Making Good on Our Commitment to Needy Students; Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/21/13

Kate Queeney, Chronicle of Higher Education; Making Good on Our Commitment to Needy Students: "Even as colleges and universities redouble their commitments to first-generation and low-income students, it's clear we still have a great deal to learn. Last December, The New York Times published an article on this topic, "For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall." In lengthy and provocative profiles, the story reflected on how students at even the most well-intentioned colleges and universities are held back—by family pressures, self-doubt, and deceptively "small" barriers—from reaching their educational potential. The profiles in The Times did not have happy endings. Fortunately, Anna's story does. She enrolled in a Ph.D. program closer to home and finished her degree while helping to care for her mother. She is a postdoc now at the same university and, with luck, will make a fine professor, if that's what she chooses. At Smith, a commitment to students of promise is a fundamental value. While not every story ends as positively as Anna's did, many do. And when disadvantaged students succeed in college and beyond, their experiences teach us what we do well and how we can do it better...As a faculty member, I have come to understand that asking questions, and being prepared to hear the sometimes difficult answers, can mean the difference for students between simply making it through college and truly reaping the benefits of higher education. When my colleagues found that first-generation students and students of color weren't persisting in STEM fields at the same rate as Smith students at large, we created a program focused on mentoring and supporting those students."