Lessons from the Country’s Most Diverse College Campus
A Presentation to the Conference Board Annual Diversity Conference
by Kathleen Waldron on March 30, 2007
I want to thank the Conference Board for inviting me to speak today and address the role of higher education in promoting diversity. I believe I was invited to address you this morning because I am president of Baruch College in New York City, a public institution of 15,000 students ranked as the most diverse college in the United States for the past seven years by U.S. News and World Report. That ranking is based upon race and ethnic diversity -- which indeed Baruch College is famous for -- with 35 percent of its student body of Asian origin, 15 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and the rest white or other. Equally divided by gender, almost all our students are of modest financial means. Seventy percent of the students are children of immigrants, they speak 92 languages, and only the U.N. has a more diverse group of people gathered under one roof. During this presentation, I will talk quite a bit about what we are doing at Baruch College, but the ideas are relevant to many institutions of higher education with which you may interact.
As President of Baruch College, it is my job to educate students for their own intellectual growth but equally to prepare them for the diverse work force they will enter. Despite the economic challenges they face to obtain their degrees, the students at Baruch have higher graduations rates than their peers and upon graduation, improve their family mean income significantly.
But recent studies in this country indicate a troubling class division among those seeking and attaining higher education. We are seeing a recent decline in the ability of our minority and lower-income population to attend and graduate from universities and thus, a decrease in their potential life time economic mobility. In fact, the discussion within academia, long focused on racial and gender diversity, has shifted to a discussion of economic diversity, with data showing that poorer students are not fairing as well as students from wealthier families. A growing number of scholars and journalists are beginning to comment on this trend. In a controversial new study, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges”, author Daniel Golden notes what many people have long suspected – admission standards for wealthy students are relaxed at many elite colleges in return for expected donations from affluent parents. The College Board just published “College Access: Opportunity or Privilege?” which criticizes the use of SAT exams as the filter to may selective colleges. The study notes that SAT scores correlate to family income and that an over-reliance on the scores will naturally prejudice lower-income students’ chances for admission to elite colleges. According to a recent College Board study, a student from a family with income of less than $10,000 will have an average score of 872 on their SATs. That score jumps about 100 points for students from families with income between $40,000 and $50,000. And the average score increases another 120 points for a student from a family whose income is greater than $100,000. If colleges continue to rely heavily on SAT scores, (which by the way are not a predictor of life success), institutions of higher education will not achieve the socio-economic diversity they espouse.
While several elite institutions recently announced that they would provide full scholarships for needy students, an action we all applaud, these same institutions, in fact, accept very few needy students. At many elite colleges, only 3 to 4 percent of admitted students fit the definition of low-income. The solution? Wealth-blind admissions, recommends Peter Sachs, author of “Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education.”
As these studies demonstrate, access to higher education is at risk for many Americans today. Just 6 percent of students from the lowest income families earned bachelors degrees by age 24 in 1970. Thirty-two years later, that figure remains the same just 6 percent – although the overall number of students obtaining degrees has increased.
In a 2005 New York Times columnist, David Brooks wrote, “…as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent…in an information society, college is the gateway to opportunity. Crucial life paths are set at age 18, which means family and upbringing matter more.” Without a college degree, mobility declines, opportunity diminishes and we as a country become less competitive globally.
I would like to give you an insider’s view of Baruch College and what it is doing to attract such a diverse student population and, even more importantly, what we do to retain these students and help them succeed.
Higher education professionals at Baruch and elsewhere understand that we play a vital role in opening doors for large numbers of people to socio-economic mobility. The vast majority of students completing undergraduate degrees attend public universities. For those of us at institutions that represent this majority we need to focus on tuition costs, the quality of the educational experience, and graduation rates.
