Mentors build bridges to UC Berkeley

The two schools are just three blocks apart, but it can seem like 300.

Vista Community College's home base is a utilitarian, four-story building in downtown Berkeley. The University of California sits up on a hill, a pristine campus with an alumni roster that boasts Pulitzer Prize-winners, governors, and judges.

It's not uncommon to hear Vista students, even lifelong Berkeley residents, say the UC campus is so intimidating that they've never set foot there. Kathleen Jones-West remembers the feeling of walking down the hill to junior college while other people getting off the same bus went up the hill to "Cal."

"One day," she told herself, "I'm going to walk up this hill."

Once she did, this exuberant woman was determined to help others make that ascent, and the result was an innovative mentoring program that brings the two worlds a little closer together.

Mrs. Jones-West had enrolled in computer courses at Vista so she could better support her family. But when she made the leap to Cal, she kept thinking about her fellow Vista students - especially women facing time limits on welfare benefits. A number of them, like her, would be the first in their families to earn college degrees, and every barrier they faced sounded familiar.

"People would say, 'Yes, I'd love to go to Cal, but....' There was always a but. 'I'm not doing well in math, I'm not a good writer, I don't have the money,' " she says. "Many people don't realize that the solutions exist."

Required by her scholarship to do a community-service project, Jones-West volunteered to give advice to low-income Vista students. Soon, it was a full-fledged program that UC Berkeley officials were eager to expand, partly because of its potential to help maintain diversity in a post-affirmative action California. What better way to break down Cal's image as elitist and inaccessible, they thought, than to train its students as ambassadors?

Since "Starting Point" was launched in 1999, more than 100 UC Berkeley students have earned credits for serving as mentors. This fall, four of the Vista students who benefited from these one-on-one relationships started their studies at Cal, and the program now reaches other Bay Area community colleges.

"You've got to get to community-college students early, so that they're motivated, so they'll believe they can do it," says Helen Johnson, director of the Centers for Transfer, Reentry & Student Parents at UC Berkeley. "If they think about it later, they might not have done the required courses."

Currently 1,740 students, about 8 percent of UC Berkeley's undergraduates, are "reentry" - over age 25. Most of them transferred from junior colleges.

The mentors try to demystify the Cal experience, whether it's helping people fill out financial-aid forms or taking them on their first trip to the massive campus library, with its marble staircase and rows of soft-lighted reading tables.

Many of the mentors started at junior colleges themselves, so their stories offer Vista students "psychological preparation," says Hermia Yam, director of Vista's programs for disadvantaged students. Ms. Yam says that among this subset of Vista students, there's been a 50 percent increase - since Starting Point began - in the number who transfer to Berkeley and other four-year colleges.

For the Berkeley mentors, the class at the School of Social Welfare - technically a "directed group study" - is a chance to improvise together to meet whatever needs arise.

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