the past three years, MCC has participated in a Learn and Serve grant, The Lowell Civic Collaborative which involves a unique civic engagement partnership between MCC and two outstanding community resources, the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell and Minute Man National Historical Park in Lexington, a suburban area near Bedford. Since 2003, thirty-one Liberal Arts and Science faculty from a variety of disciplines have incorporated civic engagement topics into their courses. These projects have ranged from biology students assisting staff to assess water quality and to determine invasive plant growth in a sheep grazing project at Minute Man National Historical Park to students in a Math Connections course gathering data from Lowell National Historical Park on immigration and tourism to graph, chart and share with the LNHP staff. Read more examples.

Through participating with the National Parks, faculty have gained a deeper understanding of the two campuses and their local communities and have begun to see more ways to use the distinct resources of both campuses. As part of The Lowell Civic Collaborative and MacNeil/Lehrer’s By the People Project the college hosted a civic dialogue in October 2005 focusing on MCC’s educational question of the year: “What skills or knowledge will students need most to be effective citizens in our world in the future?” A total of 268 students, faculty, community members, and campus staff participated (96 in Lowell and 172 in Bedford) in lively dialogue. The discussion was extended by postings on the COPPER blog, a weblog created as part of MCC’s work as a cluster group with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The dialogues and blog help unite the campuses around a central issue of importance and have provided a valuable way to chronicle views from a wide range of participants from the president of the college to students in a sociology class to experts on civic engagement to elected officials. These exchanges help to define what is needed for access and success at the college from a variety of perspectives and generate new ways to “foster a culture of civic engagement and responsive workforce development.”

As we plan for the future a number of important goals emerge. First, while civic engagement is utilized through some programs’ curricula there are others that have not incorporated civic engagement in a meaningful way. While this situation is improving, students would benefit from an increase in the number of civic engagement opportunities in some academic areas. We have also found that service-learning has taken hold in Lowell more quickly and easily than in Bedford. While this development may certainly be attributable to the different student demographic and the opportunities available close to campus it is an imbalance that must be addressed. Finally, as the number of engaged students increases the need for a consistent, meaningful process for assessing their experiences grows. MCC is in the midst of a college-wide assessment project and civic engagement opportunities will be investigated both as a whole and within individual courses.

In analyzing the dilemma of students on the move, Miller (2004) suggests that we need to help students create their own intellectual coherence. She recommends that “in every course, the major focus should be the development of the motivation, understanding, and intellectual skills that will make auto-didacts of them, owners of their own education” (p. 4). Students have open access at community colleges, but they typically take many forms of transportation and detours in their travels through the educational transit system. Many will reach a final destination of graduation, but others may stop along the way and find success without a formal degree. Being “owners of their own education” means that students can define for themselves what success means.

References

American Association of Community Colleges. Community college fact sheet. Retrieved July 18, 2006

Astin, A. (1998). Higher education and civic responsibility. National Society for Experiential Education Quarterly, Winter, 18-26.

Fera, R. (2006). Reflections of a community college educator. Explorations from a Community of Practice: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Middlesex Community College, Fall 2006.

Miller, M. A. (2004, March/April). Students on the move. Change, 36(2), 4.

Moore, R. (2004). Do colleges identify or develop intelligence? Journal of Developmental Education, 28(1), 28-34.

Sadow, D., Ryder, M., & Webster, D. (2002). Is education of health professionals encouraging stigma towards the mentally ill? Journal of Mental Health, 11(6), 657-665.

Sandy, L. R. (1998). The permeable classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 9(3), 47-60.

Sperling, C. (2003). How community colleges understand the scholarship of teaching and learning. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 27, 593-601.

The University of Maine at Machias is a small liberal arts campus located in a remote, rural, county on the coast of Maine. The current crisis in higher education is more severe in Maine than in many other parts of the country, and the situation is particularly difficult in the part of the state surrounding UMM, where traditional resource-based jobs are disappearing and rates of post-secondary study must rise if the residents are to prosper. Committed as a campus to engagement with its larger community, UMaine Machias uses a broad array of active teaching and learning strategies to address the gaps in aspirations, planning, and college readiness that prevent many in the local population from pursuing post-secondary education.

As a whole, Maine sees a very high percentage of its young people graduating from high school?86.5% in 2001?often leading both the nation and the northeast region (Maine Department of Education data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1), yet tracking the number of these graduates who enroll in post-secondary study immediately after high school produces a disappointing picture, with Maine’s figure of 50% in 2002 lagging significantly behind the 60% that characterized the rest of New England (NCES IPEDS data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1). Similarly, recent U.S Census data shows that only 37% of working-age adults in the state hold college degrees, compared to 46% in the rest of New England (cited in Plimpton, 2006, p.1). Obviously, despite its notable accomplishments in K-12 education, Maine faces a significant crisis in its post-secondary programs; this is a crisis, however, that has rather different characteristics in each of the two distinct regions of Maine.

Barriers to Post-Secondary Education in Rural Downeast Maine

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time in the state of Maine will eventually hear talk of “the two Maines.” In general, this phrase refers to a north/south split between the more populated, more urban, wealthier counties of southern Maine and the sparsely populated rural counties of the north and east that are primarily dependent on flagging, resource-based economies. Washington County, home of UMM, lies in the heart of Downeast Maine and is one of the most distressed counties in the state. Data reported in the Maine State Planning Offices’ 2005 Report Card on Poverty reveals that Washington County had the highest poverty rate in the state, 19% compared to a rate of 10.6 % for the state as a whole; 2002 estimates predicted a very slight decrease for the county’s rate to 17.6% (p. 25). 2002 per capita income at $22,469 was the lowest in the state (p. 30) and $6000 below the average for the state as a whole (p. 3). Similarly, Washington County consistently reports high unemployment rates: 8% in 2004 compared to a low of 2.8 % for the southern Cumberland County (p. 3). The educational data for the state reflects this dichotomy as well; in 2000, a meager 22.8 % of working-age adults in Washington Country had associates degrees or better compared to the high of 46.6 percent in, again, Cumberland County (Maine Department of Labor data cited in Plimpton, 2006, p. 33). Moreover, in 2001-2002 when the Maine-based Mitchell Institute undertook a study of Barriers to Post-Secondary Education in Maine, researchers found that “the experience in Southern Maine, where more residents are college graduates, appears to be significantly different than in other parts of the state” (p. 1). Young adults in Southern Maine are much more likely than students from other parts of the state to have a parent or other relative who has completed college, to have community support for college attendance, and to consistently express more optimistic attitudes about college and college finances. Young adults in other parts of the state, particularly Coastal and Downeast regions, often would be the first in their families to go to college. They are much more concerned about both the value and cost of college and report lower family and community support for post-secondary education. All of these are factors that can be significant barriers to students’ pursuing study beyond high school (pp. 2-3).

UMaine Machias’ Strategies for Reducing Barriers to Post-Secondary Education

Both the Mitchell Institute and the Maine’s MELMAC Educational Foundation have extensively studied the problem of these barriers to post-secondary education, and over the years they have identified three major strategies to overcome them. The first is a concerted effort to raise aspirations among high school students, the second is connecting these aspirations to realistic planning for post-secondary education, and the third is increasing college readiness by enhancing the rigor of students’ high school experience. UMaine Machias partners with its area schools in activities promoting all of these objectives. All of these partnerships are based on the premise, prevalent throughout the literature, that any positive exposure to college activities, even the proverbial campus visit, helps demystify secondary education and make it seem more accessible to students. The more substantive and extensive the interactions, the more students gain in enhanced aspirations, in understanding of the long-term planning process needed for college attendance, and in realistic assessment of the expectations colleges hold for their incoming students.

UMaine Machias’ Early College Program

UMM’s most expansive partnership with local high schools is its Early College Program. Established two years ago, UMM’s Early College Program makes regular college courses available to high school juniors and seniors recommended by their guidance counselors. While the program is open to any student, the majority of participants have come from five Washington County high schools that are members of the Downeast Community Learning Alliance (DECLA). In its first semester of operation, the UMM Early College Program enrolled 34 students; participation has subsequently risen substantially, with 79 students currently enrolled for the fall 2006 semester.
The Early College Program does not bring just students to campus, however. Parents and siblings are invited to join EC students for the on-campus orientation. The president or vice-president always welcomes participants to campus, and special presentations by admissions and financial aid personnel help troubleshoot the college application process for parents.

The University also goes into the high schools. The EC Coordinator regularly travels to area schools and administers placement exams to students or, if requested, to classes as a whole to help students become familiar with this aspect of the college-going experience. Placement scores can also be useful to guidance counselors who are trying to persuade students to take more rigorous college preparatory classes. The Coordinator often meets in their home schools with students who may be having difficulty in their classes and may require support services. Moreover, the minutiae of advising, course registration, progress-monitoring, dealing with absences?all of which are handled by the EC Coordinator?militate that the University and high school personnel are in frequent, often daily contact. Of necessity, any barriers that may have existed between the participating institutions have fallen as a true partnership has formed between the campus and the area high schools. The importance the University places on this partnership is clear from its decision, despite its own financial pressures, to reduce tuition for Early College students by 25% and to waive most fees. Guidance counselors have observed that the whole culture regarding college in their schools is changing. When 79 of approximately 320 juniors and seniors in DECLA schools are taking college classes, such far-reaching change is probably inevitable: students realize that not only college, but college success is available to anyone.

Service Learning: Bringing Local Area Schools to UMaine Machias

The Early College Program, given its rapid growth, may be UMM’s most dramatic effort to increase access to secondary education for young adults of Downeast Maine, but it is only one of a number of ongoing projects, all of which are related to the campus’ commitment to active learning and engagement with the broader community. The UMM faculty formalized this commitment several years ago when they voted to require that service learning be infused across the curriculum, with each academic program mandated to build at least one service learning experience into the coursework it requires of its students. Many programs were already more than meeting this requirement. In some of their classes, recreation management students were planning and hosting various events such as a Halloween-evening Haunted Forest activity held for area youngsters in the Machias high school. Chemistry students monitored water quality in area streams; marine biology students worked on salmon conservation projects; behavioral science students collaborated with area social services agencies to study county-wide problems; history students researched and rehabilitated a long-neglected African-American cemetery. For other programs, more significant changes accompanied this shift. English and Book Arts, for example sought out donations that have allowed the establishment of an in-house press that will provide students with hands-on experience with all aspects of the production of fine, hand-made editions of works by local authors and artists.

Increasingly, these active teaching and learning activities involve collaboration with area schools. Students taking Special Topics in Ornithology this spring, for example, hosted a campus visit of fifth through eighth grade students from a local elementary school. Putting their classroom learning into practice, they led these younger students through dissections, comparative studies of skeletal structures, examinations of how birds have adapted for flight, and analysis of migration patterns. Some of these collaborations extend beyond the scope of a particular course. One ongoing campus/community partnership originated in a science professor’s proposal to build a series of labyrinth gardens though projects tied to diverse course offerings. Two gardens are nearing completion and community involvement has been extensive with donations of supplies, benches, plantings, as well as financial support. High school students and faculty have also participated in work on both labyrinths, spending their service days on the UMM campus digging, planting, and otherwise helping to further this ongoing project.

One of these collaborations even has a global reach as a UMM program links area high school students and faculty with their counterparts in the Middle East. UMaine Machias is a participant in Soliya, an international program in which students in the United States and in predominantly Muslim countries examine their respective histories, cultures, and perceptions of the other through facilitated, collaborative study using videoconferencing and other sophisticated online technologies (http://www.soliya.net). Last fall, to fulfill a Soliya course requirement, one of UMM’s students, collaborating with a young woman from the American University in Beirut, developed an action proposal entitled Think! The goal of Think! was to help young people in each country gain a better understanding of United States and Middle East relations and of the two different cultures through a day-long workshop, followed up by possible virtual pen pal and video-tape exchanges. In April, UMM’s Think! Coordinator gathered high school students and faculty from 3 area schools as well as faculty and students from the college for a workshop?complete with Lebanese food and traditional bellydancing?that examined historical, cultural, and media issues. Her colleague in Beirut organized a corresponding workshop in June.

Service Learning: Bringing UMaine Machias to Local Area Schools

All of the above activities brought area elementary and high school students to the campus to participate in projects generated by UMM’s engaged students and faculty. Other activities bring the campus into the local schools. Some projects may be one-time events such as a performance by a theater class. Others are more truly collaborations and have more far-reaching implications for the students involved. One notable example arose out of the Early College Program. This past spring a section of UMM’s introductory education course, EDU 112 School and Community, was offered live at a local high school and broadcast from there to other receiving sites. Students at this high school, approximately 40 miles from the campus, had been able to participate only minimally in Early College coursework because of transportation difficulties. Housing the course at the high school impacted not only the students actually taking the course on site, but also created a college “buzz” in the school at large, with students often looking into the classroom to see what was going on with the “college course.” Moreover, since a significant component of the course took enrolled students into classrooms at the associated elementary school where they observed classroom practices, assisted teachers, and tutored students, the impact of the course extended even beyond the walls of the high school. Response from all participants in this experiment was overwhelmingly positive and next year this section of EDU 112, having been invited by enthusiastic administrators, will travel to another high school with the expectation that students will have a similarly positive experience.

Other faculty at UMM are proposing similarly expansive partnerships with the schools of Washington County. One idea currently being examined calls for the creation of a mobile science museum, staffed by UMM students, that would travel to area schools with, for example, items from the University’s collection of marine mammal skeletons. UMM students would have an opportunity to reinforce their learning of course material by teaching it; local school students would have a hands-on-learning opportunity; and area schools, in an era of dwindling resources, would have an opportunity to enhance their curricula with challenging yet fun mathematics and science activities.

A second proposal involves partnering with teachers to provide access to equipment and training in molecular biology. The University would acquire several sets of portable equipment that would allow students to collect samples, extract the DNA, amplify a particular piece of DNA, and visualize it. University faculty would train high school science teachers to use this equipment in their own classrooms and then loan the equipment to schools on a circulating basis. This work could also be extended by bring samples to UMM for DNA sequencing or other more sophisticated projects. Both this project and the mobile science museum/lab will only be realized if the faculty involved can find external funding, but each has the potential to bring more advanced work into the mathematics and science classes of local schools as well as giving UMM students another opportunity to put what they are their learning in their coursework at the service of the broader community.

Lessons Learned and Long-Term Considerations: The UMaine Machias Experience

As it has been developing these K-16 partnerships, UMM has both learned some lessons and discovered areas that need further examination. The first and most important of the lessons learned is that for undertakings like these to be successful, they must truly be collaborative enterprises. The University faculty and students cannot view themselves as enlightened benefactors bringing academic “riches” to poor, benighted local school districts. Each party must acknowledge what the other brings to the partnership and all participants must be mutually respectful. Any significant manifestations of town/gown rivalries can sabotage this process before it has fairly begun.

With more specific reference to Early College, an early clear finding is that programs such as these can be enormously successful, even in areas with no strong tradition of college attendance. That very success, however, can generate problems when student demand exceeds available funding. Early College programs, even when discounted tuition is available, are expensive undertakings. Often financed at their start-up by grant funding, participating institutions may eventually face the unhappy dilemma of having to ration access and of developing restrictive criteria for spending the limited amount of money that they do have most effectively. Similarly, they must address the question of sustainability: what happens when grant funding disappears? These are matters high school and college administrators ultimately cannot address alone. If educators and state legislatures are truly serious about promoting seamless K-16 experiences, everyone must begin to consider the long-term financial implications of such a policy.

Another issue facing Early College programs is clear identification of the target population and the development of appropriate programming. EC coursework can serve many purposes. For high-achieving students, it can supplement AP classes and bring additional challenges into the high school experience. For many students, taking college classes can fill a sometimes “empty” senior year with meaningful coursework that gives students a head start on achieving a college degree. For at-risk students, Early College courses can help demystify the college experience and make students aware that a college degree is accessible to them. Because these programs can serve so many different purposes, each one must be carefully designed to bring maximum benefit to the participating students. This is particularly true for programs targeting underachieving populations. For EC programming to have an impact on the college aspirations and success of these students, it is absolutely essential that the college experience be a positive one. Consequently, they cannot simply be thrown into ordinary college courses where their lower academic skills will very often precipitate failure. Placing these students into remedial courses, where they can experience the college setting and success in a “college” course while simultaneously building their skill levels could be one option. A second would be to follow something like the Upward Bound model and to nurture these students and their academic skills?perhaps with activities and classes both at the high school and on the college campus?until they are able to be successful in regular college coursework. Moreover, these programs must above all else be supportive of students even when they fail. They are asking students to take a risk and cannot punish them if results are lackluster (by, for example, making students pay for courses they do not pass). Such punitive measures will only diminish students’ fragile self-esteem and add to the aura of negativity that already surrounds the idea of college for many of them.

