Over a decade has passed since I published my first-ever viral essay.

I was struggling to make ends meet while pursuing my journalism degree at Long Beach City College when a friend said something that sounded crazy: have a baby.

The more I thought about what she said—about how the government would assist me (and this theoretical child) not just with my education, but also with subsidized housing, food, and other necessary resources—the more I started to question why the system was set up to support single mothers but not low-income college students.

I was 22 years old, living at home with my very supportive grandmother; my only income was the $5,000 Pell Grant I received annually. I traveled two hours on the bus to get to school and then two hours back because I didn’t have a car. I struggled (if I could put that in red writing, I would). But what kept me going—and helped inspire me to write that essay—was that I wasn’t alone in what I lacked.

Society feeds young adults the message that we should have our lives together in our 20s. But I could not name 10 young adults in my friend group or my beloved community of Watts who had gotten their college degrees by 22.

Ten years ago, I asked: Shouldn’t students from neighborhoods like mine have access to necessary resources to help us succeed in higher education?

Today, I am still asking that question.

Soon after the story published in 2014, I lost my Pell Grant and could no longer afford to attend college full-time. So I made the only decision I could: I temporarily switched my focus to finding work.

This, I told myself, would allow me to finance my education, support my family, and start to save for a dream that had started to take shape when I wrote that article: to open my own higher education resource center in Watts. I knew I wanted to be part of the change in my neighborhood and make it easier for future college students to succeed.

By 2016, I was exhausted, but still trying to do it all: working full time at LAX cleaning planes on the graveyard shift and taking classes during the day. My resource center was still at the front of my mind, and that year I even located a venue in Watts that agreed to house it. But I could not afford to launch it; I was working so many hours that I could not concentrate on my own schoolwork, let alone assist others.

Finally, I made the hard decision to stop taking classes, table the idea of a resource center, and focus on work—for now.

In 2018, I got a full-time job with the City of Los Angeles at a 24-hour call center that came with a good salary and paid benefits, including school tuition assistance. I was 28 years old and so happy; I felt more equipped to excel in school than ever. But this job came with new hurdles. I could not enroll in school until I’d completed an 18-month training and probation process. I told myself this was just one last temporary setback, and I tried to make the most out of my hard-fought financial stability—the new salary allowed me to move out of my grandma’s house to a nice apartment, and even travel and see some of the world. But the job itself was not something that felt rewarding. My commute took hours (one month, I did the math and realized I had spent over 50 hours in traffic). The schedule was constantly changing, too—10 times in an 18-month span.

Then, my grandmother got sick. She spent most of 2019 in the hospital, and by early 2020, she was gone.

That was my lowest point.

Losing my grandmother, my biggest champion, was impossible. What made it even worse was that after her death, I didn’t feel like I could really grieve my loss. All those years in survival mode did not equip me to take care of my own mental health when faced with mourning someone I’d loved my whole life.

I knew that my grandmother would not have wanted this level of unhappiness for me. Eventually, I started going to therapy, which assisted with improving my mental health and provided me with insight into ways I can be more focused, disciplined, and consistent, regardless of the circumstances.

Months after my grandmother’s death, with my probation period finally over, I could officially resume my studies—this time, in her memory. I started school remotely amid the pandemic, with a newfound interest in working in the mental health field.

The idea of trying out a new career path, now in my 30s, scares me, but I know that I owe it to myself to try. After all of this struggle, I want a career that pays well, that serves others, and that I will enjoy.

This fall, I enrolled in the last three classes I need to transfer to a university. I have big plans for the degree I’m working toward.

In the last decade, I’ve been asked time and again to pick between my educational dreams and my survival needs. But I have never given up on my goals, despite the obstacles in my path. Instead, I’ve continued to find ways to fulfill the ambitions I have set for myself.

Looking back, I am so proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish. I’ve continued writing and publishing articles. I’ve played a role in raising my younger siblings. I’ve helped out in Watts by delivering food for seniors, painting houses, and hosting several community empowerment events, which I view as practice for the resource center that I still plan to open one day.

I wish that I and so many others weren’t put in the position I’ve so often found myself in, making choices that feel more like hitting limits. But despite the lack of support and resources out there, I refuse to see the pursuit of higher education as an impossible task.

My grandmother used to tell me each morning, “You can do anything that you put your mind to.” I still take that affirmation with me, knowing that ultimately, regardless of the circumstances, I will prosper.

The post Does My Neighborhood Want Me to Drop Out of College? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a dark, chilly evening in November 1839, a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, convened a party at her friend’s house. That might seem an unremarkable event, but this was not a high-society tea party or wine-tippling book club. It was a bold social experiment. The hostess was the 29-year-old journalist Margaret Fuller, and the guest list was composed of the most finely tuned minds she could collect—minds that nevertheless, by virtue of being women, were barred from attending university. Safely concealed from the prying outside world by the guise of innocent domesticity, they were taking their education into their own hands. They were about to have a “Conversation,” with Fuller leading the way in the informal role of instructor.

Maybe more of us should be having such conversations. With fall approaching, thousands of high-school seniors are in the throes of the fraught “college search,” an anxiety-ridden affair that, for many, culminates in years of astronomical debt. Between the rising cost of higher education, the “devaluation” of degrees, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s shakeup of education—not to mention the culture wars over critical race theory and free speech—there is rising interest in finding other ways to prepare oneself for a rewarding professional and intellectual life. The resourcefulness of Margaret Fuller and her acquaintances—and the accomplishments that followed their budget-friendly, self-engineered education—show us that the foundations of a fulfilling life and career can be built on curiosity and willpower rather than loans.

The premise of a Fuller “Conversation” was simple: anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted. There would be no petty gossip, no complaints about children or servants, no exchanging of recipes or sewing tips. And unlike the salons of the time, there would be no men to impress. Instead, the curriculum was an in-depth discussion on fine art, literature, science, politics, or mythology—with corresponding homework in between these two-hour weekly meetings. At the sixth conversation, the women discussed wisdom and the mechanics of art; for the seventh, they wrote, shared, and critiqued their own essays on beauty.

By 1839, Fuller had already made a name for herself as a writer, with publications in distinguished journals such as the North American Review and the Western Messenger. She was trained in the classics, talented as a critic, translated German Romantic literature into English, and was so outstandingly bright that regardless of her gender, she was hailed as something of an authority on anything highbrow. Yet she understood that it wasn’t mere writing talent that had afforded her the rare privilege of a professional life. Fuller had benefited from an extensive education and access to the reading materials and intellectual social circles she needed to cultivate her mind for a productive life, and she wanted to share the additional elements of good connections and directed study with others. She’d worked as a teacher already, having served at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston in 1836 and at Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1837, and the role came as naturally to her as the instinct to combine it with that of an author.

Still, the Conversations had their adversaries: privileged, bookish men who felt threatened by this clever female innovation—which made their prestigious and expensive university educations suddenly not so special anymore. Historian Charles Capper writes that they tried to conceal their obvious sexism behind religious objection—they were “scandalized” by the women’s discussion of Transcendental critiques of Christianity.

