PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieder
4-21-15/10:00 am CT
Confirmation # 3392123
Page 1
PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieder
April 21, 2015
10:00 am CT
Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session at the end of the conference.
During that time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then 1 and clearly record your name for question introduction. I would now like to turn the call over to your host Mr. Greg Darnieder. You may begin sir. Thank you.
Greg Darnieder: Good morning everyone. Thank you (Tony). I appreciate you dialing in for today's conversation, which I guarantee will be intriguing and inviting and with a group that I have all the respect in the world, you know, doing work in the college access field throughout the country, the College Advising Corps.
But before I turn this over to them, let me just make a couple of announcements and also connect today's conversation to some recent Affinity calls, which have centered on this general broad area of mentoring, whether it's more traditional mentoring or in the Near-Peer mentoring strategies.
We've explored strategies, some of which about we're going to hear today, and yet different from the GEAR UP community and we've had presentations organized by MENTOR the National Mentoring Organization, from Summer Search and iMentor and A Million Degrees and Take Stock in Children along with a couple of professors doing research in this area. One from DePaul University in Chicago and the University of Texas in San Antonio.
So, this is a continuation of those conversations. Let me just mention that a little over an hour ago the White House sent out its college and high school that the First Lady will be going to, to deliver commencement addresses.
Oberlin College in Ohio has been selected by the First Lady in terms of the Near-Peer mentoring challenge, and Dr. Martin Luther King Prep High School in Chicago has been selected by the First Lady in terms of the FAFSA challenge.
So, a huge thank you to everyone who submitted video clips related to that. There's a pretty extensive announcement which the White House has released, again, about 90 minutes ago, and I will make sure that this gets attached to an announcement concerning an Affinity call connected to next week.
I've also tweeted this out, and so if you follow me on Twitter, you can find it right now. Next week, we have an interesting approach to this call in that we are going to hear in 55 minutes about hundreds of free college and career tools from nine different organizations and presenters, with all the links to these tools.
So, next week's call is around amazing free college and career access tools from both the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the non-profit college and career access community throughout the country.
One of the things that many of you have heard me say over the last few years is how wonderful it is to be engaged in work where folks have been willing to share tools that they've developed, whether it's on affordability or career exploration or just survey tools and the such, and make those available to their colleagues doing this work throughout the country.
So, look for that next week. So that being said, let's jump in today's conversation. Again, we are joined by Dr. Nicole Hurd, who's the founder and current CEO of the College Advising Corps.
And I've known Nicole for many, many years and it's great that she has brought with her Don Gilliam and Dr. Elizabeth Bender from the Gateway STEM High School in St. Louis and the Advising Corps work that's going on there as well as Dr. Eric Bettinger, who has been looking at the effectiveness and impact of the College Advising Corps' work for a good number of years.
So, let's jump in today's conversation. And Nicole, I'm going to turn this over to you.
Nicole Hurd: Great, thank you Greg. Good morning everybody. First, I want to thank Greg for his leadership. I think these Affinity calls have been an amazing way to get our community together and share best practices and share what we're all doing. So, Greg thank you for your leadership of our space. You've made a huge difference.
I also want to thank everybody out on the call. I know there's principals and researchers and counselors and high school folks and TRIO and GEAR UP and all of our friends and the community-based space, et cetera on the call and, you know, I want to first thank you.
We're obviously doing all this learning together and doing this hand-in-hand, so I want to thank you all for allowing us to be part of this together and helping steer students together. It's an honor to be a part of this space.
Also, I just want to put a disclaimer out there, as you all know there are no silver bullets in our space, and so what we're presenting this morning to you all is some of what we've learned and some of what we think is working and some of things that we think are not working and so we're going to stop doing but, you know, I want to say this all with a lot of humility.
That we're still trying to figure out what works, we're still trying to make sure we scale this together and we still need to make sure that, like I said, our counselors, our teachers, all of our friends in this space that we're doing this together.
So, what you see today is absolutely, 100% collaborative and, like I said, we're just so honored to be doing this work together. And finally, you know, one of the reasons why we're so excited to do this is it feels like we're in silos in some ways.
And so, what I want to share with you today is to get us out of our silo and share this with the bigger community. We're obviously very excited about what we're finding out within our organization, but if it only stays within our organization, we're failing.
It has to really water the whole field and so, I'm very excited about the Affinity calls and I'm very excited about today because it's a chance to make sure we kind of bust out of our silo or bust out of our organization and really think about ways that we can move the needle together.
So, we're just very excited. So, I'm going to introduce you in a few minutes to a couple of colleagues, but just so you all see the flow of what we're about to do, I'm going to talk a little bit about who we are and what we do, and then I'm going to hand it off to my amazing colleagues that are actually in the field.
So, Donald Gilliam is at Gateway STEM High School in St. Louis, Missouri, is part of the Missouri College Advising Corps. He will talk about what he does as a college advisor, which, again, is incredibly collaborative. You're going to see things like TRIO and GEAR UP and other programs pop up.