Other Logistical Lessons Learned

UMM has also learned a number of important lessons as it expanded other partnerships with area schools. One of these is that K-16 outreach is a natural outgrowth of the campus’ formal commitment to service to its broader community and to engaged practices in all of its educational programs. This commitment, in effect, reflects a change in campus culture brought about by the sustained hard work of many UMM faculty and staff and by consistent administrative support. In this context, the University’s partnerships with area schools and other local civic organizations become a natural outgrowth of classroom activities and bring benefits both to UMM and to its community partners.

While these and similar outreach activities may arise naturally from the culture of an engaged campus, only a Pollyanna would deny that they also bring with them significant practical complications, all of which require the investment of considerable time and resources. For Early College programs, conflicting class times, semester schedules, and even grading systems (when students are receiving dual credit) must all be resolved; basing college classes in high schools has its own set of logistical difficulties. Particularly in rural areas where distances between collaborating schools may be large and public transit all but non-existent, transportation and its attendant costs become a major issue for any kind of joint activity.

Planning for courses becomes more complicated when the broader community becomes a partner in students’ research and scholarship. Some projects, such as UMM’s proposed mobile science museum/lab and traveling DNA kits, require resources far beyond the means of many campuses and will require that the faculty involved seek external funding (and be given the time and support that writing those grant proposals will require).

More broadly, all participating schools must establish effective assessments that identify the least and most efficacious kinds of activities, with this information being shared both locally and in the larger, national conversation about best practices.

Finally, some undertakings will require that the campus challenge itself, take a chance, foster and have faith in the imagination and creativity of its faculty: campus/community labyrinth gardens as a vehicle for service learning activities in courses?

But the campus that is willing to experiment, to support its faculty, staff, and students as they make the broader community their classroom and share their learning experiences with area students of all ages is serving well not only its current enrollees. The campus is also serving those younger elementary, middle, and high school students in the broader community who, because of their participation in campus classes and activities, may have gained both a desire to pursue post-secondary education and a more realistic understanding of how best to prepare themselves for success in their college work and, ultimately, for more prosperous post-secondary careers.

References

Maine State Planning Office. (2005, April). 2005 report card on poverty. Retrieved July 17, 2006

Mitchell Institute. (2002, July). Barriers to post-secondary education in Maine: Making college the
obvious and attainable next step for more Maine students (executive summary). Retrieved July 11, 2006

Plimpton, L. (2006, January). Indicators of higher education attainment in Maine: College as a Right and responsibility for all Maine people. Retrieved July 11, 2006.

Inequality is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere in society including places like the work place, hospitals, elderly homes, and, of course, schools. There are many theories as to why such inequity exists. Some argue that IQ is what brings inequality: some people simply retain information and understand better than others, making them more successful. Though this may be true in some cases, it cannot explain the clear patterns of inequalities regarding race, and socioeconomics. Others, such as Jonathan Kozol, argue that a lack of material resources at some schools impede students’ abilities to grow and learn as successfully as students in schools with a plethora of both economic resources and facilities. Although Kozol’s points are valid, they do not necessarily address why many economically privileged students fail to succeed in college or in business. I would argue that no matter what the economic status of the school district or student, teacher expectations is what plays the most influential role in student success.

For me, as a Hispanic, I consider myself lucky to have parents who opted to teach me English, although I wish they taught me Spanish as well. My success, however, cannot only be attributed to my English skills. Teacher expectations played a huge role in what I was able to achieve in the public school system. Throughout grade school and junior high, I was fortunate to have a few scattered teachers who truly influenced my own outlook on school and motivated me to have a desire for knowledge that other students did not have; there was one teacher in particular who changed my outlook and allowed me to move forward in my academics and as a citizen. It was because of her that I came to Vermont and because of her that I had any interest in helping students like Maria. After I met this teacher, my goals shifted dramatically.

I met Gail Glover when I was fourteen years old on my second day of high school. Gail was my Spanish teacher. Before I met her, I had no desire to learn any foreign language. I hated Spanish. As a Hispanic who grew up in a predominately white school, I was pressured by my peers into hating the language. I was essentially taught to be embarrassed to be Mexican-American and trained to be “one of them.” If I knew how to speak Spanish, I would fit the stereotype, which was something I did not want to do. So, when I was given the opportunity to take the first of the two required years of high school Spanish in eighth grade, I took it hoping to get it out of the way as soon as possible. I took it with a narrow mind and I hated it.

The next year I hoped to get the second and final year over with so I promptly registered for Spanish II. Initially, I was placed in another teacher’s class, but due to some scheduling conflicts with a biology class I ended up in Gail’s seventh period class- her only Spanish II class. Looking back on it, I feel as if it was supposed to work out that way. Mostly, she taught the more advanced Spanish III and I was lucky to be in her single Spanish II class. On the second day of school, I walked into the classroom to find people dressed in costumes and performing skits — already, on the second day of school. I looked at who I guessed was the teacher. She was no bigger than any of the students in the room and hard to distinguish as older. She looked over at me, walked over and said, “¿Cómo te llamas?” I looked at her blankly, “¿Cómo te what???” I thought. Then she said, in English, “What’s your name?” “Ohhh,” I thought, “okay, I get it.” “Mary,” I said. “Okay, María.” She replied, “Siéntate aquí. Tenemos que terminar la tarea de ayer, y después vamos a empezar el trabajo para hoy.” I had no idea what she said to me. I was completely confused. The day before I was in a different Spanish II class and in that class, the teacher said everything in English and all she really did was take attendance. There was no work for the first day in that other class. This new class was already performing skits that they wrote as homework from the night before! I couldn’t believe the difference.

With time, I began to enjoy my Spanish class. Once I warmed up to listening to Gail speak Spanish, I understood what was happening and I learned it. It wasn’t only the Spanish speaking that did it. Gail was…different. She was constantly doing something weird or sneaking a funny word in to see if we were paying attention. I always was. I never wanted to miss anything. She did everything from hopping about the room in the middle of a lesson, for no apparent reason, to singing strange songs in some terrible pitch about penguins doing the mambo. Yes, she was strange, but that was the hook for me. Since she was so unpredictable, my attention to detail in her class resulted in my learning all about Spanish grammar, Latin American culture, and truly learning how beautiful knowing a foreign language can be. As the year came to an end, I found myself wanting to learn more. So I decided to take just one more year of Spanish and I enrolled in Spanish III. Sra. Glover would be my teacher again.

In addition to registering for Spanish III, I decided to register for French and Latin. I became obsessed with learning and understanding other languages, and I knew that Gail majored in Spanish and French. I wanted to be multilingual too. So, I took the other languages, but Spanish still grabbed my attention the most. It seemed to me that it was not only more beautiful than the other languages, it also made the most sense and it was taught by a crazy person, so there was always the entertainment aspect. I couldn’t learn fast enough. I was determined to understand everything that seemed difficult and I knew that the year would soon end. Sometimes, I would get to school early so that I could go in for extra help and ask all of the questions that I thought of about the previous day’s lesson. I am certain that my most frequent visits were right about the time we learned the subjunctive. What is wrong with that tense? Anyone who has learned a foreign language probably understands what I mean. There are all kinds of rules that come along with the subjunctive and, as it seemed to me when I first learned it, half of the time you don’t even have to use it. It all depended on what the speaker wanted to say. I remember that the old’ subjunctive really threw me when it came time for the test. I always felt that I could argue, in many cases that the regular past or present could have worked in one of the blanks where I could have also used subjunctive. Though I am certain that Gail was most likely annoyed about my persistence and curiosity from time to time, she never let me know it and she always gave me an answer for my questions. One of my favorite things about her was that she never told me, “That’s just the way it is” as so many other language teachers had. Occasionally, I would ask a question she could not answer off of the top of her head, but the next day, she would have an answer for me.

Being a fun teacher was not all of it; it was just a small part. It was so much more personal than that. As a person, she not only opened my eyes and showed me that Spanish was fun. She also opened my eyes enough to see that I could learn languages, and learn them well. She always made me feel like I could succeed on any path I chose to travel in life. It is because of her that I realized that I could be different. She helped me to step into a whole new world of possibilities, and showed me how beautiful it is to know more than one language.

Gail graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1981 and after talking with her about what would come next for me; I decided to look at her alma mater as an option for me. Middlebury has a great language program, so I took her advice and applied. When I got in, I wondered how someone like me who went to such a terrible public school could get into a place like that. I certainly did my share of hard work in high school, but that hard worked stemmed from the encouragement of my teachers and parents.
I learned a lot from Gail about how a teacher’s attitude can really affect the way that a student learns. Even in high school, shortly after having her as a teacher, I put what she taught me into practice. During my sophomore year of high school, I began working with Mexican immigrants students who came to my school because their parents migrated to the United States in search of a better life. Many Mexican families found the education system to be especially challenging in the United States and realized the difficulty that came with trying to educate their children. The fact is that many school districts across the country do not offer LEP or ESL (English as a Second Language) programs to help these populations adapt and learn in their new environment. And since they cannot understand English and, therefore, cannot understand what is going on at the school that they are attending, they drop out because there is little reason why they should spend 7 or 8 hours a day in a place that where they get little, if any, help.

In high school, I realized that there was little help for these students. In fact, they were placed in special education classrooms instead of ESL classrooms even though the only “disability” they had was a language barrier. With the proper help, these children could have really succeeded and grown to like the school that they attended. I was enraged by their lack of access to resources, so I teamed up with some of the Spanish teachers in the school and we started a tutoring program for the Mexican students that attended my high school. One student, named Maria, and I really hit it off. She was extremely intelligent and did very well when she understood the material that she was expected to grasp. For three years, we prepared for the Texas state standardized test that, at the time, was called the TAAS test. All she needed to do to graduate was pass it. We took several practice exams and worked mostly on her comprehension of the reading, but also on the math and science portions. In March of my senior year, she took and passed each section of the exam and was able to graduate with me. It was a very rewarding experience and it proved to me that when people are given the proper tools for success, they can succeed. Maria, unlike many of the other Mexican students who passed through my school district, was given access to the material that the other students did not have and was surrounded by people who encouraged her.
Educational access can be interpreted in many different ways. For Maria and me, access was given to us by those who thought we were capable. When I came to Vermont, I began working with children of all ages. Some are more challenging than others, but I have found that patience and positive energy go a long way both inside and outside of the classroom. No matter what the circumstances, when a student finds a teacher who motivates, captivates, and encourages them, that student takes positive steps forward.

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
President John F. Kennedy

Many of us have heard the phrase, “Education is the great equalizer”. In fact, I suspect that most of us have used the phrase once or twice in our work. Certainly the sentiment is one shared by many, or most, throughout our society and our world, and a hard one with which to disagree. But, when we use the phrase, we use it as if the concept of education as an equalizing agent is a novel theory, a late 20th early 21st century invention. Of course, it is not. Education has been the great equalizer for hundreds of years. The only difference today is that the level of education needed to compete and thrive in today’s global economic marketplace is quite different than it was in President Kennedy’s time. In his time, a high school diploma translated into a good job, with a good wage and economic security for one’s family.

Today, the tables have turned, and no longer is a high school diploma, alone, a ticket to economic success. Instead, today’s path to an economically vibrant, comfortable, successful life must include a higher education, and in particular a four-year degree. The good news is that society can, with a great deal of unanimity, agree on this point. The bad news, though, is that this same society is failing most low-income, and many middle-income kids, by perpetuating systems and structures that cause higher education to be an unattainable dream. Meanwhile, policy makers, higher education institutions, and others sit back and watch as the train speedily moves out of view from the station.

With the escalating costs of an undergraduate education, the shift from need-based to merit-based financial aid, and the continued emphasis on legacy admittance, the college access gap between young people from low- and upper-income families has never been wider. At the most alarming of rates, bright, talented, hard-working kids from low- and middle-income families are being priced out of higher education opportunities. For example, this year, 21 of the 36 Boston Public High School Valedictorians had unmet financial needs high enough that they were at risk of being left behind by our country’s higher education system. If we use this group of students as a proxy for the most academically talented and successful kids in the Boston Public Schools, we paint a very sad picture of affordability and accessibility for bright kids coming from low-income families. It is imperative that we examine this issue and remove the barriers that prevent smart, motivated students from attaining their higher education lifelong economic dreams.

Access = Economic Prosperity; Inaccessibility = Declining Economic Productivity for our Nation

For most, a college degree will be the key in achieving economic well-being. According to the College Board, workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 75 percent more than those with only a high school diploma. Over a lifetime, the gap in earnings between those with only a high school diploma and those with a bachelor’s degree or higher exceeds $1 million. Not only are the economic returns from higher education positive for the individual, but for the nation and our region as well. A report released by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, called Access Denied: Restoring the Nation’s Commitment to Equal Education Opportunity, explained that by significantly narrowing the gap between college-going rates of the highest and lowest income students we would add approximately $250 billion to the gross domestic product. Furthermore, college graduates are the primary source of highly skilled professionals for our nation’s rapidly growing new economy industries like biotechnology, telecommunications, financial and professional services, higher education, and health care. Therefore, the alignment of education and economic growth will continue to be of critical importance if we wish to remain among the world’s leading industrial forces.

Barriers to Access: A Perfect Storm

Every year, access to a higher education gets more and more difficult for low- and middle-income youth. The obstacles preventing low- and middle-income youth from reaching their higher education dreams plentiful, complex, and multiplying, making college matriculation an art and a science all in one. In order to attain their higher education dream, low- and middle-income students not only must get good grades, participate in school community activities score well on the requisite standardized exams, and visit and apply to a varied and diverse portfolio or schools, but they have to spend as much time researching and strategizing ways to pay for their dream. In this way, they are tremendously disadvantaged in comparison to their wealthier peers.

Sadly, a perfect storm has formed causing access to a higher education, and thus, lifelong economic success, to be, in a word, inaccessible. Costs continue to rise, both entry costs for first-year students and renewal costs for returning students. In fact, students are sold a certain set of goods and expectations on the way in and then realize a completely different — and more expensive — set once they are firmly ensconced on their campus. In the 2003 edition of the National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics we see the startling proof how expensive higher education has gotten. In a ten year period from 1993 to 2003, the cost of a public four-year institution doubled, a private four-year education increased by 60%. During a similar period, Financial Aid — both on the federal and state level — has stayed relatively flat, and has even declined slightly when compared to real dollars. For example, according to the Student Aid Alliance, while the maximum Pell Grant has increased to $4,050 in 2003-04, since its creation, in 1975, it has not kept pace with inflation, and today is only worth 86% of it value of 30 years ago.

Another factor that weighs heavily on low- and middle-income students accessing a higher education is the increased emphasis that institutions are placing on merit-based financial aid and the continued importance of legacy-based admissions policies. File both of these factors under the “rich get richer category,” which, unfortunately, is the reality of today’s higher education marketplace.

In the first case, schools are using their, often tight and limited, institutional financial aid budgets to attract the “best” students onto their campus — in part, hoping to increase their scores on such ranking systems as those conducted by US News and World Reports. Because these merit-based financial aid decisions often benefit upper-middle class, or even wealthier, students from high performing school districts or private preparatory schools, much less needy students get their tuition paid, while more needy students from less resourced areas are left watching from the sidelines. Fay Vincent, former Commissioner of Major League Baseball, shined an important light on this subject in a May 2005 Op-Ed in the Washington Post. Vincent said, “the high-income student is twice privileged — once in affording the better schools or special tutoring that help get the high scores, and then in getting a financial award.” A second example of higher education access being easier for more socio-economically advantaged youth is the tried and true legacy admissions policy subscribed to by many of America’s most elite colleges and universities. These policies propagate the significant divides — particularly along economic and racial lines — that exist on many of our nation’s elite college campuses, and lead to a privileged class become more and more privileged and those non-legacies left out. In both instances, with merit-based aid and legacy admissions, the haves continue to get the upper hand on economic growth, and the have-nots have to fight twice as hard — if not harder — to get their share of the American dream.