The Conversations continued until April 1844. Though only a five-year enterprise, they left a lasting mark, including forming the base material for Fuller’s 1845 feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. There, she laid out her stern commentaries on the inequalities between the sexes and what needed to be done to remedy them for society’s benefit. The intrepid  educational reformist Peabody, whose home was the site of the discussions, went on to find the first English-language kindergarten in the U.S., in 1860. Sophia Ripley, a fellow feminist and philosopher, went on to become a primary school teacher at a progressive academy, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, an ambitious Transcendentalist artist, published poetry and children’s books.

The Conversations have also served as a source of inspiration for factions of frustrated women who came after Fuller. Lara D. Burnett of the University of California claims that Fuller’s Conversations serve as the early model for the current phenomenon of podcasts, a technological platform through which creatives in pairs or groups can explore and discuss their niche interests vocally (an especially useful means of expression for modern-day women who are still being barred and/or systematically discouraged from mounting traditional podiums). It’s an equal, open space, where all women are free to participate as either speakers or listeners and can hope to be taken seriously. “Conversations allowed Fuller to be a kind of professor, and allowed her subscribers to participate in a kind of university course, without vetting by those who were determined to marginalize female intellectual work,” Burnett astutely observes. “Similarly, podcasts can, without any gatekeeping, make available to their producers and their listeners the conversational practices of the seminar room.”

Today, women can and do attend university, but the bittersweet reality is that not everyone can afford to partake. In this modern context, underground education is once again prevailing.  One example is the Dark Academia movement, a clothing and lifestyle culture born on TikTok that embraces the aesthetic of a 19th-century academic with some worldly flair. But it doesn’t end at looks. Dark academia appeals most to teenagers who are dissatisfied with their current education, defeated by higher education’s price tag, and have discovered the joys and benefits of self-directed study.

Though a degree is still necessary for certain jobs, it’s not essential for developing an original, critical, and respectful mind. There are always opportunities for full, rewarding, and meaningful conversations. Getting together to debate Sartre or new developments in gender politics can be done in any time period, in any available setting—tuition-free. And whether you do it on Zoom or at a friend’s place, stop and listen for Fuller’s voice, broadcasting through from a long-gone era.

The post Who Needs Student Debt When You Can Get Together for a ‘Conversation’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ten years ago, in May 2012, Harvard and MIT announced the launch of edX, their nonprofit platform for Massive Open Online Courses (better known by the acronym MOOCs). Together with Coursera and Udacity (both launched in the first months of 2012), these three platforms promised to make “the best education in the world freely accessible to any person,” as Coursera put it in their mission statement. The New York Times called 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education covered “MOOC mania.” The promise of MOOCs and the principle of open access with global reach created hype that stretched across the U.S. as well as into Europe.

But in the halls of the United States’ hierarchical and stratified university system, it looked more like MOOC panic—then-Stanford president John Hennessy warned of a “tsunami,” Udacity co-founder (and former Stanford professor) Sebastian Thrun predicted that only 10 higher education institutions would survive the MOOC revolution, and the University of Virginia even seemingly ousted its president (however briefly) for failing to jump on the bandwagon.

In 2022, MOOCs are no longer a buzzword, and most of these promises and fears have gone unrealized. A decade on, what can the MOOC story—and the way it diverged between the U.S. and Europe—tell us about the future of online education?

At the beginning of the MOOC hype, American MOOC founders shared a missionary spirit, a set of charitable goals—and a belief that computational media technologies could fix everything, including long-standing social problems such as unequal access to education. Images portraying students of color in rural villages and young Afghani girls in their homes populated the homepages of major providers and their launching videos. Ironically, prestigious private universities characterized by high selectivity and high tuition fees became the first promoters of an educational model that promised to remove the same barriers to access that had shaped them.

The mainstream, U.S.-based MOOCs originated from bottom-up initiatives led by charismatic computer science professors whose faith in the salvational potential of technology paired well with the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. Some of these organizations followed for-profit business models from the outset (Udacity, Coursera) while others (notably edX) slowly drifted toward market-oriented solutions over time. A few years in, all of these providers had introduced paywalls and limited access to course materials to paying subscribers.

While most of the leading American platforms progressively lost the first “O” of their acronym—the one that stands for “open”—European initiatives have tended to favor learning experimentation, enlarging the audience of potential users, and preserving cultural and linguistic diversity as well as accessibility and openness. (An exception is Future Learn, the UK-based platform that ranks among the top three MOOC providers globally and follows typical market principles.) In Europe, governments played an active and participatory role in MOOCs from the beginning, and higher education institutions opted not to outsource their online courses, instead relying on a mix of pan-European aggregators, country-level initiatives, and single university initiatives.

In 2013, for example, the French government—led by the Ministry of Higher Education and three other public organizations—launched a national initiative called France Université Numérique (FUN), a clearinghouse for hundreds of MOOCS from French universities and educational institutions. FUN continues to use open-source learning systems and to serve both French students and those outside the country, including via a recently created Moroccan platform. In Italy, MOOC platforms release course content under the shareable Creative Commons license; some also post course videos on YouTube. And many European platforms offer courses in English alongside national languages and Arabic. By contrast, American MOOCs do not apply open licenses to their resources, thereby preventing their adaptation, redistribution, or reuse.

The downside to all this diversity in Europe is that it creates a certain degree of confusion about where and how to find courses among novice MOOC learners—a number that grows every year, even if the media hype peaked by the second half of 2013. The number of MOOC students grew for eight years—Class Central, a MOOC aggregator, estimated 16-18 million total enrolled in 2014 and 120 million in 2019. And then, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 and the consequent lockdown policies surged interest in distance online learning to unprecedented levels and helped recast the fate of MOOCs. In April 2020, the three biggest MOOC providers registered as many new learners as they had done in all of 2019, reaching a total of 126 million new users. That number exploded to 220 million in 2021.

But these are not necessarily the students the original MOOC founders claimed they planned to serve. Research has shown that the largest share of users come from affluent countries or neighborhoods, already have high levels of education, and are employed in highly skilled professions. They rely on MOOCs largely for continuing professional training rather than for traditional university courses.

The past decade and the recent resurgence of MOOCs shows that despite their hype waning, MOOCs can be considered anything but a “moment,” an entirely new phenomenon disconnected from the dynamics happening in the society. Rather, MOOCs are the most visible part of a broader trend that concerns the digitalization of many aspects of people’s lives, education included. Now, as mainstream commercial platforms grow alongside less popular but still lively public and less market-oriented platforms, the time is ripe for moving the conversation on MOOCs to a more pragmatic level about whom they best serve, and which platforms—beyond the mainstream—are doing the most interesting and experimental work. As more parts of our lives move online, many questions remain: Will people move away from more traditional models of education? Will online education continue to serve the same type of students, or can its reach expand beyond to new terrain? Will online coursework provide an arena for people around the world to remain plugged-in? And will MOOCs be part of it all?

The post So What Exactly Happened to the MOOC? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2020 and 2021, the state’s public schools ditched their students, shutting down K-12 campuses for over a year and providing irregular and ineffective online lessons. Since then, educational leaders have often failed to acknowledge, and done too little to compensate for, all the learning loss—which is why average California eighth graders now do math at a fifth-grade level.

