In Black America; Doctoral Study Is The Possible Dream For Black Students

From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. We have awarded over 300 McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Now, you have to understand we've been 25 years. $16,000 a year guaranteed five years of support. So that's $80,000 behind each fellowship that we award. We have 175 McKnight Doctoral Fellows currently matriculating. We have now not 92 but 97 graduates. We have three girls out of the pipeline about in the last 10 days. So we're at 97 as I speak.

We have an 85% retention rate after 13 years at the doctoral level. Dr. Israel Trouble, Jr., President and CEO, Florida Education Fund. Last November, Florida A&M University hosted his 12th National Higher Education Conference on Student Retention. This year's conference theme was entitled Retention Along the Educational Continuum, kindergarten to doctorate. The five-day conference brought together more than 200 university and college administrators, counselors, academic advisors, retention directors and students. To explore issues that influence the retention of minority students in higher education, to gain information that will be helpful towards improving existing student retention programs, and to interact with peers from institutions and organizations nationwide in designing and implementing student retention programs. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr., and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Dr. O's study is the possible dream for black students

but Dr. Israel Trouble, Jr., In Black America. One of the things that you will also find that's different about our program is that we don't require that fellows have to stay in Florida once they complete their degree. That is very different than most state-assisted or state-supported programs. They usually require folks to stay for a certain amount of time before they are free to get off the plantation. We allow them off the plantation early. Then we have a junior faculty fellowship program, which is for minorities general. And that program was designed to really help with the retention issue of minority faculty, meaning that you give them a year off the right research to get their portfolios ready so that they can then make sure that everything is in order for them to present to their colleagues and on up through the academic administration. But what was very interesting, which was not planned when we started,

that we have gotten 31 PhD completions out of the junior faculty program. As we enter the 21st century, the Florida Education Fund supports the imperative that every segment of the nation's population has access to the possibilities and benefits of educational opportunity. Over the past 12 years, the FEF has provided an avenue to ensure that access and opportunity are available. Established in 1984 as a not-for-profit corporation, the quasi-public entity with a statewide mission and national impact was originally known as the benign programs in higher education and administered by the Florida Association of Colleges and Universities. Through its innovative programs and non-traditional pros to enhancing educational outcomes has been demonstrated across various educational levels. At this year's National Student Retention Conference, Dr. Israel Trouble, President and CEO of the Florida Education Fund,

shares as many years of involvement in graduate study programs. Dr. Trouble, if responsible for the development, implementation, and evaluation of the original four programs funded by the McKnight Foundation. Reasonable people with reasonable intelligence can get PhD degrees. And I think we don't communicate that to people. Somehow we give it this receipt that only special people with special gifts can somehow get these degrees and be called DASTA and so forth. And I just disagree with that. And so, in picking a title for the book, it was important for me to try to communicate. You know, what this represents? And it represents something very, very fundamental. If you can walk, you can dance. Now, you may not be Bojang or Fred Astaire. You know, all of us don't have rhythms, but I can probably teach you what you see on TNN

when they be doing that stuff going around with the cowboy hats on. I can probably get you there. Okay? I know y'all slipped by with your channel surfing. You slipped by that. You have to stop them watching for a minute and try to see the electric slide to signify it. I know what you do. But one of the things we looked at in chapter two was, what does the research say about programs? And essentially, they list a number of characteristics. One is administrative and faculty advocates, which is nothing new for most of us. I mean, you know, if you got folks there who represent the population you're trying to affect, if they are affected and involved and provide some time and support, that it makes a difference in terms of the success of African-American students. There are no models in Memphis. Most of you have some sense of that.

The problem is the historical situation that we have faced causes us to have very few at the graduate faculty level. I mean, so it's no magic when you get up there. Most of your students are going to have majority faculty and increasingly Asian and East Indian faculty in certain disciplines. And African-Americans are going to be few and far in between. So you can talk about role models and measures all you want. But if the system hasn't allowed people to number one come in at the assistant professional level and then successfully progress to tenure faculty and then on to get graduate faculty stated, your kids are basically going to be isolated and in for a very hard time. And so the whole idea of how we fund this business is very important to break down early on, I believe. Stable financial support, full-time attendance.

Most African-Americans in graduate programs are not going full-time. They are part-time. It's difficult doing that kind of work part-time. You really need to be free up to work at it full-time. Now you may do something else with your other time like, you know, goes down to the house of blues and so forth rather than study. But I know. But really, that can be done and some of us are good enough to do that. Students are not and we have to recognize the difference. We require that our students all be full-time. However, if they need an extra piece of money, we look at what it is that they choose to do and then make a decision as to whether or not it's a good idea. Now we can't stop someone from doing it, but we can apply enough pressure

that they will think twice about the severity of the decision that they're about to make. A full-blown retention program and a professionalization process that is inclusive. Now that's what the literature told us. Now what I will tell you about what the literature says and the McKnight Doctoral Scholarship program is very simple. That we achieve early on what the researchers call concurrent validity. Meaning that what the research said you have to have in order to have a successful program, we have all of that and then some. It wasn't by design. I didn't know what the literature says. Nobody grows up in our business saying they want to be a graduate dean. I've never heard anybody give my professional life who came to me and said, gee, you know what I want to be when I grow up a graduate dean? That is not how it happens.