Solving The Access Gap: A New Deal for America’s Youth

America has been hit with a depression of sorts in the form of the inaccessibility of a higher education for our Nation’s low- and middle-income youth. In the same way that FDR responded to the 1920′s depression with a series of programs and policies that helped our Nation through that crisis, we need to invest in bold solutions to eradicate the college access crisis. No one disagrees with the idea that more governmental financial aid will help to ameliorate the crisis at hand. But, in absence of such a windfall of support, there are things we all can begin to do right away. Certainly a part of any “New Deal” would be the de-emphasis of merit-based aid programs and legacy admissions. Both perpetuate the gap between rich and poor and have and have-nots, and neither have many champions outside of the entitled class. As a society, we must promote fresh ideas that reach beyond financial aid as the sole solution to this problem. Below are three such ideas that foster greater access and require a mix of local, campus based action, and governmental action:

1. Create a new Federal Initiative Called “AmeriCollege” that engages college undergraduates as mentors and coaches to young people interested in and applying to college. This program could be operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service as a focus funding area of the current AmeriCorps or Learn and Serve America Programs. Such a program could be run by higher education institutions in their local communities or by community organizations in the college access field. Each year, college undergraduates would be recruited, trained, and paired with 4-5 young people interested in attending college, but at risk of not attending. These undergraduates would help coach and support their team of college aspirants through the selection, admission, and financial aid processes, ensuring that they would not be alone in the process of getting to college. Ample research has shown that having someone, in addition to a school guidance counselor, assist students with the college-going process has a significant impact on a student’s matriculation success.
2. Provide rewards and incentives for Higher Education Institutions who successfully recruit and retain a certain — significant — percentage of low-income students. Higher education institutions do all sorts of business with local, state and federal governments and agencies. Those governmental authorities should incorporate incentives and rewards into the application and review processes — for any and all business that they do with colleges and universities — which provide an extra benefit to those schools that reach and maintain a significant percentage of low-income students on their campus. So as to not unfairly benefit wealthier schools, incentives could also be geared to those institutions that show the greatest increases in recruitment and retention of low-income youth.
3. Increased Investment in Campus Community Service and Outreach Programs. Earlier this year, Campus Compact compiled a vast collection of studies that shines an important light on the deep connections that exist between community service learning and the retention of the young people who participate in such programs. There are innumerable benefits to further investment in these programs. First, the students feel a deeper connection to their school and their community, thus making them less likely to leave, while gaining real-world experience and connections that help them secure summer jobs, school-year internships, and possible post-college employment opportunities. The local community benefits from having more trained, dedicated, committed volunteers to help solve local problems that may exist. And colleges and universities build positive relationships with the local community, breaking down some of the typical town-gown issues that crop up regularly.

To make good on President Kennedy’s charge we must make access to a higher education attainable and affordable. It is all of our responsibilities to ensure that every young person who dreams the dream of going to college has the information and resources necessary to do so. That will only happen if we eliminate the many, and overwhelming, barriers that currently stand in the way of low- and middle-income young people and that dream. That will only happen if we build thoughtful programs and incentives that lead to increased accessibility for all young people, regardless of their economic upbringing and surroundings. But, most important of all, that will only happen if we all agree to act on what we already know — that “education is the great equalizer” and that without a higher education, future generations will be left to languish, missing out on the American Dream that our generation was so fortunate to have enjoyed.

Power is only important as an instrument of service to the powerless.
Lech Walesa

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

Accountability and articulation of students’ capability to perform in a knowledge-based, technology driven global society has increased. Employees are demanding a workforce with excellent critical reasoning skills that are grounded in democratic principles, with practical experience in the field, and the community. The good news is: “More than ever before, cities and universities are joining together in mutually beneficial partnerships to promote regional vitality and university development. (Richard M. Freeland, President of Northeastern University and Thomas M. Menino, Mayor, City of Boston. Chronicle of Higher Education Campus Viewpoints, p. 1.)

The desire that propels us to build and sustain a society lies in the cultural and historical values of our communities. Local and state decision makers dwell in the community; therefore, it is in everyone’s best interest to collaborate, in order to achieve successful outcomes at both the academic and the civic level. One engine fuels the other.

This essay will discuss the emerging trend of access and academic success. In the past, local communities looked to the universities and colleges as an avenue for improving local intellectual capital, economic opportunities and regional revitalization. For many civic leaders, higher education meant opportunities to educate first generation college students who would return to the community with new knowledge and critical thinking skills, to achieve change for the common good. Unfortunately, many students who graduated relocated in search of better job opportunities, leaving an economically and emotionally depressed community with a negative attitude towards the local colleges and universities. Also, as tuition cost increased, fewer students were able to attend college.

Columnist Thomas Charles (1994, p. 7) wrote that “when higher education is treated as a cyclical balancing wheel for state budgets, a social cost is imposed from which it is difficult to rebound: many students are excluded based on their ability to pay. Legislation linking State funding to the achievement of specific benchmarks reflects high priorities being placed on economic ’˜outputs’ and ignores public service, public engagement, critical thinking and democratic-building activities.”

In 2000, the Declaration of Responsibilities of Higher Education established a premise that, “We live in a time when every sector-corporate, government, and non-profit is being mobilized to address community needs and reinvigorate our democracy. We commit our institutions to wide range examinations of our civic and democratic purposes, through curricula and extra-curricular activities, socially engaged scholarship, civic partnerships and community based learning and research.”

Declarations like these set the stage for major civic organizations and higher education institutions to revisit, research, and document, the impact of this collaborative paradigm. We see new excitement and revitalization permeating the local communities, and cities are being transformed, in collaboration with the constituents they serve. There is a new sense of ownership and pride. Students work side by side with community partners, intentionally engaged in application of theoretical knowledge to real-life situations. This reciprocal teaching and learning experience is helping the student gain a clearer understanding of the needs in the community and a deeper knowledge of how career choices operate in the workforce. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Campus Viewpoints from Northeastern University, (2006) also states that “For their part academic leaders are much more concerned about local and regional conditions than they were in decades past. They have learned through experience that vital, thriving communities can attract talented students, faculty, and staff. Universities are moving beyond merely coexisting with their communities, toward working in concrete ways to support regional vitality in areas ranging from workforce development, to affordable housing, urban health, public safety, and business growth’¦ The hope is that these efforts will lead to a lasting shift paradigm for town-gown interactions: one that promotes constructive cooperation based on a fundamental alignment of interests.”

According to Webster’s Universal College Dictionary, ‘access’ is defined as: “the ability or right to enter or use; the right or opportunity to approach or speak with; and more important to me, is the definition which says, “The state, or quality of being approachable.” The entire education process from childhood to adulthood is a series of steps, systematically structured, to prepare for mastery of certain skills, to become an active member of that society. The regular setting for teaching in higher education is primarily within the walls of the university, an area set apart from the community. Communities where students are to return as educated citizens ready to play an important role in a community are essentially foreign to them. What value are the theories and abstract generalized concepts, if students have not learned their applicability to the community?

Authors Ray Marshall, and Marc Tucker (1992) stated: “The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for learning…nations that want high incomes and full employment must develop policies that emphasize the acquisition of knowledge and skills for everyone, not just a select few. To address these policies, we must think globally, engage in new ways of attaining knowledge, and deepen the value education access, brings to a nation’s success.”

Academic life should be a replication of the social/political constructs, and the best way to achieve that balance is to advocate for mutual access for all stakeholders. Each stake holder is essentially a gate keeper of knowledge that must be transferred, if a society is to remain sustainable. Vital traditional wisdom that can not be taught in the classroom must be learned at its source, the community. Mankind by nature is a social animal, unable to thrive in isolation. Advocates for individualism should understand the academic process that non-western cultures that work and play in groups have achieved.

As Astin & Astin (2000, p. 2) stated, ‘If the next generation of citizen leaders is to be engaged and committed to leading the common good, then the institutions which nurture them must be engaged in the work of the society and the community, modeling effective leadership and problem solving skills, demonstrating how to accomplish change for the common good”

Many of our students come to college without cultural grounding. What I am referring to is understanding one’s place in the society. The history, traditions and values learned from community engagement were not transferred to certain generations, because of the transient nature of many, underrepresented families’ lifestyles. Therefore higher education can serve as the bridge for access and plant the seeds for successful university-community partnerships, and increase the graduation rate for students.

African-American students seem highly developed in practical and creative skills; however, critical thinking skills and analytical skills must be improved. Education access does not always guarantee successful learning outcomes. African-American students’ learning styles are different and they ultimately fall through the cracks. Immense pressure is placed by politicians and policy makers to raise the level of achievement and accountability, to prepare these students for success in the global market place. Theories translated into practical applications help students to learn that multiple talents can be accessed to formulate or solve problems. Similarly, this applies to faculty who are habitual isolationists, many stuck in the rut of the traditional mode of a lecture style teaching because of the separate silos that exist on most campuses.

Thomas Charles (1994 p. 7) wrote that ‘The values, processes, and relationships that are unique to higher education and that bind colleges and universities to one another and the communities surrounding them are critical to sustaining, and advancing the causes of liberty, justice, security opportunity and economic productivity.’

The community is a living laboratory where the ambiguities of life challenge students to think outside the box. They not only are able to connect the concepts across disciplines, but discover latent skills that may have otherwise remained dormant. The community offers for many, an incentive, and a call to action, because members want to make a difference. There is ownership when one is actively involved in a project from start to completion. It has been proven through several studies that mice repeat and recall what makes them feel good. This is where the reward system works. Reinforced ‘feel good’ behavior occurs when students realize the difference they made by using their knowledge to impact someone in the community.

I believe in holistic learning and yes, it takes an entire village to make this happen. In the villages outside of the urban cities of West Africa, I noticed that part of what made the Bush Schools effective transmitter of education was an educational culture that promoted a sense of community that was supportive, safe and orderly, and conducive to a positive teaching and learning climate where achievements and success were regularly recognized and rewarded. Their education was not isolated but integral to the society, and a part of each person’s daily experiences. Family members and the community helped to nurture and mentor the students on their journey. Students had access to learn through apprenticeship at the feet of the local craftsmen. Listening and learning by doing, resulted in a mentoring relationship between the student and the craftsman.

To gain such experiential learning, we must not only take the students out into the community, but we must allow the community to have access into our campus environment. We must cultivate a state or quality of being approachable, as well as willingness to approach others. The non-traditional student population is itinerant in its pursuit of the specific education sought want, sometimes attending two campuses at once, and even taking online courses from another. We must cultivate a form of peripheral learning. Peripheral vision defined means all that is visible to the eye outside the central area of focus. In today’s global society, higher education cannot excel in isolation, students must not only be aware of theoretical and practical learning, but peripheral learning. Many of the underrepresented population are already adept in this area, because of the economic circumstances that focuses on self-preservation in case of sudden dangers. A typical phrase heard among students from socio-economically deprived background is: “Whenever I go somewhere unfamiliar, I quickly skirt or check out the territory for the nearest exit, just in case.” Students want to know how what is being taught in class relates to their immediate surrounding, and we as educators must be ready to guide them through this process.

The goal of learning is development of knowledge, skills, attitude, values, and other cognitive, affective, and motor qualities needed to deal effectively with life. This type of learning cannot occur with surface learning such as memorization of isolated facts. Knowledge transfer requires extended practice using knowledge in contexts other than where it was learned, and understanding the principles for using it appropriately in diverse life situations — that is, deep learning (Bransford et al.,1999).

For many civic leaders in the community, the thought of open access to the university is still novel. Strategies I use to ease the process are two fold:

• Participation in the community’s literacy and Civic League monthly meetings. During each meeting active listening is my norm because so much of the community’s history, strengths and needs are shared and discussed. I am also given an opportunity to share what is happening at the university in areas of service, new research and students’ accomplishments.
• Results: an after school tutorial program was established at the NSU Brambleton Community Outreach Center. Norfolk State University students from the School of Liberal Arts provide services four days per week.
• The Community partners are invited every other month for a light lunch discussion at the university. The joint taskforce which includes administrators, faculty, staff, and students, engage in group discussions for improving the quality of life in the community.
• Results: Needs generated from these sessions were: grant writing training, developing a curriculum for early childhood literacy, and assistance with adult illiteracy. In collaboration with the Hampton Roads, Chamber of Commerce Literacy program and the Office of Service-Learning, guest presenters from Norfolk State University and Old Dominion University’s sponsored program offices, conducted two workshops on grant writing during the academic year. A taskforce of students from the School of Education sit on the local public school Literacy Council, along with a faculty member, to assist with the curriculum revision. Students performed on-site service-learning by tutoring adults who are preparing to take their GED in the campus library, after 5:00 p.m., or on Saturday mornings. Allowing access to the library sparked the adults’ interest in becoming computer literate. (Many of the local community members do not have access to a computer.) “Much learning takes place informally and incidentally, beyond explicit teaching or the classroom, in casual contacts with faculty, staff, and peers and through community involvement.’ (Engelkemeyer & Brown, 1998)

Students must be given access to the community. This is where concepts such as citizenship, activism, social responsibility, exercising the right to vote, and academic success translate into meaningful learning and internalization of what matters most: using knowledge for the betterment of society. I envision a community learning incubator laboratory, placed in the community, maybe at a recreation center, where faculty, students, civic leaders and business entrepreneurs can share and learn from each other in a non-threatening environment. We plan to establish a student/community leader, mentoring for research purposes, and provide ongoing training for grant writing, community building, and economic partnership development. The civic and community faith-based organizations will conduct workshops to share the local history and best practices to improve outreach interaction. Leveraging resources that can be shared in preparation for natural disasters and sharing strategies for presenting issues at Town Hall meetings will help empower the community to be enablers and the students to become socially responsible.

In collaboration with the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment, ongoing evaluation of learning outcomes in the areas of academic learning, personal development, and program development (Conrad and Hedin, 1987) are annual benchmark indicators administered to evaluate the progress of service-learning for academic success at Norfolk State University.

University-community learning access for academic success comes in many forms just as the diversity of the students we serve. We must allow more creative modes of teaching. We must engage the globally changing community around us. The future belongs not only to students who are able to develop complex critical thinking and problem solving skills, but to those who are able to apply it to the myriad array of situations within the global marketplace. Faculty who are willing to be facilitators instead of teachers, willing to discern innovation in the making, and enable students to stretch beyond the rigidity of the classroom, must become the norm. With the power of technology, the world is just a click away, but it will never change the transformative powers of human interaction and interdependency, to propel us to the next level as engaged citizens of the world.

References

A.W. Astin and H. S. Astin. Leadership Reconsidered: Engaging Higher Education in Social Change, Battle Creek, MI; W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2000, p.2.

Conrad, D. and D. Hedin 1987, Youth Service: A guide book for developing and operating effective programs. Washington, D.C.

Kellogg Commission on the future of State and land-grant universities, 2000 Renewing the Covenant: Learning, discovery, and engagement, in a new age and different world.

Wright, M. E. (2001) What We Can Do: In T. Smiley (Ed.) How To Make Black America Better: New York: Random House Inc., N.Y. 2001

Leider, J.L (1985), The Power of Purpose, New York: Ballentine Books

Campus Compact (1999), Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education. Brown University, Rhode Island

Marshall R. & Tucker, M. (1992), Thinking for a living: Education and the Wealth of a nation. New York: Basic books

Bransford et. al.,(1999),Bransford, M., Thinker, D., Walterbros, R . Engelkemeyer, S. W. & Brown, S., (1998), Powerful partnership: A shared responsibility for learning. AAHE Bulletin (Oct. 10-12)

 

Educational access and success are typically framed as ‘getting into’ and ‘staying in’ college; getting good grades and graduating. When one is facing significant barriers to accessing and completing a college education, framing access and success in this way is necessary and right. But if one stops there, most of us would agree that we are not serving the interests of students as individuals or as part of a collective public. We must ask ‘education for what?’ and ‘success to what end?’ And we must consider the ever-changing world into which students need skills and dispositions that will realize their individual and collective potential. In this essay I reflect on the ways in which engaged scholarship contributes to successful students.

My own perspective is shaped by two roles I play at the University of California Los Angeles — analyzing large survey data sets at the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), and evaluating local partnerships between my university and communities in Los Angeles through the chancellor’s Center for Community Partnerships, which directs the “UCLA in LA” initiative. Both of these professional experiences have brought me into contact and conversation with many thoughtful others; the ideas I share are not new, but I hope by bringing some data into the discussion this essay can spark conversation and more research in this important area.

My enthusiasm and passion for this work is also shaped by my own experience as a parent of children in the public school system here in LA, and holding a leadership position at their school. I can see first-hand how success gets defined in different ways by parents, teachers and administrators who each have the best interests of the children in mind. Theory-meets-practice describes my work with my own children’s learning experiences as well as trying to implement change. A basic principle of assessment is that there needs to be some consensus and clarity around what to measure, and my experiences as scholar and parent underscore the point that consensus may be common sense, but is not common practice.

As part of a HERI study¹ of service-learning and civic engagement, we created a set of items for the 2004 Faculty Survey² that examined faculty beliefs and behaviors around issues of engagement. The data reveal interesting patterns of beliefs and practices that can contribute to larger discussions of civic engagement and engaged scholarship in higher education.

