In Black America; A National Program Designed To Preserve Minority Youth in Higher Education with Dr. Arnold Mitchem

I'm really delighted and honored to have the privilege to talk with you this morning and to share my thoughts on a set of programs and a movement that I think are particularly important as it relates to the question of black retention and higher education. I wouldn't want to miss this opportunity to commend Dr. Ford and Florida A&M for the vision and concerned determination to build these conferences to keep this country's focus on a very critical problem. I've been asked to discuss the role, impact, and importance of special programs for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the so-called TRIO programs, a network of five related programs that are designed to identify qualified individuals from low-income backgrounds,

which is the largest and fastest-growing group of black youth in this country, who are come from families where neither the mother nor the father have earned a baccalaureate degree. Programs that are designed to prepare these students and to motivate these students for post-secondary education, programs that are designed to support these students while they're in post-secondary education, and programs that are designed to motivate and induce the best in the brightest of those who are poor and in our colleges to give consideration to go into graduate programs. And I'm here I'm speaking about the most recent TRIO program that was authorized in 1986 by the Congress, the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, which I'm

pleased to say that we finally succeeded in getting the United States Department of Education to fund. Those of you who have some experience in following and tracking that program remember that there was stiff resistance on the part of the Department of Education to operationalize this program even though Congress had authorized it, and we took that as a very serious insult and was deeply resented by many of us because there was no other program administered by the United States Department of Education that memorialized a black man. We're talking about a configuration of programs that represent the fifth largest, the fifth largest investment of federal dollars in higher education that's administered by the Department of Education.

A lot of people aren't aware of that. Stafford loans and Pell are one and two, and then its college work study and supplementary educational opportunity grants, and then the next largest program is the Department of Education and Ministers, special programs for students with disadvantaged backgrounds. 219.2 million will be spent in the 89-90 academic year, and contrast that with the 80-81 academic year, which was the last year of the Carter administration and the beginning of the Reagan administration, the trio programs at that point had $147.5 million, so you can see that we didn't lose much ground during the Reagan era. And I think that's a tribute to the directors and the counselors and the teachers who work in the programs as well as the parents and the students and the many friends and allies, individuals like Melinda and Jean, who were previously associated with the trio programs who used their influence with the United States Congress to keep these programs going.

7 times, 7 times, the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, sent recommendations to the United States Congress, recommending either the complete elimination or a radical reduction in these programs, and 7 times the national trio community turned Ronald Reagan back. And so finally, the old boy gave up, and he's last year in office, and to our shock and disbelief. And his last budget recommended the same amount of money that we've got the previous year. And of course, on one level, we were pleased, but on another level, we've grown so sophisticated in the last eight years, we knew too that that was also a cut, not as deep as other cuts he proposed, but it was a cut because you know that if indeed you do not raise a program's funding above the previous year's level, that's a cut because you haven't taken into consideration inflation. We talk about the trio programs, we're talking about over 1400, over 1400 separate projects that stretch from Alaska to the Virgin Islands from Maine through Georgia to California and

back through Colorado, Illinois. Probably about 50% of those programs are focused on pre-college education, upward bound talent search, EOC, and another 50% or more precisely, 716 programs at over 850 colleges and universities focus on undergraduates. Trial programs serve 500,000 students annually, 500,000 students annually with talent search serving the largest number of students, 199,000 students annually, and 41% of those students are black. Let me say that again. 41% of those students are black and we of the population of the United States are roughly about 12 to 13%, but 41% of trio participants are black, 35% are white, 17% are Hispanic, 4% are American Indian, and 3% are Asian.