You stumble in the graduate education. So knowing something about it ain't for most of us. And just because you have a graduate degree does not mean that you understand graduate education. Okay, and all that goes with that process. One of the things in the book, I think it's the third or fourth chapter. It's something I call socialization of undergraduate to the graduate experience. And again, sometimes, you know, to really, I think, think critically about an issue, does not mean you have to know everything there is to know. And sometimes just going over your own experience can be very illuminating. And sometimes we think somehow we have to go and get a statistical model and, you know, apply all of this stuff in order to understand why stuff ain't working. You know, like somebody said, we don't need any more studies about four people.

We know why four people are four. And four of us ain't got no money. And nobody needs to study that. You don't need another study to give you that answer. What you need to do is to do something about why they post. So they won't be post, no most. I mean, it's just, you know what I mean? But we'll let people come into our community and study and study and study and study and we feel they're waiting and vocal waiting and nothing is going on. Well, this issue of socialization of undergrad was like, I got to thinking about it one day. I did have some quiet time. Probably about three in the morning and I should have been sleeping. And I said, now, how does this work? How does this, how do people get some idea who come from families like mine where nobody has a high school diploma left on the college degree? Mama clean white foes houses. Mama had a fourth grade education.

You know, no daddy at home, never. I mean, and it goes on and on and on. I mean, how, how do people have some sense of what this is all about sitting in the classroom and nobody that they know has ever been? How do they get a sense of it? I said, well, what happens? Well, here's what happens. We have an informal model that still operates in this country today on most of our campuses. And what is the informal model? A professor is before a group of students just like this. And they're having some dialogue. And your A student stand up who sounds like he or she might be the one. They don't say anything to the whole class. They will tell miss Owen, so with the pretty eyes, you come see me after class. Or miss the so-and-so who was so articulate and responding to my, what, come see me after class. After class, this professor tells them, you know, I think you could probably be successful in fact. It's cool.

I want you to call my colleague over at StateU and tell them that I said. Now, the rest of the students sitting there regardless of color now. Be real clear about that. This ain't about segmentation. This is about style and process and tradition. Okay? So, student A calls, professors, so-and-so at StateU and the process is going on. But the rest of the 99% of the students there. Nobody has ever said anything to them about graduate school. Now, if you are a critical thinker, you will know that this informal system gets exacerbated for whom? Hello. But, for minority students, right? I mean, break that down one more time.

See, most of the people that they are going to pick out that they think have what they have are going to kind of look like there. I mean, it's not natural for them to pick out a little system from Opalaka. Because they don't have nothing in common. And she didn't get up and articulate like so. She didn't say how now brown cow. She goes, you know what? I think she's going down there with them. And you know, they ain't got nothing, nothing in her whole life experience explains that to her and says there's value in that. Nothing. So, I mean, if you understand how they work generally on undergraduates, generally, you then have to understand how that affects us and the students that we're most concerned about. Makes sense?

I don't hear nothing. It doesn't make sense. I mean, have you seen that informal process work? Okay. Now, what I say in the book is we have to change that. We have to go from an informal system to a formal system. What's nice about making this argument is that it will benefit all almost all of the undergraduates. As opposed to a selected few. Not just African Americans. And that's why it can be argued within the inner sanctum of the university that hey, what I'm proposing to you. Is this something just for African Americans? What I'm telling you is most of your white students here don't get this information in a timely fashion. And therefore, I think this becomes a quality enhancement to undergraduate education.

Now, if you remember all the stuff about we're going to improve undergraduate education, the books that were written and so forth. Remember that discussion that went all over higher education for more than a decade? Did you have late here? Anybody say, and I looked at all the literature, that one of the ways you improve undergraduate education is helping students to understand how to get to the graduate experience. Never been there. Check it out. Go back and look at the literature. I think you're talking about a fundamental change. You move from an informal system to a formal system. And what does this formal system consist of? Not magic. Freshman orientation. You remind us. They're too confused. Now, you don't want to put too much on. They run around trying to figure out which end is up as it is.

So you don't want to burden, but you want to say to them at interval. One thing. And that is, remember the GPA that you achieve. Have some of that on what happens to you if you ever decide that you want to go on to graduate in professional school. That is all I recommend for the freshman year. It's very simple. You just remind. You can't do anything more than that, but you just remind them. And you remind them at intervals during that freshman year. In the sophomore year. What I recommend is that you get every graduate program in your university and around your university to come into the gymnasium or someplace. Set up a table. And have all students and you can you can argue. What kind of cut off you want? I just say 2.5. All the students with 2.5 GPA come here on Saturday morning on Friday afternoon and just walk around these tables and find out.

Number one. What is required to get into a graduate program? Where might that graduate program take me? And how does it get fun? You can't overwhelm a sophomore. Half of them don't know whether they're going to come and they're feeling, you know, puberty is running through them in great ways. That is not the most important thing on their agenda. What is important is that they be exposed to what it takes in order to make this thing happen that they don't even know that they want to do yet. Make sense? Huh? You got to talk to me. I come out of Baptist tradition. But somebody ain't talking to me and I got to do something to make y'all happy. What you do in the junior and senior year is do what I call demystifying the notion of research.