It’s clear from examining the responses of faculty members that there is stronger agreement over the importance of traditional academic skills than there is around concepts of civic engagement. Whereas 99 percent of faculty agree that it is very important or essential for undergraduates to develop the ability to think critically, and 94 percent report that helping student master disciplinary knowledge is very important or essential, only 61 percent attach such importance to preparing students for responsible citizenship. This is not surprising, of course, and one might argue that having over 60 percent of faculty members attaching high importance to the goal of preparing students for responsible citizenship is a good thing, but my point is that traditional academic skills seem to be viewed as somewhat distinct from preparing students for responsible citizenship. There is also consensus around what critical thinking is, and at least some agreement around what constitutes the knowledge base of various disciplines. In contrast, preparing students for responsible citizenship can be interpreted in any number of ways.

Furthermore, even though the majority of teaching faculty members believe that preparing students for responsible citizenship is very important, far fewer connect this belief to providing students practical experiences in community settings as part of their own coursework. For example, twenty-one percent of faculty report having taught a service-learning course in the past two years. My logic here is that if we are preparing students for responsible citizenship, we should be providing them opportunities to ‘practice’ engagement in communities beyond the campus, and that such opportunities need to be connected to academic course outcomes or learning goals. This perspective takes into account what we know from learning theory. Obviously, preparing students for responsible citizenship consists of a range of curricular and co-curricular activities, not just service-learning, but service-learning is a good example of a teaching tool used in academic courses to connect students with communities.

I’m not suggesting that every, or even most, faculty members need to use service learning. I do believe, though, that there is tremendous untapped potential to strengthen civic learning in higher education through community-based experiences that connect closely with academic goals such as critical thinking, effective writing, and disciplinary knowledge, not to mention developing an awareness of civic and community issues. Faculty members, departments, institutions, and students themselves all have a responsibility to explore where such connections can and should be happening.

Data from the Faculty Survey show similar gaps between faculty beliefs and practice when it comes to campus — community partnerships. Eighty-one percent of faculty members agree that “colleges have a responsibility to work with their surrounding communities to address local issues,” but only forty-two percent report collaborating with the local community in research/teaching during the previous two years, and forty-eight percent use their scholarship to address local needs. It seems to me that these gaps represent some untapped potential if faculty can more closely connect their own academic work with their espoused values. Clearly most faculty think that colleges and universities should play a role in addressing community issues, but are they perceiving it as their responsibility? They may view work with the local communities as the responsibility of some other campus entity, or perhaps they would like to be engaged, but for some reason are unable to more closely connect their own work with local community issues. This could be a function of time, experience in community-based work, or perceived lack of support for this work in their discipline or at the institution (or both).

Forty-six percent of faculty say that their institution places a high priority on creating and sustaining partnerships with surrounding communities, but fewer report that providing resources to faculty for such work is a high priority on their campus. Only thirty-one percent say that providing “resources for faculty to engage in community-based teaching or research” is a high priority at their institution, and among university faculty the percentages are even lower (27 percent of public university faculty and 28 percent of private university faculty).

In order to achieve real change in the level of faculty engaged scholarship, faculty members will need to make it a goal of their teaching and research. It will need to matter to them and they will need to feel that their institutions and disciplines value and support such scholarship. I don’t think anyone is arguing that all faculty members would be good in community-campus partnerships, but academic units would have to value engaged scholarship and community experiences enough to agree their students would benefit from the opportunity, and to support the work of those faculty members who are directly in involved in engaged scholarship and partnership work. Institutions could provide administrative support if many students are to be placed in community organizations, training/professional development opportunities in pedagogical issues related to this kind of work, and ultimately recognition in one’s department/discipline of the products of such work in the tenure and promotion process.

The link between faculty engaged scholarship and academic success of undergraduates is multifaceted. First, it can change the way faculty think about teaching and learning. In the service-learning studies we’ve conducted here at HERI, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with many faculty and staff members who are practicing or supporting service-learning. I’ve heard again and again that working with community agencies, and dealing with the issues that arise for students in community-based work, has fundamentally changed the way that faculty view their own work and the learning process for students. For some faculty members, letting go of being the (only) expert in the classroom is a not easy; for others the act of creating a course that makes clear connections between academic and community learning presents new challenges. But there is a consistent theme of this work challenging faculty to reflect on their own beliefs about knowledge, learning and teaching.

Second, students need opportunities to practice what we claim are the educational goals of our institution, whether that be traditional skills such as writing and critical thinking, or skills more recently acknowledged as important given the rapidly changing world in which we live, such as perspective-taking or working on teams with people from cultures dissimilar to one’s own. And faculty themselves tend to teach in ways that they experienced as students, absent professional development opportunities they may have to improve their teaching. In recent years students have been more exposed to cooperative forms of learning, which may help explain why early-career faculty members are more likely than advanced-career colleagues to use cooperative learning, group learning, group projects and reflective writing/journaling in their courses (Lindholm, Szelenyi, Hurtado and Korn, 2005). One can imagine similar changes over time if a critical mass of faculty were trained in doing engaged scholarship.

Engaged scholarship also has implications for graduate student success. In the apprentice system that describes many graduate programs, opportunities to work with communities to address ‘real-life’ concerns can offer graduate students opportunities to practice engaged scholarship. Most faculty members get their doctorates at large research institutions, so I don’t think we can underestimate the importance of the graduate student experience at research institutions.

Here at UCLA, the Community Partnerships provides financial support to graduate students to engage in partnership work, through the “UCLA in LA” initiative. This type of institutional support seems to be working on several levels. First, by providing graduate student support through faculty members, we hope we are strengthening institutional ties as well as providing graduate student support. In other words, we hope that faculty members and community partners will decide to continue a relationship, even when the graduate student moves on. Related to strengthening institutional ties is that a number of the funded partners report that having funding from the Chancellor’s Office has been leveraged to get more funding from other agencies, to build upon the partnership work.

We learned some lessons about funding graduate students since the “UCLA in LA” program began three years ago. Early on, we’d made the decision to fund graduate student work directly, believing that it was a good thing to acknowledge the experiences and enthusiasm graduate students might bring to such work. As the year progressed, it became clear to us at the Center that we had assumed the graduate students were working more closely with their advisors (who had to sign off on the funding proposal) than some in fact were. Several of the graduate students completed wonderful projects and others plodded along. For a few, unforseen circumstances became major road blocks rather than temporary challenges. We found that faculty members almost always use funds to support graduate students, and have since decided to support graduate students by funding faculty, as well as to increase the structure we provide for reports.

The funded partnership program has also strengthened the work of faculty members. In addition to leveraging these funds to attract more funding, faculty members have told us that simply recognizing and validating their work in communities is important. To be sure, some projects are with faculty members who are well-known in their fields for doing this kind of work well, but the fact that the institution is supporting and recognizing the work makes a difference. For example, a senior faculty member in the medical school shared with us that because the funds were from the Chancellor’s Office his community work was validated among his colleagues in ways that he had not previously experienced.

In numerous cases, faculty members have expressed that the funding provides them incentive and opportunity to engage in projects they’ve been wanting to do, but hadn’t yet found the time. For some, it is a chance to work more systematically with a community partner they’ve known but not worked closely with, for others it’s a chance to do a new project with a long-standing partner; still others are completely new to partnership work and/ or Los Angeles communities.

Early-career faculty members are engaging in this work despite their concerns about promotion and tenure. Some of these are being told by colleagues that working in communities is a career-killer. These concerns seem to be tempered by the opportunity to receive some support and recognition to follow their passion.

The final benefit I will mention is that for some faculty members, the “UCLA in LA” partnership program provides an entrée into new cross-disciplinary relationships. The most common partnerships have been between Education and other departments (i.e. engineering, bio-chemistry), but unique partnerships have emerged as well (i.e. Center for Human Nutrition in the Medical School and World Arts and Cultures). I believe that strengthening such cross-disciplinary relationships benefits the faculty involved, the students they teach, and our institution.

I want to emphasize here that I’m not advocating colleges and universities as a social service agencies, or merely sources of volunteers for community-based organizations, nor do I believe that higher education should be completely driven by a particular set of social concerns. A strength of higher education lies in stepping back from any given social issue and examining it systematically, from different disciplinary perspectives. Another strength is the support of work considered ‘basic’ research — research that will yield insight to solving seemingly unrelated problems. I don’t believe all faculty are capable of high quality engaged scholarship — any more than all faculty should be expected to be great teachers, prolific writers or productive researchers. What I do see, however, is quite a bit of untapped potential for engaged scholarship among faculty and students. The diversity of institutions in the American system assures that engaged scholarship will surely get enacted in any number of ways, just as differences across disciplinary ‘ways of knowing’ and ‘ways of teaching’ will influence practice.

This idea of engagement — engaged scholarship, civic engagement, community engagement, engaged students — has become a catch-all phrase that means many things. As a researcher and evaluator, I know that different constituencies will view engagement differently, just as they view higher education purposes in a variety of ways (job training, preparing citizens, having an educated cadre of leaders, addressing social problems, engines of local economies, etc.). While I don’t think there needs to be a narrowly national consensus, institutions and disciplines would benefit from increased dialogue about the goals of education, the role that engagement plays, and come to some clarity on what the various terms mean. The process would likely be as useful as the outcome, and once some agreement is reached, assessment will make more sense.

As useful as developing some common definitions, it is even more important to see engagement as part of a larger picture of how we view the education of successful students. The members and leaders of the American Association of Colleges and Universities have been addressing this issue for some time now, by examining the civic engagement, diversity work, and global perspectives movements within the larger framework of liberal education. I have particularly resonated with the idea that the time has come to connect these movements more closely to each other so that resources get focused on a more cohesive and integrated experience for students. My own research findings on the types of college experiences that ‘predict’ post-college engagement outcomes show that diversity experiences and study abroad significantly shape civic outcomes, for instance, empirical reinforcement for the belief that the three concepts are interrelated.

Connecting experiences with outcomes leads me to one final point in this essay: high quality educational experiences benefit all students. K. Patricia Cross asserts that “effective teachers have a basic understanding of the learning process” (2005, p. 2). In truth, I believe that faculty and students both need training on the learning process — it is sorely lacking in formal education at all levels. But with some support, I think an understanding of the learning process can be strengthened through engaged experiences on the part of faculty and students, as well as an awareness of how learning (or research, for that matter) can be used in communities outside of higher education. Engaged experiences can bring to the classroom new ways of knowing, of teaching, and of learning. And a deeper understanding of how we know and learn will strengthen engagement experiences.

¹ Understanding the Effects of Service-Learning: A study of Students and Faculty was supported by a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies, U.S.A. back

² Information on the triennial Faculty Survey can be found at the HERI homepage. The numbers reported here can also be found in the Amercan College Teacher: National Norms for the 2004-2005 HERI Faculty Survey (Lindholm, Szelenyi, Hurtado & Korn, 2005). back

References

Cross, K.P. (2005). On College Teaching. Center for Studies in Higher Education Research and Occasional Paper Series 15.05. Berkeley: CSHE, University of California Berkeley.

Lindholm, J.A., Szelenyi, K., Hurtado S. and Korn, W.S. (2005). The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2004-2005 HERI Faculty Survey. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

Ask most college administrators how they define access and they would probably reply “inclusive opportunity.” Ask most college faculty how they would identify a benchmark of success and they would probably reply “critical thinking skills.” Indeed, our traditional notions of educational access and success tend to be either numerically delineated, “the number of entering or graduating students” or characterized as producing rationally oriented “leaders” and “citizens”.

Certainly, expanding the educational participation of our increasingly diverse student body and developing the analytical abilities of our future leaders are laudable goals. The problem, however, is twofold. First, while we have strived to broaden access, our teaching and learning processes are often quite exclusive: faculty voices dominate class sessions; readings are not tied to contemporary events and issues; and assessment is based on accumulated facts.

Second, while we have endeavored to ensure developmental success, the outcome of our efforts (e.g., our graduates) may lack the motivation and problem solving skills to tackle real-life issues: students compete for grades rather than focus on individual learning; faculty forgo community-based assignments for multiple choice exams; and graduates tout careerism rather than community.
The result is that our educational access and success objectives remain unrealized. Students are disengaged from their classrooms because our teaching strategies are limited to lecture and recitation, and graduates remain disconnected from their neighborhoods and communities because their ways of knowing are limited to abstract logical arguments. At worst, such traditional methods serve to disenfranchise those who have been historically under-represented, thereby perpetuating racial, cultural, and economic divides. At best, situational access merely represents being present and academic success is restricted to increased cognition.

Higher education faces a severe pedagogical and epistemological predicament. How do we redefine access as active participation that incorporates the visions and voices of all learners? How do we redefine success as responsive knowledge acquisition and utilization in building democratic bridges between individuals and groups? And, how do we create fully inclusive learning environments that facilitate community-centered critical consciousness?
Campus Compact has responded with a novel and provocative answer: service-learning. The goal of service-learning is development of civically minded students who possess analytical problem solving abilities and self-identify as community change agents as a direct consequence of their community-based learning experiences. The epistemology of service-learning is a promising revolution that has sparked an instructional evolution where access and success are equated with teaching and learning practices that effectively link students with each other and with their communities as critically engaged learners.
Indeed, research confirms that students who participate in service-learning evidence a wide array of outcomes including critical thinking skills (Kendrick, 1996); problem solving and reflection skills (Cress, Kerrigan, & Reitenauer, 2003); communication skills (Jordan, 1994); commitment to helping others (Astin, Sax, & Avalos, 1999); and self-concept development (Berger & Milem, 2002). However, other researchers have found that students involved in community-based learning experiences were not aware that civic responsibility was even a goal of the course (Cress, Collier, & Reitenauer, 2005; Ikeda, 1999; Jessen & Ramette, 1998).

Undeniably, faculty play a vital leadership role in structuring meaningful community-based learning experiences (Bringle & Hatcher, 1998; Eyler & Giles, 1999; Driscoll, 2000). Instructors are the catalysts for creating connections between the course content, the service experience, and broader student learning outcomes. The challenge faced by colleges and universities today is to further identify, hone, and integrate service-learning teaching strategies that truly enhance access and success. So, what might be the central tenets of a service-learning pedagogy of access and success to which faculty might aspire?

Nearly three decades ago, Bowen (1977) argued that “higher education should equip students?to discover what is right in society as well as what is wrong” (p. 49) in developing cognitive, affective, and behavioral abilities that allow for full individual engagement with our communities. In other words, beyond mere intellectual development, students must learn to know (understand), to feel (make meaning), and to do (apply their skills) as aspects of integrating themselves as contributing members of society (see diagram 1). Essentially, a service-learning pedagogy of access and success springs from this tripartite foundation of: 1) the acquisition of knowledge (understanding); 2) the analysis of issues (meaning making); and 3) the application of skills (doing).

The Acquisition of Knowledge (Understanding)

A basic premise of education is that the accumulation of knowledge leads to an increased sense of intelligence. Unfortunately, we have excessive examples of where “smart” people do “dumb” things to others and the world around them whether intentionally or unintentionally. Similarly, too often students are sent out into communities without adequate preparation for understanding the needs and nuisances of their clients and community partners (Reitenauer, Cress, & Bennett, 2005). Case and point, over one-third of students reported that their understanding of social problems, and knowledge of people from different races and cultures was weak or very weak prior to their service-learning experience (Cress, 2003). The consequence can be students who blame victims for their own victimization and resentment from the community who accuse higher education institutions of using them to perpetuate inequities in power and privilege. Such a situation promotes neither access nor success.

To counteract preconceived stereotypes and misinformation, carefully selected readings can provide factual data as the cognitive scaffolding for building increased understanding of community issues. Pea (1993) contends that faculty who provide students with the resources and means for acquiring appropriate contextual knowledge of real world issues facilitate the development of “distributed intelligence.” He suggests that the capacity to, “think well — our intelligence — resides not just in our heads but is distributed throughout the physical, social, and symbolic environment” (Perkins, 1994, p. 105). By actively relating course content to actual community issues, students become capable of distributing their intelligence to social, economic, environmental, health, and political issues. This, in turn, positions students to utilize their knowledge for problem solving efforts rather than mere charitable acts of service. As such, access for at-risk populations is improved and the likelihood of successful interactions with the community is increased.

It may seem rudimentary, but the more instructors explicate the educational intent behind community work the more likely are students to deepen their understanding of themselves and their communities. Contemporary readings on civic responsibility, racial/ethnic issues, and gender/women issues are significantly related to students’ understanding of local political issues, understanding of local social issues, and understanding of how to make a community difference (Cress, 2003). Since students often engage with aspects of the community that are unfamiliar to them (both the people and the issues), background readings and opportunities to discuss the social and political contexts of the service experience add considerably to student elucidation and understanding.

