Category: Access & Inclusion

As part of his listening tour, Matt vandenBerg, the new president of Ohio Wesleyan University, created a YouTube and TikTok video of himself not listening to a legendary superstition that stepping on a seal outside of University Hall would bring bad luck. In the hilarious parody, vandenBerg cautiously steps, then stomps, dances, and jump-jacks on the seal before he is beset by a series of calamities that have him appearing at a university function sporting tattered clothes and a black eye. 

@ohiowesleyan

POV: your university president decides to test fate and steps on the seal – bad luck level: Presidential Edition!

♬ original sound – Ohio Wesleyan University

There is much to unpack here. First, it takes a certain level of confidence for a new president to humble (vandenBerg might say “humiliate”) himself in front of his students, and on their own medium at that. It is also refreshing to see a college president bringing some levity to a position that, certainly of late, is not perceived as being much fun. His inauguration on April 19 was another opportunity to depart from the implied rules. In referring to Paul Revere’s famous ride on the same date, vandenBerg evoked a rebellious spirit in laying out nine new initiatives the school would be taking on, including partnerships with the community and other institutions that would increase access and affordability. In his speech, vandenBerg rejected a number of “unhelpful” conventions in higher education – the idea that faculty and administrators are naturally at odds, that host communities are either competitive with or overly-reliant on their university partners, and, perhaps most importantly, that the liberal arts are for the fortunate few and will not bring the kind of return on investment Americans are looking for in a college degree. 

In our interview, President vandenBerg talks about that speech, as well as what drew him to Delaware, Ohio, how he plans to distinguish OWU’s mission from “what everyone else promises,” and what new college presidents might learn from the public’s current frustration with higher education. 

LearningWell: You were most recently at Presbyterian College in South Carolina. What made you leave there and come to OWU? 

MV: My family and I were committed to staying at Presbyterian College for a good number of years, but serendipity hits in your life at times, and for us, serendipity hit in the form of an old friend calling me to say, “I know you’re not looking for a new job opportunity. I just need you to pick up the phone and listen.” This friend happened to be leading the search for the presidency of Ohio Wesleyan University, and I realized that from that short conversation with her, I didn’t just want to know more about Ohio Wesleyan; I needed to know more.

So much of the spirit of the institution, its situation in the higher education landscape, and its aspirations resonated with me. But I also thought it might bring some important enhancements to the life of my family. After a consultation with my wife, I decided to throw my hat in the ring, and the rest is history. 

We had some trepidation, but in the end, moving my family to Delaware, Ohio, was a no-brainer, primarily for three reasons. Number one, the people. The students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, and the community members that we met were really special. They wanted to do big things. Together, we were going to be able to do transformative work to elevate and amplify a tremendous institution. 

Number two, the community. The city of Delaware, in Delaware County, loves its university. It was evident to us at first blush. There’s been a bedrock of trust built over decades between the institution and the community. That stands in stark contrast to where a lot of small, private, residential liberal arts institutions are situated. They are often in struggling communities and are the sole anchor that is relied upon to drive the local economy, to bring all of the artistic and humanistic enhancement to the community. That’s simply not the case with Ohio Wesleyan University and the city of Delaware and Delaware County. This is a healthy place looking to go from great to phenomenal, and that is always a charge that I get excited about. 

The third thing that got me so excited to come here was the transformative impact that OWU has on the lives of young people. I believe that in higher education we often focus on the transaction: How much does it cost? What degree do you graduate with? What is your first-year salary? Are you seeing that immediate return on investment? To me, if done well, higher education is not a transaction. It is a transition into adulthood, and it is supposed to be transformative. Ohio Wesleyan University intrinsically understands that. It’s baked into the ethos of this place. They’ve got 40,000 success stories to showcase that impact. So, that’s how I went from not looking for another position to realizing the calling of my life was to come to this spot in Ohio. 

LW: You recently had your inauguration. Tell me a little bit about what you said that day. What was most important for you to lay out in terms of your vision for the school?

MV: We wanted to be rebellious in terms of what an inauguration actually is. They are often kind of boring, stuffy — too focused on the new person getting the job. I believe that an inauguration should be an inflection point in an institution’s trajectory. It should be an opportunity to celebrate the past and everything that brought us to where we are. It should be a chance to grapple earnestly and honestly with the challenges and opportunities that we have today. And then it should also be a way to galvanize ourselves around an exciting future. 

If you’re a college president and you’re not leveraging the concerns and criticisms for self-reflection and self-improvement, you’re missing a big opportunity. 

That day, we made the case that we need to seek and secure distinction in this overcrowded higher education landscape. We were pretty direct in tackling that head-on. Not only will we not thrive in the future if we don’t figure out what it is that makes us distinctive, but we’re also doing a tremendous disservice to students and families by not pointing out the meaningful differences between institutions. We all tend to sell ourselves the same way using the same tired cliches: “Come here because we have small class sizes, faculty who really care about you and who know your name. We have tight-knit communities. We have beautiful campuses. We have successful alumni. We’ll give you a job or an internship. You’ll learn how to apply what you’re learning in the classroom to an external context.” Those are things that every institution is saying right now, and it can contribute to this sense of white noise that students and their families have when they go on different campus tours.

I want Ohio Wesleyan University to be able to answer the question of what makes us truly unique. The title of my inaugural address is “What’s in the Water?” — What is it about Ohio Wesleyan that we offer to students that they can’t or don’t or won’t get anywhere else? And how do we channel our energy, our resources, and our focus in the same direction so that our unique, meaningful, defensible value proposition truly shines? 

We invoked the spirit of 1842, our founding year, and we connected that to the historic spirit of the day on which the inauguration actually occurred. It was April 19^th — the day of Paul Revere’s ride and the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.  That day sparked the American Revolution. So, we invoked the spirit of rebellion of that day to discuss how OWU began and to proclaim with confidence and joy where we were going. 

In 1842, a local Methodist minister went door-to- door, just like Paul Revere did, to rally the countryside in a call to do something important and in service to a greater purpose. That was a fun message to deliver, but it had a serious undertone. The idea was to apply a sense of rebellion to the way we move forward, and that means categorically rejecting all of the things in higher education that are broken, all the things that we think are supposed to be truisms but that are absolutely not. For example, the understanding that faculty and administrators are supposed to be at odds with each other — we categorically reject that notion. The idea that the liberal arts are not inherently valuable as an educational model, that they don’t lead to good careers, that they are a poor choice if you’re looking for return on investment. We categorically reject those notions. And lastly, we wanted to showcase that at OWU, we don’t just talk about things; we do them. Our love language is action. We made nine significant announcements that day, and they all boil down to three different things. One is investing in people, especially our students, faculty and staff; two is building community, especially through investments in our infrastructure; and three is changing lives through innovative partnerships. 

LW: Can we talk a little more about that third goal? 

MV: Establishing partnerships is a big part of what we want to do. We want to radically expand affordability and accessibility and build equitable pathways that help students get to where they want to go in their lives. We want to deliver on the student’s timetable, not necessarily just higher education’s timetable. So, we announced a few new ways of doing just that. 

Columbus State Community College is the major two-year institution in central Ohio. Together, we launched a powerful three-part partnership to help community college students realize that there is a viable pathway for them to a four-year degree at a liberal arts institution. The first component of our partnership is called “Preferred Pathway.” It’s fairly common for community college students to want to pursue a bachelor’s degree once they graduate. The problem is that, at many institutions, their credits don’t always fully transfer and they don’t maintain their hardfought status in their major.  They are promised this two-year pathway to a bachelor’s degree, and then they discover that it’s going to take them longer and cost them more to graduate than they were told. It can feel to them like a bait-and-switch. Moreover, for a lot of students, including those transferring in from a community college, just the idea of going to a private liberal arts college can sound expensive – perhaps even out of reach, financially. We knew we could improve that experience for students. In partnership with about 25 different professors, we hand-built transparent, hassle-free two-year pathways for students across 20 different majors. It’s the most comprehensive pathway program that Columbus State has among national liberal arts universities.

The second part of the partnership attacks the real and perceived cost issue, head-on. For up to 25 students with at least a 3.5 GPA at Columbus State, we have a tuition match program, so they actually pay the Columbus State tuition rate to attend and complete their Ohio Wesleyan University degree. The tuition match program means that students now not only have the logistical means to succeed, but they now have extraordinary financial support as well. No other university, public or private, can match that commitment.

We want to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education.

The third part of our partnership addresses a vexing national issue – and certainly one that affects our region as well. It’s the looming teacher shortage and the dearth of people entering the teaching profession. We don’t think that we can solve that problem on our own, but one of the things that we can do is begin to reduce the barriers to entry for people who do have an interest in the teaching profession. How do we encourage those students who feel a calling toward this work to get their credentials and degrees without saddling them with crippling debt?

In partnership with our local Delaware County school systems and Columbus State, we found a new way to deliver extraordinary value and encourage more teachers to enter the system. Using the College Credit Plus program in Ohio, students in their junior year of high school are able to earn credit toward their associate degree from Columbus State. By the time they graduate from high school, they get not only a high school diploma, but also an associate degree, and then they can jump seamlessly into Ohio Wesleyan University and complete their bachelor’s and teaching certificate in just two years. This program cuts the time to completion in half and reduces their costs dramatically. 