And with public schools just trying to survive chronic absenteeism, teacher resignations, political controversy, and historic enrollment declines (270,000 kids statewide since March 2020), there’s little chance of restoring the system and its standards anytime soon.

Rather than confront this historic educational failure, the state of California has sought to cover it up—by eliminating testing, turning Ds and Fs into passing grades, and reducing graduation requirements, which were already among the most meager in the country (we only require two years of math).

Add it all up (if you have the math skills), and California high school diplomas no longer mean that much.

Which is why our state university systems should stop requiring them for admission.

You read that right. The University of California and California State University systems should immediately drop their admission requirement that students graduate from high school—for at least the rest of this decade.

Anyone who attended school in California during the pandemic and who wants a seat in one of those systems should get one, regardless of high school completion.

The notion may seem crazy but it is not novel. You already can attend California community colleges without a diploma or GED. And some elite colleges, including Harvard, will admit students without high school degrees.

But California’s four-year public universities still require a high school degree—maintaining a status quo that wasn’t working all that well before the pandemic.

Now, unfortunately, UC and CSU are putting more emphasis than ever on the grades and work students do in the state’s failing high schools. CSU is considering adding a required quantitative course and raising their standards to 16 required high school courses, while 11 of the 13 factors UC considers in reviewing applications are entirely tied to high school performance.

And they are unapologetic about it. Indeed, these institutions are bragging about their new high-school-heavy admissions policies, because it is part of California’s self-righteous rush to eliminate standardized testing in education.

The UC and CSU systems, by getting rid of the SAT and ACT, and the state, in eliminating the high school exit exam, have claimed to be promoting inclusion, since standardized test results often are biased by race and class. But this shift away from testing has a dark side. It means that high schools—the same high schools that have lost track of as many of the one in 10 kids who have departed their rolls—become even more important.

You don’t have to be a cynic to see the cynicism in this test-free, high-school-centric approach. By eliminating tests that might show how poorly schools and students are performing, the educational system is avoiding accountability, protecting itself, and shifting the costs of its failures onto pandemic-era students.

Worse still, the whole thing is being justified by a supposed commitment to equity, and by educational officials who have denied the full reality of the current crisis.

So, what is that reality? Part of the scandal in pandemic-era education is that the schools and the state have made that question impossible to answer. The education establishment, which has struggled to build a robust and effective student data system, hasn’t kept close enough tabs on students to provide a full and accurate picture

But one near-certain truth is that the most vulnerable students—homeless students, students with disabilities, and students who are children of immigrants, or of color, or from poorer places—have been the most likely to be left behind these past two years. So, if equity is to mean anything in California education, those students deserve the right to walk into a public university, regardless of how they did in high school.

Giving those students a real chance to stick in our universities will be hard. It will demand new ways of assessing high school dropouts to see if they would fit better at UC or CSU. It will require more kinds of support, more counseling, and more resources to keep them there. (CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025, which has had some success in keeping students in college, offers the beginnings of such a model.)

It also may require the federal government to step in and exempt California from requirements that tie federal financial aid to high school degrees. And it will force the state to shift fiscal priorities, forgoing one-time giveaways like gas tax rebates and embracing the type of longer-term educational investments that are challenging under our complicated budget system.

But if more students whose educations were disrupted by the pandemic can get to college, and get through college, they won’t be the only winners. Colleges, suffering declines in enrollment during the pandemic, will see more students. And California as a whole will be better off.

Indeed, decoupling high school graduation from college attendance could prove to be more than a short-term experiment. California has been producing far fewer college graduates than its economy requires. If California wanted to be more ambitious, it could combine a “no high school degree, no problem” policy with a larger program to help the millions of adults who have dropped out of college to return and get their degrees.

This approach is what real fairness would look like—especially for the young Californians our education system has left in the lurch.

The post Californians Shouldn’t Need a High School Diploma to Go to a Public University appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“The premise of this whole conversation is that higher education needs to be transformed,” said the evening’s moderator, Jennifer Ruark, deputy managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Why,” she asked, “is there such a deep and extensive need for change?”

Arizona State University President Michael M. Crow voiced his concern about the classism that’s infected America’s colleges and universities. “One of the things we have messed up in higher education is that we have allowed ourselves to be socially hierarchically structured in a ranked system of status,” said Crow, who is also the co-author of The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education. “That is deeply and negatively impacting our society and it affects everything, and so we’ve got to figure out how to fix that.”

If one of the problems, Ruark said, is that the current system is built to reinforce competition among colleges instead of collaboration, “how do you overcome those forces in order to collaborate more?”

“There are enough seats in American higher education for every student who is qualified,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. She pointed to the common application, which allows students to apply to many colleges easily, as one example of how colleges have created an artificial sense of scarcity. “What we have to do is protect the ability of every kind of institution to fill those seats and give the best education. That is really my concern,” she said.

Joseph I. Castro, the former president of Fresno State and newly minted chancellor of California State University (CSU)—and a first-generation college graduate himself—agreed. “I do think there is a place for students who want access to higher education. We just need to work together to ensure that those who are place-bound, like those I used to serve in the Central Valley, that they have a place to go.” Castro said.

One of his goals is to enroll more first-generation students and families in the CSU system. “There are so many … in California and throughout the country that have not yet been touched by higher education.” But he is concerned about the pipeline to get them there. “I worry a lot about men of color.” he continued. “Because even as we’ve seen more students of color come to CSU, the number of males of color have not increased, and I do think that has something to do with how we’re educating our students in K–12.”

In what ways, Ruark asked the panelists, has the pandemic made them rethink higher education?

Starr said that Pomona professors have told her that the past 10 months have given them a better sense of who their students are. “They see their students in their homes, where they study,” she said. “You learn so much more about a student by being where they are rather than the student having to be where you are.”

Castro spoke to the hardships experienced by students, faculty and staff. “I can feel the stress,” he said. On the other hand, he added, CSU has also found new ways forward. “We’ve basically pivoted 80,000 courses virtually in just a few days,” he said—a “silver lining” to the pandemic.

Crow also spoke to the way the pandemic’s challenges have stretched ASU to grow. “We’re not even the same institution we were a year ago,” he said. “I’m optimistic about the ways in which we can be even more innovative in the future after going through this experience.”

A robust audience question and answer session—with questions submitted via live chat—addressed a range of issues. Why, asked one audience member, does America lag behind other countries in social mobility—and have colleges elsewhere done a better job of addressing this problem? “There’s a tremendous system of social mobility [in America], but one that has been lagging as our economy has become more mature and aged,” said Crow, referring to the last 40 years. “We have to go back and rethink this.”

Another audience member asked whether there’s a path to one California higher education system, to which Castro replied, “I am seeing silos break down.”

Ruark wrapped up the evening by asking the panelists a hypothetical: If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one change you’d make in higher education?

“No more rankings based on inputs,” said Crow. Changing the way schools are evaluated would create “massive change.”

Castro called attention to the thousands of Dreamers across the country who have remained in the U.S. thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and lack the financial support necessary to access higher education. “On top of my list is support for our Dreamers,” he said.

Starr finished off the wish list by touching on another group in need of more support: community college students. “[I’d] make it as easy as possible for students to go from community colleges to four-year colleges across every single state,” she said, “so that they can begin to maximize their educational attainment.”

