News 2019

Yes We Must Coalition Receives $249,000 Grant To Transition Longitudinal Data Project to the National Student Clearinghouse Postsecondary Data Partnership

Since 2014, YWM has identified data capacity and reporting as important for understanding factors that impact the success of low-income students and for informing decision-making about strategies to promote degree completion. For the past three years most of our members have submitted persistence data for students entering their institutions. The data base, which has already yielded useful information regarding factors related to success for particular sub-groups of low-income students, has now grown to the point that more help is needed to efficiently and effectively collect and analyze relevant student-level data. In addition, we seek to add course-level data.

This grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides funding to help transition YWMC members to the National Student Clearinghouse’s Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP), which serves as a hub collecting, verifying and reporting data back to participating institutions so they can make sound, evidence-based decisions about how to help their students succeed. An advantage is that PDP provides access to a larger pool of data than the Coalition can offer on its own and can export dashboard metrics and analysis-ready files, for example, for sharing student information and developing reports. The Coalition will still provide peer comparisons among YWMC members.

The grant will help the Coalition cover some of the start-up fees and will make it possible to retain a consultant to provide assistance with the transition and teach YWM member institutions how to do the work involved in the process themselves.

We foresee that PDP will become an important benefit of Coalition membership and will be of value to administrators, faculty, and staff as well as to the low-income students they serve. In addition, the data will help inform the collaborative work of the Coalition. We are grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for supporting this significant next step in fulfilling the goal of increasing degree completion among low-income students and students of color.

The extra challenges of career-ready education at colleges serving low-income students

by Goldie Blumenstyk, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education

With the rise of the gig economy, the erosion of job security and employer-provided training, and the threats to jobs from a coming wave of automation, the role of education in helping people prepare for their working lives — perhaps over and over again — couldn’t be more pressing.

That’s a point I’ve made at several public events over the past few months, after completing research for my “Career Ready Education” report.

Easy for me to say, right?

And even more to the point, of course: Actually helping students prepare for their careers is easier said than done. That’s especially true for small colleges that aren’t sitting on fat endowments and that enroll a high proportion of financially needy students. Those students have the fewest advantages when it comes to having connections for first jobs and internships. And as graduates, they could be seriously at risk economically if their investment in college didn’t adequately prepare them for the workplace.

All of that came sharply into focus for me last week when I spoke to 75 college leaders from the Yes We Must Coalition at their gathering at Augsburg University, in Minneapolis, on engaging with employers. (The 35-member coalition includes only colleges where at least half of the students qualify for Pell Grants and the overall undergraduate enrollment is no greater than 7,500.)

Yes We Must, which I’ve been following since it became a national advocacy group, invited me to share some lessons on developing employer partnerships from my report. I took the opportunity to ask them about the particular challenges they face and the strategies they employ — considering their limited size and resources and the nature of their student bodies. In asking that, I kind of horned in on their meeting, so I’m grateful for their willingness to let me report what they shared.

Here’s some of what struck me:

Being located near a tech hub like San Francisco doesn’t guarantee that students can
get internships.

Holy Names University is in Oakland, Calif. But because so many of its students need to work, internships at the many start-ups and tech giants in the region are often out of the picture for them. What’s more, they can’t always afford the costs of getting to them. BART, the local public-transit authority, can be pricey, and, as Laura Lyndon, the university’s vice president for student affairs, noted, “a lot of students don’t have cars.”

Making the case for changes that might enhance students’ career readiness can be tough.

Faculty members in the liberal arts can be wary of adding components from other disciplines to majors because “they’re scared they’re going to lose what students they have,” said Beverly Downing, associate provost at Huston-Tillotson University. And getting buy-in from administrators isn’t necessarily any easier. Some of are mindful of the debates about the role of college, she said, and can be reluctant to adopt approaches that may seem too career-focused.

Colleges may need to create their own work-and-learn opportunities.

The nursing program at Martin Methodist College is the only one in a 17-county region of Tennessee. To give students hands-on experience, the college operates a “nursing van” service that takes them to see patients in church basements, school lunchrooms, senior homes, and community centers throughout the south-central part of the state.

Relationships with employers need to be thoughtfully cultivated.

