When Tyler Mulvenna struggled in his classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta, he found support through a program designed for students at risk of dropping out. Rick Wood/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
ATLANTA – Tyler Mulvenna wanted to achieve more than a high school diploma.
His sisters had babies as teenagers. One dropped out of high school but later earned her GED; the other finished high school. His mother, a single parent, worked two jobs and did not go to college.
Mulvenna noticed white students at his racially mixed high school, 45 minutes south of Atlanta, typically went to college, the second or third generation in their families to do so. He saw their posts on Facebook from campus visits with their parents, who were successful college graduates.
“It was a fork in the road: The people who went to college, and those who didn’t,” Mulvenna recalled years later. The path he chose led to graduation from Georgia State University last spring.
Mulvenna started college in 2013, shortly after the urban research university made a commitment to not just admitting students but teaching them how to succeed.
Leaders at the school — located a few blocks from Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace — stepped up their game in 2011 to nurture students who didn’t excel in high school, who didn’t know anything about navigating college, and who didn’t have anyone to guide them.
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Leaders at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — a peer of Georgia State in a city that struggles with a similar racial divide — have heard a lot about how Georgia State dramatically improved retention and graduation rates for at-risk students over the past six years. UWM hopes to find success by following a similar path.
No longer turning its back
Georgia State was segregated well into the 1960s. As recently as 10 years ago, white students were far more likely to graduate than black students.
Between 2008 and 2012, when the recession hammered Atlanta, the university lost $40 million in state support. But leaders didn’t let the lost funding rob them of their sense of mission.
Georgia State today graduates more African-American students than any other university in the country, and black students earn degrees at the same rate as whites.
Since stepping up its efforts, Georgia State has more than doubled the number of bachelor's degrees it awards to African-American students — from 1,001 in 2009-'10 to 2,040 in 2016-'17.
Leaders at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — a peer of Georgia State in a city that struggles with a similar racial divide — have heard a lot about how Georgia State dramatically improved retention and graduation rates for at-risk students. UWM hopes to find success by following a similar path.
Georgia State created an elaborate safety net for students at risk of dropping out.
It harnessed the power of analytics and big data and started so-called GPS advising, linking advisers to students as soon as they fail an exam, start missing classes, or register for a course that could slow them down because it won't count toward their major.
The university also began offering need-based Panther Retention Grants to students who fall behind paying tuition bills. It changed the way classes are taught to help vulnerable students succeed and introduced broad meta-majors to make sure classes fit with more than one major as students figure out a career path.
When it consolidated last year with a two-year community college, Georgia State boosted to 50,000 the number of students it educates — 20,000 of them at the community college's campuses.
Georgia State's commitment to graduate more degree holders has not only helped students, it has helped the university's finances as well.
That’s because every student who doesn’t drop out continues to pay tuition and fees of roughly $10,000 per year.
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For every percentage point increase in the number of freshmen who return for the second year — 325 students — the university collects $3.18 million in revenue it otherwise would have lost if they dropped out.
Even with that boost, the university still is not replacing all its lost state funding after the Great Recession. But leaders decided the school could no longer turn its back on low-income, minority and first-generation students, said Timothy Renick, a Georgia State vice president.
Minority students from low-income households are often the first in their families to go to college. Because many attend urban public schools with marginal success rates, they aren’t academically prepared for college, Renick said.
In their quest to serve those who need the most help, Georgia State’s leaders were guided by a single question: Given this demographic reality — which mirrors Milwaukee’s — how do we shape the institution to respond to the students we enroll?
Learning from mistakes
UWM today looks a lot like Georgia State in 2003.
And in Milwaukee, one of America’s most segregated, poverty-ridden cities, the success of the city itself is in some ways tied to the future of its most vulnerable residents.
Nationwide, the disparity in six-year graduation rates between blacks and whites is 13 percentage points.
At UWM, the racial disparity is 24 percentage points. By comparison, Marquette University, a private Jesuit school in Milwaukee, has a gap of 7 percentage points, but also enrolls fewer African-American students.
Three of every four black students who enroll at Georgia State graduate within six years, while one of every five black freshmen at UWM finish in six years — among the worst track records in the nation, according to a recent study by the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group.
African-American students actually graduate at a slightly higher rate than white students at Georgia State: 77.5% vs. 76.4%.
UWM is looking to Georgia State to see if approaches that worked there could help in Milwaukee.
For example, UWM is hiring more advisers and changing its advising approach. Acommittee is working to make sure introductory courses provide students with adequate preparation for their majors — and to be sure those courses fit with more than one major in case they change their minds.
Alumni and administrators are raising private money to help students cover financial emergencies that might otherwise force them to drop out.
A November decision by the UW System Board of Regents also may help UWM speed its progress. The plan will restructure UW’s two-year colleges, known for nurturing students toward four-year degrees. For UWM, that means taking on UW-Waukesha and UW-Washington County as satellite campuses. The intent is not to ship students to the suburbs, but rather to serve them where they are.
