In California, a Public Research University Succeeds Because Its Low-Income Students Do
Chronicle of Higher Education 3/23/07
But Riverside's position has also allowed it to draw large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds, who are likelier than their wealthier peers to have received poor preparation in high school and to come from families without college-going experience. That has helped Riverside carve out a new identity: It has become one of the system's — and the nation's — most socioeconomically diverse public research institutions, with a track record of helping its financially needy students succeed.
Nearly two-thirds of all students at Riverside graduate within six years, well above the median of 39 percent for low-income-serving institutions calculated by the National Center for Education Statistics last fall.
Close to half of the campus's more than 14,700 undergraduates qualify for federal Pell Grants. More than two in five are among the first generation in their families to attend college, and about one-third are from underrepresented minority groups.
Among those groups at Riverside, the graduation rates are similar, with most hovering around 64 percent. The rate for low-income students is even higher. For first-time freshmen who enrolled at Riverside in the fall of 1999 and received Pell Grants, 66.3 percent graduated within six years.
"Riverside really could be a model for a research university that serves access and excellence missions," says Jennifer Engle, a research analyst at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, an independent research group.
As the nation grows more racially diverse and seeks to improve degree-completion rates across socioeconomic groups, she says, public institutions are going to have to follow Riverside's lead and learn to help a wider array of students graduate.
Riverside has many of the programs found by Ms. Engle and other higher-education researchers to help impoverished students graduate. For instance, about half of Riverside's freshmen are part of small learning communities, in which students form study groups and gain peer support as they adapt to college. The campus also offers extra academic sessions, taught by more-experienced students, to supplement regular lectures in about 30 courses, many in mathematics and science, in which new students tend to struggle. Summer sessions are offered to help incoming freshmen get acclimated to college-level work.
Disparities Among Public Colleges
France A. Córdova, Riverside's chancellor, is still not satisfied with her university's graduation rates. She wants to expand successful academic-support programs and create more.
"We spend a lot of time as presidents and senior administrators worrying about how to get students in the door, and then we don't worry about how to keep them there," she says. As the United States falls behind other nations in degree attainment, she adds, "we can't afford to do nothing."
Graduation rates among public colleges that serve high proportions of low-income students, like those of other four-year institutions, vary significantly, even among similarly selective campuses, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Education Department.
Within California State University, for instance, six-year graduation rates on low-income-serving campuses ranged from 51 percent at Chico to 34.3 percent at Los Angeles.
The 23-campus system has several programs to help improve degree attainment at all branches, says Keith O. Boyum, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs. Those efforts include determining the college readiness of high-school juniors, aligning curricula at Cal State and community colleges to help transfer students, and sending teams of faculty members and administrators to all campuses to see how each might improve its graduation rate.
But some disparities among campus graduation rates may stem from differences in the colleges' identities, says Mr. Boyum. On Cal State's urban campuses, like Los Angeles, he says, the average course load is often lower than at rural and largely residential branches, like Chico. The urban campuses tend to draw more students who work or who have children or other family obligations, circumstances that lead them to attend part time, Mr. Boyum says. Many of those students are still likely to earn degrees, he says, just not in six years.
In Kentucky, where fewer than one in five residents hold bachelor's degrees, low-income-serving colleges have had varied success in helping the state achieve its goal of increasing the number of graduates of four-year colleges. Students who attend the University of Kentucky or Murray State University are twice as likely to graduate as those who attend Eastern Kentucky University.
Thomas D. Layzell, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, the state's coordinating board, says Murray State has made a big push to help its students, including adding residential colleges where faculty members live with students. Eastern Kentucky has begun to increase aid for financially needy students, says Mr. Layzell, "but they're not going to turn around their statistics overnight."
Measuring Intervention
One key to raising graduation rates is monitoring programs designed to help low-income students academically, say the Pell institute's Ms. Engle and other researchers.
At Riverside, Ms. Córdova says empirical research helps the university improve how it assists students and builds a case for seeking money from foundations and the state. This fiscal year, the university plans to spend about $3-million, mostly from institutional funds, on its programs to support students academically.