Another partnership, the Delaware County Promise, is a great example of our vision for the future. Delaware County is considered the healthiest, wealthiest, and fastest-growing county in the state of Ohio, and the unfortunate truth is that not everyone participates equally in that prosperity. We can prove over and over again that higher education is the great social mobility agent, but a lot of people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, even in Delaware County, don’t think about going to their local liberal arts college, because they dismiss it as being out of reach. This was one of the earliest problems I remember thinking about when I came here. I started talking with city and county leaders, and we came up with an exciting program to tackle that problem, which we announced at the inauguration. “If you are from Delaware County or go to school in Delaware County, and you earn a 3.5 GPA in high school and your family makes $100,000 a year or less, you can now go to Ohio Wesleyan University absolutely tuition-free.” We worked out a way, through our own investments in financial aid, to make that possible and then partnered with the community and the Delaware County Foundation to make it happen. 

Ultimately, what we really want to do is to democratize access to the transformative benefits of a liberal arts education. We want to be able to reach anyone for whom the liberal arts can be a life-changer. We want a student’s personal choice to determine where they attend college, rather than financial barriers, social constraints, self-confidence constraints, or other challenges. We want personal choice and fit, as decided by the individual, to be the ultimate determinant. 

LW: Major change, as opposed to tradition, is not something we often associate with higher education. What are your thoughts on that?

MV: Higher education certainly features some significant strengths. For example, shared governance, academic freedom, and free speech strengthen what we do and how we do it. But we can improve in some areas.  Among our relative weaknesses is our sense of toxic egalitarianism — the idea that we have to do everything with the same amount of effort, that we can’t give anything we do more attention unless we give an equal measure of attention and investment to everything else. Most people who start a business, or run a business, understand that that is no way to succeed. We need to know our distinctive value proposition and make disciplined and strategic decisions accordingly.

Moreover, higher education has tended to have an incremental approach to mustering its way through challenges by adding a few programs here or there, adding a few more students, and reducing operating expenses a little bit. My abiding notion is that this moment in our history is not a time for incremental strategies alone. We should be thinking about continuous improvement — how we can be better and better at what we do — but if we don’t start breaking some of the implied rules about what higher education is and what it is supposed to be, we are going to miss the mark as our society – and students’ needs – continue to change at unprecedented levels.

LW: Do people ask you why you wanted to become a college president at a time when higher education, and presidents in particular, are under such scrutiny? 

MV: The presidency of a college can be a hard job, no doubt, as I said to a group of aspiring vice presidents and presidents in Washington, D.C., last week. I told them, “If you’re thinking about a presidency simply because it gives you a fancier title, because the pay is better, because you think people will respect you more, or because you receive more visibility, this job will eat you alive.” 

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy.

You have to want to do this work because it’s a calling. I’ve known I wanted to do this job since I was 20 years old. I know that is an oddly specific sense of vocation for a 20-year-old to have, but I have always believed in the value of higher education and particularly in the power of liberal arts colleges to transform lives. I don’t think liberal arts colleges are for everyone, but I do think they are for a lot more students than who currently realize it. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Religious connotations aside, I see myself as a liberal arts evangelist, helping to bring the word of what we do to more people who would benefit enormously from this important educational philosophy and delivery model.

One underrated quality of liberal arts institutions is that we’re fundamentally good for democracy. We promote and engender in our students an appreciation for civic participation, free speech, intellectual inquiry, and service to others. And in these fractious times, we think it’s critical for our institutions to serve as an antidote for the deficits we see in our society’s discourse. Our educational approach is uniquely effective at training students to engage in constructive dialogue, especially amidst disagreement and difference. We believe that more people need to learn how to be productively engaged citizens who understand how their government works and who can work to address problems in ways that bring others together, rather than in ways that exacerbate divides. In the coming months, OWU will seek to amplify its role in that vital work. We think it’s essential to our democratic republic. And that work is just one more example of the vital role of higher education.

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio’s interview with Dan Porterfield on his new book “Mindset Matters: The Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth.” You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede:

This is Learning Well Radio, the podcast of Learning Well Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong wellbeing. I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the editor of Learning Well and your host. Today, Dan Porterfield is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a global organization committed to realizing a free just and equitable society. He’s also the former president of Franklin and Marshall College, where from 2011 to 2018, he led the achievement of a number of student-centered milestones, including tripling the enrollment of low-income students and expanding student wellness and career services. Dan’s new book is called Mindset Matters, the Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth. He joins us today at Learning Well Radio to talk about how higher education can achieve its promise to shape mindsets that enable students to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Dan, welcome to Learning Well Radio.

Dan Porterfield:

Thank you, Marjorie, and thank you for that description of my book. It’s better than I could have done on my own.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I’ve got to tell you, I loved your book. Are you ready to give us some highlights?

Dan Porterfield:

Sure thing.

Marjorie Malpiede:

First, I wanted to ask, and it’s so obvious from the first page, this book really comes from a place of deep experience for you in terms of your mentoring students. Can you talk about those experiences first and how they may have led you or compelled you to write the book?

Dan Porterfield:

Oh, thank you, Marjorie. I was fortunate that I was exposed to education and great educators from the time I was growing up in Baltimore City as a child, which included having great coaches and mentors throughout all the different experiences I had playing sports in Baltimore, going to Loyola High School, later going to Georgetown University. I have a huge list of caring adults from my developmental times who played important roles in my life by setting an example, investing in me, listening and caring, encouraging me, sometimes challenging me or criticizing me, all those different kinds of experiences. But when I was younger, I coached basketball, I worked with court supervised youth, I worked with immigrant families in their homes in Washington, D.C., I taught in prisons and I had a set of experiences in my twenties that allowed me to be an educator, and that motivated me, inspired me to pursue a PhD and to envision college education as the place where I would develop my career. I got into working at the college level, having already both benefited from mentorship and been a mentor many times over. And so I do bring that joy to this book and everything I do.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Well, it comes through in the pages. The other thing I want to ask you, Dan, you were a college president. You were also particularly attuned to the students’ development in a way that you don’t always see in the president’s office.

Dan Porterfield:

I don’t know what to say about how other people get into this role of leading a college and university and what experiences they have, but my life has been so enriched by being a teacher and a mentor and a coach. So one of the things I’ve always looked for is more when I was at Georgetown University, I was senior vice president for strategic development and also an English professor I taught most semesters. But about five years into my experience at Georgetown, my wife and I chose to move into a residence hall with our three daughters who at that age were six, five and zero. And so, for eight years before going to F and M, we lived in the ground floor of Copley Residence Hall and were the faculty family. I was teaching, I was working at the senior level and I was living on campus, and all those roles were complementary of course, but the opportunity to be present 24/7 to the student experience at Georgetown was just so enlightening and inspiring to me. It made me want to be a president that was in close touch with the student body.

Marjorie Malpiede:

The book is called Mindset Matters. Great title by the way. And you start by describing growth and fixed mindsets, with a conclusion that encouraging a growth mindset is one of the major goals of higher education. Can you elaborate on that with an eye towards why, as you argue in the book, it’s more important than ever?

Dan Porterfield:

Yes. So first of all, Carol Dweck is the brilliant psychologist and professor of psychology who came up with the concept of growth and fixed mindsets. When I read her book Mindset years ago, it influenced how I taught my students at Georgetown and later at Franklin and Marshall, because Professor Dweck came to see through her research that people adopt a view about their capacity to handle change and to be able to grow in the face of change, to meet new challenges, to learn new skills, to climb new mountains, to develop new capacities. And she found that people tended to adopt either the mindset, I can do it, I’m a learner, or the opposite: I’m not good at that. I found myself as a professor and as a leader on Georgetown’s campus, so inspired by the idea that my actions as the professor, as the faculty and residents could directly influence a young person’s lifelong perception of their capacity to take on new challenges, to lead their learning, to be able to expand their capability. This idea that our capability and our talent is malleable and not fixed is I think first of all, absolutely true. And secondly, a great resource for educators because it reminds us if we can ignite in our students their capacity for self-development, if we can help them think of themselves as equipped and able to lead their own learning, we are giving them the gift of themselves for life. Be the person that ignites, in a younger student, their self-confidence that whatever may come, they can take responsibility for leading their learning. 

Marjorie Malpiede:

And to be on the receiving end of that, Dan, is so hopeful, and I got to say unusual in terms of the way many of us went through our education, which is What are you good at? Oh, okay, you’re good at that. And I think that’s just such an interesting insight, to think, You know what? I don’t really know what I’m going to be or do until I explore it more. And to your point, college is the place to do it.

Dan Porterfield:

Well, I think that also just for anybody listening, think about the educators in your life who were most influential. Almost always, the ones you lean on were the ones that said, You can do it and let me help you be able to know you can do it. Let me challenge you, instruct you, motivate you, and then express my faith in you. And I got that sense of educators having faith in me all across my learning journey from third grade on, but especially the Jesuits who taught me at high school and at Georgetown University who has a set, and I had at least 10 or 12 different professors or teachers who were Jesuits again and again, their worldview, their understanding of the human person was that we were beings in development, and that their job was to foster and nurture that developmental process, not to limit it.

Marjorie Malpiede:

In the book, you talk about five different kinds of mindsets that are critical to this holistic approach, which again is the Jesuit way of looking at learning, and you illuminate these with stories about students themselves. It’s one of the things I love most about your book because it was the best way to illustrate your point by talking about the students’ journeys. Can you describe those five mindsets and maybe tell us a little bit about the students that for you sort of characterize the best of those.

Dan Porterfield:

So overall, I believe that growth mindsets express themselves in certain directions. What I explored was how the residential college experience fosters in students growth mindsets for discovery to be the one that can look for answers. No one’s thought to look for creation, the one who can make something that didn’t exist before for mentorship, the one who can give mentoring so that another person can develop what’s great inside of them for teamwork, for collaboration, for working as a part of a group in a way that advances the power of the collective. And then for striving. And by striving, what I mean by that is that we drive our growth in a way that the growth is in pursuit of what we value most, that our values and our growth are reinforcing. So those five growth mindsets I think are exceptionally valuable in today’s economy and today’s society. 