Tuition needs to be kept affordable at public universities because tuition affects access. Increases in the cost of a college education occur at both the public and private sector institutions. In the 1960s, for example, students attending Baruch and the other institutions of The City University of New York received free tuition. At the same time, the city government accepted the idea that a free education for the best and the brightest young people, irrespective of their income, was a social good and a highly competitive strategy for ensuring a well-prepared work force. After the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, free tuition disappeared. Today, we charge $4,000 per year for a full-time undergraduate—one of the lowest tuitions of any public college in the country yet most students must work 20 plus hours a week to afford this, as their parents cannot help them.
Over the past decade, tuition rose 47 percent at public, four-year colleges and 42 percent at their private counterparts. At the same time, state appropriations for higher education have declined substantially. With the burden of jobs and increased loans, the children of the working class who dream of a college education are finding that getting that education becomes more a test of their endurance than their intelligence.
I will tell you the story of one such student, Angelo Cabrera, who graduated from Baruch in 2006 at the age of 32. Because he could only attend school on a part-time basis, it took him 9 years to earn his degree.
Angelo arrived in New York City at the age of 15. He came from Tehuacan, Puebla, in south-central Mexico. He was poor and he spoke no English. He became a citizen and he worked 12-hour days in restaurants washing dishes and mopping floors just to survive. From what Angelo saw, neither he, nor the other young Mexican immigrants he knew, had any future.
Eventually, Angelo became a community organizer, promoting the importance of education, particularly college education, within New York’s Mexican American community. He became president of the Mexican American Student Alliance, which conducts mentoring programs in the South Bronx. As a result of this mentoring program, more than 500 young people have been accepted to college, including 20 now pursuing their PhDs. He worked with the City University of New York system and the Mexican Consulate on a new initiative to bring more young Mexicans into higher education.
While at Baruch, he began working with Robert Smith, a professor who specializes in studying the lives of Mexican migrants. The two have a grant to run a program for English as a Second Language and mentoring programs for Mexican families who know little or nothing of SATs, English language proficiency exams, or what it takes to succeed in college.
As a professor at Baruch, Robert Smith has dedicated himself to researching the factors that make immigrants successful.
The Education Trust, a not for profit Washington D.C. think tank, singled out Baruch College as the only large, four-year college in the country with 50 percent of the student body receiving Pell Grants—an indicator of significant financial need—and having a six-year graduation rate of more than 50 percent. It is an often-overlooked fact in the mainstream media that graduation in four years is the exception, not the rule, among U.S. college attendees.
Education Trust’s paper, entitled “Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Institutional Practices Restrict College Opportunities,” highlighted Baruch for successfully implementing measures that improved graduation rates. Notably, we expanded class schedules and academic support. In colleges such as ours where students hold jobs in order to supplement their families’ income, we found we needed to offer weekend, evening, summer, and winter intersession classes to make it easier for students to earn the credits they require for graduation. Also, academic difficulty needs to be addressed immediately. We even established an emergency loan fund to help students pay their rent or buy groceries rather than quit college.
At Baruch, as well as at other schools, we encourage freshman to build intellectual community through a common reading. Specifically, everyone participating in the freshman year - students, faculty, and administrators - reads the same book, with every entering fall freshman given a copy of the chosen book and instructed to read it over the summer.
Baruch integrates the freshman text into in a freshman's first semester curriculum. Our reading is often challenging and thought provoking, with a focus on helping students learn not just about other cultures, races, ethnicities, and religions (among other things), but about tolerance – or lack thereof – what it means to be part of a pluralist society, and what their role is in improving our world.
Because many students at Baruch are the first in their families to pursue a college degree they often lack contact with professionals and do not have an understanding of the world they aspire to enter. These students need to be well-informed about the array of career and life paths they can take. Students need tangible experiences – namely, exposure to individuals in various fields, internships, mentorships, career counseling, professional networks, and career seminars.