The post Can America’s Status-Obsessed Universities Figure Out a New, More Inclusive Way Forward? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mulvenna was bright and resourceful and full of promise when he enrolled at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta seven years ago, but he jumped into a higher education system stacked against anyone who is a first-generation college student, who does not have money, and who is non-white. Mulvenna had all three strikes against him. He is biracial, and was raised by a single mother in a small town 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. He was the first in his family to go to college and could draw on no resources beyond what he could cobble together from grants, loans, and the jobs he worked on evenings and weekends.

But Mulvenna was fortunate in one way: timing. Just a few years before Mulvenna arrived on campus, Georgia State had an undergraduate drop-out rate of well over 50 percent. Most, like Mulvenna, were capable and eager to learn but hit brick walls because of money, university bureaucracy, or both.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, though, Georgia State administrators decided it was no longer acceptable to wish good luck to promising students and then watch them fail over and over. The university went out on a limb and took responsibility for those it had deemed worthy of admission—and Mulvenna, with this support, was able to blossom into a star student.

Today as the United States grapples with its legacy of racial bias and a yawning gulf between rich and poor, many educational institutions are wondering how they can change and do better. Georgia State offers an inspiring glimpse of how things can be different.

Instead of clinging to the status quo, Georgia State chose to turn its leadership structure upside down, restructuring the jobs performed by professors and administrators around students’ needs, not the other way around. The results have been extraordinary. Georgia State has eliminated all achievement gaps between rich and poor, and between white and nonwhite students. It has also enjoyed a dramatic leap in the number of lower-income students on campus (now well over half the student body) and a parallel leap in graduation numbers.

Tyler Mulvenna could have dropped out of school at any of several critical junctures. The first big crunch came at the end of his freshman year, when a maddening combination of state regulations, university strictures, and financial realities blocked his path to a crucial state grant, without which he could not afford to continue. Mulvenna had come to Georgia State with a high school grade point average just shy of the 3.0 he needed to qualify for Georgia’s merit-based HOPE scholarship, which covers most tuition costs, and he’d staked everything on doing well enough in his freshman year to earn the scholarship thereafter.

Sure enough, Mulvenna sailed through his classes, but at the end of the year he found himself three credit hours short of the 30 required to qualify for HOPE. That was because Georgia State had put him in a special support program for academically promising students from vulnerable backgrounds, and the program had put a cap on the number of credit hours he could take at 27.

Mulvenna had been learning French—which would end up being one of his three majors—and he decided he’d make up the credits with a summer course in France, even winning a scholarship to cover some of the travel expenses. But he was still around $2,000 short of what he needed. The bill for summer tuition was due up front, but the HOPE money wouldn’t come through until fall.

He was a thriving student with a 3.2 GPA, and he’d hit a dead end at exactly the moment he should have been receiving maximum encouragement. It didn’t help that he’d crashed and almost totaled his car the summer after high school and couldn’t work as many hours as he’d planned. Unable to build up any savings, he’d taken out a high-interest commercial loan and was struggling to pay it back.

What came to his aid at this first juncture was a university micro-grant, designed for just this sort of eventuality, when an academically strong student is just a few hundred dollars short of what they need to keep going. Georgia State had introduced these grants just a year before Mulvenna enrolled, calculating—correctly—that the investment would pay for itself. The university would recoup thousands of dollars in continuing tuition fees and grants that would have been lost if the student dropped out.

Then came sophomore year. Thanks to HOPE, Mulvenna could afford his classes, but he was still drowning in debt and needed to work. Since he couldn’t afford a car and he couldn’t get to a job without one, he persuaded an auto mechanic in his family to stretch out the crumpled body of the Ford Fusion he’d smashed up a year earlier so it would be more or less roadworthy. It was a desperate move, because the car couldn’t pass the state tests required to get license plates. Without tags, Mulvenna was at risk of being ticketed every time he drove or parked on the street. But he depended on the car, sleeping in it several nights a week to save himself the gas he’d otherwise need to commute to and from his mother’s house.

Things became a little easier junior year, because Mulvenna was finally able to afford campus housing. But the pressure of studying full-time while logging as many as 30 hours a week at paying jobs was unrelenting. Mulvenna came down with shingles, strep throat, tonsilitis, and mononucleosis, each of which disrupted his studies and his ability to pay for them.

Microgrants from the university helped Tyler Mulvenna graduate with a triple major. Courtesy of Carolyn Richardson/Georgia State.

Any of these setbacks could have ended his studies—and without an additional two micro-grants from Georgia State before graduation, they would have. Instead, Mulvenna graduated on time with a triple major in French, marketing and international business—and a rack of university honors to his name.

Similar problems derail hundreds of thousands of students across the country each year. Students rise to the academic challenge of college but cannot always handle the precariousness of scrimping for every dollar when one slip-up or unforeseen crisis—a family illness, or an overstretched credit card, or a scheduling clash pushing a key course requirement back by a semester—can blow up their finances and make it impossible to continue in higher education.

Guiding Georgia State’s radically different approach was the firm refusal to accept that students from disadvantaged backgrounds were doomed to fail in large numbers. Tim Renick, the university’s student success guru and driver of its most important reforms, knew this received wisdom was wrong because he’d seen students of all kinds thrive during his years as a gifted young religious studies professor.

When Renick began his administrative job devising student success strategies in 2008, the economy was collapsing and the university was beginning to view higher retention and graduation rates as a way of compensating for a sharp drop-off in state funding. But Renick was driven, above all, by a conviction that loading students up with debt and sending them away without a degree was morally abhorrent.

Renick’s approach tracked students based on individual need, not by race or family income. The university then used the data it collected to identify and remove obstacles standing in students’ way, and to sell policy changes to faculty leaders who were resistant to change by temperament, and reluctant to accept that they could be doing a better job.

Renick transformed the university’s academic advising service to ensure that it reached out to every student, not just the ones who elected to seek help on their own. A cutting-edge advising platform processed tens of thousands of data points, including years of past grades and graduation outcomes, to offer students a predictive model showing them what degree path was most likely to be successful. Renick used similar data analysis to show deans and department heads how to change class schedules and move students along more quickly.

To help students negotiate the thicket of financial forms required to set foot on campus, Renick’s team helped develop an artificial intelligence chatbot to answer questions and offer reminders of looming deadlines. To assist the most vulnerable first-generation students, at risk of getting lost on a large urban campus, they set up a summer academy to give them a head start. And they set up the micro-grants and awarded them automatically. Academically deserving students did not have to apply; they simply saw debt wiped clean from their university accounts.

More than 55,000 students now benefit from Georgia State’s brand of individualized, micro-level assistance. Students who struggle with homelessness and food insecurity now graduate at the same rate as the children of wealth and privilege. The four-year graduation rate, which hit a low of 32 percent in 2003, is now close to 60 percent, with the six-year graduation rate pushing 80 percent. Remarkably, the university has done this while greatly expanding its numbers of lower-income and nonwhite students. For each of the last eight years in a row, more African Americans have graduated from Georgia State than from any other institution in the country—an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that, two generations ago, African Americans were locked out as a matter of official policy.

