Common Themes
Several common themes emerged from our case studies of institutions with strong economic mobility performance. These universities are building a culture around the success of low income students by:
- Recruiting families, not just individuals
- Connecting students to other students, faculty and staff, and alumni who share cultural and economic backgrounds through multiple reinforcing pathways
- Making bold investments for low-income students
The thematic analysis below is a summary of these policies and practices. For a deeper dive into the work of each institution, see the Case Studies tab of this resource.
Recruiting families, not just individuals
At each institution we studied, recruitment and enrollment management practices are built around families rather than individuals. The orientation of institutions in our case study is toward helping low-income families understand that sending a young person to college (almost always with a job) will benefit the family more in the long run than sending them directly into the workforce alone. Admissions staff focus nearly all of their attention on enrolling students who will be the first in their families to attend college. When senior leaders and front-line staff at these institutions refer to “the competition,” they are talking about the forces pulling students away from college—not about other colleges.
Make the campus permeable
Bringing families to campus to help them become familiar with the college is a central element of recruitment. For institutions located in big cities like Wayne State University in Detroit and Cal State Los Angeles, creating a sense of public accessibility and permeability is key. Many colleges bring prospective students to campus to show off their physical assets. High mobility institutions focus not on impressing students but on creating a sense of belonging. In part, they are challenging the impression families might have that college is not for them.
By creating opportunities for local schools and families to visit campus over many years, these institutions create an environment in which, before people face an enrollment decision, they have already walked the campus, picnicked on the grounds, taken class field trips there, and attended events. Building familiarity and comfort with the place begins years in advance of enrollment.
Demonstrate commitment
Recruitment and enrollment approaches reinforce a narrative of accessibility and demonstrated value. Programming is embedded into local communities and high schools. UTRGV has recruitment officers dedicated to each local high school, where they are visible and available to students and their families. Most are bilingual, and are themselves first-generation college graduates who come from low-income Spanish-speaking families in the region. They help bridge the gaps–supporting students with admission and enrollment in courses. Cal State LA, UTRGV, and TAMIU all offer information sessions in both Spanish and English where bilingual staff can answer questions from students and their families. Cal State LA’s parent academy is a resource for parents of first-time college students and an example of the continuing engagement of families.
This recruitment narrative involves creating a distinctive mixture of specialness and continuity. Part of what students and families hear is that college is an exciting opportunity to help advance long term prospects. It involves sacrifice, and that sacrifice is worth it. But students and families also feel that they are already connected to the college experience. They have gotten to know people who work there. Students are taking courses that yield college credit. Yes, they are hearing, college is a big deal; but no, it’s not beyond your reach. You’re already doing it.
Reinforce connection
Campus-community partnerships are strategically employed as pathways for involving families and local communities more deeply in the life of the institution, creating positive community impact and demonstrating the value of college education. Texas A&M International University (TAMIU)’s Dr. Kaitlyn Culliton’s Multicultural Children’s Literature course and its outgrowth, the Border Lit project, engages students in writing, illustrating, and producing children’s books that celebrate Laredo’s culture for use in TAMIU tutoring and literacy partnerships. Participating faculty reported the power of inviting families for the presentation of final projects, enabling them to see first-hand how the books their children produced are celebrating their local culture and providing resources for literacy and youth reading programs in the community. Another example of how curriculum builds connection and demonstrates educational value is found at Ferris State (MI), where industry-focused majors like plastics and manufacturing engineering create a tie to the history of the regional economy. Families in Michigan, where manufacturing jobs enabled strong economic futures in the past, can see the connection to the evolution of the local economy in course offerings and understand its value for their children.
Connecting students to systems of support
Create an environment that puts students in constant connection with people who understand what they are up against.
Hire faculty and staff who come from similar cultural and economic backgrounds
Each of the institutions in our case study employs significant numbers of alumni among faculty and staff. Because these institutions have for years served low income student populations, this hiring practice means many faculty and staff members themselves come from low income families, were the first to attend college, and share similar cultural backgrounds with the students. The shared goal of helping low-income students succeed is amplified, as is a sense of accountability, because administrators, faculty, and staff understand where students are coming from. In many cases, staff and faculty know students’ family members or neighbors. The baseline of shared experience functions as a lubricant, reducing friction in efforts to achieve commonality of purpose among everyone working at the institution.
There have been many discussions of “grit” in recent years. Grit has been identified as a key ingredient for success among low income students, and it has been critiqued for implying that students should just suck it up when systems and institutions are not designed for their success. Many people at the universities we studied talked about students’ grit, but they invoked it as a quality the institution constantly seeks to match. The students’ grit inspires a reciprocal can-do spirit. A parallel resilience and drive runs through the student body and the university. We saw examples in innovative approaches to problem-solving, with fluid boundaries and a high degree of collaboration. Faculty, staff, and administrators shared countless examples of individuals and units taking responsibility for “figuring things out” through creativity and cooperation.
Institutional investments in building a diverse faculty and staff such as UCR’s Advancing Faculty Diversity Grants program demonstrate how resource allocations can make a substantial difference in enabling connections between students and those with similar cultural and economic backgrounds who can provide guidance and support. This program has increased faculty of color from about 30 percent to 42 percent in the past decade. Forty percent of the newly hired faculty members were first-generation students.
