For as long as she could remember, Vanessa
Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a
college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young
woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to
rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years
earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior
in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.
Vanessa’s
mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school
boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a
working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company.
Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight,
but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could
accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as
she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that
she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her
mother: a four-year college degree.
There were plenty of decent
colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she
made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the
University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in
the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned
out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then
get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good
job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family.
In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she
received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were
checking off the first item.
Five months later, Vanessa’s parents
dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little
intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that
she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that
U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me.
“I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”
And
then, a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. She failed her
first test in statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing
program. She was surprised at how bad it felt. Failure was not an
experience she was used to. At Mesquite High, she never had to study for
math tests; she aced them all without really trying. (Her senior-year
G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating
class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of about a 1,030 on the
SAT — not stellar, but above average.)
Vanessa called home,
looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so supportive, but
now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to
succeed at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just
weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “Maybe we should have sent you to
a junior college first.”
“I died inside when she said that,”
Vanessa told me. “I didn’t want to leave. But it felt like that was
maybe the reality of the situation. You know, moms are usually right. I
just started questioning everything: Am I supposed to be here? Am I good
enough?”
There are thousands of students like Vanessa at the
University of Texas, and millions like her throughout the country —
high-achieving students from low-income families who want desperately to
earn a four-year degree but who run into trouble along the way. Many
are derailed before they ever set foot on a campus, tripped up by
complicated financial-aid forms or held back by the powerful tug of
family obligations. Some don’t know how to choose the right college, so
they drift into a mediocre school that produces more dropouts than
graduates. Many are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans.
And some do what Vanessa was on the verge of doing: They get to a good
college and encounter what should be a minor obstacle, and they freak
out. They don’t want to ask for help, or they don’t know how. Things
spiral, and before they know it, they’re back at home, resentful,
demoralized and in debt.
When
you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there
are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there
are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on
campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40
percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t
earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college
students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse
than any other country except Hungary.
The second trend is that
whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely
on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it
in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.
Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen
born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to
collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of
freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to
finish their degree.
When you read about those gaps, you might
assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on
the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out
to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare
college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from
different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes
reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like
Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between
1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from
families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of
graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the
bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to
graduation.
The good news for Vanessa is that she had improved her
odds by enrolling in a highly selective college. Many low-income
students “undermatch,” meaning that they don’t attend — or even apply to
— the most selective college that would accept them. It may seem
counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the
higher your likelihood of graduating. But even among the highly educated
students of U.T., parental income and education play a huge role in
determining who will graduate on time. An internal U.T. report published
in 2012 showed that only 39 percent of first-generation students
(meaning students whose parents weren’t college graduates) graduated in
four years, compared with 60 percent whose parents both graduated from
college. So Vanessa was caught in something of a paradox. According to
her academic record, she had all the ability she needed to succeed at an
elite college; according to the demographic statistics, she was at
serious risk of failing.
But
why? What was standing in her way? This year, for the first time, the
University of Texas is trying in a serious way to answer that question.
The school’s administrators are addressing head-on the problems faced by
students like Vanessa. U.T.’s efforts are based on a novel and
controversial premise: If you want to help low-income students succeed,
it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You
also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To
solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside
the mind of a college student.
The person at the
University of Texas who has been given the responsibility for helping
these students succeed is a 56-year-old chemistry professor named David
Laude. He is, by all accounts, a very good college professor — he
illustrates the Second Law of Thermodynamics with quotations from Trent
Reznor and Leonard Cohen and occasionally calls students to the front of
the class to ignite balloons filled with hydrogen into giant fireballs.
But he was a lousy college student. As a freshman at the University of
the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., Laude felt bewildered and out of place,
the son of a working-class, Italian-American family from Modesto,
Calif., trying to find his way at a college steeped in Southern
tradition, where students joined secret societies and wore academic
gowns to class. “It was a massive culture shock,” Laude told me. “I was
completely at a loss on how to fit in socially. And I was tremendously
bad at studying. Everything was just overwhelming.” He spent most of his
freshman year on the brink of dropping out.