Simply put, the trio programs are intervention efforts, intervention efforts that are designed to overcome the academic, social, and cultural barriers to higher education. Teachers recognized in 1965 at the same time that they authorized the educational opportunity grant program that in order to move poor individuals into and through higher education that required more than simply financial aid, that there were some other needs and some other obstacles that prevented the movement and success of these individuals and those issues had to be attended to as well, and that was in part the rationale for the trio programs. In fact, in the late 60s and early 70s, trio programs were a principal factor that contributed to the momentum, the developed, to encourage the children of the poor to undertake and persist

and to pursuit of baccalaureate degrees. Since the late 70s, a period of significant decline that Mr. Hill indicated to you that you have heard over and over again at this conference in black enrollments, the trio programs and my opinion have kept the federal commitment to a policy of equal educational opportunity in place and by so doing, kept a bad situation from getting worse. And that's a point that a lot of people miss. We're very, very disturbed about the decline in black enrollment, but let me submit to you this morning that the decline in black enrollment would be a lot deeper and a lot greater if it had not been for these programs. And the other thing that I think you need to be aware of, if you're not already aware of, is that the impact that these programs have had on black participation especially in higher education has for too long been overlooked and unrecognized.

Some of you who have been around in higher education for a while recall back in the early 70s when intervention programs were debunked. Some of you remember Christopher Jinks' famous work in 1972 titled Inequality, where these efforts with all but ridiculed by one of the most imminent scholars in this country. Some of you clearly remember and some of you experienced and suffered the backlash to the war on poverty and the great society programs and they too were ridiculed. Some of you remember as you worked on college and university campuses that there was a move in the early and mid 70s to what they called main streaming, main streaming. That is, there was no need for special efforts or special programs that somehow we could blend black and brown students into our institutions the same way we could other students and indeed we expected them to respond.

And this was driven and largely by, in my opinion, by a need as they put it to reduce costs and they could serve more people for less. But at the same time, we know today that that approach did not work and that is of course another reason that we find ourselves this morning faced with an educational crisis as we look to the issue of black and Hispanic enrollments. We also know based on recent research that main streaming never could have worked and some of you may or may not be familiar with the work of Richard Richardson in Arizona State in Alfredo de Los Santos at Maricopa Community College in Phoenix. And one of the things they have shown that unless you have a critical mass of black and Hispanic students at an institution, indeed those students will be alienating, will not feel comfortable and it is very unlikely that they will succeed in any large numbers. And when I say critical mass, I am not talking just about students, there has to be a critical

mass in terms of faculty, there has to be a critical mass in terms of leadership. I understand there is an example of that and at least they cite an example of that in this state, Florida State, where you have minority leadership, where you have achieved an understanding of critical mass in terms of students and faculty. And they went on to say from what they could determine, if they looked at the situation, they found four institutions other than Florida State that met their criteria. For blacks, it was Wayne State and Detroit and Memphis State. For Hispanics, it was El Paso, University of Texas at El Paso and University of New Mexico. And they found in those four institutions that there was a kind of conservability level that black and Hispanic students had which played a role in their succeeding at those institutions. They went on to say further that in the absence of this critical mass that indeed it is important

if not essential to protect these students by providing them some kind of comprehensive program or cocoon, if you will, to protect them not just from the faculty and the biases of administrators, but increasingly folks to protect them from their peers. I'm talking about white students who have been socialized and perhaps the most conservative era in this country since Calvin Coolidge. And they're reflecting that and their attitudes and their behaviors and their amnesia. So I think, given all of this, that it's important that this juncture in American history to reflect on the history, philosophy, and methodological contributions that the TRIO programs or special programs for students with disadvantaged backgrounds has made to higher education.

First of all, let's remember that TRIO changed the outlook toward disadvantaged youngsters in the larger society, in the larger society. I believe we already knew in our black colleges and universities the value of a human being, the potential of a human being, but I'm not so convinced that we understood that at our other college universities, even for like people. What we learned is a, the importance of teacher expectations on the behavior and performance of students. Some of you may be aware of a study that came out recently by Anton Garibaldi, who's the chairman of the Department of Education at Zabre University in New Orleans. It was a study that he conducted that was sponsored by the New Orleans public school system

and it came out, I believe, around 1987, and is focused on black males. They looked at the disproportionate dropout rates, suspension rate, et cetera, et cetera, all sorts of negative factors as it related to black males in the K through 12 system in New Orleans. And one of the things that they looked at, they surveyed the teachers and they came out with a very startling piece of information which I want to share with you this morning. It's very troubling. They asked the teachers, they asked the teachers, elementary school teachers. They asked the teachers, did they expect these young black boys to go to college? Six out of every 10 teachers they asked said no. We have no expectation that these black males will go to college. Now folks, what is even more disturbing, now