To meet these needs, we have launched The Starr Career Development Office at Baruch College, with a generous grant from the Starr Foundation, to develop new initiatives for networking, mentoring, internships, leadership, and motivation. The new programs help students to prepare better for the workplace by teaching the “unofficial” rules of business, such as presentation skills, confidence in speaking, and other life skills that can have a major impact on career paths. The goal is to help students compete more favorably for valuable internships while they are in school and then to get better full-time jobs in New York and beyond when they finish school. We have seen that it works. These programs counsel and groom students for graduate school, law school and management training programs in government and in some of the top companies in the country.
Businesses, individual executives, and government officials are integral partners with Baruch. Close to 400 executives mentor students through our “Executives On Campus” program. One way we engage these executives is to have them participate in networking sessions with our students. The executives give the students constructive feedback about how they handled themselves. They also listen to and critique our students’ three-minute “personal pitches,” an important tool for anyone to master.
Let me give you an example of one student who represents so many. Gladys Del Rosario emigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic when she was two years old. She came to Baruch College with the goal of securing a good job upon graduation. She knew that a college education was the pathway to employment and professional advancement, but beyond earning good grades, she did not really know what to do to make herself a desirable “catch” in the job market, a challenge faced by many minority students.
In her freshman year, Gladys sought help from Baruch’s Starr Career Development Office, where she quickly learned about using internships as a stepping stone to the kind of job she aspired to—an accounting position in a Big Four firm. Since she had no experience to speak of, Gladys’ first internship was an unpaid one—balancing the books in a funeral parlor! Because Gladys sought out the help of the Career Development staff early in her Baruch career, they were able to help her, groom her and build her self-confidence. “They forced me to go to networking events I was too shy to go to on my own,” Gladys said.
The Career Development Office also steered Gladys to an INROADS internship, one of the premier internship programs in the country, which partners with major U.S. corporations, to provide outstanding minority students with top-notch pre-professional experiences. The program helped her extend a one-year internship at PriceWaterhouseCooper to two years. At the conclusion of her internship PriceWaterhouse was so pleased with her (and she with them!) that she was offered a permanent position.
Today, Gladys works in PWC’s Insurance Practice. She is grateful for the help and encouragement she received. In Gladys’ case, college did just what it was supposed to do. It transformed her life.
There are concrete actions you can take in your roles as human resource and diversity officers to replicate these partnerships with diverse colleges. For those of you with business based in New York, I open the doors of Baruch College to you. Come to Baruch, bring your message of advocacy and success to students, and give them a better idea of what to expect and how to affect change in the world. For the rest of you, I encourage you to seek out ways to become involved in the life of educational institutions in your community.
Let me suggest some specific ideas:
First, offer paid internships. Internships are critical for providing students with real-world experience and the opportunity to showcase their abilities to future employers. Unpaid internships often are not feasible for students of diverse backgrounds who, very simply, need to make money.
Second, I encourage you to mentor students. Again, many students representing groups you want in your organizations will not have access to people with your professional experience. Give these students a leg up and work with them before they hit the job market.
Third, I ask you to consider multiple ways to meet your diversity goals. Diversity isn’t simply recruiting students of color at elite colleges to satisfy targets. Instead, I urge you to consider a wider pool of candidates – a pool with socioeconomic diversity - to truly offer equal opportunity.
Walter Benn Michaels’ book, “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,” helps articulate this point. Diversity in American society has become associated with race, ethnicity, and gender. We talk too little about socioeconomic class differences.
As long as we accept that our top colleges are deemed “fair” if they have some racial diversity, we ignore the harder reality that there are class barriers developing within higher education.
As the U.S. population increases past the 300-million mark, 40 percent of current U.S. population growth is coming from immigration and an additional 12 percent from the children of immigrants. One can only imagine how much more diverse the country will become in the next 30 years! That workforce will need to be highly educated if our economy is to stay competitive.
Your duty as professional leaders—and ours as academic leaders—is to ensure opportunities for those who will follow us. I hope that you will value socio-economic diversity and intellectual diversity to the same degree that you ensure racial, ethnic, gender, and religious protections.
Thank you for your support and enjoy the rest of your day.