The student success work has continued despite the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a university where students are trained to be conversant with multiple technologies from day one, the move to online classes was relatively seamless, and the spring semester saw a class attendance rate of more than 98 percent. Graduation and grade point average numbers were up too.

Nothing about these achievements has been simple. The university leadership had to win over multiple constituencies, including a ruby-red state legislature suspicious of academia and internal critics who thought Georgia State shouldn’t bother admitting students who, through no fault of their own, arrived less than fully prepared for university-level calculus, or organic chemistry. Many thought a smarter response to the 2008 recession would have been to raise admissions standards and weed out students like Tyler Mulvenna—the ones most in need of what the campus had to offer and just waiting to be given their chance. It’s difficult not to hear echoes of Georgia’s ugly racial history, in the way these arguments were framed.

Georgia State’s successful interventions gives students the sense someone is in fact looking out for them and eager to see them thrive. That feeling of connection is huge—especially for Black and other minority students who just a few years ago, found themselves overlooked as a matter of course. Cary Claiborne, now a senior member of Georgia State’s advising staff, remembers being told as a failing community college student in the early 2000s that “the world is not designed for people like you to do what you want to do. You’re supposed to fail out of school.”

Claiborne found his own path to success, earning a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Georgia State, and now makes sure to communicate a very different message to new students. Everything you do matters, he tells them, and the university’s job is to help you graduate and get out into the world as quickly as possible. The result is a new, vibrant, extraordinarily diverse generation of college graduates who promise to change the face not only of Atlanta—but the country as a whole.

The post A Micro-Loan at a Time, an Atlanta University Is Bridging the Racial Achievement Gap appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Have any grand but unfocused ambitions? Have an idea but no strategy to execute it? How about any half-finished projects clogging up your garage?

Send them to Merced. That’s what the state of California does.

Perhaps this is because it’s so convenient: a city of 83,000 people in the center of the Central Valley, and so close to our most hallowed outdoor place that it’s called the “Gateway to Yosemite.” But whatever the reason, Merced is taking on a role as the self-storage unit for California’s abandoned dreams.

Earlier this month Gov. Gavin Newsom turned to Merced as he decided to slow down the state’s high-speed rail project. In his state of the state speech, the governor said that there wasn’t enough money to complete the first phase of the rail project, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or even a more diminished plan to go from Bakersfield to San Jose. At least not yet. Instead, Newsom declared that high-speed rail would start at Bakersfield and find its first northern terminus at Merced.

The governor soon faced a firestorm of criticism. And justifiably so. His retreat to a smaller project betrayed years of planning and disruption in the cities along the project’s path—including the condemnation of hundreds of businesses. Since the speech, Newsom has claimed he’s still committed to the entire statewide high-speed rail project. Meanwhile, President Trump is attempting to claw back federal funding for the project.

It’s hard to know what to believe about the project’s future. But if the project does end in Merced, then at least there will be plenty of open land to bury high-speed rail in a large grave, with an appropriately large tombstone to catalogue modern California’s failures of strategy and urgency.

Today’s California thinks of itself as a fast-paced place, but it actually moves quite slowly when it comes to building. High-speed rail was first floated in the early 1980s. In 1996, the state created a high-speed rail authority. In 2008, voters approved a bond to fund part of its cost, and in 2009, the feds gave the project a couple extra billions via the stimulus act. But here it is in 2019, and it looks like this state-of-the-art transit system just might reach Merced. All told, that’s 40 years to create a 45-minute train trip to replace the three-hour drive from Merced to Bakersfield.

And high-speed rail is only one place where Merced represents the terminus of a once-lofty California ambition. Bay Area communities have been trying to create a true transit system to connect Northern California since the 1960s, with the advent of BART. More recently, those plans have extended into the counties beyond the Bay Area with one small train line, the Altamont Corridor Express. The ACE, as it’s known, originated as a collaboration between counties in 1995, and now has plans to reach Merced in the future, perhaps by 2027—which would still be some 55 years after BART’s opening.

“At some point, there will be connectivity from Silicon Valley to the Central Valley,” Merced City Manager Steve Carrigan told the Merced Sun-Star recently. “When? I don’t think anybody knows.”

The good news is that Merced does its best with what the state leaves it. And the city needs all the help it can get—it suffered some of the largest drops in home values in the country during the Great Recession.

Right now, there is pride and optimism in Merced because of growth that is mostly tied to the expanding University of California Merced campus. But even the UC Merced story is another example of how California treats Merced as a long-term storage unit for grand plans.

The University of California first announced it would open a 10th campus all the way back in 1988, part of what some hoped would be an overdue expansion of the system. But it wasn’t until 1995 that it decided to make Merced the location. And, because of the state’s screwy budget politics and environmental litigation, it wasn’t until another decade later, in 2005, that UC Merced finally opened.

In its first decade and a half, the campus has been the place that admits students who don’t get into their first choice of UC schools. It’s been a leader at serving poorer and non-white students, but it has fewer big-name professors and out-of-state students than other campuses.

Only now does the campus feel like it is ramping up to full build-out, as part of a project to double its size, add research labs and fitness facilities, and accommodate 10,000 students by 2020.

Unfortunately, UC Merced’s expansion has been an isolated case in California. The state’s public university systems have simply not grown fast enough, leaving the state with an estimated shortage of two million college graduates to meets its future economic needs. In many years, thousands of Californians who are eligible for our public universities find there is no space for them, and just 55 percent of Californians who do enroll in universities are finishing their degrees at those places.

The good news is that the city of Merced is feeling some benefits. In addition to expanding its main campus on the city outskirts, the university has also expanded downtown, both by renting space and then by opening a $45 million Downtown Campus Center last year. That, in turn, has inspired new investment in downtown, including a hotel and a renovation of The Mainzer, a historic theater.

UC Merced’s downtown center is a short walk to the likely site of its high-speed rail station, where Martin Luther King Jr. Way meets State Route 99. From that spot, it’s possible to imagine Merced as a model 21st century crossroads, with integrated transit that gives educated workers a short ride to jobs and meetings on the coast, relatively cheap housing that attracts young families, and a university that has doubled or tripled in size, radically raising Central Valley education levels.

But for all that to happen, high-speed rail would have to continue past Merced into the Bay Area, California would need a massive expansion of higher education, and the state would have to provide the foresight, strategic planning and solid funding that makes big projects possible.

A more likely outcome: California can’t finish building the future it promises, so Merced must keep taking what it can get.

The post Merced, Where California Stores Its Big Plans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many faculty members objected to the holiday, but few were as visible and vocal as professor Burt Green Wilder, who would go on to become a defining, if little-known, figure in American higher education.

Spring Day built upon a relatively new tradition: During the 1890s students began holding a dance and fundraiser, the Navy Ball, prior to major fall regattas. Not surprisingly, on the day of the regatta, class attendance was low. But attendance became even more abysmal in 1901, when the students moved the Navy Ball to March and reorganized it as a “circus parade” and noontime concert to benefit the Cornell Athletic Association. Faced with almost no students in classes, the administration capitulated and declared Spring Day a holiday. But Wilder, a pioneering physician, anatomist, and natural historian, hated it—for reasons that turned out to be prescient.

