A generous gift and an ambitious goal: UT-Austin aims to close completion gap - The Washington Post

The university wants to raise that number to 90 percent in the next decade.

“What has been successful to get [here] may not be what’s needed for the last 250 or 300 students who are dropping out,” university President Gregory L. Fenves said. “We’re combining what we’ve been doing . . . with a very well established program that the Dell Foundation has been doing at over 500 universities.”

Equity in educational outcomes has emerged as a priority in higher education as more students from the lowest rungs of the economic ladder pursue degrees. Colleges and universities, even the most selective ones, must confront the challenge of making sure those students graduate at the same rate as everyone else on campus.

Degree attainment is especially critical for students from modest means because of the potential for economic mobility and the risk of financial instability if they fail to graduate. Pell recipients, most of whom come from families earning less than $40,000 a year, are more likely to borrow — and borrow more than their peers, according to federal data. Taking on debt without earning a degree or taking longer to complete a degree can prove detrimental.

“So many Pell students struggle,” said Susan Dell, co-founder and chairman of the foundation. “They have a lot of obstacles in the way that aren’t just financial. These are often first-generation college students who have excelled academically but aren’t familiar with navigating the higher education landscape.”

In the past 15 years, the foundation has provided $109 million in scholarships to 5,000 low-income college students through its Dell Scholars program.

Eighty percent of recipients graduate within six years — four times the national average for students from low-income households. The scholarship program offers mental health counseling, routine check-ins with recipients, tutoring and peer advising, with the understanding that financial support is often not enough to get students to the finish line.

It’s a model the foundation wants to expand on the UT-Austin campus.

Beginning in the fall, all incoming Pell-eligible undergraduates at the state university will receive an array of individualized support services to help them navigate campus resources and career planning to stay on track to graduation.

Freshmen who have less than $1,000 of expected family contributions will also become part of the Dell Scholars program and receive a $20,000 scholarship. The grant could result in local students having their entire $27,218 cost of attendance covered, because the university takes care of tuition and fees for residents whose families earn less than $65,000 a year.

UT-Austin is providing a dollar-for-dollar match of the $100 million donation to support the additional financial aid for students from lower-income households.

All of the money from the foundation gift must be spent over the next decade on the project, not invested through the university’s endowment. That way, the school can be flexible with the funds and more responsive to the needs of students, said Janet Mountain, executive director of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

The foundation and university will hire a team of up to 15 people to primarily serve as case managers and shepherd the initiative over the next decade, plus 24 UT-Austin students to work as peer advisers.

Having a group of students who looked like her and understood what it meant to be the first to leave home and the first to go to college made Reina Olivas believe she belonged at UT-Austin, she said. A Dell Scholar who graduated in 2017, Olivas, 24, is proud to have had a chance to help younger scholars feel the same way when she served as a peer ambassador.

She recalls one student who had never heard of office hours and worried about bothering her professor even as she struggled with the class. An academic adviser could have provided the same guidance but receiving help from a peer is far less intimidating.

The built-in community that the Dell Scholars program provided Olivas was what she most needed to get through the first year of college. It helped ward off homesickness and allay some of the guilt of not being home in Houston to contribute to the bills or take care of her five siblings.

“It really made the difference and gave me a lot of confidence in knowing that I did belong and that my story and my journey there was valuable,” said Olivas, a journalism major who works in advertising.

UT-Austin was a natural choice for the foundation because the university had already laid the groundwork for an undertaking of this magnitude, Mountain said. It also helps that the campus is near the foundation’s headquarters, making it easier to team up and monitor the progress of the project.

“Getting to this [graduation] goal is going to require a lot of work,” Mountain said.

Working with the school also allows the foundation to expand its scholars program from 500 students a year to 2,000. If the initiative can be executed at a school as large as UT-Austin, Mountain believes it will encourage other institutions.

With more than 40,000 undergraduates, UT-Austin is one of the country’s largest public flagships. Black, Hispanic, Asian and multiracial students represent more than half of its enrollment. Nearly one-quarter of undergraduates — 9,161 students — received Pell awards in the 2017-2018 academic year, according to the latest available federal data.

UT-Austin convened a task force on graduation rates in 2011. The university mined data to identify students at risk of falling through the cracks, and found income and whether a student’s parents attended college were strong predictors, University President Fenves said. UT-Austin beefed up advising, improved early intervention, expanded financial aid, revised credit requirements and paired students with mentors — all in an effort to keep them on track.

Nearly 70 percent of students at UT-Austin now graduate within four years, compared with 52 percent in 2013, according to the university. Eighty-three percent of students complete their undergraduate studies within six years. While the school has narrowed the gap in on-time and six-year graduation rates between Pell-eligible students and their peers, Fenves said more work needs to be done.

Experts say that’s true throughout higher education, as Pell recipients continue to lag their peers in earning a college credential. Data from the Education Department show the gap in bachelor’s degree completion rates between Pell and non-Pell students is 10 percentage points at public colleges and nearly 15 percentage points at private institutions.

There are universities bucking the trend by enrolling and graduating large numbers of students from modest means. In schools that are part of the University of California system, Pell-eligible students make up from a third to more than half of the population — and their graduation rates are on par with, or sometimes better than, their classmates.

California has one of the best-funded public systems in higher education, but the schools are also strategic in recruiting and serving low-income students. It’s a strategy that begins in K-12, with universities partnering with underserved schools to ensure students are prepared to meet admissions standards and understand the inner workings of higher education, said Yvette Gullatt, a vice provost of the university system.

“You have to think beyond admissions,” Gullatt said. “It means not taking a deficit approach to students, seeing first-generation and Pell students as bringing assets with them. These students are resilient.”

Andrew Nichols, senior director of higher education research at the advocacy group Education Trust, said too many colleges have a laundry list of initiatives for lower-income students that are not coordinated and do not assess whether they are working.

“Approaching student success as more of a movement that includes several different approaches, versus a bunch of scattered programs that don’t fit, is key,” Nichols said.