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Georgia State’s success with such programshas hinged on pinpointing mistakes made by past students to help current students avoid the same mistakes. Professors each day plug students' test grades into software linked to advisers who can reach out to help students before it's too late.
He took advantage
Mulvenna, who grew up outside Atlanta, started down the road to college at the end of eighth grade. That’s when his soccer coach, a NASA aerospace engineer, invited him along when he took his own son to visit Georgia Tech.
Mulvenna learned he needed to sign up for the challenging high school courses that would prepare him for college. He started picturing himself on campus, becoming excited for the future and working toward it, like his white Facebook friends.
Still, his odds of success weren’t great. No one in his family had attended college before him. His study habits were lacking, as were his financial resources. Like 60% of Georgia State students, he was eligible for federal, need-based Pell Grants.
Mulvenna commuted from home his freshman year and worked about 30 hours a week through most of college to pay his bills. He was able to limit his student loan debt to about $8,000 with the help of scholarships and grants.
He took advantage of everything Georgia State — a majority-minority campus tucked amid the shiny skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta — offered him. He built relationships with advisers. Got involved with campus activities.
He graduated in four years, with a degree in French, international business and marketing.
Comparing notes
Like Milwaukee, Atlanta doesn’t have the proudest heritage of race relations. But unlike Milwaukee, it has an influential and affluent African-American community.
Renick, vice president for enrollment management and student success, worked closely with Atlanta’s city leaders to make his vision for Georgia State a reality.
Before taking on that role in 2008, he served as a professor of religious studies at the university for more than 20 years.
Renick, who is white, oversees a multitude of areas that are managed by at least three different people at most campuses. Among them are financial aid, advising and the registrar’s office.
One of his innovations was implementing a weekly meeting where staff members from different departments exchange information to help students stay on track.
For example, the bursar may share with financial aid staff and advisers the names of students who haven’t paid their bills. Then, all three can work together to determine whether there’s a financial emergency. If there is, they may arrange for private grant money to cover it.
'Come in and we'll talk'
When Renick became a campus administrator, Georgia State had roughly 15 people who only did academic advising. Now there are 150 between the Atlanta campus and its community college campuses.
Part of the expansion was increasing the advising staff, so there would be one adviser for every 300 students. The ratio had been 750 to 1.
Advisers have access to an early warning system powered by data.
It allows advisers to track students’ every academic move, from course registration to grades. Faculty update the system daily.
Any time students make any one of 800 different missteps — such as failing a quiz, not showing up for classes, or signing up for the wrong course — advisers receive electronic alerts. What gets flagged was based on an analysis of 10 years of data, 2.5 million grades and 140,000 student records.
The data analysis also found that 75% of students who get an A or a B in their first course in their major graduate on time. If they get a C, it drops to 25%.
As a result, advisers try to address problems as early as the second week of class to change the trajectories of potential “C” students.
Advisers sit down with the students who don’t start off strong to get to the bottom of what happened. Maybe a student needs tutoring. Maybe he needs to go to the writing center. Maybe she needs to take another course before trying upper-level work.
The approach is “Why don’t you come in and we’ll talk about what resources we have that can make you successful so you can succeed,” Renick said.
“What had we been doing with that C student?” he asked. “Absolutely nothing.”
In fact, the university was doing worse than nothing, in his view. Students who got Cs were led to believe they were ready to move on to more difficult courses. But that isn’t always the case.
“They get into the class with upper-level work," Renick said, "and whatever the weakness is evidenced in the C grade becomes exacerbated and turns into Ds and Fs.”
By then, it’s too late.
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At UWM, similar initiatives to prevent those students from falling through the cracks are in their infancy. Earlier this year, the university brought together advisers focused on multiculturalism and those who specialize in student support. Those teams focus special attention on first-year students and on those who haven’t declared majors.
“Business, Industry, and Applied Technology” and “Social and Behavioral Sciences” are among the so-called meta-majors to keep UWM students on track toward graduation, while giving them flexibility to switch majors.
UWM last year used grant money from UW System earmarked for advising initiatives to launch new software already used by Georgia State and others. The software helps students make better choices, starting with course schedule planning. The start-up cost was $5,000; the ongoing annual cost is $40,000.
Students choose preferred courses and schedule times for breaks and work. The software then generates the best scheduling choices, based on requirements of their major, reducing the chances for mistakes that can slow progress toward graduation.
The grant from UW System is to last through fiscal 2019.
Like Georgia State, UWM also creates alerts for advisers in real time, but it doesn't have nearly the number of staff available to help students. Georgia State has more than 150 professional academic advisers. UWM has 85.
Too Big Brother-ish?
In the beginning, vocal opponents on the Georgia State faculty argued using such up-to-the-minute data was too Big Brother-ish and invaded students’ privacy.