But he didn’t drop
out. He figured out college, then he figured out chemistry, then he got
really good at both, until he wound up, 20 years later, a tenured
professor at U.T. teaching Chemistry 301, the same introductory course
in which he got a C as a freshman in Sewanee. Perhaps because of his own
precarious college experience, Laude paid special attention as a
professor to how students were doing in his class. And year after year,
he noticed something curious: The distribution of grades in his
Chemistry 301 section didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you
might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal
distribution.” In each class of 500 students, there would be 400 or so
who did quite well, clustered around the A and high-B range. They got
it. Then there would be a second cluster of perhaps 100 students whose
grades were way down at the bottom — D’s and F’s. They didn’t get it.
To
many professors, this pattern simply represents the natural winnowing
process that takes place in higher education. That attitude is
especially common in the sciences, where demanding introductory classes
have traditionally been seen as a way to weed out weak students. But
Laude felt differently. He acknowledged that some of his failing
students just weren’t cut out for chemistry, but he suspected that many
of them were — that they were smart but confused and a little scared,
much as he had been.
To
get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started
pulling records from the provost’s office. It wasn’t hard to discern a
pattern. The students who were failing were mostly from low-income
families. Many of them fit into certain ethnic, racial and geographic
profiles: They were white kids from rural West Texas, say, or Latinos
from the Rio Grande Valley or African-Americans from Dallas or Houston.
And almost all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least —
often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.
The default strategy at
U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into remedial
programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors
instead of chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the
worst thing you could possibly imagine doing,” Laude said. “It was
saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the data to
see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into
nonmajors chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder.
They were outsiders from the beginning.”
In 1999, at the beginning
of the fall semester, Laude combed through the records of every student
in his freshman chemistry class and identified about 50 who possessed
at least two of the “adversity indicators” common among students who
failed the course in the past: low SATs, low family income,
less-educated parents. He invited them all to apply to a new program,
which he would later give the august-sounding name the Texas
Interdisciplinary Plan, or TIP. Students in TIP were placed in their
own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by Laude. But rather than
dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master
exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger
section. In fact, he scheduled his two sections back to back. “I taught
my 500-student chemistry class, and then I walked upstairs and I taught
this 50-student chemistry class,” Laude explained. “Identical material,
identical lectures, identical tests — but a 200-point difference in
average SAT scores between the two sections.”
Laude was hopeful
that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that
small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We
weren’t naïve enough to think they were just going to show up and start
getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with the kind of support that
would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he
supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP
students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them
advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the
students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work
with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did
everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to
convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar
students who needed help; they were part of a community of
high-achieving scholars.
Even
Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started
giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,”
he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were
200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students
in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This
cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned
for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a
whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also
above the U.T. average.
Two years ago, Laude was promoted to his
current position — senior vice provost for enrollment and graduation
management. His official mission now is to improve U.T.’s four-year
graduation rate, which is currently languishing at around 52 percent, to
70 percent — closer to the rates at U.T.’s state-university peers in
Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va. — and to achieve this
leap by 2017. The best way to do that, Laude decided, was to take the
principles and practices that he introduced 15 years earlier with TIP
and bring them to the whole Austin campus.
One complicating factor
for administrators at the University of Texas — and, indeed, one reason
the school makes for such an interesting case study — is that U.T. has a
unique admissions policy, one that is the legacy of many years of legal
and legislative battles over affirmative action. After U.T.’s use of
race in admissions was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in
1996, the Texas Legislature came up with an alternative strategy to
maintain a diverse campus: the Top 10 percent law, which stipulated that
students who ranked in the top tenth of their graduating classes in any
high school in Texas would be automatically admitted to the campus of
their choice in the U.T. system. (As U.T. Austin has grown more popular
over the last decade, the criterion for automatic admission has
tightened; Texas high-school seniors now have to be in the top 7 percent
of their class to earn admission. Automatic admits — Vanessa Brewer
among them — make up about three-quarters of each freshman class.)