That’s advice from Chris Dowdy, vice president for academic affairs at Paul Quinn College, which has developed an array of job-placement partnerships that place students with employers in Dallas and Plano, Tex., as part of its work-college model. “When employers think of it as a favor or a donation,” he said, the relationship may not be as lasting. Colleges should recognize that they, too, bring value to the partnerships, especially if their students represent a population that employers are trying to recruit, he said. Sometimes colleges should be talking with the talent-development office of the employer, not just the social-responsibility folks.

To use faculty members effectively in enhancing students’ career opportunities, give
them support.

In “Career-Ready Education,” I floated the burgeoning idea of “faculty-employability fellowships” to acquaint professors more directly with what employers want. Turns out at least one college, Virginia’s Averett University, is way ahead of me. Next summer eight professors will spend two weeks studying employers’ needs in the region so they can incorporate some of that into their teaching and develop relationships that could lead to internships or student projects based on the real needs of companies and nonprofits. Billy Wooten, executive director of the college’s Center for Community Engagement and Career Competitiveness, told me he’s also hoping to create an Averett Corps, which would allow students to work in departments on campus that are closely aligned with their majors.

The best connections might already be on the payroll.

When Martin Methodist went looking for a new director of internships, it decided that the best person for the job was an internal candidate — Pat Ford, an instructor in business who just happened to also be the mayor of Pulaski. Politically popular and well-known in regional economic-development circles, he’s helped open doors for the college with many companies and says employers are eager to talk with him. Ford was at the gathering, too, so I asked him whether that openness was due to his being director of internships or his being the mayor. “It doesn’t matter,” he responded with a big grin. “It works.”

Ascendium Education Solutions Awards YWMC up to $95,000 for 2019 College-Employer Partnerships Convening

The Yes We Must Coalition has been awarded up to $95,000 to plan, coordinate and host a two-day convening and to cover the costs of travel by 4-person teams from 18 YWMC member institutions. The goal of the convening is to develop a model for the collaborative engagement of colleges and employers with particular attention to what works for students from low-income backgrounds. The meeting will be held in September 2019 at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

The member institutions participating in this grant are united by their commitment to low-income students. They are diverse in location — rural, urban and suburban — and represent various religious affiliations, including several with no affiliation. One is a two-year school although several of the 4-year schools also award Associate degrees. There are two federal Work Colleges among the group, four HBCUs, a women’s college and several Minority Serving Institutions.

Participating YWMC Institutions:

The Coalition is grateful for this support from Ascendium that allows us to work across institutions to explore existing models of employer engagement and build our own employer engagement plan that becomes a 4-year pathway to professional readiness.
— Gloria Nemerowicz, President, Yes We Must Coalition

Read More:

In 2015, at a YWMC Institute focusing on collaboration, members discussed ideas about how to work together to prepare students for and help usher them into meaningful work after college for which they would be well-prepared and enthusiastic. It was noted that students from low-income backgrounds have a particular need for early and frequent exposure to a range of career and graduate study options as well as a need for reinforcement of the development of a professional identity.

For a year following the Institute, the Yes We Must Coalition facilitated discussions about how to organize a nation-wide inventory of employers with whom our members had some relationship, in order to see if we might create a national resource of employer involvement for our students. The more we worked at it, the more we realized that we needed to make partnerships at the local level that might then be scaled. We also became aware of the need to integrate preparation for the world of professional work into the earliest experiences of our students and carry that preparation through to graduation. It is clear that preparation needs to involve employers in the life of the campus as well as involve students in the professional workplace. It is a reciprocal relationship.

About Ascendium

Ascendium Education Group (formerly Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation & Affiliates) is the nation’s largest student loan guarantor as well as a leading higher education philanthropy and provider of student success services for postsecondary institutions. Founded in 1967, Ascendium provides information, tools and counseling to millions of borrowers nationwide, helping them avoid the consequences of default and keeping the door to re-enrollment open. Since 2006, Ascendium’s philanthropy program has committed more than $325 million in grant funding aimed at exploring, validating and scaling evidence-based strategies for overcoming systemic obstacles to completion of postsecondary education, particularly for students from historically underserved populations. All of Ascendium’s operations are grounded in the belief that every individual has potential to contribute meaningfully to their community and society. We work to unleash that potential through the power of higher education, and to eliminate barriers that stand in the way of its fulfillment. To learn more, visit https://www.ascendiumeducation.org.

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