Wayne State, like UCR a research university, has created a specific category of teaching-focused faculty, alongside its research faculty members, who are evaluated for tenure and promotion with an emphasis on student learning and success. This change has aligned incentives to provide the level of support appropriate to Wayne State’s students while maintaining sufficient capacity for the university’s research mission.
Create opportunities for peer to peer support systems
Institutions in our case study set made sure that in all curricular and co-curricular spaces, students could find inspiration, connection, and practical guidance from people like them.
In places with highly diverse student bodies like University of California Riverside (UCR) and Wayne State, there are a variety of approaches for helping students find supportive connections. UCR’s ethnic and gender centers, living learning communities, and robust peer mentoring programs connect students to academic and social transition support, career resources, and activities organized around interests and identities. Student programming at Wayne State emphasizes the value of multiculturalism through cohort-based models connecting students based on shared interests and goals; the institution is deliberate in making student clubs easy (and cheap) to form. Ferris State builds a sense of belonging and creates connections for students through an emphasis on first-generation identity. The First-Gen Alliance program provides support and a vehicle for first-generation students to connect.
Get them out of their cars
One theme emerging from our site visits is the concept of creating environments that are not only welcoming but also facilitate deep connections among students and between students and the institution. At TAMIU, for example, each unit is aligned toward the goal of student engagement–working to pull “parking lot students” out of their cars in between classes and into community building programs. Ferris recently invested in a new Center for Virtual Learning for students whose programs are fully online or hybrid, offering an on-campus place to find community and technical support.
A central theme in these efforts is working within frameworks established by student choices. TAMIU’s focus on parking lot students begins with a pragmatic assessment that many of their students will choose to live with family, work significant numbers of hours for pay, and commute to campus. The university is unlikely to change that pattern, so rather than fighting against it by trying to get students to live on campus, TAMIU has focused on maximizing the connections between commuting students and the campus, creating opportunities for campus jobs and for participation in campus life during breaks between classes.
Making bold investments for low-income students
One of the key factors we explored in our study is “earnings post-graduation.” The Economic Mobility Index is retrospective; its measures of earnings focus on students ten years after they enroll in college. That makes sense, since the question it seeks to answer is how much economic benefit low income students receive from college. Because we wanted to know what was driving those earnings outcomes, we also looked backward to understand what was happening at the universities in our study over the relevant ten year period.
In several cases, this retrospective look led people who had been working at the institution over the whole of the period to identify inflection points that enabled these institutions to positively impact the economic mobility of low-income students. The following were key decisions that institutions in our case studies made that helped explain the success we captured in the EMI:
Investments in making the cost of attendance free for low-income students and increasing the numbers enrolled
The question wasn’t “Can we?” It was “How can we?” In all cases, the solution involves a combination of funding streams. State support is a key enabling factor. Programs like California’s Education Opportunity and Cal Grant programs, Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program, and the Texas Grant drive institutions’ capacity to lower costs for students. The institutions pick up the momentum by adding programs such as Wayne State’s Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge, the Ferris Pledge, and UTRGV Tuition Advantage Grants that bridge the gap between Pell Grants and state funding to eliminate or dramatically reduce the cost of education for low-income students. While the idea of free college has taken off in recent years, the universities in our study were ahead of the curve and have continued to push further to eliminate every possible financial barrier to success for low income students.
Investments in data and technology
Institutional moves to gain greater visibility into the success of low-income students during this period are directly connected to positive gains in retention and graduation. TAMIU investments in technology enabled more staff time to be spent on the “human side” of student advising and support; leaders estimate that investments resulted in a 5 percent jump in graduation rates.
UTRGV’s investment in the development and collection of its own data (rather than national data documenting the experiences of Hispanic students) enabled visibility into the real-time progress of their students and related system adjustments. Wayne State’s story of transformation begins with home-grown spreadsheets pointing toward systemic failure points, which laid the groundwork for a coherent approach to identifying students who need support. UCR benefits from its membership in the data-rich UC system. UC regularly gathers data from surveys, such as NSSE, SERU, and the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey, providing strong infrastructure for institutional researchers to conduct comparative analysis and to develop custom data sets.
This data infrastructure is valuable in two ways: first, it enables UCR leaders to evaluate how well the campus is achieving its goals for low-income students, and second, it enables staff and faculty to improve those outcomes by pinpointing shortcomings. For example, institutional researchers worked with staff and faculty to create custom course grade dashboards. The goal of these dashboards is to identify equity gaps in course outcomes so that instructors, working with the XCITE Center for Teaching and Learning, can redesign courses to address challenges and barriers for their students. In fall of 2024, faculty will launch some of these redesigned courses that directly address equity gaps identified in the data.
The universities in our study did not employ a uniform approach to data and technology. In some cases, institutions used nationally available products; in other cases, they built their own. In all cases, they had a clear understanding of what the data and technologies were for, and they made choices that fit their needs.
Investments in academic advising
In 2015, UTRGV hired 30 new advisors, increased salaries for existing staff, and dedicated a newly designed space for academic advising. Around the same time, Wayne State made a huge investment in advising, hiring 45 new advisors and creating an advisor training academy. These investments were accompanied by the implementation of consistent advising approaches, acquisition of technologies to support the approach, and cultivation of workplace cultures that celebrated advisors as key contributors to the success of students and essential informants to senior leaders about the realities of students’ lives.