At
high schools in the wealthier suburbs of Dallas, the top 7 percent of
students look a lot like the students anywhere who go on to attend elite
colleges. They are mostly well off and mostly white, and most of them
rack up high SAT scores. What sets U.T. apart from other selective
colleges is that the school also admits the top 7 percent of students
from high schools in Brownsville and the Third Ward of Houston, who fit a
very different demographic and have, on average, much lower SAT scores.
The
good news about these kids, from U.T.’s point of view, is that they are
very good students regardless of their test scores. Even if their high
schools weren’t as well funded or as academically demanding as schools
in other parts of the state, they managed to figure out how to learn,
how to study and how to overcome adversity. Laude’s experience teaching
Chemistry 301 convinced him that they could succeed and even excel at
the University of Texas. But when he looked at the campuswide data, it
was clear that these were the students who weren’t succeeding.
“There
are always going to be both affluent kids and kids who have need who
come into this college,” Laude said. “And it will always be the case
that the kids who have need are going to have been denied a lot of the
academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation that the
affluent kids have been given. The question is, can we do something for
those students in their first year in college that can accelerate them
and get them up to the place where they can be competitive with the
affluent, advantaged students?”
Before he could figure out how to
help those disadvantaged students, though, Laude first had to find out
exactly who they were. This was relatively simple to determine in a
single chemistry class, but with more than 7,000 students arriving on
campus each year, finding the most vulnerable would be a challenge.
Laude turned to a newly formed data team in the provost’s office called
Institutional Research. Like every big university, U.T. had long had an
in-house group of researchers who compiled statistics and issued
government-mandated reports, but with Institutional Research, the school
had created a data unit for the Nate Silver era, young statisticians
and programmers who focused on predictive analytics, sifting through
decades’ worth of student data and looking for patterns that could guide
the administration’s decision-making on everything from faculty career
paths to financial aid.
Laude wanted something that would help him
predict, for any given incoming freshman, how likely he or she would be
to graduate in four years. The Institutional Research team analyzed the
performance of tens of thousands of recent U.T. students, and from that
analysis they produced a tool they called the Dashboard — an algorithm,
in spreadsheet form, that would consider 14 variables, from an incoming
student’s family income to his SAT score to his class rank to his
parents’ educational background, and then immediately spit out a
probability, to the second decimal place, of how likely he was to
graduate in four years.
In the spring of 2013, Laude and his staff
sat down with the Dashboard to analyze the 7,200 high-school seniors
who had just been admitted to the class of 2017. When they ran the
students’ data, the Dashboard indicated that 1,200 of them — including
Vanessa Brewer — had less than a 40 percent chance of graduation on
time. Those were the kids Laude decided to target. He assigned them each
to one or more newly created or expanded interventions. The heart of
the project is a portfolio of “student success programs,” each one
tailored, to a certain extent, for a different college at U.T. — natural
sciences, liberal arts, engineering — but all of them following the
basic TIP model Laude dreamed up 15 years ago: small classes, peer
mentoring, extra tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and
community-building exercises.
Laude’s most intensive and
innovative intervention, though, is the University Leadership Network, a
new scholarship program that aims to develop not academic skills but
leadership skills. In order to be selected for U.L.N., incoming freshmen
must not only fall below the 40-percent cutoff on the Dashboard; they
must also have what the financial-aid office calls unmet financial need.
In practice, this means that students in U.L.N. are almost all from
families with incomes below the national median. (When you enter a
family income at that level into the Dashboard, the predicted on-time
graduation rate falls even further; for U.L.N. students, Laude
estimates, it is more like 20 percent than 40 percent.) The 500 freshmen
in U.L.N. perform community service, take part in discussion groups and
attend weekly lectures on topics like time management and team
building. The lectures have a grown-up, formal feel; students are
required to wear business attire. In later years, U.L.N. students will
serve in internships on campus and move into leadership positions as
mentors or residence-hall advisers or student government officials. In
exchange for all this, they receive a $5,000 scholarship every year,
paid in monthly increments.