Among the programs with demonstrated success is a freshman "learning community" in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in which students take a yearlong series of courses together, attend workshops, and meet with student mentors. Participants in the program, 70 percent of whom receive Pell Grants, are 10 percent more likely than their classmates to return for their sophomore year.
Another program has increased the pass rates of low-income students, as well as others, in tough introductory courses in biology, chemistry, and calculus. More than 80 percent of freshmen who enrolled in a five-week summer program to prepare them in those subjects pass the introductory courses, in some of which as many as half of all other students fail.
David R. Santiago-Dieppa, a sophomore who receives a
Pell Grant, says his high school did not prepare him for college-level math and science. He enrolled in Riverside's summer program before his freshman year, and on the first day, professors' lectures lost him within minutes. "I was in a panic," he says.
By the end of the summer, he had received a C in biology and chemistry and had failed math. But the classes had given him a grounding, he says, and by the end of his first quarter, that fall, he had earned an A– in chemistry and had passed remedial math. Now he is in Riverside's Medical Scholars Program, which helps students from low-income families and other disadvantaged backgrounds prepare for medical careers. It helped him get into a program last summer in which he shadowed doctors and worked on cadavers.
"If you're willing to work hard," he says, "they're willing to help you."
Looking to Improve
Not all of Riverside's services have proved as effective. A review of university programs conducted about two years ago revealed deficiencies in advising.
Ms. Córdova says she heard too many stories about poorly trained advisers who steered low-income students and others away from tough courses instead of helping them learn to thrive in difficult disciplines. Among other remedies, the university has added training for advisers and hired people with expertise in developmental education who can tailor academic help to learning styles.
In recent years, Riverside has also sought to build on its strongest programs so that they reach more students and help them in new ways. Last fall the learning-community program in the humanities college tried a new approach to helping freshmen adjust to college. Students were placed with the same classmates in a composition course and in a discussion section of a separate, large lecture course.
Feryal Cherif, a political-science professor who taught one of those lecture courses, says she noticed a difference. Compared with students she has had in other "Introduction to World Politics" classes, the learning-community participants had higher attendance, wrote better papers, and asked more questions. The program's approach seems to ease students' anxiety, she adds, since they share similar experiences and backgrounds.
Neal L. Schiller, associate dean for biomedical sciences, has been slowly building the Medical Scholars Program, which he based on a similar program at Berkeley. It began as a way to help meet the state's growing need for physicians in the Inland Empire region, east of Los Angeles, where Riverside is located, and in other medically underserved areas.
In 2004, its first year, the program had 15 students and operated on a budget of about $50,000, enough to hire a part-time coordinator and buy snacks for participants. He has since won support from private foundations, including $1.6-million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This year 160 students participate.
Along the way, however, Mr. Schiller has met resistance, even from some faculty members.
"There have been a few people who look at this money and say, 'Why are you putting it on these kids?'" he says. "They say, 'We're the University of California, and if they're not prepared, that's too bad.'"
Mr. Schiller argues that Riverside, though, has a duty to help all students succeed, a view he says most administrators and faculty member share. "If students are eligible for the University of California, and they're admitted to our school," he says, "we're obligated to work with them."
And with Riverside's extra help, many low-income students thrive.
José L. Magaña, whose father cuts metal in a factory and whose mother is a homemaker, graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade-point average. He had dreams of becoming a doctor. But once Mr. Magaña, a Pell Grant recipient who is the first in his immediate family to enroll in college, entered Riverside, that career goal seemed much more distant.
He had no idea that preparing for college tests would require so much time, he says, and he ended his freshman year on academic probation: "I was really discouraged, and scared, too."
But he gained hope in his sophomore year, when a faculty member showed him that medical schools sometimes look favorably upon students who turn their grades around. The professor told him that the Medical Scholars Program could steer him in the right direction.
Through the program, Mr. Magaña got advice about what courses to take and how to study. He received free preparation for the Medical College Admission Test, and met with admissions officials from medical schools. Now a senior, Mr. Magaña earned a 4.0 grade-point average last fall. He has applied to 11 medical schools and so far has qualified for interviews at two. His career goal is reachable now, he says, because he didn't have to go it alone at Riverside. "We're a community," he says, "and we help each other out."