And then we're so thrilled that Dr. Elizabeth Bender, the principal, will also be talking about college access work in the school and what we do together, and as you all know, this only works if we do this with our schools and so very, very grateful for Dr. Bender's leadership.
And then finally, we're going to end our time together with Eric Bettinger, who is, and if you have not seen Eric's research, Eric has done some amazing work showing, you know, how FAFSA completion rates can go up, showing how we can be more effective in outreach to students, how we can really move the needle together.
One of the things I love about Eric is he's not just an amazing academic, but he can speak in ways that make practitioners empowered. And so you're not going to hear a lot of jargon this morning, I promise.
What you're going to hear is an amazing scholar-researcher who is really moving the needle in terms of helping us translate this into ways that can help students, help our advisors, and help our field move forward.
So, on that note, that's sort of our agenda. Like I said, we're going to talk about the overview, we're going to talk about what's in the field, and then we're going to talk about closing the gaps and the impact of the work through the research. So, that's Slide 2.
So onto Slide 3. Our mission is to really increase the number of low income, first generation and underrepresented students both entering and completing higher education and, as I said before, this is only done in partnership so we're fortunate enough this year to be in 483 high schools across the country.
The research and the analysis you're about to see is based on being in those high schools across the country. We're in 14 states, and we do this with our advisors being fully embedded in the schools.
So they spend, you know, from the minute the school opens until after-school time is done, working with counselors, teachers, administrators as well as students and parents on the college access work. If you go to Slide 4, there's really been a lot of innovation in our model so we really see that this is about Near-Peer advising.
So, they're full-time, like I said, they're not just there for half the day or part of the week. They're there all day, every day, which again has given us the ability, and you'll see in our research, to make sure that we really can help counselors, we really can help teachers, we really can help parents and students wherever they're at, whenever they're at.
We also can hold hands with those of you who are only in the school part-time and make sure we leverage that support, which is really, really important and really exciting. All of our work is research-based so, again, Eric will talk more about this.
But we're doing this on a college match strategy so, again, you've all seen the research that's come out on under matching and how our high achieving, low income students are not going to college or going to the selective colleges in the numbers that we'd hoped to. I think our theory at the Advising Corps is actually every student is under matching, so we're not a cohort program.
We believe every student deserves a post-secondary opportunity, and why I say every student is under matching it means, you know, we've got students that really should be going to community college that are not going to higher education at all. We've got students that are going to a community college that might actually be prepared to go to a four-year university.
And then we've got, again, the students that others have studied really that should be applying to highly selective schools that aren't. So, I think we really believe that every young person deserves to have his or her potential reached through education and so, our job is to make sure that everybody finds that post-secondary opportunity.
Again, this is all about partnership and one of the things I should tell you about, our model it's a little different as we anchor our advisors through our university partnership.
So if you go ahead and look at Slide 5, the way we've done this in the 14 states we're serving is to say to our partner universities you, you know, all have high graduation rates so you cannot be a partner university of the College Advising Corps in terms of recruiting advisors and placing them unless you have a 70% five-year graduation rate.
So, what we've said is you've got great graduation rates, you've got great graduates, you've got great resources, will you please partner with us and co-invest in helping train and recruit recent graduates, and then place them full-time with the cooperation and partnership of our high schools, in these high schools across the country?
So on Slide 5 you'll see, you know, we've got 24 partner universities across the country. So, for example, a U.C. Berkeley or a University of Michigan is actually recruiting their recent graduates for us. They're training them very heavily over the summer and, again, I need to thank a lot of people on the call who helped us with training.
So, again, training's everything from, you know, how are they helping students think about post-secondary opportunities? Are they filling out FAFSA forms? Are they finding colleges that are the right match and fit? Are they making good social, academic and financial decisions? Are their parents engaged?
You can imagine the range of activities that we do in that training and then after that six weeks of training, they're deployed full-time into those high schools.
And, again, for those of you that can see the slides, you can see that our partner universities are across the country with the idea that, really what we're trying to learn, we'll scale to other university partners and scale that way.
But we also want to scale to the larger high school and college access community beyond those partnerships. Slide 6 you'll see a little bit about our advisors. As I told you, we're really honored this year to have 456 advisors serving in 483 high schools. And you'll talk to Donald in a second who's one of them.
But I just wanted to point real quickly how diverse our Corps is. So, this year 70% of our advisors are underrepresented. We're 31% African American this year and 28% Latino.
Fifty-four percent of our advisors were first in the family to attend college and 64% were Pell eligible themselves when they were in college, which again is incredibly important as they sit down with a student or a parent and say, you know, I was first in my family, I know what the barriers are. If I can do it, you can do it too.
Really important in terms of going to schools where they have similar demographics of our advisors, so if you see on the next slide, we actually match up very well to our school demographics.
This year we're in those 483 high schools serving, you know, together over a 150,000 students, but you'll see, on average, 70% of our students that we're serving are underrepresented and 72% of our students that we're serving are in free/reduced lunch.