you get this, 65% of the teachers they pulled were black. We have a problem. They have a problem, but we got a problem too. What we learned in Upward Bound and other programs in the 60s and 70s, that when our students believe that someone cares about them, when they believe that somebody respects them, I'll never forget a grand old lady, Addy Cook, who used to run a school up in New York, Malcolm King, thank you. She died about four or five years ago. And our members spending a couple of days up there. There was a school on 125th Street in Park Avenue and Park Avenue with all the different scene, 125th Street than it is around 56th Street. And the respect that she showed to the individuals, the students,

the people on the street, the people used to hang out in the lobby was just unbelievable. And what she got in return from some people who I'm sure were just frightened most of y'all out your hair in terms of where they appeared. It was an amazing thing. So respect is critically important. When I talked to my American Indian colleagues in the Southwest, they always emphasize how important it is, how important it is to communicate to their students that we or they respect them. And also to communicate to them that we expect them to succeed. In other words, the message, the message of this ideology is that we want you to succeed. And we are willing to prove it by our effort and our concern. And when I used to run a program at Marquette University years ago, it was a model and a philosophy

that I gave to all of my staff when they were hired. And I said, you got to understand. You got to chase these kids to help them. And if you can't do that, well then you go to work somewhere else. We also learned the value of personal contact. We learned the value and importance of sensitive counseling. We learned the value of cultural based curricula. We learned the value of involving parents in the educational process. We learned the importance of constant contact in small groups. And now we have Treesman at Berkeley, with a grant going around telling us what we had learned 20 years ago. I'm not a criticizing Treesman, so don't take that back. We learned the importance of structured

tutorial assistance. We learned that was important to assign tutors up front and not to rely on tutorial banks. We learned the importance of identifying those courses that would be difficult for our students and providing them supports up front rather than waiting for them to experience difficulty. Now we have supplemental instruction. And my dear friend Dr. Dana Martin, the University of Missouri, Kansas City. And I had breakfast with her the other morning. That's her concept. That's the key of her concept of SNI. I go about the United States from campus to campus, particularly some of our larger ones like Penn State and so on. They have implemented her approach, which the ideas, the ideas really essentially grew out of an educational experience 10 or 15 years ago. I was struck this summer. I was over in Scotland with John Gardin. I noted that John was here, I guess, a pre-conference

workshop. And we're talking about his first year experience. The program he runs out of course is South Carolina. And he said, Mitch, he said, you know, let me be confessed to you that the theory and the ideas and the examples of what I'm doing. And another guy that he worked with a colleague of his named Manny Hires, who died last year, that he and Manny put together, that it grew out of their experience working in the University of South Carolina's upward bound program. And John used to be an English teacher in the upper bound program in University of South Carolina before, as he puts it today, he is the other John Gardiner, everybody knows who the first John Gardiner is. And the importance of monitoring the academic progress of our students went through and wrote in our colleges to stay on top of them. So as I said, much of all of these things were found and discovered and practiced and tried and refined in the oldest of the trio programs upper bound. Today,

there are 475 upper bound programs serving roughly 32,000 students. And it counts as some very distinguished alumni. I think of Barbara Herman Schomburger. And he too came out of an upper bound program and views upper bound as critical to his success and life. So let me go back even further and just give you just a brief quick overview of the history of all of this and how all this stuff got started. And what I loosely describe as the equal educational opportunity movement. In the early 60s, there was a, what I call a climate for intervention, a climate for intervention. And this was brought about largely by the civil rights movement by the crisis of conscience that America experienced by kind of a social reformation or a social revolution, depending upon your perspective, that was going on in