Centering our acquisition of knowledge in the community offers us the ability to enhance critical thinking skills by linking them with broader notions of intelligence (Gardner, 1993; Goleman, 1995; Kolb, 1984). This newly shaped community-informed intelligence helps us move beyond the construction of an “argument culture” that conditions our approach to political, economic, social, religious, and cultural issues as a fight between opposing sides, to a new civic responsibility paradigm that emphasizes critical consciousness and collaboration. As community participants, learners become “whole persons who develop knowing in context, by becoming agents of their own learning through the construction of identities within their community” (Wildman, 2004, p. 254).

The Analysis of Issues (Meaning Making)

If our understanding within a community context is the first epistemological step for increasing access and success, then meaning making through critical analysis is the second. As Dewey (1916) aptly asserted, mere knowing is not enough. For Dewey, “pedagogy and epistemology were related — his theory of knowledge was related to and derived from his notions of citizenship and democracy” (Giles & Eyler, 1994, p.78) through the intentional utilization of critical reflection. Indeed, Dewey (1933) argued that reflective thinking is the key to whether an experience is actually educative. He believed that to truly comprehend an experience, it is imperative to consider how you are affected by it. In other words, connecting our thinking with our feeling is what generates meaning of the circumstances.

According to Walters (1994), in contrast to traditional notions of reflection (a.k.a., critical thinking skills) where the emphasis is on abstract logical arguments that are seemingly analytical, impersonal, universal, and objective, it is possible to extend our understanding of critical analysis to a wider suite of human capabilities that connect the person to the community (Harvey & Knight, 1996; Walkner & Finney, 1999). As Gallo (1989) describes, this definition of critical analysis takes us beyond “disembodied logicism” to more holistic notions that include empathy, compassion, and imagination in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions that affect the well-being of community members (Halpern, 1996).
Barnett (1997) characterizes students engaged in this type of meaning-making reflection as “critically connected beings”. Such individuals appreciate the intricate and meaningful interdependence between themselves and their community. They are able to analyze, for instance, the multiple factors (e.g., economic, political, sociological, psychological) that lead to community challenges like homelessness, while concurrently feeling concern for those who are homeless. Moreover, they come to recognize that homelessness is not cured through soup kitchens. Nor does our responsibility as community citizens end with ladling the soup. As Dewey (1933, 1938) suggested, formal analysis is insufficient for such purposes. Instead, reflection centered in the subjective meaning of the experience is what connects us together as human beings.

All too often our reflective practices have relied on mere descriptions of service experiences. Student journals highlight client interactions, list the issues, note problem incidents, and clock the number of hours at a community site. Such depictions are an entry place for bridging understanding. But if we desire to leverage positive community change by strengthening access and success, then, as Collier and Williams (2005) suggest, reflective analysis must include not only our observations, but also personal relevance and connection. Student papers, and small group and large group discussions should encourage learners to address such questions as: How do you feel when you reflect upon the interaction you described? What assumptions did you bring with you about the people in this relationship? What assumptions do you think the community partner had about you? Has the experience changed your personal understanding of service? What knowledge gained from your academic major (concepts or theoretical models) might explain the underlying processes of this community issue?

Thus, meaningful reflection in service-learning experiences allows students to situate thinking, feeling, and action within actual community contexts. The result is that “through the process of effecting transformations [the] human self is created and recreated” (Greene, 1988, p. 21) with a fuller potential for affecting others.

The Application of Skills (Doing)

In a recent survey of service-learning participants, only half of the students reported an increased understanding of the relationship between community issues in their service experience and local political issues (Cress, 2003). Improving access and success in our communities is premised upon our ability to develop students as community problem solvers who can evaluate potential solutions utilizing local, national, and global sources in forming and implementing a trajectory for change. Rather than simply referring to de-contextualized abstract knowledge as the normal scope of problem solving, a fundamental relationship is developed between an examination of the world and effective action (Bowden & Marton, 1998; Walkner & Finney, 1999). In this spirit, service-learning offers students the opportunity to become critically engaged individuals by analyzing underlying assumptions about community problems, and then testing those ideas through application of their knowledge and skills.

Indeed, one of the unvoiced secrets of service-learning is that things can and often do go wrong. Even with the best of intentions community members can react negatively to the presence of students, community agencies may experience staff changes and not uphold their responsibilities, and/or conflict may occur within and between student teams (Voegele & Lieberman, 2005). In short, failures happen.

How learners and faculty respond to the dynamics of failure impacts community access and success. Conflicts and misunderstandings that are addressed early in the service experience can usually be remedied. One strategy for clarifying roles, responsibilities, and tasks is to develop an Action Learning Plan for Serving (ALPS) as a goal setting and service orienting experience for students and community members alike (Reitenauer et al, 2005). The ALPS can then serve as an individual, team, and group framework for reflecting upon assumptions, expectations, timelines, and duties. Moreover, the skills required for a successful service-learning experience are made both evident and prominent. Such an approach helps faculty facilitate a service-learning environment that sharpens student application of knowledge and skills.

As Halpern (1996) suggests, students become mindful of their interdependence with community when service-learning allows them to be more consciously aware of their actions and thought processes in the midst of application. The consequence is personal and community empowerment since students see themselves linked with community life beyond college (Harvey & Knight, 1996). Parks (2000) describes this kind of shift in critical consciousness as a distinctive mode of meaning making where students become critically aware of composing one’s reality. As one’s identity forms within this context of and in connection to the community, students’ self-authorship coordinates their beliefs, values, and behaviors (Kegan, 1994). Thus, students become equipped for creating community change as congruence between their beliefs and behaviors align. Indeed, nearly three-fourths of surveyed students reported that as a result of participating in a senior Capstone community service course, they had a better understanding of how to use their skills to make a difference in their community and that the service experience helped to transform their views of the world and themselves by deepening their motivation and ability to promote social justice and equity (Cress, 2003).

The Service-Learning Pedagogy of Access and Success

Improving our communities now and in the future is dependent upon providing the leadership to give students the knowledge, skills, and experiences that are less self-referenced and more community-referenced (Astin & Astin, 2000). The Service-Learning Pedagogy of Access and Success is a method for achieving those goals. Through the acquisition of knowledge that connects instructive readings with community challenges, the analysis of issues that reflects upon objective as well as subjective social, political, and psychological factors, and the application of skills that encourages learners to actively employ their multiple talents, students are positioned on a path to become consciously engaged community members. Such individuals are “able to place themselves in the context of a diverse world and [to] draw on difference and commonality to produce a deeper experience of community” (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002, p. 22). In so doing, students have a broadened understanding of their role in complex community, state, and national issues and develop the capacity to enact change that leads to increased access and success for everyone.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities (2002). Greater expectations : A new vision of learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC : Author.

Astin, A. W., & Astin, H. S. (2000). Leadership reconsidered : Engaging higher education in social change. Battle Creek, MI: W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Astin, A.W., Sax, L. J., & Avalos (1999). Long term effects of volunteerism during the undergraduate years. Review of Higher Education, 22(2), 187-202

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. Buckingham, SRE: Open University Press.

Berger, J. B., & Milem, J. F. (2002). The impact of community service involvement in three measures of self-concept. NASPA Journal, 40(1), 85-103.

Bowen, H. R. (1977). Investment in learning: The individual and social value of American higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bringle, R. & Hatcher, J. (1999, Summer). Reflection in service-learning: Making meaning of experience. Educational Horizons, 179-185.

Colliers, P.J. & Williams, D. R. (2005). Reflection in action: The learning-doing relationship. In C.M. Cress, P.J. Collier, & V.L. Reitenauer, Learning through serving: A student guidebook for service-learning across the disciplines. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Cress, C.M. (2003). Critical thinking development in service-learning activities: Pedagogical implications for critical being and action. INQUIRY: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines.

Cress, C.M., Collier, P.J., & Reitenauer, V. L. (2005). Learning through serving: A student guidebook for service-learning across the disciplines. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Cress, C.M., Kerrigan, S., & Reitenauer, V.L. (2003). Making Community-Based Learning Meaningful: Faculty Efforts to Increase Student Civic Engagement Skills. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The theory of inquiry. Troy, MO: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Lexington, Mass: Heath.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

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One of the enduring challenges for higher education during the 20th century was learning how to accommodate the increasing demand for education from populations that had been excluded from pursuing a college degree in the past. Social movements and legal mandates such as the GI Bill, Civil Rights, and Affirmative Action pressured institutions to incorporate educational equity for the greater good of our society. But progress has been slow, and an inherent reluctance to modify systems that sustain traditional academic cultures has diffused efforts for institutional change. So far, the results for achieving diversity have been mixed. There are increasingly more women than men going to college and graduate school today than ever before. But despite the efforts, many segments of our national population remain grossly underrepresented, especially in our science, math, technology, and engineering programs. And as we enter the 21st century, our national government is backtracking on the progress made toward advancing diversity in higher education. Academe faces a dilemma; some say it is a crisis, and we have become stalled at a cultural crossroad unable to determine which direction to go.

However, around the turn of the century, higher education encountered developments in distance learning technology that could change its ways forever. The development of the Internet forced institutions to consider new ways of teaching, learning and doing research. As so-called “virtual universities” emerged, many have had more success in attracting diverse populations than traditional colleges and universities. Despite their for-profit business models, their missions and Internet-based degree programs are grounded in core values emphasizing social change and community engagement that is highly attractive to historically underrepresented groups (Ibarra 1999b).
In fact, evidence is mounting that academic programs or institutions that emphasize people-oriented relationships, family/community engagement, supportive psychological environments, working in groups, and collaborative learning environments, to name a few characteristics, are not only attractive to underrepresented populations, they also provide conditions for them to thrive and achieve academic success in fields where they have been traditionally unsuccessful in the past (Bowen & Bok 1998, see also Ibarra 2001, Treisman 1988). The dynamics of diversity has changed over the last decade, and a new paradigm is emerging that I call Context Diversity, which could provide solutions for achieving equity without relying on traditional methods of affirmative action. To begin solving our conundrum, we must first understand the three-dimensional nature of Structural, Multicultural, and Context Diversity.

Dimensions of Diversity: Structural, Multicultural, Context Diversity

The concept of cultural diversity as we know it today assumes that we need do little more than recruit and retain people of different gender, heritage or ability to achieve equity in our institutions. Since 1965, affirmative action encouraged us to create equitable access for those who previously lacked admission to our institutions. This concept, often called Structural Diversity, is characterized as compliance-oriented and recruitment driven, and is measured mainly by increasing the number of minority or underrepresented groups of students, faculty or staff. The solution for increasing diversity was to create special programs for recruiting, retaining and remediation of minority populations, to help them overcome barriers to access and success.

Accomplishing structural diversity seemed simple: refine and expand support operations and business functions of our institutions to accommodate diverse populations. This strategy rested upon three basic assumptions: (1) A critical mass of underrepresented populations was needed to achieve diversity; (2) Underrepresented students were disadvantaged and needed remediation; and (3) Underrepresented populations would eventually assimilate into the culture of our institutions. The policies were derived from a deficit-thinking model; that is, minorities lacked skills, experiences and resources, and needed additional help to adjust to the system. While the number of underrepresented populations increased gradually on our campuses over the years, these programs rarely achieved projected outcomes.
Because structural diversity emphasizes human resource functions such as access, support and remediation, diversity initiatives were often marginalized in our institutions as business operations far removed from the main business of academic work. In time, diversity initiatives simply became a human resource function?hiring faculty and admitting students to achieve a critical mass of underrepresented populations. Although increasing critical mass can be achieved, just having more women or minorities or people with disabilities in an organization, does not necessarily change the way of doing business. It does not guarantee a diverse environment nor does it assure institutional cultural change. This model cannot alone achieve its implied outcome. Consequently, structural diversity has limited applications for influencing academic culture change, but it is still a vital and necessary part of our current diversity paradigm. Consequently, structural diversity is the primary source for providing Best Practices models.

Multicultural Diversity is a dimension of campus diversity introduced during the 1970′s and 80′s to infuse cultural customs or gender issues (multiculturalism) into our institutions. Underrepresented populations were valued for their potential to recruit and retain others and to contribute toward making institutions more aware of multicultural issues. The problems it addressed were the negative campus climates for women and minorities, the lack of multicultural awareness and embedded institutional discrimination.

The solutions involved various activities: introducing campus-wide minority action plans, increasing the number and type of student service programs and creating new cultural awareness initiatives, and most importantly, creating new ethnic and women’s studies programs. The objective was to change campus attitudes toward more positive views on ethnic, gender and racialized issues. The focus was on student affairs, with some attention to curriculum change, but little if any attention was directed toward enhancing academic affairs?the primary educational arena of higher education. Diversity initiatives remained predominantly support functions or Human Resource functions, and the strategy was, as before, to strengthen educational support for recruitment/retention programs. The only notable change over the years was the shift from a negative perception of student remediation to more positive approaches toward student academic preparedness. Although ethnic/racial studies programs can influence academic core requirements, the increases in underrepresented populations on campus have been slow to materialize.

Rethinking the Problem

A major problem for achieving diversity today lies in the origin of academic cultures. The context of higher education in the U.S. is locked into a centuries old German research model imported from Europe and clamped on a British colonial college system. The predominance of a particular and preferred learning environment tends to exclude all the others, and thus defines the cultural context of higher education today. The outcome is not only a Euro-centric learning community, but also a hidden dimension of cultural context that has been invisible and ignored until now. Today, we must look beyond operational models based on outmoded ideas about one-size fits all educational pipelines and focus instead on changing the cultures of organizations to accommodate new kinds of populations that are attracted to applied or community-oriented education. There has always been a realization that educational systems need to change, but what has been lacking is a model for doing it.

Context Diversity describes an emerging transformative paradigm that emphasizes reframing rather than reforming academic cultures to address the needs of all populations, and especially underrepresented groups. Context Diversity strives to create a learning community with myriad ways to attract diverse populations, and have them thrive in an academic or workplace environment. The concern for access is still vital, but it is not the main problem. The lack of underrepresented populations (low critical mass) is a symptom, but not the problem. Underperformance issues and conflict over the cultural context of higher education surface as major problems. The solutions involve finding creative ways to change campus climate and academic culture, with the emphasis on systemic change. One strategy is to reframe (expand/shift) pedagogy and curriculum without giving up good educational practices. Another is to shift diversity initiatives from current concepts about recruitment and retention to concepts that emphasize attracting and thriving. Results are measured not only by how well we attract diverse populations, but also by how well we enhance our campus cultures to improve upon the academic and work performance among all students, faculty and staff. Rather than focus on just using structural models for increasing diversity, we should focus on ways to study, apply and eventually build diversity into the context of our higher education system, our learning communities and beyond. This vision correlated directly with the concept of embedded engagement described in the 20th Anniversary Visioning Summit framing essay by Barbara Holland and Liz Hollander for the Campus Compact.

Multicontextuality

Associated with the new diversity paradigm is a critical theory for changing academic culture I call Multicontextuality (Ibarra 2001). The concept, derived from research done since the 1960′s (Hall 1984, Ramirez 1991), is based on a set of dynamic principals of cultural context and cognition that can be incorporated into the fabric of our institutions (see Ibarra 2001). A growing number of individuals entering higher education since WWII, (and not just the Millennial generation born after 1980, Oblinger 2003), bring with them a mix of individualized characteristics described as their cultural context that is quite different, and even at odds with the cultural context of academe and college/university life. These learned preferences influence how they interact and associate with others, use living space, perceive concepts of time, process information, respond to various teaching and learning styles, perform academically or in the workplace, and include many other cognitive factors that were imprinted on them from birth to maturity by family and community, and that continue to help shape their world view.

Researchers identified a variety of national origin cultures that exhibit Specific or Low Context tendencies that include Northern European populations, such as English, German, Swiss, and Scandinavian people. Other groups exhibiting Generalized or High Context tendencies include Asians, Arabs, people from other Middle Eastern and Mediterranean-based countries, Africans, Latin Americans, and native North American Indian groups. US populations, derived from voluntary and involuntary immigrant groups exhibit to varying degrees the low or high context imprinting of their heritage origins. However, mainstream American culture, including higher education, is primarily low context, and North American men are generally, but not always, more low context than North American women. But research among Latino graduate students and faculty in the 1990′s, found they were neither high nor low context but instead Multicontextual — a learned ability to survive in low context academic environments while maintaining high context characteristics in other aspects of life. Though academically successful, the consequences of this dual-world existence lead to conflicts, compromises and even underperformance issues in academic life, which Bowen and Bok described in their book, The Shape of the River (1998).