Perhaps the most striking fact about
the success programs is that the selection criteria are never disclosed
to students. “From a numbers perspective, the students in these programs
are all in the bottom quartile,” Laude explained. “But here’s the key —
none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule
of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the
Dashboard. Laude says he assumes that most U.L.N. students understand on
some level that they were chosen in part because of their financial
need, but he says it is important for the university to play down that
fact when dealing directly with students. It is an extension of the
basic psychological strategy that he has used ever since that first TIP
program: Select the students who are least likely to do well, but in all
your communications with them, convey the idea that you have selected
them for this special program not because you fear they will fail, but
because you are confident they can succeed.
Which, from Laude’s
perspective, has the virtue of being true. I sat with him in his office
one morning in late January, not long after students had arrived back on
campus for the spring semester. The university was closed for the day
because of a freak ice storm, and he and I were more or less alone in
the administration building, a huge clock tower in the center of campus.
We were talking about his experience in Sewanee, specifically a low
moment almost exactly 38 years earlier when he arrived back on campus
for spring semester of his freshman year, plagued with doubt, longing to
give up and go home. “Everybody has moments like that,” Laude said.
“There are probably 50 or 60 kids in the U.L.N. who are on academic
probation right now. They’re coming back, and we’ve got all these great
support networks set up for them. But still, there’s got to be a part of
them that is afraid, a part of them that wonders if they can make it.
My bet is that the vast majority of them will make it. And they will,
because nobody will give them the chance to simply give up.”
Though Laude is
a chemist by training, he spends much of his time thinking like a
psychologist, pondering what kind of messages or environmental cues
might affect the decisions that the students in his programs make. He’s
the first to admit that he is an amateur psychologist at best. But he
has found an ally and a kindred spirit in a psychological researcher at
U.T. named David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is
emerging as one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of
education. In his research, Yeager is trying to answer the question that
Laude wrestles with every day: How, precisely, do you motivate students
to take the steps they need to take in order to succeed?
Before
he arrived at U.T. in the winter of 2012, Yeager worked as a graduate
student in the psychology department at Stanford, during an era when
that department had become a hotbed of new thinking on the psychology of
education. Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and
Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the
experience of students from early childhood all the way through college.
To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision,
it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to
their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and
doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at
moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high
school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be
particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves
to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering
programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the
Ivy League.
The negative thoughts took different forms in each
individual, of course, but they mostly gathered around two ideas. One
set of thoughts was about
belonging. Students in transition
often experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged —
or could ever belong — in their new institution. The other was connected
to
ability. Many students believed in what Carol Dweck had
named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed
quality that was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so
when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart
or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would
often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts
about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and
together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness
dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I
can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want
to talk to me anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became
self-fulfilling prophecies.
When Yeager arrived at Stanford in
2006, many of the researchers there had begun to move beyond trying to
understand this phenomenon to trying to counteract it. In a series of
experiments, they found that certain targeted messages, delivered to
students in the right way at the right time, seemed to overcome the
doubts about belonging and ability that were undermining the students’
academic potential.
Yeager began working with a professor of
social psychology named Greg Walton, who had identified principles that
seemed to govern which messages, and which methods of delivering those
messages, were most persuasive to students. For instance, messages
worked better if they appealed to social norms; when college students
are informed that most students don’t take part in binge drinking,
they’re less likely to binge-drink themselves. Messages were also more
effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a
sense of autonomy. If you march all the high-school juniors into the
auditorium and force them to watch a play about tolerance and inclusion,
they’re less likely to take the message to heart than if they feel as
if they are independently seeking it out. And positive messages are more
effectively absorbed when they are experienced through what Walton
called “self-persuasion”: if students watch a video or read an essay
with a particular message and then write their own essay or make their
own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more
deeply.