Hired in 1867 as one of Cornell’s original professors, Wilder was a man of 19th-century values but 20th-century sensibilities. Whenever the Spring Day festivities took place in front of McGraw Hall, where his office was, he made clear his feelings about the concession, by writing his disapproval in five languages on a large blackboard, according to the Ithaca Journal-News. He began in French, “O athletique, que de folies on commet et ton nom,” and continued in English and Latin—“In an individual folly may be merely a fault; in a university it is a crime. From fake show to fake scholarship facilis descensus (it is easy to descend).”

Yet students who dismissed him as a curmudgeon or an anachronism were wrong, or at least not entirely right. Wilder could be grumpy, surely. But what is the point of aging if you can’t be grumpy? And Wilder’s case of grumpiness is instructive. In the ways he insisted upon applying traditional values to the culture of higher education, he proved to be a man well ahead of his time.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of exceptional transformation in the United States. An older culture that had emphasized the importance of character and stressed moral qualities was eroding. By the turn of the century, a new one emphasized materialism, scientific and technical improvement, leisure time and recreation. The concept of character was replaced by a focus on personalities, one that stressed the need for respect, admiration, and above all, success.

Wilder felt the tension of being caught in between. As a scholar of anatomy, he was an agent of change and progress. And he was optimistic by nature. But he was also grounded in the principles of his youth, principles that were fixed in the crucible of the Civil War. The words that Wilder associated with his youth were words such as duty, discipline, work, honor, reputation, morals, and integrity.

Wilder was born in Boston in 1841 to parents who were “members of the New Church,” also known as Swedenborgians; as such they were homeopaths, haters of oppression, and strict vegetarians. Late in life he summarized his parents’ influence. From his father he inherited “a hopeful spirit and tendency to seek new facts and to devise original methods.” From his mother, he gained a disposition “at once active and cautious, an unwillingness to sacrifice principle to expediency, and a tenderness towards animals which has prevented his hunting for sport and restricted his physiologic experiments to such as are painless.” From both parents he drew a life-long commitment to personal and societal improvement.

When Wilder graduated from Harvard with a comparative anatomy degree in 1862, he knew he should join the Army of the Potomac but he believed he lacked both the training and aptitude necessary. Fortunately, he was offered a position as an acting medical cadet in a Washington hospital.

The war, which was transforming American medicine and medical research, created the opportunity for a bright comparative anatomist with little medical background but with a compulsive work ethic, an ability to perform autopsies, and access to medical texts to grow professionally. Wilder soon found himself at the forefront of anatomy and medicine.

He also had his consciousness expanded. By May 1863, he had accepted a commission as an assistant surgeon in the newly formed black 55th Massachusetts Volunteers. During the 28 months that he served in the regiment, he developed a profound respect for the courage and commitment of the black soldiers.

His army experience also let him develop professionally. In what little time he had when he was not attending the sick and wounded or studying medical books, he collected species for his natural history collection, including a large silk-spinning spider he discovered on Folly Island in 1863, that was later given his name (Nephila wilder).

In the two years after the war, Wilder obtained a medical degree from Harvard while also working at its Museum of Comparative Zoology and publishing a half-dozen scientific papers. That, and a glowing reference from Louis Agassiz, a prominent naturalist, led to his appointment as Professor of Natural History at Cornell University, one of the new land-grant colleges. He would teach there until 1910.

At Cornell, he developed a reputation as an innovative teacher and a captivating lecturer. He pioneered pre-med education, introduced dissection and laboratory methodology into undergraduate courses, built up a natural history museum at Cornell, and established the Cornell Brain Collection. As president of the American Neurological Association in 1885 and the Association of American Anatomists in 1897, he used his research on the human brain to challenge the scientific racism and gender biases of the time.

In 1893 his former students recognized his contributions to Cornell and their debt to him by producing one of America’s first Festschrifts—a German term for a collection of writing published in honor of a scholar.

While Wilder was a progressive where science and society were concerned, his perception of student conduct remained rooted in an earlier era. By the turn of the century, that brought him into greater conflict with some he called “stoodlums.” Cornell students in 1900 were different from the first students whom Wilder had taught. Students now expected an element of fun and diversion while at college. Football had become an all-encompassing passion.

Wilder disagreed. He had always argued that university students were a special and privileged group. Given the sacrifices that others made on their behalf and the benefits which they would receive, Wilder believed college students should be more strictly held to account than their peers. “Leniency towards transgression, particularly when intoxication is pleaded in extenuation, is seldom really kind to them,” he wrote to the university president in 1909. It was also unfair to well-behaved students.

A portrait of Burt Green Wilder in 1889. Courtesy of Kevin S. Weiner.

Wilder had a long list of student activities he opposed. He was foresighted in his targets, pointing at activities that still create problems for universities today. He objected to secret societies, intercollegiate athletic competition of any kind (on-campus sports were fine), betting and gambling, hazing, campus smoking, alumni buffoonery, Spring Day, leaves of absence for other than personal or scholastic reasons, and “stamping in class-rooms.”

He gained national notoriety in the 1880s and 1890s for his opposition to the growing popularity of football. Not only did that sport take students away from their academic work, he argued, but it caused more serious injuries than other activities and also coarsened its audience.

Wilder was always willing to challenge authority in ways that might resonate today. In June 1905, Wilder responded to an article by U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge in the New York Daily Tribune titled “The Young Man and College Life.” Among other things, Beveridge had written, “I never took much stock in the outcry against hazing.” How could the senator defend the practice, Wilder railed, when his government, after a long investigation, had just dismissed cadets and midshipmen from West Point and Annapolis in 1901 for their hazing abuses? Hazing, Wilder continued, corrupted law, morals and ethics by giving one group of students’ arbitrary power and authority over others. Hazing always implied a preponderance of power or advantage on the part of the aggressors. As a result it was not only brutal and unjustifiable, Wilder believed, “but mean, despicable and cowardly.”

Wilder, who had long supported women’s rights, took even greater exception to another of the senator’s paragraphs headed, “The More Fun the Better.” Beveridge claimed that nobody cares how mad the student pranks were. Wilder challenged Beveridge’s argument that, “We cannot change our sex or the habits of it. A young man is a male animal after all, and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with nature.” Although Wilder accepted that, “we cannot change our sex” as a truism, he was convinced “there are many, in college as well as without, whose unsexing would render this a cleaner and safer world.” While agreeing that the “habits of our sex” might not be changed in a day or a decade, Wilder was adamant that change was possible—and had to be possible if man was to be more than an animal.

Sometimes, perhaps, an anachronism is really not an anachronism.

The post The Pioneering Cornell Anatomist Who Sought to Bring ‘Honor’ and ‘Duty’ to College Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Mormons, under immense pressure from local and federal authorities, jettisoned their utopian separatism in favor of monogamy, market capitalism, public schools, national political parties, and military service. The question is, how can any human institution—much less a religion that historian Martin Marty has called the 19th century’s “most despised large group”—change so much so quickly?

The answer lies in understanding how Mormons determined that a pact with America was not a deal with the devil.