As critical theory, Multicontextuality explains how the composite of peoples’ experiences throughout their lives affects their experiences and performances in higher education. But we pay little attention to the fact that institutions also have their own imprinted cultural contexts — a predominantly Euro-centered research model steeped in rational scientific methodology that favors basic science over applied science and civic engagement. For many, this is out of synch with the needs of students and faculty today, and as a result, it is an incomplete learning institution. But rather than have people adjust to the system, the system needs to adjust to the people. The new objective for increasing diversity is to reframe and balance the various principals of cultural context found within the current organizational ways we do scholarship in order to create a more inclusive and better teaching, learning and working environment for attracting diverse populations to higher education, so they may thrive.

However, producing students trained to conform to the traditional university model produces people unprepared to function at their best in an increasingly high context or multicontext world. In other words, the reward systems within academic institutions are not adapted to the kinds of rewards that will encourage success in a world that is different in almost every possible way from the nineteenth century European world that created the modern university system. As a result, few minorities, especially Latinos, are attracted to the traditional world of academe.

Context Diversity and Community-Based Learning

If a new diversity paradigm is emerging, how can we detect it? Anecdotally, many colleagues working with diversity initiatives, or in minority programs, would tell you about the important association between community-oriented academic work and their success in attracting underrepresented populations. Some research suggests that differences in cultural context could provide a logical alternative to explain why capable minority undergraduates tend to transfer from majors in science, engineering, math or technology to pursue degrees in the humanities or social sciences (Ibarra 1999a). But the data from faculty surveys collected by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) offer the best clues for observing the differences between the cultural contexts of diverse populations of faculty and the educational context of our colleges and universities on the issue of community-based learning.

For example, data in Tables 1 and 2 below are taken from the HERI Faculty Survey 1995-96 and are the most recent data disaggregated by gender and ethnicity (from Ibarra 2001, 210-217). From approximately thirty-four thousand respondents, (22, 000 males and 12,000 females), approximately 1,800 were minority males 1,100 minority females.

Table 1: Instill Commitment To Community Service (Important Value Question)

Majority Males	29%	Majority Females	42%
African. American Males	54%	African American Females	57%
American. Indian Males	44%	American Indian Females	50%
Asian American Males	32%	Asian American Females	47%
Latino Males	46%	Latino Females	43%

Table 1 shows the percent of faculty who believe it is important to instill a commitment to community service in undergraduate education. From previous analysis derived through preliminary inter-rater reliability tests, this question was considered an element that differentiated cultural context (Multicontextuality) between ethnic and gender groups (Ibarra 2001). Majority males, notably the largest tenured population in the survey, represent the benchmark group, simply because their predominance in numbers over time has allowed them to set standards for performance and preferences for educational pedagogies. In the survey they appear to be the least interested instilling commitment to community service among all the groups responding. In fact, the differences between the Majority Males and all others are often twenty or thirty percentage point spreads, and they are significant enough to suspect that such differences play an important role in faculty evaluations, promotions and tenure for underrepresented populations.

Table 2, however, shows a very different picture. Despite the fact that female and minority respondents highly valued community service as a component of undergraduate education in Table 1, a scant number of them actually required it in their classes. In fact, the differences found in Table 1 almost disappear in Table 2. Although it cannot be determined from the data exactly why this occurs, one can suspect it is a consequence of limited time, space and resources. Despite the high value placed on community service, apparently few instructors can make it a class requirement for their undergraduate students. If so, one hypothesis is that an important experience for undergraduate education is likely being stifled in its application by the cultural context of our educational system that cannot provide multiple contexts (i.e. time, space, etc.) to allow for community service experiences. However, further research is needed to validate this hypothesis.

Table 2: Community Service In-Courese Required (Teaching Methods Question)

Majority Males	1%	Majority Females	4%
African. American Males	5%	African American Females	11%
American. Indian Males	6%	American Indian Females	7%
Asian American Males	1%	Asian American Females	3%
Latino Males	3%	Latino Females	4%

The Challenge for Educational Access in the 21st Century

The Campus Compact is now celebrating 20 years of educating students for active citizenship, and building strong learning communities among scholars and academic leaders. The 20th Anniversary Visioning Summit framing essay by Barbara Holland and Liz Hollander includes a focus on bridging the opportunity gap by improving educational access and success for minority and immigrant populations throughout the nation. But higher education faces a major crisis, and it apparently cannot find solutions to the dilemma of diversity facing it today. The traditional residential university, its buildings and classrooms could become “relics” in the next twenty years according to predictions from the late management and business guru, Peter Drucker (Lenzer & Johnson 1997, 122). Those comments were predicated on the continued disregard for the impact of rising educational costs, for the rapid developments in distance learning technology, and for a total disbelief that for-profit Internet-based institutions could compete with traditional institutions in the future. Only time will tell the outcome, but the implications seem clear. Traditional institutions are too slow in dealing with major crisis’s, and may be incapable of making necessary course corrections in time to tackle fast-paced world events. The risk of rethinking the system could undermine the foundations that have guided universities for the past century and a half. Academic organizations react against change agents by accommodating them and co-opting their innovative programs in ways that will not lead to the destruction of the university itself. This is the failure of reform. Can Campus Compact’s focus on access and success develop breakthrough strategies to address complacency and resistance to change?

Perhaps reframing and not reforming is part of the strategy. Reframing suggests expanding, not necessarily eliminating or reforming those ways in which we teach, learn, and do research. To strike a balance with traditional learning and community service means accommodating more than one cultural context. This does not mean that colleges and universities should change from low- to high-context institutions, but that they must become multicontextual in order to align with and effectively educate learners of all types.

We start the reframing process within the divisions of Academic Affairs where both business and educational support functions take place. Affirmative action models tend to thrive in Student Affairs programs and Human Resource offices. But the academic units are the controlling systems of the institutional culture, and they are often devoid of diversity initiatives. If it is possible to reframe the context of Academic Affairs; that is, to rethink what we have ignored for over a generation of developing diversity programs, then Campus Compact will have a real breakthrough strategy. It will change the “faculty factory” model for producing the professoriate toward a model that helps contextualize faculty teaching and research. We can then generate new templates for our educational systems, all the way from k-16 to graduate school and beyond. We will be able to create new templates for business schools, government, and for science as well. Ultimately, the university itself could reclaim its place as an institution of civic engagement. To fundamentally change the operations of our current structures we need to move away from the outdated and inadequate German research model of disengagement. We must implement new diversity models that reconnect with our civic entities rather than dictate to communities how to behave. In short, it is time to reframe the Ivory Tower, and that is the challenge for Campus Compact in the 21st century.

References Cited

Bowen, W. G., and Bok, D. 1998. The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in college and University Admissions. Princeton, NJ,: Princeton University Press.

Hall, E. T. 1984. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, 2nd ed., Anchor Press/Doubleday Books, Garden City, New York.

Ibarra, R. A.1999a. Multicontextuality: A New Perspective on Minority Underrepresentation in SEM Academic Fields. Making Strides, (American Association for the Advancement of Science). 1, no. 3, (October): 1-9.

Ibarra, R.A. 1999b. Studying Latinos in a “Virtual” University: Reframing Diversity and Academic Culture Change. Julian Samora Research Institute, Occasional Paper, No. 48, October, proceedings from Latinos, the Internet, and the Telecommunication Revolution, East Lansing, MI: Julian Samora Research Institute.

Ibarra, R.A. 2001. Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ibarra, R.A. 2006. “Campus Diversity in Transformation.” Anthropology News, February, 47: 2, pg. 29.

Lenzer, R., and Johnson, S. S., 1997. Seeing things as they really are. Forbes, March 10, 1997, pp.
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Oblinger, D. 2003. Boomers, Gen-Xers & Millennials: Understanding the New Students. EDUCAUSE review, July/August; pp 37-47.

Ramírez III, M. 1991. Psychotherapy and Counseling with Minorities: A Cognitive Approach to Individual and Cultural Differences, Pergamon Press, New York.

Treisman, U. P. 1988. A Study of the Mathematics Performance of Black Students at the University of California, Berkeley, in Changing the Culture: Mathematics Education in the Research Community. N. D. Fisher, H. B Keynes, and P.D. Wagreich (eds.), CBMS Issues in Mathematics Education, Vol. 5, American Mathematical Society.

Introduction

Our country is facing an unprecedented challenge as it prepares for the future. It must succeed in a global marketplace and an increasingly hostile and divided world. In the past, our successes have been founded on a wealth of innovation and ideas, coupled with an educated and skilled workforce and a commitment to the common good. Our nation has thrived in a culture of democratic values, of citizens exchanging ideas to get the best services and government possible. Yet today we see widespread evidence that our citizens are succeeding at starkly disparate rates. Children from poor communities, youth from racially-isolated communities and urban environments, and adults who immigrate from other countries do not enjoy access to and achievement in our schools and institutions of higher education. Unless we address the root causes of these disparities through well-researched and proven programs, we run the risk of failing to create the educational and social platform from which all Americans can strive for success. Worse, we could create a more deeply divided society that will fray our social fabric and potentially unravel the measure of social integration and cohesion that made America strong.

Our goal in this paper is to outline the foundations of programs and practices we are implementing in Minnesota that have implications for communities all across the country. These programs are based on knowledge gleaned from research in a variety of areas, all of which points to a need for active, long-term collaboration between K-12 schools, institutions of higher education, and community organizations to ensure that those of our most vulnerable citizens who choose to attend our urban institutions in Minneapolis and St. Paul have optimal opportunities for access and success in school, in college, and in life. As our mission statements indicate, we seek to implement our “unwavering commitment to civic engagement” by developing collaborative initiatives that combine the strengths of our institutions of higher education to promote the common good for all members of our community.

Research Studies That Define Issues, Problems, and Practices

The problems we face are not new. Disparate levels of access to and success in school, higher education, and society have been recognized instances of inequality for decades. African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority groups have experienced far less economic and academic success than the majority population for as long as researchers have tracked the data. While almost everyone expresses an interest in closing the gaps in achievement, income disparity, and high school and college graduation, society can point to only relatively modest improvements in the forty years since the Civil Rights Act was passed. In our own state of Minnesota, recent research reveals that high school graduation rates for Caucasians average 79%, while the rate for African American students is 44% (Swanson, 2006). The graduation rates for Hispanics and American Indians are similarly low. This scenario is repeated with only local variations in every urban center and every state in the country.

The good news is that we know what causes these disparities, and even better, we know how to correct them. To implement the necessary remedies, we need the political will, the institutional leadership, and the social awareness to put into practice policies and programs that will truly make a difference.

A recent report on dropouts, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, describes the world as seen from the perspective of those who leave high school. In The Silent Epidemic (Bridgeland, Dilulio, and Morison; 2006) we learn that almost half of students left school because classes “were not interesting (p. 3).” A majority (88%) had passing grades and 74% would have stayed in school if they had it to do over again. More importantly, the report tells us that students would have stayed in school if they “had courses and programs that provided opportunities for real-world learning, such as service-learning, vocational education, and internships.” The notion of relevance and meaningful study is as important today as it was 30 years ago when much of the educational establishment promoted vocational education and civic curricula that connected young people with the community for career education, democratic knowledge and practice, and life-long learning.

Other studies, such as a report by national dropout expert Russell Rumberger, indicate that the issues of dropouts are complicated, and that academic achievement scores are not the only way to judge success in school (Rumberger and Palardy, 2005). They found that schools that are “effective in promoting learning (growth in achievement) may not necessarily be as effective in reducing dropouts or transfer rates (p.3).” Thus, programs designed to help youth achieve must also be equally concerned about preventing students from dropping out and about creating environments of stability and personal connection as they are about improving academic performance.

Still another major study, The Toolbox Revisited (Adelman, 2006), which follows a cohort of students from high school through postsecondary education, suggests there are aspects of their educational experience that can predict success in college matriculation. Several factors, including improved communication and outreach between postsecondary institutions and high schools, hold real potential for increasing success rates. Significant first-year credit generation (of 20 credits or more), high thresholds for course withdrawals (coupled with academic support), use of summer terms, avoiding delayed entry, and a high school curriculum of “academic resources” all help to ensure greater potential for graduation (p. xxv-xxvi). Yet, the report indicates, “despite increased participation of minority students in postsecondary education over the past quarter century, the gap in bachelor’s degree completion between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and Latinos and African Americans, on the other, remains wide (p. xxv).

Finally, a special report in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Schools and Colleges” (March 10, 2006) provides much information about the challenge of preparing high school students for success in college and the programs and practices that seem to be making a difference. In many ways, this report captures the recommendations for practices from all the above mentioned studies that ensure that high school students are not only prepared for college, but they have a good chance of successfully graduating from institutions of higher education. Such suggestions include:

• More rigorous academic preparation, including sufficient math, science, and language arts courses to ensure college level functioning;
• More dual enrollment programs, through which high school students earn college credit while in high school and enter college with credits toward graduation;
• More effective teachers, who can promote high-quality learning in an interesting, relevant, and engaging manner;
• More opportunities for individualized instruction and support for struggling students, including tutoring, mentoring, and counseling;
• More engaged, interesting curricula and programs that instill motivation and meaning in the high school and undergraduate experiences.

Creating Programs That Matter

Metropolitan State University and Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC) have attended to this body of research as they have developed policies and programs that address the needs of their Minneapolis-St. Paul and suburban communities. This research tells us that policies, to be effective, must sustain long-term collaborative relationships with schools and communities (Haycock, March 2006); must provide opportunities for the university and college to work on teacher preparation and educational development; must provide courses and programs that support tutoring, mentoring, and other initiatives that help K-12 students and teachers; must endorse programs and practices that combine resources from higher education with schools and community groups; and must open doors and financial resources to support access to and success in higher education institutions. All of these programs come with the endorsement and blessing of the university and college presidents and faculty and ensure that personnel, financial resources, and vision will work continuously toward goals of improving the educational climate and outcomes for all our community members. The goals of social justice and meaningful civic engagement are not mere slogans, but guidelines for practice.

A few examples will illustrate what we mean. When it comes to long-term collaborations around educational issues, both Metropolitan State and MCTC are heavily involved in higher education/school/community connections. Support for area youth occurs through school programs such as College for Kids, Achieving Higher Education and Dreams (AHEAD), YOUniversity at Metropolitan State, and Career Pathway Day, Public Achievement Program, and summer career exploration camps at MCTC. These programs directly involve higher education faculty, staff, and students in programs that affect children and youth in the schools. Designed as enrichment efforts, these programs engage youth in fun, educational activities on college campuses. Designed to impact elementary and middle school youth, direct classroom instruction and field trips expand their educational horizons, supporting skill, knowledge, and attitudinal development.

In addition, Metropolitan State and MCTC support Post Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO), a state program that allows high school students to participate in dual enrollment programs, taking college courses, often in their local high schools, and taught by college faculty, to both develop college level knowledge and skills and to provide them with early college credits so important to both access and success in higher education.

Metropolitan State and MCTC also support on-campus centers for service-learning and civic engagement. Such centers have been shown to be the single most important element on college campuses to ensure high-quality courses and programming (Bowley, 2003).

The Center for Community Based Learning (CCBL) at Metropolitan State (in its tenth year) and the newly developed Center for Civic Engagement at MCTC are working to develop courses and programs that continuously connect faculty, students, and resources with schools and community organizations for educational achievement and community development. Faculty workshops, coordination of AmeriCorps and VISTA personnel, and continuous communication with these groups ensure that higher education is an active partner in improving the education and quality of life for all our community members. These centers also represent strong commitments by the administrations to sustain infrastructures that support high-quality civic engagement initiatives.

As for teacher training and education, MCTC and Metropolitan State have created a fully-integrated initiative that supports teacher development from the beginning of college through the baccalaureate. MCTC’s Urban Teacher Program is designed to attract students from under-represented minority and ethnic groups to engage in schools, to learn about urban schools and urban learners, and to prepare for careers in education. These students are involved in urban schools, working with students as tutors, mentors or coaches, and assisting teachers to instill innovative practices in their classrooms. Urban Teacher Program students are encouraged to continue their preparation at Metropolitan State and to matriculate into the Urban Teacher Education program, to become practicing teachers in our urban schools. In these programs, potential teachers learn of the importance of active learning, challenging curricula, personal connection, and meaningful, relevant educational programming for academic and personal success. These efforts provide a pipeline for individuals to learn, understand, actively engage, and make a difference in the education delivered in our inner cities.