In one experiment after another, Yeager and Walton’s
methods produced remarkable results. At an elite Northeastern college,
Walton, along with another Stanford researcher named Geoffrey Cohen,
conducted an experiment in which first-year students read brief essays
by upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The
upperclassmen conveyed in their own words a simple message about
belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only one who felt left
out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and
everyone gets over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays,
the students in the experiment then wrote their own essays and made
videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole
intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the
white students who took part in the experiment. But it had a
transformative effect on the college careers of the African-American
students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment
tripled the percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top
quarter of their class, and it cut in half the black-white achievement
gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health — the black
students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer
doctor visits three years after the intervention.
Next, Yeager did
an experiment with 600 students just entering ninth grade at three high
schools in Northern California. The intervention was 25 minutes long;
students sat at a terminal in the school computer lab and read
scientific articles and testimonials from older students with another
simple message: People change. If someone is being mean to you or
excluding you, the essays explained, it was most likely a temporary
thing; it wasn’t because of any permanent trait in him or you. Yeager
chose ninth grade because it is well known as a particularly bad time
for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over
the transition to high school. Indeed, among the control group in
Yeager’s experiment, symptoms of depression rose by 39 percent during
that school year. Among the group who had received the message that
people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive
symptoms. The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other
words, but it did stop the appearance of depressive symptoms during a
traditionally depressive period. And it did so in just 25 minutes of
treatment.
After the depression study, Yeager, Walton and two
other researchers did an experiment with community-college students who
were enrolled in remedial or “developmental” math classes. Education
advocates have identified remedial math in community college as a
particularly devastating obstacle to the college hopes of many students,
especially low-income students, who disproportionately attend community
college. The statistics are daunting: About two-thirds of all
community-college students are placed into one or more remedial math
classes, and unless they pass those classes, they can’t graduate. More
than two-thirds of them don’t pass; instead, they often drop out of
college altogether.
Clearly, part of the developmental-math crisis
has to do with the fact that many students aren’t receiving a
good-enough math education in middle or high school and are graduating
from high school underprepared for college math. But Yeager and Walton
and a growing number of other researchers believe that another
significant part of the problem is psychological. They echo David
Laude’s intuition from the early days of TIP: When you send college
students the message that they’re not smart enough to be in college —
and it’s hard not to get that message when you’re placed into a remedial
math class as soon as you arrive on campus — those students internalize
that idea about themselves.
In the experiment, 288
community-college students enrolled in developmental math were randomly
assigned, at the beginning of the semester, to read one of two articles.
The control group read a generic article about the brain. The treatment
group read an article that laid out the scientific evidence against the
entity theory of intelligence. “When people learn and practice new ways
of doing algebra or statistics,” the article explained, “it can grow
their brains — even if they haven’t done well in math in the past.”
After reading the article, the students wrote a mentoring letter to
future students explaining its key points. The whole exercise took 30
minutes, and there was no follow-up of any kind. But at the end of the
semester, 20 percent of the students in the control group had dropped
out of developmental math, compared with just 9 percent of the treatment
group. In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost
no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by
more than half.
Soon after Yeager arrived at the University of
Texas, in the winter of 2012, he got an email from a vice provost at the
university named Gretchen Ritter, who had heard about his work and
wanted to learn more. At Ritter’s invitation, Yeager gave a series of
presentations to various groups of administrators at the university;
each time, he mentioned that he and Walton were beginning to test
whether interventions that addressed students’ anxieties about ability
and belonging could improve the transition to college, especially for
first-generation students. Ritter asked Yeager if the approach might
work in Austin. Could he create an intervention not for just a few
hundred students, but for every incoming U.T. freshman? In theory, yes,
Yeager told her. But at that scale, it would need to be done online. And
if he did it, he said, he would want to do it as a randomized
controlled experiment, so he and Walton could collect valuable new data
on what worked. In April 2012, Ritter asked Yeager to test his
intervention on the more than 8,000 teenagers who made up the newly
admitted U.T. class of 2016. It would be one of the largest randomized
experiments ever undertaken by social or developmental psychologists.