It also lies in American universities. In the same period that animosity between Mormons and non-Mormons reached fever pitch (the two decades between the death of Brigham Young in 1877 and Utah’s admission into the Union as the 45th state in 1896), a rising, influential generation of Mormons began attending the nation’s universities. On those campuses, Mormons enjoyed a rare, revivifying freedom from both outside aggression and ecclesiastical oversight. For them, the realm of American higher education was one of genuine dignity, hospitality, and meritocracy; it was a liminal, quasi-sacred space where they would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity.

As a result, a generation of Mormon leaders developed an enduring devotion to non-Mormons’ institutions, deference to non-Mormons’ expertise, and respect for non-Mormons’ wisdom. These extra-ecclesial loyalties would dismantle the ideological framework of Mormon separatism and pave the way for Mormons’ voluntary re-immersion into the mainstream of American life.

It was Brigham Young himself who in the 1860s and ’70s authorized the first wave of Mormon academic migration to American institutions of higher education—like the University of Michigan, the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia, and West Point. His hope was that a few exemplary Latter-day Saints could secure professional training in law, medicine, and engineering that would help reinforce Mormon independence.

Students, however, began harboring their own diverse ambitions, and their experiences left them ambivalent at best about Mormon independence. As law students at the University of Michigan, for example, Mormons James Henry Moyle and Henry Rolapp wrote home about how they relished the opportunity to wrangle with non-Mormon classmates over Utah’s bid for statehood and the church’s legal status. They earned the clear, abiding respect of their peers not by proselytizing but by engaging them in rational discussion and debate about law and politics, leaving matters of faith off the table.

It was a rehearsal for, and a path to, American citizenship. In correspondence published in 1883 for Mormons in rural, southern Idaho, Rolapp wrote, “We have had quite [a] severe time in our class regarding our religion, but after we determinedly let them understand, that while we were not on a preaching mission, we were nevertheless proud of our religion, and could not be converted by ridicule—they let us alone.” Non-Mormons did more than leave them alone. They would support Moyle in his bid for the junior class presidency and elect Rolapp to the law department’s Supreme Court. For downcast Saints at home, Rolapp exulted, “we have held our own in spite of coming from Utah.”

Other Saints had similarly exhilarating academic experiences, which official church periodicals celebrated and disseminated for audiences delighted to know that the church’s best and brightest could succeed in the proving grounds of American academia. Each student’s dispatch introduced a distant, prestigious school—Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Michigan, the U.S. Naval Academy, even the art schools of Paris—to Mormon youth. The feature articles contained large photographs and ample descriptions of each school’s distinctive strengths, religious milieu, entrance requirements, daily routine, social life, and insider language like “quiz” and “flunk.” The students thus assumed authority as culturally bilingual diplomats who allowed the faithful at home to experience, vicariously, the thrill of being welcome in America.

Richard Lyman, writing from Ann Arbor, bore some of the most ebullient testimony. He described the University of Michigan’s campus and surrounding town as “a perfect little garden of Eden.” He had arrived with fear and trembling, because Mormons tended to “go out into the world feeling that in some degree, at least, we shall be curiosities to people.” Anxiety nearly overcame him when he introduced himself to the university’s president, James B. Angell. Carefully examining Lyman’s credentials, Angell assured him, “I am very glad to see you. We have had a great many students from your state, and among them we have found only good workers.” Lyman’s relief was inexpressible.

Also from Ann Arbor, the Mormon medical student Julia MacDonald Place wrote that the University of Michigan possessed a redemptive power that lifted her to heights of romantic eloquence. “Here is one place in the world,” she enthused in her correspondence to young Mormon women, “where money and position are of little avail, unless coupled with ability, and conscientious application to study … So may it ever be, thou queen of western universities. Be ever as now, the friend and helper of the poor and struggling student, who but for such aid must needs sink beneath his load of poverty, and the frowns of those more fortunate than himself.”

John A. Widtsoe, who graduated from Harvard in 1894, became of one the first Mormons to earn a PhD. Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.

Likewise, the first generation of Mormon students at Harvard luxuriated in the company of the university’s renowned faculty and student body. Reflecting years later on his arrival in Cambridge in 1891, John A. Widtsoe—who became one of the first Mormons to earn a Ph.D., president of the University of Utah, and a high-ranking church authority—enthused, “History, tradition, science, books—the dream had come true! My prayers had been heard. Who cared for the past, in full view of a glorious future!”

Harvard’s famed president, Charles Eliot, had intentionally created this sort of environment for his students. He exalted their freedom by promoting unfettered inquiry, making chapel attendance voluntary, and implementing an elective system that allowed students tremendous power to determine their courses of study. Widtsoe and his Mormon companions revered him. Widtsoe recalled, “In my generation he was easily the foremost citizen of America. Such men as he have the power to shape the world, and always for good.”

Ordinary Americans had no idea that a small cadre of Mormons was enjoying such lavish hospitality at Harvard. They found out in 1892, when the personal connections that Mormons had established with Charles Eliot led him to visit Salt Lake City. Before a crowd of 7,000 Mormons and non-Mormons in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Eliot delivered a speech on one of his favorite topics, religious liberty. He expressed admiration for the Mormons, who, he said, resembled the early Puritans in their willingness to endure hardship and travel great distances in pursuit of a religious ideal.

But reports of the speech drew a backlash. Non-Mormons in Salt Lake City and throughout the nation found Eliot’s comparison intolerable, even traitorous. Eliot only added to the storm of controversy when he acknowledged that there was indeed a “colony” of Mormon students at Harvard.

The aftermath of Eliot’s speech illustrated how badly Mormons wanted to be seen as fully American, and how far most of the country still was from seeing them that way. Mormons rejoiced when President Eliot continued to defend them in the face of public criticism. “They live together,” Eliot conceded, “but they are not colonists in the sense of propagating Mormon doctrines or endeavoring to secure proselytes. They are good students, but do not differ greatly from other young men in their habits and customs.” Mormons savored the soul-stirring respect.

Other leading educators beat a path to Utah in the 1890s. The ambitious and idealistic head of the nascent Brigham Young Academy (later BYU), Benjamin Cluff, who had spent years at the University of Michigan, inaugurated a series of summer schools that brought the church, and Utah, into close communion with academic royalty. Guest lecturers included Col. Francis Parker of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago (1892), James Baldwin of the University of Texas (1893), and Burke Hinsdale of the University of Michigan (1894). Hundreds of Mormon and non-Mormon teachers attended the summer schools to hear lectures on the latest methods in education and psychology. John C. Swenson, a member of the Brigham Young Academy faculty who had never set foot outside Utah, recalled that the event fueled his desire to pursue university training in pedagogy and psychology at the glittering new Stanford University, starting in 1894.

As a result, by the dawn of Utah’s statehood, university-trained Mormon students possessed a new status and authority perhaps best exemplified in the career of Martha Hughes Cannon, MD. In 1896, Cannon became the first American woman to serve in a state senate—defeating her polygamist husband, Angus, in the election. She held three degrees from outside Utah, all earned in the early 1880s: a bachelor’s in medicine from Penn, a second bachelor’s from Philadelphia’s National School of Elocution and Oratory, and her MD from the University of Michigan. In the mid-1880s, during the federal raid on Utah polygamists, she had gone into exile in Europe, pregnant, to help Angus avoid arrest. There, she had visited training schools for nurses, and she had opened her own training school in Salt Lake City in 1889, before entering politics.