Metropolitan State has taken the notion of community connections seriously by conducting a University-wide civic engagement audit in 2003. Surveying all stakeholders in the university, from the president, to faculty, to department chairs, to students, the MSU audit sought to determine the “level of penetration of civic connections” at the university. This resulted in discovering that almost 20% of our courses had community connections, and that some departments (Social Work, for example) were truly engaged departments (Shumer, 2003; Kesckces, 2006). A similar audit of MCTC revealed that 35% of faculty required service learning or other community-based activities. These audits, based on some of the great work produced by Campus Compact (Holland, Saltmarsh, and Zlotkowski, 2002; O’Meara and Kilmer, 1999), have laid a foundation for us to track the growth and expansion of civic engagement as an institutional phenomenon. We expect the model will be useful for other universities that are looking for auditing practices to show growth from simple connections to transformative outcomes.

The university has also entered into a rich community/higher education collaboration through its university-community library initiative. Working with community planning and advisory groups in St. Paul for more than a decade, the university was able to develop resources to build a library on its campus that combines the resources of Metropolitan State with the St. Paul Public Library system. The result has been a true partnership through which efforts are directed at engaging the entire community to improve educational and cultural programs. From the Homework Help Center, to the inclusion of library knowledge and skills in the AHEAD and College for Kids programs, to developing field trips for schools and community groups that serve minority/ethnic/cultural groups, to providing special English and second language learning for children and adults, to connecting faculty, teens, and the American Library Association through the Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) project, this partnership is providing significant gains for our community in improving educational offerings for individuals of all ages.

MCTC also has promoted similar community initiatives, involving both public schools and community organizations. Several hundred Minneapolis high school students complete college readiness testing at the tenth or eleventh grade, early enough so they can address their college readiness issues before leaving high school. College instructors have regular meetings with Minneapolis high school teachers focused on alignment of curriculum, college readiness, and peer observations of teaching. In addition, MCTC staff members have regular assignments in all of the Minneapolis high schools, providing the opportunity for building relationships with students and staff that extends throughout the students’ high school years. The Urban Teacher Program and manufacturing and construction trades career programs provide summer camps and after school career exploration programs for middle and high school students, targeting Latino, African American, and American Indian youth.

Community connections are enhanced through MCTC multicultural advisors who have weekly office hours at community centers in Hispanic, African American, and American Indian communities, reaching out not only to young people but also to adults and parents with information and advising about college-going. Community partnerships that have supported outreach to K-12 students include YMCA, African American Family Services, NorthPoint Health and Wellness Center, Hospitality House Youth Directions, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Circle of Discipline, and Achieve!Minneapolis. The Urban Teacher and the Urban Park, Recreation and Youth Programs sponsor Front Porch community forums with community citizens and leaders where issues of the urban community are discussed and leadership training is provided.

In order to better address issues of access to and support for higher education, Metropolitan State University and Minneapolis Community and Technical College have initiated a new program, “The Power of You,” to encourage and support high school youth to prepare for and enter postsecondary education. This program is designed to give high school students who meet appropriate criteria an incentive to prepare through the guarantee of free tuition and fees for the first two years of college. In addition, students who participate in the Power of You benefit from “reach-back” programs — tutoring and mentoring from college students. Such collaborations provide the human resources and the motivation to help both types of students achieve. Research has shown (Takahashi, 1991; Gallegos and Finkelstein, in press) that engagement in tutoring at the high school level can produce general success in grades and content knowledge for college students. In addition, the Power of You eliminates the significant and growing barrier that college costs now constitute for low income students and their families.

Conclusion

Providing broad access to and success in higher education is a foremost challenge to American society and particularly to its institutions of higher education, especially if we are to address the disparities between minority and majority populations in our inner cities and rural communities in achieving financial security and influence in society. A country cannot call itself socially just when it affords one group disproportionate access to educational opportunities that ultimately lead to better-paying jobs, increased indicators of personal and social success, and greater access to positions of power in government, in business, and in society as a whole. Neither is a society just when one group consistently achieves these goals at a rate significantly below another.

Institutions of higher education that have explicit missions of serving the populations in their immediate communities, especially those in urban centers, are making a difference by changing this social fabric. Institutions such as Metropolitan State University and Minneapolis Community and Technical College, by committing to long-term collaborative relationships with schools and community organizations (including government) and by supplying the policies, programs, and practices that support the personal and educational foundations of learning; that inspire young and old to achieve at levels important to adult success; that work with young people to enhance and improve their academic and social competence; that assist K-12 school systems to provide more active, engaged, and meaningful learning programs; and that provide the leadership and resources to ensure that access and success is a reality for all members of society, are fulfilling their roles as places where higher education serves the needs of all our citizens. While our society’s widespread denial of equal educational access and subsequent academic and personal success has not yet been resolved, we believe that we are on our way to reaching this goal in the 21st century.

The authors are pleased to acknowledge the valuable contributions of Lois Bollman, Robert Shumer, and Susan Spring Shumer to the development of this paper.

References

Adelman, C. (2006). The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion from High School through College. U.S. Department of Education.

Bowley, E. (2003). The Minnesota Campus Civic Engagement Study: Defining Engagement in a New Century. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Higher Education Services Office and Minnesota Campus Compact.

Bridgeland, J., Dilulio, J., & Morison, K (2006). The Silent Epidemic: Perspective of High School Dropoust. Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Swanson, Christopher B., “Diplomas Count: An Essential Guide to Graduation Policy and Rates,” E.P.E. Research Center/Education Week, June 20, 2006; cited in: Draper, Norman; “Graduation Rates Tell of Two Minnesotas,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 28, 2006.

Eyler, J., & Giles, D. (1999). Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Gallego, M. and Finkelstein, N. (in press). When the Classroom Isn’t in School: The Construction of Scientific Knowledge in an After-School Setting. Retrieved 7/12/06 from the University of Colorado website.

Haycock, K. (2006). Student Readiness: The Challenge for Colleges. The Chronicle of Higher Education (2006, March 10). School and College. Section B.

Hollander, E., Saltmarsh, J., & Zlotkowski, E. (2002). Indicators of Engagement. In M E. Kenny, L A. K. Simon, K. Kiley-Brabeck, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), International Series in Outreach Scholarship: Vol. 7. Learning to Serve: Promoting Civil Society Through Service-Learning (pp. 31-49). Norwell. MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kecskes, K., (2006). Engaging Departments: Moving Faculty Culture from Private to Public, Individual to Collective Focus for the Common Good. Boston, MA. Anker Publishing Company.

O’Meara, K. A., & Kilmer, H. (1999). Mapping Civic Engagement in Higher Education: a National Initiative. Providence, RI: Campus Compact.

Rumberger, R. & Palardy, G. (2005). Test scores, Dropout Rates, and Transfer Rates as Alternative Indicators of High School Performance. American Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 3-42

The Chronicle of Higher Education (2006, March 10). School and College. Author, Section B.

Takahashi, J. (1991). Minority Student Retention and Academic Achievement. Unpublished dissertation: University of California, Los Angeles, CA

Shumer, R. (2003). Civic Engagement Audit. Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, MN

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the
conditions of man — the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
Horace Mann

Growing up in the Delta Region of Arkansas in the 1950s and 60s, in an area rife with racial segregation, poverty and political disenfranchisement, I experienced the profound and unrelenting effects of legalized discrimination. One of 11 children born to subsistence farmers, I never attended school for more than six months in any given year. The schoolhouse was a place my siblings and I entered only after the planting and harvesting seasons were over. Despite this bleak reality, my parents and others recognized that education, voting and land ownership were the pathways to equal opportunity. They instilled in us the steadfast belief that “if you get a good education, no one can take it away from you.”

Although the all-white school board in my community was comprised of plantation owners who never embraced the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, this did not dissuade my parents and teachers from their unswerving faith in the transformative value of education. They, like many other black farmers, mortgaged their small farms many times over to pay for their children to attend historically black colleges, which were the only choices available in the south prior to the 1970s. My siblings and I were so convinced by my parents’ admonition to get a good education that 10 of us pursued some form of post-secondary education. Included among us are teachers, social workers, skilled tradesmen, public health practitioners and university administrators. We, in turn, have passed along to our children and grandchildren an abiding belief in the value of education.

Based on objective measures, even the most ardent critic must concede that considerable progress has been made in increasing college access and success during the past several decades. Due to numerous state and federal funding efforts, along with college and university outreach initiatives, since 1976, increases in the undergraduate enrollment of African American, American Indian, Asian American and Hispanic students range from 110% to 1140%¹. Similarly, impressive gains have been achieved in the enrollment of first generation Caucasian and rural students.

While college attendance is no longer limited to upper middle class whites, it is a fact that students from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds are disproportionately represented in community colleges and less competitive public four-year colleges and universities. Despite the avowed commitment to diversity, America’s elite public and private universities continue to be homogeneous places of learning with respect to income distribution, ethnicity and social class. Students from underrepresented backgrounds, for example, comprise 12% of the enrollment at elite public and private colleges and more than 26% of the enrollment at other types of post-secondary institutions.² In terms of degrees, in 2004 only 11% of the baccalaureate degrees granted by elite institutions were awarded to underrepresented minorities.³

A review of the literature in higher education reveals that diversity is viewed as a strategic concern for all sectors of higher education. For example, the American Council on Education through its widely acclaimed bi-annual conference, “Educating All of One Nation,” attracts thousands of participants interested in learning about promising practices in recruiting, retaining and graduating students from diverse backgrounds⁴. At the same time, national and community foundations fund an array of scholarships and academic enrichment programs designed to increase the pool of students prepared for college success.

These efforts notwithstanding, there are several worrisome trends that must be addressed if the higher education community is to significantly increase access and success for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Prerequisites for doing so include the recognition that diversity is not a substitute for equity — and a “one-size” approach does not fit all. Failure to recognize these facts precludes the higher education community from utilizing a variety of affirmative measures that address issues of race, socio-economic status and low levels of educational achievement.

Diversity and equity are often used interchangeably, but they are really quite different. Diversity focuses on valuing cultural and social differences, and it has a qualitative dimension. Most of us in the academy have witnessed first-hand the value of diversity in our classrooms and on our campuses. Higher education is becoming more diverse every day, with an ever-widening range of people from different disciplines, geographic areas, socio-economic backgrounds and sexual orientations.

Diversity in higher education promotes a healthy democracy by strengthening communities and enriching the workplace. Research shows that students will have more relationships that are diverse if they are exposed to diversity during their university experience. They interact more with individuals who are different from them and are open to living in more diverse neighborhoods. They are more likely to be among the group that Richard Florida calls the “creative class”⁵. It will be this creative class whose innovations and ideas will fuel our knowledge economy. Yet diversity often loses steam outside of higher education and the workplace, even though it is critical to ensuring our global competitiveness. Diversity is not a luxury; it is a necessity. We fail our students if we do not prepare them to live in a global society.

We also fail our society if we do not move beyond diversity to equity. People often think of equity as treating everyone the same. It is entirely possible to have a diverse environment, but not necessarily an equitable one. The principle of equity goes far beyond appreciating cultural and racial differences. It demands the full participation of historically disenfranchised people in any given system. In contrast to diversity, equity has a more quantitative dimension. Do enrollments at our colleges and universities represent various members of our population in the same proportions? Not likely. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education, J.P. Greene and G. Forster found that Blacks make up 14% of the total population of 18-year-olds but only 9% of all college-ready graduates⁶. In addition, Hispanics, who represent 17% of the total population of 18-year-olds, make up only 9% of all college-ready graduates. Remember, these are college-ready graduates, since far too many underrepresented students drop out long before their 18th birthday. The representation of people attending nearly all college campuses across this country would have similar and troubling trends in representation. Equity must transcend our student populations and include university faculty, administration and staff as well.

Why is it imperative that the academy concern itself with issues of equity, especially when these issues are not being effectively addressed in the culture at large? There are several reasons, but perhaps the most pressing is that higher education plays a sorting and certifying role in our society. One’s skills are often less important than whether one has earned a degree. The college degree is a calling card, and universities are the gateway to higher earnings. Studies indicate higher education leads to higher earnings and numerous possibilities for a higher quality of life.⁷ Even more important for the health of our democracy, higher education correlates with greater levels of civic engagement. Research shows a higher level of education is associated with greater voter participation and with more volunteering. Both voting and volunteering are important indicators of a democratic society’s well being. Higher education increases cultural capital. Some in our society are experiencing an historic decline in their cultural capital, and until their lack of access to higher education is addressed, this will remain a serious problem.

Worrisome Trends

While the issues related to higher levels of access and success are complex and defy simple characterizations, four trends must be addressed if the higher education community is truly committed to making diversity, equity and excellence more evident.

The first is the growing movement to raise admissions standards, which has developed hand-in-glove with standardized testing. While this might appear to be the best way of guaranteeing excellence in higher education, it has a paradoxical effect. If high-stakes testing is relied upon to measure the potential of college applicants, those students whose skills and life experiences cannot be measured in this way will fall by the wayside. Schools that can prepare their students with coaching and other extra assistance, that is to say, schools with the greatest resources, will always produce the highest scoring students. Cultural capital will continue accruing to those with the greatest resources, without regard to principles of diversity and equity, which are the foundations of our democracy. Equal opportunity will become a relic from another era, and the playing field will remain as uneven as it was during my years growing up Arkansas.

The second trend that promises to undermine the very foundations of our democracy’s commitment to educational access is the shift from need-based to merit-based financial aid. According to research from the Lumina Foundation, while rising college costs affect all students, low-income students are hardest hit⁸. Over the last decade, need-based aid has increased 99 percent while merit-based aid has increased 348% and, according to the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Program, the trend continues⁹. Need-based aid provides the foundation for higher education among those in the lower SES quartiles, but the shift to merit aid leaves fewer resources for need-based aid. This trend has serious consequences for underrepresented students and their families, and it has been the topic of significant research on college affordability and its impact¹⁰.

This growing shift to merit-based aid raises the concern for the third worrisome trend. The movement of a majority of minority, immigrant and first-generation students to community colleges, proprietary educational institutions, or even the military has been the result of higher college costs and fewer need-based aid dollars. Students in these institutions are less likely to graduate and less likely to transfer to four-year colleges. Are we witnessing the development of a caste system in education, one that is sorting and classifying its students, preparing them for a very different future than that of the creative class?

Although community colleges have played a vital role in helping to democratize American postsecondary education, they and proprietary educational institutions may in some cases emphasize training rather than learning, preparation for jobs rather than life. In preparing students to fill jobs in specific industries, these institutions can end up gambling with the future of their students, betting that specific industries will provide stable employment. However, in the new knowledge economy, most Americans will change employment numerous times during the course of their work lives. Specific job training may be of little help in times of transition. Those who can thrive during transitional periods in our economy will be those who can adapt the most quickly to change: those who can “learn, unlearn, and relearn.”¹¹

The final disturbing trend is the under-participation of minority males in higher education. The participation of young men in general has been acknowledged as a problem¹². Within the minority population, the problem is even more acute. In Indiana, for example, only four in 10 Black and Hispanic boys will earn a high school diploma¹³. An analysis of recent graduation rates nationwide confirms this alarming disparity. In support of this data, I have personally observed that at many Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the male to female ratio is as high as one to three. We have all heard the frequently cited statistic that there are more young Black men incarcerated than in college.

By relegating an entire population of our society to this kind of fate, we risk increasing the sense of injustice and anger that is often voiced in Hip-Hop lyrics. Those who have been historically and systematically excluded from society may end up feeling they have little stake in its success. Those who believe they have no future can more easily conclude that they have little to lose. They may take greater risks with their own lives and with the lives of others. Hopelessness is the enemy of cultural capital. It is also one of the most serious threats to any democracy because it erodes the belief that civic engagement can make a difference.

Fortunately, I believe there are real reasons for cautious optimism about the future, if we choose to think creatively about the trends I’ve described. There is no reason the nation that expanded the higher education system for World War II veterans, a very diverse group, cannot overcome our contemporary challenges. To ensure the future of diversity, equity and excellence in higher education and throughout our society, we must act decisively.

Meeting the Challenge

The first thing we must do is address diversity within the leadership of the academy. If those charged with running our universities do not themselves embody diversity and equity, we are likely to keep talking a good game without producing real results. We need greater numbers of university presidents, deans, chancellors and provosts from historically underrepresented groups. This will not be an easy task, but this change at the top must occur if we wish to move forward and training these future leaders must begin today.

Second, we must enter into more meaningful relations with the K-12 system so that we engage communities and strengthen the education pipeline. We must continue to expand effective pre-collegiate programs and outreach activities that help families plan and prepare for college, beginning in elementary school. Data about the growing “achievement gap” among Black and Hispanic students should compel us to take immediate action. For many underrepresented students, college matriculation is the culmination of years of sacrifice. We must remain mindful of the critical role we can play in helping students and their families overcome the obstacles on the path to higher education. We are partners in this effort. Only then can we begin to ensure greater educational access for higher education.