And it would need to be ready to go in three weeks.
Yeager was
already feeling overwhelmed. He and his wife had just moved to Austin.
Three weeks earlier, they had their second child. He was swamped with
lingering commitments from Stanford and scrambling to stay on top of the
classes he was teaching for the first time. But he was painfully aware
of the statistics on the graduation gaps at U.T., and he had enough
faith in the interventions that he and Walton were developing to think
that a well-orchestrated large-scale version could make a difference. “I
went home to Margot, my wife,” he told me, “and I said: ‘O.K., I know
I’m already overworked. I know I’m already never at home. But bear with
me for three more weeks. Because this has the potential to be one of the
most important things I ever do.’ ”
Yeager immediately
began holding focus groups and one-on-one discussions with current U.T.
students, trying to get a clearer understanding of which messages would
work best at U.T. It’s an important point to remember about these
interventions, and one Yeager often emphasizes: Even though the basic
messages about belonging and ability recur from one intervention to the
next, he and Walton believe that the language of the message needs to be
targeted to the particular audience for each intervention. The
anxieties that a high-achieving African-American freshman at an Ivy
League college might experience are distinct from the anxieties
experienced by a community-college student who was just placed into
remedial math.
Yeager and Ritter decided that the best way to
deliver the chosen messages to the incoming students was to make them a
part of the online pre-orientation that every freshman was required to
complete before arriving on campus. That May, rising freshmen began
receiving the usual welcome-to-U.T. emails from the registrar’s office,
inviting them to log on to U.T.’s website and complete a series of forms
and tasks. Wedged in between the information about the meningococcal
vaccine requirements and the video about the U.T. honor code was a link
to Yeager’s interactive presentation about the “U.T. Mindset.”
Students
were randomly sorted into four categories. A “belonging” treatment
group read messages from current students explaining that they felt
alone and excluded when they arrived on campus, but then realized that
everyone felt that way and eventually began to feel at home. A
“mind-set” treatment group read an article about the malleability of the
brain and how practice makes it grow new connections, and then read
messages from current students stating that when they arrived at U.T.,
they worried about not being smart enough, but then learned that when
they studied they grew smarter. A combination treatment group received a
hybrid of the belonging and mind-set presentations. And finally, a
control group read fairly banal reflections from current students
stating that they were surprised by Austin’s culture and weather when
they first arrived, but eventually they got used to them. Students in
each group were asked, after clicking through a series of a dozen or so
web pages, to write their own reflections on what they’d read in order
to help future students. The whole intervention took between 25 and 45
minutes for students to complete, and more than 90 percent of the
incoming class completed it.
Going in, Yeager thought of the 2012
experiment as a pilot — simply a way to test out the mechanics of a
large-scale intervention. He didn’t have much confidence that it would
produce significant results, so he was surprised when, at the end of the
fall semester, he looked at the data regarding which students had
successfully completed at least 12 credits. First-semester
credit-completion has always been an early indicator of the gaps that
appear later for U.T. students. Every year, only 81 or 82 percent of
“disadvantaged” freshmen — meaning, in this study, those who are black,
Latino or first-generation — complete those 12 credits by Christmas,
compared with about 90 percent of more advantaged students.
In
January 2013, when Yeager analyzed the first-semester data, he saw the
advantaged students’ results were exactly the same as they were every
year. No matter which message they saw in the pre-orientation
presentation, 90 percent of that group was on track. Similarly, the
disadvantaged students in the control group, who saw the bland message
about adjusting to Austin’s culture and weather, did the same as
disadvantaged students usually did: 82 percent were on track. But the
disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set
messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12
credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves
and the advantaged students in half.
A rise of four percentage
points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton
are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the
intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the
elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation
students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have
graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David
Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45
minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning
this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the
pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.
When
Yeager and Walton present their work to fellow researchers, the first
reaction they often hear is that their results can’t possibly be true.