Such resilience and success made the 1890s heady times for the young scholars of the church. From Stanford, John C. Swenson wrote to Benjamin Cluff that with statehood secured, there was no telling “what we cannot do.”

Celebration of the students’ success would forestall a resurgent Mormon anti-intellectualism until the early 20th century, when conservative members of the church’s hierarchy, even some highly educated ones, began to fear that Mormon scholars’ respect for “the theories of men” had gone too far. They recast students’ enthusiasm as arrogance, their diplomacy as treason. As education turned into the main battleground in the 20th-century war to define Mormon identity, patriarchal scrutiny would often make Mormon scholars rebel or cower.

In the tumultuous late 19th century, however, Mormons needed their intellectuals—and American universities—to show them that becoming American would be neither humiliating nor irrational.

The post How Attending Elite Universities Helped Mormons Enter the Mainstream  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Going to college in the city seems so normal now that it’s difficult to comprehend that it once represented a radical shift not only in the location of universities, but also in their ideals.

From the founding of Harvard in 1636 onward, college leaders held a negative view of cities in general, and a deep-seated belief that cities were ill-suited to educating young men and women. In 1883, Charles F. Thwing, a minister with strong interest in higher education, wrote that a significant number of city-bred students “are immoral on their entering college” because city environments have “for many of them been excellent preparatory schools for Sophomoric dissipation.” “Even home influences,” he wrote, “have failed to outweigh the evil attractions of the gambling table and its accessories.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, higher education leaders believed that the purpose of a college education, first and foremost, was to build character in young people—and that one could not build character in a city. When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he wrote that college must promote “liberal culture” in a “compact and homogenous” residential campus, explaining that “you cannot go to college on a streetcar and know what college means.” The danger of cities was so self-evident that even the president of the City College of New York, Frederick Robinson, lamented to a 1928 conference of urban university leaders that commuter students “do not enter into a student life dominated night and day by fellow students” and therefore “miss the advantages of spiritual transplanting.”

A 1950 photo of the downtown brewery that housed the University of Newark before and several years after it officially became part of Rutgers University in 1946. Image courtesy of Rutgers University—Newark Library.

Urban colleges struggled to overcome the handicap of their locations. Columbia University, for example, moved three times to escape the encroaching city. In 1897, the new campus at the then-largely-rural Morningside Heights area in northern Manhattan was bounded by walls, with many trees planted inside, to isolate students from the urban growth that would eventually surround the school. Campuses with large numbers of commuters initiated a range of programs to “Americanize” students and get them to move beyond the culture of their working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. However, universities in cities also took advantage of the opportunities the city offered for research, teaching, and collaborations with local museums and cultural institutions.

After World War II, federal and state governments increasingly saw college education as critical, a view reflected in the G.I. Bill and the massive expansion of state universities. College attendance in America grew dramatically, from 1.5 million in 1940 to 2.7 million in 1950, 3.6 million in 1960, and 7.9 million in 1970. By the 1960s, government officials and civil rights leaders also sought to expand access to higher education for low-income students in order to enable poor people to move into the middle class. Two-year community colleges opened across the country, largely in cities. City University of New York inaugurated “open enrollment,” guaranteeing that any high school graduate could attend a CUNY institution.

But even though the higher education landscape was changing dramatically, the term “urban university” still bore a stigma as low-status institutions that enrolled large numbers of local commuter students seen as socially unrefined and academically weak. As a result, “urban university” became a low-status label, which many universities in cities tried to avoid. In 1977, the Association of Urban Universities, which was founded in 1914, voted itself out of existence—reflecting the resistance of its members to its own name.

Then, in the last 25 years or so, higher education’s longstanding ambivalence about urban students and colleges evaporated. As many central cities have revitalized dramatically, growing numbers of upper-middle-class people have chosen to live there. In addition, cities appeal more and more to relatively affluent young people who grew up in homogeneous low-density suburbs. Cities are now “cool,” and the kind of worldly education they offer is in demand.

By 2012 an NYU admissions administrator told a Chronicle of Higher Education writer that, “whereas 20 years ago the city was our Achilles’ heel, it’s now our hallmark.” Freshmen applications to NYU grew from 10,862 in 1992 to 43,769 in 2012. Two years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Urban Hot Spots Are the Place to Be,” arguing that “a college’s location might be more important than ever to its long-term prosperity as a residential campus”—because college students seek “hands-on experiences” which are most available in the “vibrant economy of cities.”

As students and schools have changed, the once controversial innovations pioneered by colleges in cities have prevailed. City institutions pioneered the democratization of undergraduate education, and universities across the country now strive to enroll large numbers of the kinds of “urban students,” including immigrants and minorities, once viewed with deep skepticism by many in the academy. It was urban colleges, particularly municipal institutions like City College and Hunter College, that began the once-controversial practice of providing college to commuters who could not afford to live away from home while in school.

Today, the overwhelming majority of college students commute. Urban colleges also initiated programs, controversial at the time, for adults and part-time students, including evening classes. Today, adult, part-time, and evening courses are nearly universal in state universities and widespread in private institutions. The broad access to college that was initiated by innovative city institutions is now central to the overall mission of American higher education.

Urban colleges also changed curriculums and research agendas by developing a commitment to community-based research, taking advantage of the extensive resources of the city, and encouraging the study of local problems and policy issues. This kind of research is now widely practiced. The Engagement Scholarship Consortium, founded in 1999, encourages all universities to do research that is important to their communities. Its member institutions are located in cities, towns, and rural areas.

Relatedly, service learning and community engagement by college students has become a central focus of American higher education—vigorously championed by organizations like the National Society for Experiential Learning and federal government agencies like the Corporation for National and Community Service. This is another area pioneered by the so-called urban colleges.

Universities are also seen as key players in the economic development of their communities, a change that would not have occurred without the leadership of urban schools. In 1994, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter founded the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City to “spark new thinking about the business potential of inner cities.” In 2001, CEOs for Cities and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City released a study arguing that higher education institutions are well-positioned “to spur economic revitalization of our inner cities.”

The following year, Carnegie Mellon Professor Richard Florida published a book arguing that economic development depended on a “creative class” and that universities were “a key institution of the Creative Economy.” Florida re-envisioned the city as a fountain of economic growth and intellectual activity, placing the university—and its knowledge—at the center. Universities have become key entities for economic development in the post-industrial technology economy, not just in inner cities but also across the nation. Old prejudices about the urban university are effectively dead.

The purpose of colleges and universities—and undergraduate education itself—are still widely debated. Many people are deeply critical of American higher education. These conditions make it important to understand the history and value of college in the United States. Today, access to college makes it possible for millions of Americans to improve their socio-economic status and to live richer lives. Many do so while living at home, working, and attending part-time. Colleges teach traditional-aged students and adults of all ages, both full-time and part-time, including many minorities, immigrants, and people from low-income families, in degree and non-degree programs. Colleges play an ever greater role in our nation’s economy. And college students engage extensively in experiential learning, developing work skills and a commitment to civic responsibility.

All of these conditions began many years ago, in universities in cities. Whatever the deficiencies of American colleges, we must not forget how profoundly they serve society—and how those practices emerged initially in urban institutions.

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