Improving the college pipeline for at-risk youth

Working with high-schoolers isn't enough. Colleges must reach out to third graders to make a difference.

By Roger Hull

from the May 24, 2007 edition

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Schenectady, N.Y. - Now I know how Don Quixote felt when he jousted with windmills. As I read about the efforts of Bill Gates to reform American high schools, I want to scream "No!"

While his efforts will do some good, I wish that he, and others who are following his lead, would realize that investing in children must happen much earlier than high school – third grade would be ideal – to really make a difference.

I was a college president for 24 years. During most of those years, I – and many of my presidential colleagues – worked with high schools. Why? Because in an effort to make our campuses more diverse, we thought that by reaching out to ninth-graders we would be able to prepare them for the rigors of college and, in the process, broaden the pipeline to college for at-risk students.

I was wrong. I failed, and I know that most of my colleagues did, too. At Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where I was president from 1990 to 2005, we increased the population of at-risk students by 30 percent – not nearly good enough for a 15-year stretch.

The failing grade is not the result of lack of effort but the product of too little, far too late. Despite our collective desire to make our campuses more diverse, we are falling short because the pipeline is too narrow and the pool of qualified applicants too shallow. We are competing for the same students. Although the bidding war is good for those students, it does little to advance our objective.

We need a different approach – and I have a model that works. While president of Beloit College, in Beloit, Wis., I initiated a program for grade-school children to address this issue. (I wrote about it on the Monitor's Opinion Page in 1989.) The results were astounding: 41 percent of the children stayed with the program though elementary, middle, and high school, and 95 percent of them went on to college.

Now that I have "passed the baton" at Union, my efforts are focused on creating, like a proverbial Johnny Appleseed, after-school academies on college campuses across the educational landscape for at-risk, grade-school children. In the process, the pipeline to college for these students will be broadened.

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