You try to get undergraduates involved if it's writing a paper for the South Eastern historical association. That they help the professor do the scutwork in the library or getting in laboratories, scientific labs, doing scutwork, cleaning. I mean, whatever it is, but getting them around so that they begin to see that ordinary people can do this thing called research. It's like the chuch, you know, research. And y'all, y'all understand that if I get it down to the lingo, we're, all right, research. But it's very important. But I mean, you think about it. I mean, the best applicants we've had from day one in our program have been students who were marked or MBRS students. Let me tell you about our mob and the pieces that we have in this mob.

Our GRE scores range from 680 to 1550. I told you about our first 40 grads with 25 of them had GRE scores less than a thousand. And that table is in this book. Okay. And our discussion of that table. Now clearly, we started out with 15 million dollars in the back. Nobody's ever done it on behalf of African-Americans before. But we had a Godfather. And I, you know, quite a physical priest who was the minister to the McKnight family, which is the father founded the 3M Corporation. And this man believed that things could be changed.

And so he put his money where his mouth was. And we started out with 15 million dollars in the bank on behalf of making sure that African-Americans succeed at the graduate level. Now, that is unusual. But it's not unusual if you think in terms of all of the resources that are at our university when it comes to graduate fellowships, graduate assistantships, and the like. Money was never an issue from mainstream American higher education. Their problem was they told us 12, 13 years ago was that they couldn't find it. They didn't say we couldn't fund them. Read all the literature. They never said we got a money problem, folks. Because they've been in the money on all of the foreign students they want to spend it on. They've been in the money on all of the life they want to spend. The money has always been there.

Okay. We have a private public partnership, which means that I don't report to any president, any chancellor. I run my own show, responsible to my board, but my main mission is to make sure that my fellows are successful. So I can't, I don't have any political agenda in between that. Which is part of administratively why we can get things done quicker and on point. We have a mentor support system. We have something I call a concentric support system, which is circle within service. We start out with the orientation where we tell the students that they are their brothers and sisters. I mean, we make no point, we go right at it. These are value-laden judgments that have been made, but I believe I can defend them.

We tell them they are, they are responsible for success of everybody sitting around. All 24 others. If you can work with a computer better than anybody else here, then you got a responsibility to share that with your other fellows. If you write better, you have a responsibility to edit paper. From that inner circle, we go to the next level, which is having McKnight Liaison on every campus, who are responsive and caring people, who will look after them on the campus when they can't look after themselves. And then in our office, which is the third level of this concentric support system, the word in my office had been since day one still in today. If a McKnight fellow calls, we get back to him in two hours or less.

And you can talk to any McKnight fellow anywhere in the world, and they will tell you that they've never had to wait. And if there was a problem, whether it required money, or whatever it required, within reason, we have gotten it to them. So there's a commitment there that is unshakeable. The other thing I think we've learned over these 12 years is that, and I need to get with some of my more theoretical friends in the social sciences. But I'm up the opinion that, as the people we've never had power on our side. And when real legitimate power is on your side, what we have found is that over a 13 year period, we've only had to transfer four McKnight fellow, meaning that the power was always there. They got messed up at the University of Florida.

I can take the money and them and move them to have that you at the University of Miami or the University of Central Florida. They did math, but the power was there, and they understood it, and I made sure they understood it at orientation time. But I think the incredible result is that you look back over the years that you only had to do it four times. And people thought, you know, people say the brothers just like to get over. You know, I mean, here, well, you know, this one ain't working. I just just don't know. We never even remember that. And I think what happens is that when people have true legitimate power on their side, they will go the extra mile to make it work. That's what I, that's what I'm seeing from our work. That's a pretty, that's a pretty powerful, powerful statement. Because if you took that out in a number of different directions, it would say that if in fact, people who have been disenfranchised,

who have never had anything on their side, finally get some real stuff on their side, they can do incredible things. Now, I think in our community, real educators always understood this. Hello. But I'm not sure the institutions act in a way that communicates that to the students that we represent and care about. We have a consistent, we're African centers. And that's something you need to understand. Our program is African centers. When we spend time with the fellows, and we have three times a year that we spend time with them at the orientation, at the annual fellows meeting, and at the mid-year fellows meeting. And this is where we get the bonding and the mentoring and the African centers knits into their lives.

We have a consistent faculty that comes back all the time to talk to them about the wondrous things that have happened to people of African descent. Dr. Israel Trouble, Jr., President and CEO, Florida Education Fund. I would like to thank Florida A&M University for their assistance in the production of this program. If you have a question or comment or suggestions asked your future in Black America programs, write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA technical producer David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today, and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America Cassettes. Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

That's in Black America Cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America. We've got to get better data on doctors too, if there is no good aggregate data in the country. Two, we've got to do something about time to the group. Graduate studies program with Dr. Israel Troubled Junior this week on in Black America.