Faculty also worried students would be steered toward easier majors to improve graduation rates.
That hasn’t happened. Computer science and biology are the two fastest-growing majors, according to Renick.
“It might be because we’re giving them a fighting chance,” he said.
Georgia State provides that chance by getting students up to par in their chosen fields or, if they can’t do that, helping them make different choices.
Part of that assistance is a revamped math curriculum. Instructors work with students hands-on in both classrooms and in math labs, where students progress at their own pace and get hundreds of bits of personalized feedback every hour.
Lectures are online.
Another strategy is giving students time to explore before they choose majors. Students interested in business, for example, spend their freshman year learning the differences among majors such as accounting, finance and risk management.
This helps prevent a common situation: Students who change their minds midway through school, but can’t change their majors because the courses they have already taken won’t count toward something different.
'My head was spinning'
At Georgia State, high-achieving undergraduates are paid to mentor struggling students.
First, university leaders identified the required courses with the highest rates of failure or withdrawals.
Then they identified the mentors: students who had earned good grades in those courses and were eligible for federal financial assistance via work study.
Rather than wasting their talents in typically mindless work study jobs such as answering phones, the mentors lead classes known as “supplemental instruction.”
About a third of Georgia State’s students take advantage of the additional group tutoring sessions each year, in part because they are led by undergraduates who may mirror the demographics of the struggling students, Renik said.
Students who attend at least three sessions for a single course do about half a letter grade better than those who don’t, and they are more likely to return to school the following year, Renick said.
UWM, which introduced supplemental instruction in about a dozen courses a couple of years ago, is hoping for similar results. Course offerings are expanding.
During a supplemental instruction biology session at Georgia State, student Makeda Phillips shared frustrations about a professor’s lecture.
“He went through today so fast, I could not keep up,” she said.
“My head was spinning,” another student chimed in.
Mentor Maya Earl, who had done well in the class the previous year, knew what they were talking about because she was sitting in the lecture that day, too, as part of her job.
Earl helped her fellow students break down the biological processes into mnemonics that would help them remember.
Soon they were slapping high-fives.
Start college in summer
Better advising and scheduled sessions of group tutoring are only part of Georgia State’s solution.
There’s also summer school. But it’s not make-up work. It’s an early start to freshman year.
Incoming freshmen with borderline grades get a college acceptance letter that says if they want to attend Georgia State, they must start classes in June — not September.
Those classes — seven credit hours of coursework toward a degree — are part of what’s known as the Summer Success Academy.
Students also learn how to study, how to manage money and how to work effectively with tutors and advisers. Their dorms become “freshman learning communities” where they are matched with peer mentors and live with students who have similar academic interests.
The program works.
Before, only half the students in the bottom 10% of the freshman class came back the next year. Four years after the Summer Success Academy started, 90% of students with that same academic profile returned.
The few who don’t succeed are told that although they are still Georgia State students, in the fall they must attend the community college that merged with Georgia State last year.
It’s a similar concept to the upcoming merger of the UW System’s two-year campuses with its four-year ones.
'I'm glad it happened'
Fortune Onwuzuruike, who grew up in Marietta, was not thrilled to get an acceptance letter telling him to show up for his freshman year at Georgia State three months early.
“It felt like such a bad idea. I had just graduated from high school, and three weeks later, I’m back at it,” he recalled.
“My parents said, ‘It’s a head start; jump in there and get it done.’ ”
So he did. He was in summer classes with 25 to 50 students instead of 200. He had one-on-one time with professors. He learned where to go if he had questions. His peer mentor was a Georgia State homecoming prince — someone who linked him with student organizations, including student government, where he excelled.
Onwuzuruike was elected president of student government his senior year, graduating with a 3.69 GPA and a bachelor’s degree in health informatics.
He is now pursuing a master’s degree and working as an associate application analyst for Wellstar, the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Georgia.
“It turned out to be a great opportunity,” Onwuzuruike said. “I left Summer Success with a 4.0 GPA, a head start with seven college credits and a goal to earn as many As as possible. I’m glad it happened the way it did.”
The difference was people
Mulvenna is well on his way to succeeding in the work world since graduating last May.
He was promoted by his college employer, Intercontinental Hotels Group, to project manager for language efforts to give all guests the best experience, regardless of the language they speak.
He knows what made the difference for him at Georgia State.
"The difference was the people I met," he said.
Mulvenna met his best friend his first day of a Freshman Learning Community class. He also had strong mentors: an adviser who, among other things, helped him figure out scholarships so he could study abroad; his adviser for a student goodwill ambassador program established by the university president; and a professor who helped him gain experience in international business before he graduated.
"I never had a shortage of people," Mulvenna said. "That really confirmed the importance of relationships."
Read more of this special report at jsonline.com/education.
This story was done in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network, www.solutionsjournalism.org.