The reason I say that is because as I think we all know, there’s so much change coming faster and faster. What is the cause of that change? A lot of it is technology, the rise of artificial intelligence being only the latest example. All of our jobs are evolving constantly because of technological change and because of the plethora of new knowledge, there’s also change happening demographically. There’s change happening in terms of the climate, the ecosystem, and there’s change happening in terms of communications technologies which connect people in far-flung places so much more easily. So if you think of the individual human being making her way in a world of rapid change, more change faster and faster and faster change, what is it that can allow for coherence and a feeling of empowerment? It’s that you think I have the capacity to thrive in change because I can be the one that discovers because I can create, because I can partner with people to do something together because I can learn on the go as a mentee and because I can pursue my values, my growth and my values, not just do what somebody else tells me to do. And so I find this notion of growth mindset is even more empowering if you think about being in a very dynamic sort of turbulent, disruptive ecosystem and economy because it centers the individual on our ability to adapt, to learn, and to grow, to meet new challenges. Now then explicated these five mindsets by telling the stories of the learning journeys of students I knew very well at Franklin and Marshall College.

“Their understanding of the human person was that we were beings in development, and that their job was to foster and nurture that developmental process, not to limit it.”

Marjorie Malpiede:

So one of the things that struck me is let’s start with the striver. I’ve got to say that sort of interested me the most. I love that term. You gave the examples of Julia and Aisha, amazing women with great stories to tell. So, again, in your mind and from your experience with them, they have achieved this striver mindset. Can you give us a little bit of what it means to be a striver, how these particularly young women sort of personified that?

Dan Porterfield:

So for me, a striver is first of all the person that’s always relentlessly looking for new experience, for new opportunity, for growth, for the chance to have a different kind of experience because they’ve got a new interest that sparked their curiosity. The strivers are the people on a college campus that are constantly raising their hand and saying, Yes, I’ll join in. Yes, let’s try to do that. They’re the ones that are inventing new events for people to attend or new clubs for students to grow where they’re the ones who are connecting what they’re learning in class to what they might do over the summer. They’re trying out and adopting new possibilities all the time. And the key though for striving is that they’re doing it not simply to achieve a job or to get an award – they’re doing it because they value that growth.

So in the case of Julia Ramsey, she came to Franklin and Marshall College with a deep yearning to be the student who would do it all and achieve the best grades and be the top one. But then she got sick and she was suffering from a condition that essentially affected the tissue in her muscle, very hard to diagnose. It made her exhausted. After a very strong freshman year, she came back for sophomore year and she simply couldn’t stay awake, she couldn’t keep her head up to study, she was lethargic all the time, and while rehearsing for a play she actually collapsed. She was diagnosed with a condition called EDS. She went through a process of trying to get better using all of her willpower. She was always the kid who could work harder, work longer, came back to school, collapsed again. And this time when she went home, she had to have treatment and medical care for more than 18 months.

And so this goal, she had to be the top student, was dramatically disrupted by this condition. And so instead she began to ask herself and talk with her family about: What do I value most, even more than being the number one student, which is kind of extrinsic; what’s intrinsic? What do I value now, as I’ve had so much taken away from me months and months lying in bed, unable to do anything? And she basically came to realize that some simple everyday pleasures like walking around on a campus and taking in what’s around her or having meaningful conversations with people or feeling that she could set her own schedule, that those things were even more important and more true to her than being the number one student in the school. And with the help of a who advised her try to do everything you can, just 5% better than you were, she gradually came to realize that she could control her illness a bit by dialing back the amount of time she spent on studies and dialing back that idea of being number one and dialing up a kind of learning and a growth that was speaking to her experience of being a human being enjoying life in and of itself.

And so she didn’t lower her expectations for herself. She re-centered her expectations on what was most valuable. Then her professors helped her because when she came back to school after that 18 month time on leave, now that her classmates, some of them had graduated that she started with, she eased back into school. She was able to balance what her body could do with her yearning for everyday experience. She graduated then over a course of a couple years with this feeling, even though she wouldn’t have chosen that path of struggle, she was glad it happened because it put her in touch with the values that she wanted to live well beyond college. I look at that story as a way of reminding people that if we can encourage students to strive for growth, but to do it with a deep appreciation for what they value most, we’ve got a great shot at helping students experience fulfillment. And that’s something so many college students today are struggling to feel a sense of fulfillment, sometimes going deep to just ask yourself what is it that really matters can help us focus on the inherently meaningful instead of the more performatively meaningful, if you will.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I am so glad of your explanation of that, and I realize this in the book, but one of my follow up questions to you, I think you’ve pretty much have answered because one of the things you think of when you think of strivers, I mean a lot of strivers are striving themselves into unhealthy situations and from the work that we do in covering student mental health, a lot of, in fact, I think it’s the number one identified source of stress on campus is reaching these academic milestones or making sure that you’re in every kind of leadership position that you’re stacking your resume, all these things that are kind of connote striving, but you are talking about something different, right?

Dan Porterfield:

Absolutely. So in the case of Aisha – and Aisha is a pseudonym – she was a remarkable achiever who came to America from West Africa at the age of, I think it was about 13, was reunited with her father and a stepmother in New York had to learn English on the fly, was expected as the eldest daughter to perform many household duties. And her father really was not comfortable with her even going to college. She had a bit of a battle royale with her father to have the opportunity to leave home and go to Franklin and Marshall, and he was very concerned that she would lose her identity as his daughter, that she would be inauthentic to how he understood she should live her life as a woman, which to him meant she’d returned to Africa for a marriage that he would arrange. And so Aisha at Franklin and Marshall College was this incredible, super engaged student with extraordinary learning, constant leadership and growth.

But when she went home to New York, she had to subordinate all of that. She had lived two identities because that school identity at home would’ve been deeply, deeply threatening to her father. And one of the things that she came to recognize is that she deeply valued having a relationship with her younger siblings and her father and stepmother, even though her father held these constraining views, these kind of older worldview, that she was willing to negotiate two identities and two lives because it’s so mattered to her to have her younger siblings in her life. She was an amazing student. She went on to win a George Mitchell scholarship and to study in Northern Ireland. She’s doing great things with her life now, but for her striving meant finding some kind of a measure of peace with being a bridge person with a foot in two worlds, not having to choose one or the other, and that striving is going to be her life calling basically to have both parts of her identity alive in her, not to have to choose one or the other.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I loved both of those stories and both of them, and I think all of the stories that you tell eliminate another important lesson, which is all of the mentors and supporters along the way that they encountered in college. So I want to turn next to some of the advice that you provide. I think that some of the most important messages here actually come from your subtitle, right, the Power of college to activate Lifelong Growth, many schools throughout the country, and you talk about what it takes to really, and I would say again, back to your examples, really have those interventions with the adults on campus that will lead to this growth, this amazing growth in the mindset that you talk about. So what has to happen, I know it’s a huge and perhaps simplistic question, but what would you say has to happen to change higher education in order for it to fulfill this promise? It has,

Dan Porterfield:

I guess I’d like to say let’s double down on what’s working in terms of what really to ignite growth mindsets in 18 to 23 year olds, which is another way of saying to help young people claim control of their own future, to believe that they have a greatness within them that they can develop and they can apply whatever they do. What’s needed is one, to have caring adults, mentors of various types, including definitely faculty members active in their education, and lots of research has shown the power of caring and involved faculty in the development of young people. It’s probably the number one thing that people remember about their own college experience along with their close friendships. So that happens with faculty that help to inspire students to push themselves academically. It happens with faculty who serve as mentors and as guideposts to give students a place to come to reflect together on what they like to do with their lives or what they’re encountering as challenges.

It also happens through writing centers, through career centers, through coaches, through people that work in residence halls and facilitate collective learning that way. The most important thing I believe, to develop the talents of young people and the confidence they can keep developing those talents is educational relationships with adults. The second next thing that I think critically matters is strong peer experience recruiting and encouraging students who want to be active learners and who want to take the constant opportunity to say yes to growth. And there’s a lot of students out there that really want to go to college, really want to grow and develop themselves, and the single biggest barrier to those students going to have those opportunities is finances. And I really believe that the investment our institutions need to make is in faculty mentors and in student financial aid. Those two investments above all others will unlock opportunity.

A third thing that’s worth thinking about is how we can help students to sequence their learning so that they have the experience of yes, learning something and then knowing they’ve learned. So it’s both learning, documenting, seeing that you’ve learned, and then the third step is learning how you can do it again, and then finally learning that you love it and those are the elements of a growth mindset or that you sequence learning, you see that you’ve learned, you know can learn again and you know love learning. And when that comes together, it comes together often not because of single magic moments, but of a series of well sequenced learning opportunities. And I saw that over and over at Franklin and Marshall College throughout every level of the curriculum, the faculty were so committed to helping students sequence their learning. I tell four stories in the chapter on the mindset for discovery about students named Charisma Lambert and Eddie Alena and a student named Morgan, a student named Wyatt, and how in each case individual faculty spent the time to help them make the incremental learning that then builds for the next incremental learning and the next incremental learning.

And all that adds up to a tremendously powerful wave of understanding that I’m a learner.

Marjorie Malpiede:

And Dan, that leads to a very strong point you make in the book about post-college lifelong learning, and we don’t think about that enough, and I know just for my own sons who’ve gone through college, they all think about the milestones of graduation and they think learning sort of stops there when in fact what you’re describing is it’s a mindset that continues forever. Correct.

