Mentors build bridges to UC Berkeley

During a discussion this fall, a young woman asked for advice about how to draw boundary lines with her mentee, who was also a friend. One of the few men in the group said he had so far been mostly listening as the woman he mentored talked about the challenges of adjusting to college life after raising children. Some mentors, on the other hand, had been paired up with confident Vista students who pestered them for UC Berkeley application forms that hadn't come off the presses yet.

Starting Point dovetails with recent changes to the UC system's admissions policies, designed to signal that the universities welcome people from diverse backgrounds. Instead of taking race into account, a policy that was abandoned in 1995, the system admits people in the top 4 percent of their high school class. And just last month, the Board of Regents voted for comprehensive review of every application, taking various talents and personal hardships into account in addition to academic achievement.

Another planned change, on hold because of budget constraints, is to admit those who graduate between the top 4 and 12.5 percent of their high school class, provided they do well in their first two years at a community college. Starting Point is just one way UC Berkeley has already begun trying to nurture the pool of talent they see at local community colleges.

"What we're talking about here isn't just social benevolence," says Prof. Bart Grossman, director of field instruction at the School of Social Welfare and the original sponsor for Jones-West's project. "We're really talking about workforce development. We can't have a system that dead-ends."

For Adam Ebrahim, Cal had been an abstract goal since his youth. But he had to work the late shift in a cafe to earn money for school, and in the meantime he enrolled at Vista. Meeting weekly with a mentor made his goal concrete, he says, and helped him get over feeling like a "fraud" when he used the resources at UC.

As Mr. Ebrahim navigated his first semester at Cal this fall, his mentor persuaded him not to take an extra-heavy load of courses. "He brought me back down to reality, which helped a lot, because a lot of Berkeley students come in with misperceptions and fall flat on their face," he says.

Starting Point not only attracts new students who may be considered "at risk," but helps them succeed and gives them opportunities to reach out to their community, says Maria Lucero Padilla, a co-facilitator of the mentoring class who works to improve retention rates.

Ebrahim plans to be a mentor himself next semester. "I got a lot of [advice about] the educational aspects, but I think what I'm going to do is immerse my mentee in some of the social things as well," he says.

Even simple encouragement can be meaningful to people who face temptations to put educational goals aside. Jones-West recalls feeling isolated when she was studying at Vista and caring for her mother, husband, and son during various illnesses. "I would tell myself that I had 10 reasons to quit on any given day, but I had a million reasons to keep going," she says.

Now, one semester shy of a master's degree, she has the satisfaction of seeing people she tutored in math at Vista enrolled in calculus courses at Berkeley. And she's heartened to see the university pick up her idea and run with it. "This is about taking all students who are qualified, no matter what their skin color or socioeconomic status," she says. "If we prepare [community college] students, there's no limit to how many can apply."

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