America, was brought on by pressure and concern regarding the absence of blacks and predominantly white college universities, pressure and concern coming from students who worked in Mississippi and Alabama in the civil rights movement as well as faculty and others who were also in those states in those years. And they went back to Brenmar and they went back to Oberlin and they went back to University of Illinois and noted the absence of black faces and a black presence on these campuses. So in the winter of 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation called a meeting with some college presidents to discuss these issues. And the challenge or the question at that meeting that morning was how can intellectually promising high school students from deprived backgrounds be prepared for first rate colleges? That was the agenda that morning in New York City. Nine months later, as an outgrowth of that meeting

in early 1963, the Rockefeller trustees had a special meeting in September of that year and they determined that they would finance three approaches at $450,000 a year for three years that would roughly serve 150 students a year. One approach they set up at Dartmouth and out of that grew the ABC program and some of you may be familiar with the ABC program. Another was a middle school initiative that they set up at Oberlin College. And the third was what they saw, what they called at that time a summer studies program at Princeton University that later came to be known at Princeton as the cooperative school program, the cooperative school program. And of the three models that the Rockefeller trustees established in the fall of 1963, it was the latter, the cooperative school program that

evolved into what we now know as upper bound. In 1965, Sargent Sriver funded 18 pilot upper bound programs. Sargent Sriver had, in terms of his budget, 20% of his budget was discretionary. 20% he could use to set up any sort of national programs that he chose. 80% was sort of committed to the community action program agencies, local and state funding. But 20% was just pying the sky, experimental money, good idea, sort of deal. And so he launched two programs. One of which was head start, head start is like Mama Hood and Apple Pie now. And the other was upper bound. And both of those programs was launched that same year. In fact, Dr. Khalida Ford, our host, had an involvement in all of that and was closely

associated with Dr. Sriver and had one of the initial programs. The first 18 programs, seven of them were at historically black colleges and universities. 11 of them were in private colleges where they're black or white. Seven were in public institutions and two were in Ivy League institutions, one at Cornell and one at Columbia University. Then in 1966, since the experiment was successful, they radically expanded the upper bound programs from 18 to 200 to 200 to over 200 programs, 220 programs to be exact. The previous year in 1965, when Congress authorized the Heart Cation Act, they created another program that was later to become part of the Trial Family. And that was talent search. Talent search was designed initially to advertise the educational opportunity grant program. Congress and their

wisdom understood that just because the federal government had established this need-based scholarship program, there was no certainty. There was no certainty that the poorest of Americans would be aware of this development. And thus, they needed to be aware of these programs so they could have access to them so they could take advantage of them. Talent search was set up to make poor communities and individuals aware of these federal funds to provide them counseling to match these individuals to college universities that would best suit their aptitudes and interests. And so that was a genesis of talent search. And then in 1968, when Congress first amended the Higher Education Act, they created another program, special services for disadvantaged students. And its role in purpose was to provide counseling and academic advisement and pre-freshment programs and remedial development education and a variety of other things to assist disadvantaged students in negotiating college

universities. So it was in 1968 that this notion of trio was formed and those are indeed the core programs in the trio family. Later in 1972 at the insistence of Senator Jabbits of New York, Congress authorized educational opportunity centers whose functions and focuses much like talent search. And then later in 1986, as I indicated to you earlier, the Ron Lee McNair program was launched. So the question that some of you might be asking, who are not as familiar with these programs as many others in the room are, is do these programs really work or have you folks just romanticized these programs? And I get those kinds of questions and stairs oftentimes in airports and other places from individuals who ask me, what do you do for a living? So let's talk a little bit about whether these programs work or not. Let's start with student support services, which is the college-based program that focuses

on undergraduates. In 1981, the United States Department of Education commissioned a study, well they actually commissioned a study before 1981, but a report was issued by the Systems Development Corporation, which was then based in Santa Monica, California, and they did an intensive and extensive comprehensive study of student support services. And they concluded that students who received the full range of academic and counseling services provided by student support services projects, listen to this, are more than twice as likely, twice as likely to complete their first year of college as students who do not receive these services. So a very important finding and conclusion. Let me give you a very local example, a monograph. The program that I used to direct at Marquette is now 20 years old. In fact, I was over

there last month to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that program. That program has served since its inception in 1969 over 1400 individuals, about 1400 individuals, and has had a student support services grant since the beginning of student support services in 1971. Right now, that program can boast a cumulative retention rate of 59 percent.