Dan Porterfield:

Well, success in today’s workforce and certainly tomorrow’s requires constant learning and the beauty of a great college education is that you will take away from that the confidence that you can drive your own learning in the future, and that’s critical in almost any field because the field itself is going to change constantly and also your responsibilities as you progress are going to grow. So you’ve almost got to keep learning. I think that the colleges could do maybe an even better job of helping not just providing learning experiences, but helping students document through portfolios or through different ways of developing resumes so that resumes aren’t achievements but more they are a record of continuous progression.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Reflection can help with that too.

Dan Porterfield:

Reflection is essential to a growth mindset because you have to not just learn, but know you’ve learned and know you can learn again.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I’m really glad that you mentioned affordability and access, the financing conundrum of whatever reforms we’re trying to make in higher education. So when I noticed a lot of the examples in your book were of students who were low income or first gen, and I wonder about the correlation between that and this hunger or real desire to pursue their education despite their financial circumstances. What did you witness there in terms of motivation?

Dan Porterfield:

And this, of course, I was witnessing this long before I went to Franklin and Marshall College because I’ve worked with first gen college goers and immigrants and members of lower income communities my whole life, and what’s just so beautiful to witness if you’re working as an educator with people who are searching for opportunity and who have faced disadvantages, is this hunger to learn and grow and give back. I’ve worked with thousands of first gen college students, I have yet to meet a single first gen college student who didn’t want to give back. It’s amazing, not one. And that’s the beauty of education that when you seek it, you love it, you want others to have it too. When I went to Franklin and Marshall College, a group of us on the board and the administration worked to develop what we call the next generation talent strategy through which we reorganized the financial priorities of the institution in order to triple our investment in need-based financial aid.

And we made a promise to every student admitted that we would meet their full demonstrated financial need with a package that was mostly a grant and did involve some work study and also $5,000 a year of loan. We did feel that having some loan was actually a help because we could have more low income students if students were having a small loan as a part of their college experience. And so when we tripled our aid budget, we began to think, well, where are we going to recruit our students? And we reached out, first of all, to the Lancaster Public Schools in Pennsylvania where F&M is and then to a set of access programs around the country that we’re working with motivated lower income students. Some of them you’re probably familiar with, the Posse program, one called SEO in New York, one that was called College Match in California, college Track in California and in New Orleans.

Then we began to reach out also to different public charter schools, the KIPP Educational Network Achievement First Uncommon Schools, Green Dot Noble were some of the ones we worked with, Breakthrough Collaborative, another access program. We also worked with some private schools that had scholarship programs. We had all this financial aid money and we wanted to recruit students who would really benefit from F&M. So we felt partnerships was essential, and through all those different partnerships, we identified students who had what we called the ingredients of talent that we were looking for as a talent strategy. It was not framed as exactly a diversity strategy, as important as diversity is what qualities of talent would predict success for first gen students at a very rigorous liberal arts school. And so our qualities we looked for were curiosity because if you go to a liberal arts college, you’re going to take classes that you’ve never studied before, maybe geology or maybe dance or maybe philosophy classes that weren’t in your high school as a part of the curriculum.

Without curiosity, you might wonder what am I even doing studying this stuff? A second thing we looked for was saying yes to opportunity. Even if you didn’t have a lot of opportunity, what opportunity could you say yes to? Was it babysitting after school? Was it tutoring other students in your school? Was it holding a job over the summer to help your family out? We saw that saying yes to opportunity as predictive of success in a college context where students need to take initiative and seek out opportunity. The third thing was resilience because F&M’s, a very hard school, rigorous school in terms of academic expectations, so everybody struggles through the learning process. If they’re being challenged, who having faced challenges in their life were able to meet those challenges, not because they overcame them all, but because if they got knocked down, they could get back up.

If they had a setback, they had some perspective to help them go forward or they could lean on the resources of their culture or their religion or their family as an inspiration in dealing with difficult times. The talent to have a vision for education, somebody say, is that talent? Yes. If you’re going to commit yourself to four years of doing something meaningful and hard, you’re going to borrow money. You’re going to say, leave home, you’re going to start off in this whole new world. Do you go because somebody told you to or because you have a vision for why it matters. So those qualities of talent, again, saying yes to opportunity, resilience, curiosity, and having a vision of education. Were so highly predictive of success that our first gen students at Franklin and Marshall College right off the bat, even their first year, achieved the same grades pretty much as the student body as a whole.

And later we started to see first gen students overperforming in terms of representation at summa and magna com laude, or secure winning prestigious scholarship competitions. The graduation rates were always at or above domestic students as a whole at F&M. And so what I’m trying to say here is that we need to look at all students as a collection of assets and capabilities and potential. There’s talent in every zip code and there’s hunger in every zip code, and there’s a special kind of combination of talent and hunger that we find in lower income communities. Amazing point. It’s a collective effort. The faculty are critical to this because the faculty bought into this idea that Franklin and Marshall could triple at basically our enrollment of Pell Grant students, which meant triple our Latino students, triple our African-American students, triple our rural students. Everything tripled and the school got even stronger because there were that many more highly engaged students. But there are individual faculty members that I can name a lot, but someone like Ken Hess in chemistry who committed himself to working with all these first gen pre-med students and really was this amazing facilitator for students right off the bat feeling and knowing that they belonged. Ken was just one of many that I admire so much because of the way that they created a climate that allowed incoming students from underrepresented backgrounds to think of themselves as the talent in our talent strategy, not the diversity in somebody else’s student body.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I love that distinction and I am glad you made it because a lot of schools who have done similar efforts, very well intentioned, have sort of forgotten that piece. If you focus on the numbers and not the belonging, it’s not going to work.

Dan Porterfield:

And that doesn’t mean there’s not going to then be challenges. I write about Charisma Lambert, a student from Newark who overcame the feeling of imposter syndrome during her first year at F&M, and for her, a critical breakthrough enabled by faculty was that she could use F&M to learn about dynamics of her life story and Newark’s life story, that the college was equipping her to have even more understanding of the causes and consequences of inequity. And so she more than belonged F&M was her power pack for the life she wanted to live, or a different student, Nadia Johnson, who came into F&M believing that as a first gen college kid, she should be pre-med because if she was a doctor, she could help people in our community, and the only thing was that wasn’t where her interests lie.

She was doing it because she was living the identity of a high powered, high achieving student, but her fulfillment, she realized wasn’t found through that avenue with faculty guiding her and supporting her, she took the risk of changing majors, went into sociology, nailed it, and now for the last six years has been a incredible educator in Baltimore city and public education working with students like her and so fulfilled by doing it for her imposter syndrome was living into an identity of the high achiever at first that didn’t actually fit with what she values most. These journeys of learning and discovery, of course, like all growth, there’s pain in the process. I try to write with permission from my mentees about the pain points because it is in pain often that we experience growth and awareness and ultimately a sense of purpose in our lives

Marjorie Malpiede:

And for their educational journeys and certainly what they’re going to be facing. I want to ask one last question, and again, it’s two or three parts, so forgive me, but it’s a little more philosophical. I loved your point in the book about the necessity for a growth mindset given the world we’re living in towards a universal good versus something that’s just an individual benefit. You argue that growth mindset setters can navigate rapid change towards good outcomes like improving the planet or expanding economic opportunity, but how do we get students to think in terms of these universal goods when so much in their world and in society encourages them to think inwardly?

Dan Porterfield:

I think that the one way to do that is by having as the overall educational environment, it’s very vibrant where students are able to be exposed in and out of class to the experiences of others, the needs of communities, the needs of the world where college is in part about a widening of perspective and a coming to see the relationship of self and other through all kinds of relationships with people in your neighborhood, with people in your country, with people on the other side of the planet. We’re all living in a network of mutuality and dependency as Dr. King said. And so I think that a rich educational environment constantly exposing students to new and encouraging them to take the risk of learning the new is the best way to invite students to choose the course for them that will allow them to give back, but give back in a way that’s resonant with their sense of identity.

That’s why I think that for some it’s about discovery, and so they need faculty present to help them see themselves as able to discover. For others it’s about making their own mark as a creator. For others, it’s about teamwork. There shouldn’t be one way to make a difference, but the environment should always be about growth and expanding our range of exposures, if you will. I end the book by writing about three students who all ended up at Franklin and Marshall College because it was pretty much the only option for them of a school like this. They all came from schools where almost nobody went to college. One is a Muslim immigrant whose name is Akbar Hussein, who came from Bangladesh, lived in a workers’ factory as a child in Saudi Arabia before coming to America. The second is a student named Marra Jones, who came from a highly segregated community in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where there was tremendous racial discrimination and educational inequality in the schools and public health systems and housing that she grew up with.

She found her way to F&M because of a single college advisor who encouraged her to push herself to a school like this. The third Sheldon, Ruby comes from central Pennsylvania from a small rural community, all white fundamentalist Christian where he had never encountered anybody who was black, who was gay, who was Muslim, who was Jewish. His exposure, he was the only one in school just about that went to college. Any exposure he had, his first two years of college was new. And those three, Akbar, Marra and Sheldon, each one of them is exemplary, but they’re also representative of the talent in their communities. Today, Akbar at age 30 or something is the chief policy advisor to the governor of Pennsylvania. Marra is a freshly minted clinical psychologist having earned her PhD at University of Illinois. After serving and Teach for America, Sheldon spent his junior year studying abroad, including in Bangladesh living with a Muslim family.