Early on, they each had a scientific paper or grants rejected not
because there were flaws in their data or their methodology, but simply
because people didn’t believe that such powerful effects could come from
such minimal interventions. Yeager admits that their data can seem
unbelievable — they contradict many of our essential assumptions about
how the human mind works. But he can articulate an entirely plausible
explanation for what’s happening when students hear or read these
messages, whether they’re at U.T. or in community college or in ninth
grade.
Our first instinct, when we read about these experiments,
is that what the interventions must be doing is changing students’ minds
— replacing one deeply held belief with another. And it is hard to
imagine that reading words on a computer screen for 25 minutes could
possibly do that. People just aren’t that easy to persuade. But Yeager
believes that the interventions are not in fact changing students’ minds
— they are simply keeping them from overinterpreting discouraging
events that might happen in the future. “We don’t prevent you from
experiencing those bad things,” Yeager explains. “Instead, we try to
change the meaning of them, so that they don’t mean to you that things
are never going to get better.”
Every college freshman — rich or
poor, white or minority, first-generation or legacy — experiences
academic setbacks and awkward moments when they feel they don’t belong.
But white students and wealthy students and students with
college-graduate parents tend not to take those moments too seriously or
too personally. Sure, they still feel bad when they fail a test or get
in a fight with a roommate or are turned down for a date. But in
general, they don’t interpret those setbacks as a sign that they don’t
belong in college or that they’re not going to succeed there.
It
is only students facing the particular fears and anxieties and
experiences of exclusion that come with being a minority — whether by
race or by class — who are susceptible to this problem. Those students
often misinterpret temporary setbacks as a permanent indication that
they can’t succeed or don’t belong at U.T. For those students, the
intervention can work as a kind of inoculation. And when, six months or
two years later, the germs of self-doubt try to infect them, the
lingering effect of the intervention allows them to shrug off those
doubts exactly the way the advantaged students do.
When I spoke
with Vanessa Brewer in January, she was deep in the grip of those
doubts. She had made it through the fall with a perfectly decent 3.0
G.P.A., and she even pulled out a B-plus in statistics, but she looked
back on it as a very difficult stretch. “I felt like no one really
believed in me,” she said. Her mother was the only person she really
confided in, but even those conversations sometimes made her feel more
aware of the lack of a support system around her. “She told me I sounded
different,” Vanessa said. “She was like: ‘Are you O.K.? Are you taking
care of yourself?’ I’m normally a pretty happy person, but I guess when I
called her, it was more monotone, uninterested.”
When Vanessa
thought about the semester ahead of her, she felt stressed out, and she
told me that her anxiety about whether she belonged at U.T. was with her
every time she stepped into a classroom. “Everybody else seems like
they have it in the bag,” she said. “They look intimidating, even when
they’re just sitting in class — even the way they’re taking notes. They
seem so confident. I sometimes feel like I am the only one who is lost,
you know?”
But as the spring semester progressed, things started
to look up for Vanessa. She was taking the dreaded Chemistry 301, and
while she found it a real challenge, she was also determined not to fall
behind. She was enrolled in U.L.N. and in Discovery Scholars, another
of the programs David Laude oversaw, and her advisers arranged for her
to get free help at the campus tutoring center. She spent six or more
hours there each week, going over chemistry problems, and by March she
was getting A’s and B’s on every test.
Gradually, Vanessa started
to feel a greater sense of belonging. She told me about a day in
February when she was hanging out in the Discovery Scholars office and
suddenly had an impulse to “do a little networking.” She went up to the
young woman working at the front desk, an African-American undergrad
like Vanessa, and asked her on a whim if she knew any students in the
nursing program. As it happened, the woman’s two best friends were in
nursing, and they had just helped start an African-American nursing
association at U.T.
Vanessa got their numbers and started texting
with them, and they invited her to one of their meetings. They were
juniors, a couple of years older than Vanessa, and they took her under
their wing. “I like having someone to look up to,” Vanessa told me. “I
felt like I was alone, but then I found people who said, you know, ‘I
cried just like you.’ And it helped.”