One of the largest obstacles to access is the escalating cost of higher education. This combined with the shift from need-based to merit-based aid trend mentioned earlier is discouraging more and more underrepresented students from even dreaming of higher education. We must work hard to recalibrate the way aid is distributed, so that we are not contributing to an educational caste system. By diversifying higher education leadership and partnering with K-12 communities, we are more likely to succeed in this goal. Equity, like power, is more often won by hard struggle than granted outright.

Fourth, we must cultivate in our students the belief that a community college education can be an effective route to the baccalaureate degree. Community colleges are a distinctly American institution. They represent our nation’s finest democratic values and offer a vast array of educational opportunities. Yet community college students who wish to transfer to four-year colleges often face innumerable obstacles. We must help these students by expanding cooperation and collaboration among all institutions of higher education. By facilitating the transfer process for community college students, we can also help address the broader issues of educational access and equity.

Finally, just as we strive to throw open the doors of educational opportunity, we must make sure students experience the depth and breadth of learning available in higher education, including service-learning, internship opportunities and international study. Research by the National Survey of Student Engagement and others highlights the importance of student engagement to success both in college and after graduation. Engagement in college life is more likely to lead to civic engagement after graduation¹⁴. Unfortunately, many historically underrepresented students do not fully participate in the life of their institutions, whether for social or economic reasons. This means that while they have received access to higher education, they are not benefiting from the experience as much as they could. The lack of engagement can also be related to problems in recruitment and retention. Education is a dynamic organism, where each part is connected to the whole. We must make both student access and success a priority.

So much has happened since Campus Compact was founded in 1985. Over the years, we have seen hope and fear in constant battle. We have seen cause for discouragement and cause for celebration. I remember the day Nelson Mandela was released from his captivity. It reminded me of the promise my classmates and I made after Dr. King’s assassination and renewed my faith in the potential of humans to move mountains.

Mandela has said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” I believe in our power to overcome the challenges we face in creating a world in which diversity, equity and excellence can flourish. What lies within us is greater than what lies before us. As we pause to commemorate 20 years in the life of Campus Compact, we can and must envision a future that is more equitable than our present. In this future, educational access and success will be recognized as our birthright. We have the power to learn, unlearn and relearn. We have the potential to live up to democracy’s promise and to do what must be done.

¹ Digest of Education Statistics. Table 205 – Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-granting Institutions, by Race/ethnicity, Sex, Attendance Status, and Level of Student: Selected years, 1976 – 2004. back

² Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS): Fall 2004 Enrollment and Academic Year 2004-05 Completions Surveys. United States Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. back

³ Ibid. back

⁴ The American Council on Education’s 10th Educating All of One Nation conference was held on October 6-8, 2005 in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme of this conference was “Realizing America’s Promise: Embracing Diversity, Discovery, and Change.” back

⁵ The Rise of the Creative Class, and How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Richard Florida (2002), Basic Books. back

⁶ Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States, J.P. Greene and G. Forster, Manhattan Institute, (3) September 2003. back

⁷ See Table 137 – Earnings by Educational Attainment, 1975-2001, Postsecondary Education Opportunity: The Mortenson Research Seminar on Public Policy Analysis of Opportunity for Postsecondary Education. back

⁸ “Restricted Access: States Enter the Merit Aid Race,” Student Access and Success News, Lumina Foundation for Education, June 23, 2006. back

⁹ See National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Program’s annual report. back

¹⁰ See Affordability topical index on the Postsecondary Opportunity Education. back

¹¹ “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Quote by Alvin Toffler. back

¹² See Gender topical index on the Postsecondary Opportunity Education. back

¹³ “27% of Indiana Students Don’t Graduate. Study: Less than Half of Hispanic, Black Boys get Diplomas,” by Staci Hupp, Indianapolis Star, June 21, 2006. back

¹⁴ See NSSE website for research reports. back

I am honored to have been asked to write an essay for inclusion in the collection recognizing the 20th Anniversary of Campus Compact. I am also very pleased to have this opportunity to share with you how the University of Texas at El Paso, the institution that I have been privileged to serve as president for nearly 20 years, has become a model for higher education engagement with its surrounding community. UTEP’s community is El Paso, Texas; and the University, with an enrollment of nearly 20,000 students, is located just a few hundred yards from the U.S.-Mexico border.

During the past 20 years, UTEP has learned many important lessons from its civic engagement. Among them:

• Universities can create access to higher education for non-traditional groups while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to excellence in education and research.
• To be effective community partners, universities must be “context-sensitive,” that is, to be aware of, understand and respect the communities in which they live and work.
• Universities have a special responsibility to respond to the needs of their surrounding communities, particularly through K-16 initiatives and in economically distressed areas.
• Although risk-taking is unavoidable as new collaborative lines open to previously underserved communities, these risks are manageable and offer great opportunities for institutional learning.
• There are enormous reciprocal benefits to be derived from university engagement.

When I came to El Paso in 1971 as a faculty member in the Department of Languages and Linguistics, the city was much smaller than it is now, with a population of about 320,000, compared to nearly 700,000 today. Although the Census Bureau was not yet collecting data on Hispanics, surveys conducted as part of the 1970 census indicated that El Paso was approximately 55 percent Hispanic. At $7,368, El Paso’s per capita income was lower than that of Texas and the nation as a whole, although the 1970 disparity was not as great as it is today.¹

Since its founding in 1914 as the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy, UTEP has always served a regional population, drawing most of its students from far west Texas and northern Mexico. When I arrived, however, UTEP didn’t look very much like the surrounding community. Like the Census Bureau, UTEP didn’t gather data in 1971 on the proportion of our student population that was Hispanic. However, when we did begin such data collection in 1978, only 38 percent of UTEP’s students were reported to be Hispanic, while the Hispanic segment of the city’s population had risen to 60 percent.

By the late 1980s, UTEP developed a plan to recruit a student population that better mirrored the demographics of the region. We believed that talent was everywhere in the community, and that it was our responsibility to create opportunities for that talent to be developed. University representatives went into all the county’s high schools to provide information about higher education in general and UTEP in particular. We met many young people who never dreamed that college could be an option for them; and we knew that we would have to reach them as early as possible so that they could begin to think about and prepare for college. We developed partnerships with area schools and community organizations to create such initiatives as our Mother-Daughter program, which targets sixth-grade Hispanic girls who are invited to the campus with their mothers to participate in activities designed to help raise educational aspirations. Since the program began in the mid-1980s, nearly 100% of the girls have successfully completed high school, and many of them have enrolled in and graduated from UTEP, as have several of their mothers. And, we have since begun a father-son program.

Our involvement in the Mother-Daughter program and other outreach efforts helped us recognize the need for broad-based systemic work to raise both educational expectations and achievement in El Paso area schools, so that seniors would aspire to and be better prepared for college-level work. We also recognized that we operate in a “closed loop” wherein approximately 80% of UTEP’s 20,000 students are graduates of El Paso County schools, and two-thirds of the teachers in those schools are graduates of UTEP. In this context, it was easy to conclude that trying to blame each other for low educational attainment in this region was a futile exercise, and that partnerships among K-16 educational institutions were going to be critical to our success.

In 1991, UTEP joined with the El Paso Community College; the three largest school districts in El Paso County; Region 19 Education Service Center, representing the six small rural districts in the county; both City and County governments; the Greater El Paso, Black, and Hispanic Chambers of Commerce; and a community group, the El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO), to form the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, which is housed on the UTEP campus and works to achieve three ambitious goals:

• To ensure academic success for all students, K-16;
• To ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared to succeed in a four-year college or university; and
• To close achievement gaps across demographic groups.

The Collaborative has received major funding from numerous sources, including the National Science Foundation’s Urban Systemic Initiative and Math/Science Partnership programs, for its work to improve El Paso students’ achievement in mathematics and science. It has also offered programs that target school leaders?superintendents, principals, and counselors?to ensure that these critical team members recognize and encourage all students’ potential for high academic achievement. In addition, UTEP has participated actively in the simultaneous reform of its teacher preparation programs, which are now strongly field-based.

Our K-16 educational reform efforts seem to be working. Standardized test scores are higher, and more students are planning to attend college. State figures indicate that “the percentage of graduates telling their schools they’re going to college ranges from the mid-70s to high 90s throughout the county.”² The percentages of students taking the SAT or ACT and completing Advanced Placement courses have also risen dramatically.³ These figures are impressive in a county in which, according to the 2000 Census, only 16.6 % of the population reported holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, more than 34% reported less than a high school education, and more than 21% less than ninth grade.

More young El Pasoans are now heading for college, most of them to UTEP. That’s very good, but it’s not enough. The next step is to ensure that their improved access to higher education also leads to successful outcomes, which for most students is completion of an undergraduate degree and competitiveness for success in a career or post-graduate education. Recognizing that most UTEP attrition occurred between freshman and sophomore years, we began in the early 1990s to develop programs that would help our largely first-generation college student population make a more successful transition to the University. With support from NSF’s Model Institutions for Excellence (MIE) program, we developed and pilot-tested a program in science and engineering that expanded orientation to the University, strengthened academic advising, created learning communities by clustering students in core courses, and established a mathematics and science study center on campus for our largely commuter-student population.

By the end of the decade, the success of the MIE program led to its institutionalization across the campus. A core component of the program is the entering student seminar, which provides content focused on a variety of topics that reflect the broad range of UTEP faculty and staff expertise, structured practice in using higher level reasoning skills, and an introduction to the services of the University. UTEP’s entering student program has greatly improved student retention on our campus and received national recognition for its success.

In addition to focusing our attention on the first year of enrollment, we have developed during the past several years strong pedagogies to reinforce students’ engagement throughout their undergraduate experience. Two of these pedagogies?undergraduate research experiences and service learning?appear to be especially effective.

Much of the literature on student success suggests the importance of engaging students in activities on campus. But most UTEP students have to work to pay for their education and help support their families. So we have placed a high priority on creating employment opportunities on the campus that are related to students’ academic programs. Work in research laboratories offers one such set of opportunities for students to “earn while they learn.” Undergraduate research opportunities began in the 1970s via the NIH Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) program, and were later expanded as an integral part of the NSF-funded MIE and Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP) programs. Faculty members are also encouraged to build student support into their budgets for investigator-initiated research projects.

Grant funding and research infrastructure are important factors in creating research experiences for undergraduates, but the real keys to their success are faculty mentors who understand and are fully committed to integrating their research and teaching, and to building the skills and self-confidence of their students. They invite students to co-author papers with them and present the results of their research at national and regional meetings. In many cases, they create vertically integrated research teams, called Affinity Groups, which include faculty members, Ph.D. students, master’s-level students, undergraduates with various levels of experience, and sometimes high school students, with each level providing role models for the next.

The presence of doctoral students in colleges across the UTEP campus is new and represents another of the critical building blocks in our strategy to become a catalyst for human and economic development in the surrounding region. Our first doctoral program, in geology, was approved in 1974, a few years after I came to UTEP. We were then classified by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as a “single-doctoral degree granting institution” until 1989, when we were successful in gaining authorization to offer a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Since that time we have added doctoral programs in all six academic colleges, as well as interdisciplinary degrees in Environmental Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. To date, 13 programs have been authorized and more are in various stages of development. In addition to attracting students from throughout the U.S. and internationally, these doctoral programs offer a full range of graduate education opportunities to area residents who may be place-bound because of employment and family responsibilities. Their collective intellectual capital also serves as a valuable resource to individuals and organizations in the region.

Doctoral programs also contribute to the robust research infrastructure that enables UTEP to recruit and retain highly competitive research faculty. These faculty members serve as role models who encourage undergraduates not only to complete their bachelor’s degrees but to go on to graduate school. UTEP ranks among the top ten universities nationally in the number of Hispanic bachelor’s graduates who complete Ph.D. degrees. Despite the relatively short history of our doctoral programs, UTEP is already ranked among the top ten U.S. universities in awarding science and engineering Ph.D.’s to Hispanics. This achievement is both a reflection of the serious national under-representation of Hispanics in doctoral programs, as well as a validation of UTEP’s potential to become a major contributor to the development of an enlarged pool of Hispanic Ph.D.’s who will help change the demographic profile of many professions, including the U.S. professoriate.

Service-learning programs and civic engagement opportunities are also an important part of our campus-community relationships. It is often suggested that commuting students are less likely to have time or inclination to engage in service-learning programs. Quite the opposite appears to be the case at UTEP. Our students’ strong stake in and commitment to the region appear to motivate them to participate: more than half of UTEP students have contributed quality time to community-based, nonprofit organizations and public schools through service-learning programs. Thanks to generous support from the Kellogg Foundation and a growing institutional culture of grant writing, UTEP established the Institute for Community-Based Teaching and Learning, which in 2000 became the university-wide Center for Civic Engagement.

The Center for Civic Engagement is an academic program, led by faculty and grounded in faculty members’ innovative teaching, which connects course requirements and partial course grades to community-based learning. The Center offers 10 structured service-learning programs, complete with presentations of service-learning options to classes, training, on-line registration, and organized reflection, in areas such as:

• Tutoring in English-as-a-Second-Language and Citizenship classes;
• Presenting at middle and high schools on such topics as interpersonal violence, voting and civic engagement, and pathways to college;
• Observing area courtrooms to assess fair processes for all; and
• Reading in elementary schools

Participation in these activities enables students to learn about their communities, discover talents and interests within themselves that they develop further, and respond to community needs with an ethic of service and engagement that they carry through their lives. Center for Civic Engagement figures show that students who opt for service learning match overall UTEP demographics, with a slight over-representation of Hispanic and female students. Course evaluations show that 37% of students indicate they might consider careers in the nonprofit, public service sector. The Center is now developing new service-learning programs in the areas of financial literacy and neighborhood revitalization. It also supports more sophisticated, community-based partnerships in survey research and technical assistance in areas such as accounting and web-design for nonprofit organizations.

During the past two years, UTEP has moved to institutionalize these new, curricular forms of campus-community collaboration. Tenure and Promotion policies were revised in 2000 to include criteria under both teaching and research (NOT service, which is traditionally undervalued in faculty incentive systems) that recognize peer-reviewable community-based work. Acknowledging that dependency on external grants was unhealthy for sustaining engagement and service-learning programs, UTEP funded a professional position for the Center for Civic Engagement’s Assistant Director and continues to support a course release for the faculty director.

Undergraduate research and civic engagement will contribute significantly to the success of another major new initiative at UTEP. Building on the positive results of our entering student program, we have now shifted attention to what we refer to as the “middle years” of enrollment. We are conducting in-depth analyses of the factors that contribute to student success and those that impede student progress toward degree completion. Some of those factors, such as health emergencies, job-related relocation, and family crises, are obviously external to us and beyond our control. Others, such as degree requirements and business practices, are controlled by the University and well within our capacity to review and reform. The most interesting challenges occur where university and student pressures collide: tuition increases required to preserve quality in the face of declining state support vs. price sensitivity and loan aversion of low-income students; or, budget constraints on the scheduling and frequency of course offerings vs. students’ demanding employment and family responsibilities. Managing these tensions, which inevitably arise as we pursue our goals of accessibility, affordability and excellence, will ultimately determine UTEP’s success in serving as a catalyst for change in this U.S.-Mexico border region.

Over the past two decades, UTEP has engaged in major institutional transformation. A university that once offered its alumni bumper stickers that read, “Harvard on the Border,” woke up to the reality of its surroundings and began earnest efforts to serve as an authentic and responsible catalyst for the human development of an undereducated and economically under-performing region. UTEP faculty and staff removed their blinders and began to address in their teaching and research the many challenges and opportunities of the region. What’s most interesting about this transformation has been that, in the process of serving this region and its population well, UTEP has achieved the national recognition to which its earlier pretensions aspired. Both UTEP and Campus Compact have a lot to celebrate on this 20th anniversary!

The significant contributions to this essay by my UTEP colleagues, Dr. Kathleen Staudt, Director of the Center for Civic Engagement, and Florence Dick of the Office of Research, are acknowledged and greatly appreciated.

¹ In 1970 El Paso’s per capita income was three-quarters of the national per capita income; in 2000 it had dropped to about two-thirds of the national average. UTEP has made a strong commitment to help reverse that trend. back

² Acosta, Gustavo Reveles. “More Seniors choose to attend college.” El Paso Times, May 20, 2006 back

³ The Ysleta Independent School District, one of the large districts in the County, now requires that students take either the SAT or ACT and even helps defray the cost of such tests for students with economic need. back