He then won a wrangle fellowship which paid for his graduate education at Georgetown. Now he’s a diplomat in the US State Department, and these three students were just about the only ones in their schools who went to college. F and m was the only place that offered them admission. They were offered full scholarships because of our full need approaches, and they took their opportunity to work with incredible faculty to become for our country a policy leader, a clinical psychologist, and a diplomat, and one is black and one is Muslim American and one is white rural background. And that is the vision that I have for education for all young people: that before college and in college, we ignite what is great in young people by giving them the belief that they can drive their own learning and we support them every step of the way. And then we have the benefit as a society, I believe, of seeing people grow into roles of leadership and public service that will make our country stronger. Cynicism has never solved a single problem in our country. There’s plenty of people cynical about the world, and when they start solving problems, we should start adopting cynicism, but otherwise, we need to invest in people that are optimistic, can do mindset, that want to learn and give, and from that they will create the kind of world we want to live in.

Marjorie Malpiede:

I have a personal reflection here, Dan. We’ve had many conversations and I’ve always found you to be so optimistic, and I’m reading through the lines here in the book, and it’s also based on my own experience because every time I actually get out on campus and talk to students, I feel hopeful and I can see now why you are actually so optimistic.

Dan Porterfield:

All you’ve got to do in my opinion, is walk around and get to know young people, and I don’t only mean on college campuses, we just get to know young people. Real young people just listen, just engage. Just allow them to express the things that interest them, that make them laugh or that give them a feeling of optimism and then double down on that. Education is something where if you get it, I benefit. That’s what’s so distinctive about it compared to all the other social goods. If everybody gets it, my children are better off. And so I hope as a society we will come together around this notion that young people are rising. Generations are a place where we can land in all our disagreement, we can land around the idea that let’s invest in the greatness of our young people, let’s give them educational and work opportunities that give them the chance to be the leaders of their own lives. Let’s take pride in what it means to be a country that pays it forward.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Well, I am going to have that be the last word. Thank you so much, Dan. This has been an absolute joy to talk to you, and again, it has really been inspirational and it gives us all more reason to get up and do the work we do in higher ed.

Dan Porterfield:

There’s hundreds of thousands of people across all of our campuses of all types, with students of all backgrounds who are doing what I celebrate in the book every single day. That’s not the dominantly told story, but that is the dominant reality.

Marjorie Malpiede:

The book is called Mindset Matters, the Power of College to Activate Lifelong Growth, and it is available starting June 25th on Amazon, correct, Dan?

Dan Porterfield:

That’s right. Johns Hopkins University is the press, and I hope that readers who, if they do read it, take the time to linger over those stories because there is an eminence in the life experiences of students in our midst and ask ourselves, are these 35 or 40 students at Porterfield profiles from F&M? Are they all that different from the students on my campus in my neighborhood? The answer to that question actually is no. They’re exemplary, as I said before, but they’re also representative.

Marjorie Malpiede:

Thank you so much, my friend. I’m sincerely grateful for you joining us on Learning Well Radio today.

Ian Elsner:

This has been Learning WellRadio, a production of LearningWell, for more information about our work, go to learningwellmag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. Thanks so much for listening.

One out of every five college students is a parent. As with most students, student parents are balancing many and often competing demands on their time, including classes, studying, and work. Unlike their peers without kids, student parents also have to manage the complex scheduling puzzle of childcare responsibilities on top of everything else they handle each day.   

Parenting students are trying to succeed, while receiving limited support from higher education and financial aid systems that were not designed with them in mind. It is long past time for policymakers to recognize the need for targeted support to help this group flourish. Decision makers must pay more attention to parenting students with inclusive and specialized efforts. It will take better data collection, holistic wraparound services, and building trust through consistent action over time. 

This is especially important as colleges face enrollment challenges created by changing demographics. By supporting parenting students, and adopting student-centered policies, colleges and universities can become environments where student parents feel welcomed and supported to succeed—a win for student parents and for colleges trying to alleviate the enrollment crunch. 

Supporting parenting students is more than just a matter of fairness. It is also an issue of economic development and mobility. After all, when we ensure student parents succeed, we ensure their families succeed. As policy leaders are considering supports to retain historically undersupported students, student parents should be at the top of the list. Juggling the responsibilities of parenthood and being a college student is hard enough, the way in which our systems and policies are structured shouldn’t make it even harder.

Several states, including Texas, California, Illinois, and Oregon, recognized the need and enacted legislation to support parenting students in higher education. These state-level policies aim to dismantle barriers by mandating data collection, support services and accommodations on college campuses. And, while progress has been made, more needs to be done in acknowledging and addressing the unique challenges faced by parenting students.

Why support parenting students?

The landscape of higher education is rapidly evolving, and institutions must adapt to the needs of the increasingly diverse student body encapsulated by the incredibly diverse student parent population. Student parents are more likely than non-parent students to be people of color, women, and veterans, all groups that are entering higher education at increasing rates but often face barriers to success.

Research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and Ascend at the Aspen Institute shows that parenting students face significant challenges in completing college compared to their peers without children. Only 37 percent of parenting students graduate with a certificate or degree within six years of enrollment, in contrast to nearly 60 percent of students without children. 

Parenting students encounter obstacles related to childcare, basic needs insecurity, time constraints, financial insecurity, and mental health, which can disrupt their path from enrollment to graduation day. We know that one of the fastest paths to economic security for a family is for a parent to gain a degree or other credential. Given these statistics, supporting student parents is not just the right thing to do—it also makes economic sense by creating opportunities to increase household incomes, reducing reliance on public benefit programs and ensuring a well-educated workforce to help drive economic growth and development. 

Supporting parenting students is good for colleges and states

Targeted support for parenting students can also help states meet their postsecondary  attainment goals. States need to increase the proportion of individuals with postsecondary credentials, such as degrees or certificates to help provide the skilled workforce that drives economic growth. State and federal governments should invest in students because that investment confers important community and societal benefits as well as individual benefits.

Without addressing the barriers faced by parenting students, states risk leaving behind a substantial portion of their population and falling short of their attainment targets. By creating a more inclusive and supportive environment, colleges and universities can attract and retain a diverse pool of students, thereby mitigating persistence barriers.

Mitigating persistence barriers for parenting students starts with better data collection at the state and federal levels. Evidence suggests that targeted support can enhance the success rates of parenting students. However, the lack of comprehensive data on this group creates a significant gap in colleges’ ability to address their needs effectively. The absence of data is a missed opportunity for the federal government, states, and institutions to improve student outcomes and underscores the need for greater attention to the unique challenges faced by students with children.

Parenting students encounter obstacles related to childcare, basic needs insecurity, time constraints, financial insecurity, and mental health, which can disrupt their path from enrollment to graduation day.

Targeted support needs for parenting students are equally important for mitigating persistence barriers. In our work at Generation Hope, we have seen targeted and direct services and supports make a massive difference in the success of students. This is why federal policymakers should integrate wraparound support services, such as counseling, mentoring, and access to resources like housing assistance and healthcare, to address the holistic needs of parenting students to help them increase degree attainment. 

Moreover, recognizing parenting students’ diverse backgrounds and experiences is crucial in designing effective support programs. Federal and state policy leaders should employ culturally responsive and trauma-informed approaches that consider the unique needs and challenges faced by parenting students, creating inclusive and supportive learning environments where all individuals feel valued and empowered to succeed.

If policy leaders and influencers do more to provide support for groups with the most complex needs, they can also make life easier for all students who face similar challenges like managing conflicting work and school schedules and struggling to provide for their basic needs. When we smooth the path to college completion for student parents, we make it just a little bit easier for other historically under-supported populations to get from enrollment to graduation day.

Brittani Williams, Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research at Generation Hope.

Generation Hope engages education and policy partners to drive systemic change and provides direct support to teen parents in college as well as their children through holistic, two-generation programming.

Edward Conroy, Senior Policy Advisor, New America Higher Education Policy Program. 

New America’s Higher Education team focuses on creating a higher education system that is accessible, affordable, equitable, and accountable for helping students lead fulfilling and economically secure lives. New America’s Student Parent Initiative conducts research, policy analysis, and advocacy work in the student parent space.

The following is a transcript of LearningWell Radio Episode 2: Interview with Paul Tough. You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Marjorie Malpiede: This is LearningWell Radio, the podcast of Learning Well Magazine, covering the intersection of higher education and lifelong well-being, I’m Marjorie Malpiede, the editor of LearningWell and your host today. Paul Tough is an author and journalist, widely known in the education equity space with books such as How Children Succeed and the Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. Widely read, Paul Tough has become a national voice for making college more equitable, affordable, and accessible to all Americans, and holding up a mirror to higher education asking, “Can’t we do better?” He joins us today from the National Conference of the Coalition for Transformational Education where he delivered a keynote address. Paul, welcome to LearningWell Radio.

Paul Tough: Thank you. Great to be here.

MM: Let’s get started. So your book, the Inequality Machine and your New York Times article last fall and the public’s perception of the value of a college degree have really led the national narrative on this big question, right? Is college worth it? Why is it not for so many Americans?

PT: Well, it’s a great question and I mean part of what is complicated about this question is there’s the reality for whom it is worth it, and when and then there’s the perception that a lot of people have. And I try to stay in the reality though the perception is really important to a lot of families. But I think that what has changed is that the calculus, the sort of economic calculus of when college pays off has grown more complicated in the last couple of decades. So when you look at the sort of big picture number, the college wage premium that economists talk about, they point out the fact that on average people who have a BA in this country earn substantially more than people who only have a high school degree, about two thirds more. So that’s what the college wage premium is. So when you just look at that, college obviously pays off, right? It’s a great deal for everybody. However, a few things have changed. One is the cost of college, which then means that getting that benefit has a bunch of costs to it. But the other that I think is more crucial and is harder to measure is that the variability of the returns to college have changed. So that in the past, a couple of generations ago, didn’t really matter what happened in college. If you graduated, didn’t matter what your major was, even sort of where you went, those things mattered somewhat, but you were going to do just fine. But now because college has become more expensive, because higher education is more stratified, there are some people who with a BA, who are making a ton of money. And some people with a BA who aren’t making much more than a high school graduate, in fact some who are earning less than the average high school graduate. It’s additionally complicated by the fact that a lot of people don’t finish their college degree. And the numbers are really clear that when you start a degree and you borrow money and you don’t finish, you are not doing well at all. Economically, you’re probably earning less than the average high school graduate and about 40% of people who start a degree don’t finish. We can predict somewhat who’s going to and who isn’t, but for any one student, there’re just all these factors that make going to college a real gamble. And that just isn’t the way we think about college and certainly not the way we should think about it or want to think about it. We’ve been trained to think about it as this investment. That’s what we tell kids. It’s an investment, it’s like a treasury buying a treasury bond. In fact, for a lot of families it’s more like going to a casino. So you could win big but you also could lose your shirt. And that kind of uncertainty is emotionally, psychologically really unpleasant, painful for a lot of families, but financially it’s a real true risk.