The messages about belonging
and ability that Vanessa was hearing from her mentors and tutors
weren’t the only things getting her through Chemistry 301, of course.
But they were important in lots of subtle but meaningful ways, helping
to steer her toward some seemingly small decisions that made a big
difference in her prospects at U.T. Like walking into the tutoring
center and asking for help. Or working up the nerve to ask a stranger if
she knew any friendly nursing students.
I spoke to dozens of
freshmen during the months I spent reporting in Austin, most of them,
like Vanessa, enrolled in U.L.N. or another of Laude’s programs. And
while each student’s story was different, it was remarkable how often
the narratives of their freshman years followed the same arc: arriving
on campus feeling confident because of their success in high school,
then being laid low by an early failure. One student told me he fell
into a depression and couldn’t sleep. Another said she lost weight and
broke out in a rash. But then, sometimes after weeks or months of
feeling lost and unhappy, most of them found their way back to a deeper
kind of confidence. Often the support necessary for that recovery came
from a U.L.N. adviser or a TIP mentor; sometimes it came from a family
member or a church community or a roommate. But one way or another,
almost all of the students I spoke to were able to turn things around,
often pulling themselves back from some very low places.
“What I
like about these interventions is that the kids themselves make all the
tough choices,” Yeager told me. “They deserve all the credit. We as
interveners don’t. And that’s the best way to intervene. Ultimately a
person has within themselves some kind of capital, some kind of asset,
like knowledge or confidence. And if we can help bring that out, they
then carry that asset with them to the next difficulty in life.”
My
conversations with the U.L.N. students left me feeling optimistic about
their chances. But they also served as a reminder of how easy it is for
things to tip the other way — for those early doubts to metastasize
into crippling anxieties. What Laude and Yeager are helping to
demonstrate is that with the right support, both academic and
psychological, these students can actually graduate at high rates from
an elite university like the University of Texas. Which is exactly why
the giant educational experiment now taking place there has meaning well
beyond the Austin campus.
It matters, in all sorts of ways,
whether students like Vanessa and her fellow U.L.N. members are able to
graduate from a four-year college. The data show that today, more than
ever, the most powerful instrument of economic mobility for low-income
Americans is a four-year college degree. If a child is born into a
family in the lowest economic quintile (meaning a family that earns
$28,000 or less), and she doesn’t get a college degree, she has only a
14 percent chance of winding up in one of the top two quintiles, and she
has a 45 percent chance of never making it out of that bottom bracket.
But if she does earn a four-year degree, her prospects change
completely. Suddenly, there is a 40 percent chance that she’ll make it
into one of the top two quintiles — and just a 16 percent chance that
she’ll remain stuck at the bottom.
Beyond the economic
opportunities for the students themselves, there is the broader cost of
letting so many promising students drop out, of losing so much valuable
human capital. For almost all of the 20th century, the United States did
a better job of producing college graduates than any other country. But
over the past 20 years, we have fallen from the top of those
international lists; the United States now ranks 12th in the world in
the percentage of young people who have earned a college degree. During
the same period, a second trend emerged: American higher education
became more stratified; most well-off students now do very well in
college, and most middle- and low-income students struggle to complete a
degree. These two trends are clearly intertwined. And it is hard to
imagine that the nation can regain its global competitiveness, or
improve its level of economic mobility, without reversing them.
To
do so will take some sustained work, on a national level, on a number
of fronts. But a big part of the solution lies at colleges like the
University of Texas at Austin, selective but not superelite, that are
able to perform, on a large scale, what used to be a central mission —
arguably
the central mission — of American universities: to
take large numbers of highly motivated working-class teenagers and give
them the tools they need to become successful professionals. The U.T.
experiment reminds us that that process isn’t easy; it never has been.
But it also reminds us that it is possible.
Paul Tough
is a contributing writer and the author of “How Children Succeed.” He
last wrote about the rescue of John Aldridge, a Montauk lobsterman.
Editor: Joel Lovell