MM: So I think this information that came to the fore is incredibly important. If you are thinking about this investment, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s a bit of a downer, right? When you think-

PT: It is true.

MM: … about how we think about higher education. So in your book, you tell amazing stories about families who actually still believe that this is going to give them a better life. And in fact, the data show that in terms of public opinion of the value of college, a recent Gallup survey showed that 66% of Hispanics and 65% of Blacks said that a college education was very important compared to just 45% of whites. So I could read this through the lines that you’re rooting for these people and you hope that we get back to a place where we can still hold a college degree out as the ladder to upward mobility. But I guess my question is, Paul, what would be the two or three things that you would change about higher ed to keep that dream alive for these people you wrote about?

PT: Well, I mean I’ll talk about two or three, but there’s one that’s really the biggest.

MM: Go with the one.

PT: Which is cost. I mean, I think that is really what is so hard for these families. So yes, absolutely. I wrote about a lot of low-income students, including a lot of Black and Latino and Latina students. And for individual students it is still amazing how higher education, how completing a degree can change your life. I saw it happen again and again where students would just go from a really difficult economic background, four years of college, they have these opportunities that open up to them that are going to change their lives and change their children’s and grandchildren’s lives for generations. You can see this is what higher education is supposed to do and it does work absolutely for individual students again and again. The problem again is that the overall calculation now just has all this risk in it for a lot of families

And especially for low-income families, the risk has to do with cost and costs have absolutely gone up. I understand the economics that we shouldn’t just look at list price, that there’s financial aid, there are ways to save money. But for a lot of families, even the cost of public college with some good financial aid, it’s a big deal for those families. And going into 20 or $30,000 worth of debt, which is sort of what we tell students is totally reasonable. You’re going to earn that back. That’s really scary. And so I think that’s where we have to do better. We’re creating a system where those families, in order to achieve the American dream and in order to achieve their goals, it’s not enough for them to just work hard. They also have to invest a lot of money and it shouldn’t be that way. We don’t have that kind of risk in high school. There’s not that idea of like, “Well, you go to high school but you’re rolling the dice about whether it’s going to be worth it or not.” And so this is not a problem that any institution can change on its own, though I think institutions can do a lot to make a degree more affordable, to make the finances and tuition more transparent. But I think this is something we need to take on as a country to figure out how to make college much more affordable for millions of students. And that’s the way it always was, right? It’s the way it is in other countries. It’s the way it was in this country 50 years ago. We have just created this new model where higher education is suddenly this high stakes high risk game and it doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t work for a whole lot of families.

MM: And you do a phenomenal job of unpacking the history around that. And I know we don’t have time for all of that, but people should read the book to get those kind of details. But I don’t want to simplify, but is the number one thing reinvesting from a public funding perspective in higher education? And I know that you do a lot of comparison to countries in Europe which are actually doing the opposite of what we’re doing, instead of sort of questioning the value, they’re kind of doubling down. So yeah, is that really what we need to be doing?

PT: Is what we need to be doing in terms of public investment?

MM: Public investment,

PT: Yeah, I think-

MM: And we saw that dip right after the recession, the Great Recession of 2008, 2009.

PT: Yes, there was a dip then, but I mean it started back in the late ’60s. Ronald Reagan who I think was the first to sort of say like, “Well, wait a second. The benefits from college go to a student. They don’t go to society. So why are the rest of us underwriting this college wage premium? Why are we paying for these certain people to be able to earn more than the rest of us?” It’s a very powerful sort of populist message and it’s made more powerful when a lot of students, a lot of families feel excluded from higher education. And that began this process of disinvestment in public higher education. Before that started in the ’60s and ’70s, the cost of going to the University of California, to any good public flagship institution was a few hundred dollars tuition and fees for a year. It was something you could work a minimum wage job in the summer and you could pay for your tuition fees. That seems like a good model. And again, that’s true in lots of other countries. And then there was this sort of progressive disinvestment in public universities, public higher education beginning sort of late ’70s and ’80s. And what public colleges found is that if they didn’t have money coming in from the state, they needed to charge more tuition. If they charge more tuition, people would still show up. And at the same time, we made debt easier get for students. And this sort of happened gradually over time. You’re right, the recession of 2008, 2009 sort of turbocharged it and continued that process, but there was a bit of a boiling frog quality. There was no one year where everything suddenly changed, but over time, the shift in public higher education just went from the public paying for it to students paying for it. And I think, I’m not clear, I think economists are not clear why the same thing happened in private higher education, but I think the two things are linked. As it became clear that people were going to pay more for public higher education, private higher education said, “Well, we need to and can do the same thing.”

MM: Right, right. So again, this is very concerning and disturbing because it leads to implications that could be pretty dire in terms of… to the extent that you care about things like equity or a civically engaged society, some of the things you talk about in your book. I’m going to ask you something more specific about the business model and have you stick with that for a minute. But I want to come back and also talk to you about some solutions. So one of the things that I think in terms of disturbing consequences is this idea that because of the higher education business model, which you described, if I got this correct from reading your book, it incentivizes schools to attract more high income students oftentimes over performance. But given that, what are we supposed to be doing about high performing low income students? You talk in your book about people as an academy having an interest and a desire to reach those students, but because of this business model, it’s complicated, right?

PT: It’s really complicated.

MM: That may be a complicated question.

PT: It is. I mean, in some ways that’s what the whole book is about. And what, it took me a decade to try to understand. I mean, when I started reporting the inequality machine a little more than a decade ago, it was what I felt was going to be the interesting story to track was the way that colleges changed the way they attracted high performing low income students. It was this moment, it was during the Obama administration, it was this moment, there was this big study that had come out that was on the front page of the New York Times by Caroline Hoxby in which he said that if you just send a packet to high performing low income students saying, “Here’s where you should apply, here’s a voucher for your waiver, for your application fees. They will go to more selective institutions and they will succeed.” And this was a big deal.There was a ton of philanthropy that got put behind it. College board got involved, but it was all premised on this idea that the problem was in the students. That the problem was that students and their families were making mistakes in how they were applying, that they just weren’t… they didn’t understand enough about college. They weren’t enough like us, the college people, and they were blowing it. And so all you needed to do was just nudge them. Let’s just remind them how much it would pay off and things would change. And that underwrote just many years of efforts by both colleges and nonprofits and the government to do things differently. And it did not work and it has not worked. And I think why it didn’t work is because that really wasn’t where the obstacles lay. There were some of that. Sometimes I think students didn’t know enough. Sometimes they didn’t have the right advising, all true. But really the obstacles were in the institutions that these selective institutions weren’t admitting these students, if they were admitting them, they weren’t giving them the aid that could make it reasonable for them to come. If they did come, they weren’t making them feel welcome and create a sense of belonging for those students. And so over 10 years after all of these institutions and government agencies got together and said, “We’re going to flood the campuses with low income students.” The reverse has happened. There are fewer low income students at highly selective institutions than there were a decade ago. And so it’s clear what has to change. What has to change is those obstacles that exist within institutions. And a lot of it I think is financial. I think that it is very difficult for institutions to admit students who can’t pay full freight. If you’ve got two students to choose from and one’s going to pay full tuition and one’s going to pay zero, it’s a lot easier to admit the one who’s going to pay full tuition. And I think a lot of those institutions are not in great financial shape. Some of them obviously are in fantastic financial shape, but a lot of them aren’t. But I think there are all of these institutional pressures that is making it hard for those colleges to do what they really want to do as individuals, which is to admit more of those low-income students. And what’s frustrating to me as a journalist and as an American is that I feel like we wasted this decade with a lot of rhetoric about what it was going to take to admit more of these low-income students and nothing really changed. And so what my hope is what can happen next, is that we really take seriously the question of how to admit more of those students because they’re out there, they’re applying, they’re just being rejected or not being given enough aid to attend.

MM: Remind me, I know you go into this in the book and you give some really good examples, particularly around how they show up and how to receive them. And that makes a big difference in how they stick because as I think you point out, the absolute worst case scenario is for someone to take on debt, go to school, and then drop out with absolutely nothing to show for it. So a little bit more, Paul, for our listeners who are mostly in higher ed and mostly care about these issues, I would say not mostly. But if they’re listening to our podcasts, they care about these issues.

PT: Yep, yep, yep.

MM: Some words of advice then, I mean the economic model is one thing, but what more can they do other than when people show up and they can create welcoming environments for them, which is big. Any other advice?

PT: Yeah, so actually I don’t think we’ve made great progress in admissions, but I do think we’ve made great progress in student support over the last decade. So I did a lot of my reporting at the University of Texas, which I think has made great strides in creating communities that are really welcoming for first generation low income students. And creating not just emotionally welcoming, but actual that make it easier for those students to get the courses they need to negotiate the university bureaucracy in ways that will get them to the finish line. So I think we’re doing a better job with a lot of that. I think for your listeners, they’re at a level of expertise where it’s useful to know exactly which programs work. And what strikes me as more of a journalist and a lay person is that it’s not rocket science. It really is about removing obstacles, institutional obstacles, and then it is about the sort of emotional, psychological work of creating belonging. And sometimes that’s like ice cream socials and pizza parties, and it’s just the stuff that when you’re 18 makes a difference and makes you feel like you belong in summer programs, that let you get oriented before the first day of school. That stuff really matters and really makes a big difference to students. I’ll just say one other thing, which is that I still feel though I do think we’re making strides in that sort of student support world, there’s still this obstacle that admissions creates, which is just numbers. If you are a Black student on a campus that has five or six or 8% of the population, student body is African-American, it’s great if there are steps taken to make you feel welcome, but you’re still going to feel like a very small minority on a large campus. And so I think that’s true for some racial minorities, but I also think it’s true for low-income students, for Pell eligible students. I also think it’s true for rural students. I think it’s true for conservative students. I think it’s true for lots of students who just don’t fit the mold of-

MM: Feel like I belong here.

PT: Exactly. And so again, that’s partly a question of how you create a sense of belonging. It’s partly a question of how you do admissions.

MM: So I want to ask you a little bit more about the big question, is college worth it? And some of it is economic, some of it is PR. It’s this public perception of the value of college. Now this question is a little bit of a personal perspective, but so much of the public discussion on the value of higher ed is about cost, logically so for all of the reasons you’ve just described. I wonder if we who sort of work in higher ed and are cheering for the students, I wonder if we are not doing a good enough job talking about the other benefits that come from a college experience, right? So in our world, so LearningWell covers a lot about re-flourishing and mental health. We cover opportunities colleges have to improve students’ lifelong well-being and their engaged learning. So I don’t want to be in these two different worlds where we’re not actually acknowledging that if we don’t crack the affordability nut, we can’t do all these other great things. But I’m going to sort of challenge you to think about it in the reverse. So how do we work those benefits to the extent that you agree with me, that come from the years that matter the most? How do we work that into this public narrative? Do people care about that stuff? Do we need to talk about it more?

PT: Yeah, my perspective on it, I think maybe different than other people’s, and I wonder, I’m not sure if it’s supported by the data that’s out there. And I keep going back to the same themes, but I think it has a lot to do with cost, that I think that when college is expensive and creates a lot of debt, it’s very difficult for students to think about it any other way than what am I going to get out of it? And there is this sort of a cultural social expectation that sort of snowballs around that. But yeah, when I went to college, I was not thinking about what my first job was going to be. I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to make money. I wasn’t thinking about what the payoff was going to be. I majored in religious studies and I’m really grateful for all of that. I think that was the right way to go through college. For me, I think that it helped me, it helped create skills that turned out to be marketable later. I’m a big believer in the humanities and the arts. That was what everyone I knew was studying. And so yeah, I think that’s a really important story to tell. And again, even beyond what I was studying, I think that the social experiences I was having, emotional, psychological, cultural experiences I was having were a big part of what was going on in those years. So I think it’s important to tell that story, but I don’t think actually that eighteen-year-olds don’t get that. I just think they were like, when we’re handing them the bill, it’s really hard to say now, “Just go goof around and have fun, major in religious studies.” Because they know they’ve got to pay that off and their families do as well. So until we lower the stakes, it’s hard for them not to think about the high stakes.

MM: Yes, I think that is such a great point. And we talk a lot about the vocationalism and why it’s out there and how we might work against it, not against getting great work. We talk a lot about purpose in work and aligning one’s work, the people go to college to get jobs, right? So we can’t dismiss that, but we’d love obviously to see a little bit more fusion of the both. So the last question, and Paul, you’re just such a fantastic journalist, I can’t help but bring politics into this discussion.

PT: Great.

MM: So you point out that political ideology influences the public’s view of higher education clearly. So state legislators obviously are now making curriculum decisions. 80 some bills have been filed to eliminate DEI offices. I guess my question is what do you make of that in terms of how this affects what you wrote the book for, which is to try to enact some change to this formula that’s not working for anyone? And I guess my follow-up to that is, to the extent that you agree, is there a way to depoliticize this so we actually get to work on the real issues? What do you think?

PT: I think it’s a really, really important question. I think it’s a hard one to talk about in higher education. I think my take on it is probably not going to be totally popular among people in higher education. So when I was reporting, not the book, but this magazine article that came out last fall, I was interested in the political angle. So I talked to some conservative thinkers and tried to understand from their point of view what was going on politically in terms of college. And what really struck me, I talked to this one guy named Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute, who I disagree with on all sorts of ways. But when he talked about what higher education felt like to him and people who think like him, there was a lot of overlap with how I felt and how the low-income students I talked to felt. He just saw it through an ideological lens. He was like, “The game is rigged. It’s just designed to help certain people and create… It’s just this machine that perpetuates.” And so when I talk about how it’s a machine that perpetuates things, I think about it in terms of economic class. He thinks of it in terms of ideology. He thinks that there are these institutions that are governed by liberal elites and that use higher education to perpetuate their thinking, right? I don’t agree with that in lots of ways, but I do understand where it’s coming from. And the data is really clear was I was struck and I wrote about it in that article. College campuses really are really liberal places. And so it is true that if you’re a conservative student or a conservative family, it’s hard to feel welcome in the same way that it’s hard to feel welcome for a low- income student or an underrepresented minority student on a college campus. And so the difference though is that in terms of politics is I think in some ways it’s even more salient.

I mean, it’s debatable how this is going to play out in private colleges, certainly government and political parties are finding ways to interfere, to intervene with private colleges in ways those private colleges don’t always like. But in terms of public colleges, they are supported by the public. And so the public in the United States includes as many conservatives as it does liberals. And I feel like those institutions should reflect that. And of Europe, conservative student from a small town in Iowa, and you’re going to your flagship college, you should feel welcome. You should feel like this is a place where your ideas are respected and you belong. And there’s not going to be some lingo that you’re supposed to know and you’re not going to be accused of things in terms of… based on who you voted for and where you go to church and everything else. And I think that’s often not true on our most prestigious campuses. And to go even more broad, I think that this division that has happened only in the last 10 years or so. If you look at the, I think it’s a 2012 election, I think that was Romney and Obama. And if you look at the educational divide in that election, it was not the way it is now. So college grads were voting more for Romney and non-college people were voting more for Obama, kind of what you’d expect from Democrats and Republicans, but more it was just even, right? What education you had didn’t predict how you voted. Now, it absolutely does, and that’s bad for everybody. I think it’s certainly bad for the Democratic Party to be, I think, associated with higher education and educated elites. I think it’s bad for higher education to be so associated with one party, especially if the other party comes into power. And I just think it’s bad for the country. It’s bad to divide ourselves through education. Education should not be the thing that sort of affects how you vote and how you live your life to the extent that it does right now. So what can higher education do? I think they actually more so than some of the other things we’re talking about, I think they can change that. And I think that it doesn’t mean you have to sell out your principles and you have to give in to conservative politicians, but it does mean that you should think about diversity on your campus in terms of politics as well. And make sure that if there are, especially for public campuses, that I would say for everybody, if you’re a conservative student coming to that institution, there are things that make you feel welcome. And again, that doesn’t mean censoring yourself or not saying what you believe, but I think it really is important that those students feel welcome, that those families feel represented by that institution. And I think that could be the beginning, not only of lowering the political pressure on institutions of higher education, but it could be the beginning of trying to bridge that bigger divide, which I think is a real problem for the country as well as for higher ed.

MM: And that is a great message to folks in higher ed. I’m going to push back a little bit.

PT: Please.

MM: I think there is a movement within higher ed acknowledging this because what you’re describing on its merits, a good majority, I don’t know if it’s a majority, you’re this person who deals with the numbers, would agree with you. Because on its merits, they’re absolutely, they absolutely want each student to have their knowledge grow with facts, not with ideology. My question to you is there are these sort of good faith reasons why higher ed needs to change around, quote, unquote “wokeism”. I’m asking your personal opinion. Do you not though with all your reporting over the years, see that this public opinion around the cumulative effect of professors being liberal leaning is been utilized superbly by politicians?

PT: No, no, I think it’s really true. I mean, I guess I feel like it kind of doesn’t matter. You know what I mean?

MM: Yeah, I know what you’re saying.

PT: But I think at this point, I think there’s enough blame to be placed on higher education and enough solutions that higher education itself can enact, that I mostly… though I absolutely think that’s true. And if I was speaking to Governor DeSantis or something, I would be saying, yeah, much the opposite. And I feel like, yeah, it’s not a good faith effort in all sorts of ways, but the sort of conservative pushback against higher education,.but I think it is based on real public opinion. And so it doesn’t matter that those politicians are politician-ing, right? They’re going to do that and you can’t stop them. If you’re in a state with a governor and a legislature that are pushing on you the way… So I live in Texas, the way it’s happening in Texas, the way it’s happening in Florida and lots of other places. I would encourage higher education to deal with that as best they can, except yes, that a lot of it is politics. But then accept that it’s working partly because good at it, but partly because they responding to something very real in public opinion, that is coming from a genuine sense that higher education is exclusive elitist, not for them and deal with that, right? And so if you change public opinion and create a system we used to have where people who weren’t going to college still felt really proud of higher education of their state’s higher education of their state’s, flagship school. It wasn’t that long ago that there were lots of people who weren’t going to college, who felt like college is great. That it’s not for me, but it’s great that it exists. It’s great that my kids can maybe go there or my grandkids. You want that sort of feeling, right? And so I think changes have happened, some of which higher education itself is responsible for that has made that not happen. And that I think is reversible by higher education. And so the more that they can let go of the aggravation of people taking advantage of it, and the more they can think, “Well, what can I do to change the underlying feelings among Americans?”

MM: And I love a couple of things you’ve said there that I just want to emphasize. One is to ignore this very real public opinion of higher education right now is at your peril basically in terms of higher, is what I’m hearing you saying. And the other thing that I actually love you saying, when I sort of was sticking it to you on the political question, you said it doesn’t really matter. And you know what? I think that’s a really important takeaway because it’s irritating and it’s something to deal with. But if you really want to solve this problem so that more kids that you write about in your book can fulfill the dreams that they have and the stories you wrote about, which were so beautiful, if you really want that, it’s really not the point is it?

PT: It’s not. And so just to take a step back from that, I mean, if you’re at the University of Texas, Austin, where I am, and you’re provost or dean or a president and you’re having a deal with the actual legislature, of course you got to take it seriously, right? And you’ve got to figure out when to give in, when to push back. You have to deal with politics. But for public higher education as a whole, I think the more you can ignore the frustration of those politicians taking advantage of this and start to think like, “Well, how can we change what’s going on underneath,” the better.

MM: Right, let’s solve the problem. So this has been a fantastic interview with Paul Tough. And Paul, I don’t know what more to say other than, thank you so much for being with us today, and we’ll keep in touch with all your great work.

PT: Great. Well, thanks for this opportunity. Really appreciate it.

Ian Elsner: This has been LearningWell Radio, a production of LearningWell. For more information about our work, go to learningwellmag.org. And if you like what we’re doing, leave us a rating or review. LearningWell Radio is engineered by me, Ian Elsner. Thanks so much for listening.

David McGhee has an interesting way of looking at the world. In talking with the Chief Executive Officer of the Steve Fund, it is clear he strives to see beyond popular narratives and predetermined judgements. In his new role, he hopes to bring together “unlikely allies and unusual suspects” to continue to address the issues to which he has dedicated his career – poverty, equity, and the flourishing of young people. 

The Steve Fund is the nation’s leading organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people of color. McGhee believes his previous work in government, community service, and philanthropy prepared him well for this work which he calls “the crisis of our time.” Since its founding in 2014, The Steve Fund has been a major influencer in higher education’s ability to understand better the determinants of mental health issues in young people of color and their unique help-seeking behaviors, with research and recommendations such as the Equity in Mental Health Framework, which they created with the Jed Foundation. 

McGhee plans to strengthen the organization’s commitment to transformational change by focusing on outcomes as opposed to outputs, the former being the more sustainable result. To get there, he wants to expand the Steve Fund’s partnerships with people and organizations that he says need to be part of the conversation but may not have been invited in. He talks of enabling a set of conditions that make any strategy possible. It is an approach that McGhee learned early on as a young black man navigating poverty on his way to achieving his own personal outcomes.  

Marjorie Malpiede: What was your career trajectory before coming to the Steve Fund? 

David McGhee: My background is primarily in philanthropy. It really set the direction for the course of my career. After earning my undergraduate degree in public administration and public policy, I set out to work in the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on child wellbeing and also influencing public policy. Having come from concentrated poverty myself, I bring to this work a commitment to transformational change so that opportunity becomes systemic, not random or transactional. This is where my passion lies. 

Early on, I was an intern in the executive office of Michigan’s first female governor, Jennifer Granholm. I had an opportunity to meet the governor, and we were in her office, and I remembered something she had on her wall. It was a receipt from a lawn care service she had employed when she was running for Governor and the lawn care provider had written on it, “Don’t forget the little people” and she framed it. I was just an intern, but I actually believed I had the most important job in the executive office. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every single day my job was to open every piece of mail addressed to the governor, read it, either route it to their proper department or craft a response on behalf of the governor. That job helped me develop an understanding of rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty. I knew what urban poverty was. That was my lived experience. But this helped me understand residents’ concerns throughout the entire state, which in many ways is applicable across the country. Those things really stuck with me. 

Following my internship, I was offered a job with the governor which I respectfully declined. Many people thought that I was crazy but I came back to my local community in Detroit to work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and I did that for seven years. In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you wanted out, you either played sports or you sold drugs. I had had the opportunity to go to college and it was important for young kids in my neighborhood to see that. From there I had an opportunity to work for a member of Congress and I learned a lot. I knew the amount of money that sat in the federal government and how hard it was to trickle down. I knew what nonprofits needed. And then I found my sweet spot in philanthropy. I worked seven and a half years in private foundations, and spent about a year and a half in family foundations, working for a high net-worth family in Seattle, Washington.

MM: Now that you are at the Steve Fund, what are your main priorities?

DM: The Steve Fund exists to promote the mental health and emotional wellbeing for our young people, and, in our case, young people of color. I’ve also layered in not only promoting, but really protecting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this population. And we do so in three ways. One is by transforming environments. We know young people will occupy environments, whether it’s college campuses, or employer partners, or the community. How do we make sure that we can support the transformation of environments so young people feel as if they belong? Two, we provide resources and skill-building to ensure that families, caregivers, and young people themselves actually have the tools and resources to navigate this life at this moment. And then lastly, we shape the field by normalizing the conversation around mental health. How are we removing the stigma around it? 

My job is to strengthen these assets by creating a set of enabling conditions that are really ensuring that there’s organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We are one organization in this entire ecosystem contributing to the overall mental health and emotional wellbeing. So how do I make sure that we can manage every aspect of our organization towards a unified whole and achieve the results through performance efforts? How do we commit to organizational learning and agility? We need to be flexible. We need to be nimble and responsive in this moment. 

I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve?

And then importantly, how are we catalyzing and supporting strategic partnerships? How are we bringing together unusual suspects and unlikely allies? How do we establish, encourage, and engage in partnerships that build continuity, otherwise unattainable on our own? And this to me means being willing to go into places other organizations may not be willing to go, to have conversations other organizations may not be willing to have, and to have those conversations with different audiences that some people may shy away from. 

MM: What, in your opinion, are some of the things young people of color need in order to thrive in these environments? 

DM: What do I believe young people need? If there was a magic wand that I had, then I could identify a handful of things that would contribute to better outcomes – but I might start with agency, readiness and connection. I think young people would benefit from agency to be able to make decisions on their own to feel empowered. I think they need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, and I also think that the environments they go into need to be ready. I fundamentally believe that when we want to work towards the power of achieving outcomes, they’re achieved in one of five ways. Either change behavior, shift attitudes, create better conditions, improve knowledge, or equip people with more skills. If a young person enters an environment that has prioritized these things, at least some of these things, I think that they are set up for success.

To really understand this better, we are continuing to rely on one of our strengths – and that is to use survey research to examine the attitudes of both students and families. We think it’s an important time to ask these questions coming out of the pandemic and the post affirmative action decision. It also allows us to explore different issues within different population groups that maybe we hadn’t thought of before. For example, I’ve become fascinated by the lack of data – or at least what I’ve been exposed to – around student athletes. Have we thought through what it might mean for a young person whose skills and gifts and talents have earned them a college scholarship, but they now find themselves in a campus environment that’s totally different from the environment that they were reared in? What does it mean for an inner city Chicago student to now be at the University of North Dakota? Just using that as an example, or vice versa. What does it mean for a standout high school student in Iowa to find themselves in New York City? Some of it is different by race for sure, but some of it is also situational.

Another area that’s rarely explored is the different generational issues among students of color. There’s some first-generation college students whose families see this as such a phenomenal opportunity that a lot of the skills and the resources and support they have are beyond measure, right? However, depending on your environment, there’s a level of stress and anxiety for non-first generation college students. What if I’m a fifth generation college student and everyone in my family had a history of performing at Yale and then I’m here and my experience is not quite the same? 

I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.

MM: You strike me as someone who looks beyond the obvious or the commonly accepted. Would you say that’s true?

DM: Yes, though it is not to suggest that I’m right, but I actually think it comes from my experience: one, having to navigate poverty, because I always had to find another way. I just naturally had to find another way. But then it also came from my decade or so in philanthropy. Many philanthropic organizations throughout history were complicit or had simply gone along with current conditions. But many of our nation’s wealthiest foundations and their respective namesakes built their wealth by defying the odds — by not going with the status quo. Henry Ford said, “Many, many moons ago, if I would’ve asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.” 

How do we strike the right balance between, “yep, this is what’s presented. This is the status quo” to have we thought about, have we considered, there’s also a layer beneath that? If we don’t dig, we run the risk of not getting the full story. I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation. 

MM: Are you hopeful we can bring different viewpoints together in these polarizing times?

DM: One of the best leaders that I’ve ever known and worked for, a woman by the name of Tanya Allen, would often give this analogy around 70, 20, 10, especially when it came to coalition building and alliances. It was this notion of 70% of the things that we want for children, even if we’re on a different perspective or different side of the aisle, we can agree on. There may be 20%, depending on the day or the context, that we’ll never agree on, right? And there may be 10% that’s negotiable depending on what the conditions are. The problem is – oftentimes we start at the 20% as opposed to starting at the 70%.

MM: Issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obviously impact the mental health of young people of color. What is your opinion on the way this is being debated in higher ed today? 

DM: I actually don’t think it’s a diversity issue that we need to solve. I actually think it’s a disparities issue, because the minority today could be the new majority tomorrow. I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve? In a college environment that exists to provide a high quality education, is there any population here that suffers from some type of disparity in their ability to receive that? And can we get to a place where we agree on minimizing those conditions?

To learn more about the Steve Fund, visit stevefund.org