Preparing Disadvantaged Students for Success in College: Lessons Learned From the Preparation Initiative

The Preparation Initiative Program Background

The Preparation Initiative (PI) is a learning community in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan for students from circumstances that put them at a relative disadvantage compared with their peers. ¹ Most of our students were first-generation college students, from low-income families, and were racial minorities. Many also went to underresourced kindergarten through 12th grade (K–12) schools. This mattered for their precollege preparation. For example, the university has a math placement exam to determine which math course new students are ready to take when they arrive on campus. The placement exam suggested that most students who started Michigan were ready to take calculus or beyond, whereas 72% of PI students were prepared only for precalculus (Samuels & Cui, 2016).

The PI was designed to address these precollege gaps in student preparation. To be clear, we are not suggesting that our students, or students from the broader categories we described, are deficient in an essentialist way; the evidence suggests quite the opposite—the vast majority of our students were from the top of their high school classes. However, as suggested by research from psychology (e.g., Aelenei, Lewis, & Oyserman, 2017; Bronfrenbrenner, 1979; Davis-Kean, 2005; Oyserman, 2013; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017), economics (e.g., Dynarski, Hyman, & Schanzenbach, 2013; Michelmore & Dynarski, 2017), history (e.g., Rothstein, 2017), and sociology (e.g., Beck & Muschkin, 2012; Diamond, 2016; Hedges & Nowell, 1999), moving the needle on educational disparities requires accounting for students’ backgrounds and social contexts when building intervention programs. Students’ backgrounds have important implications for academic outcomes, not only for social structural reasons but also because of the implications of social structure for psychological processes (Earl & Lewis, 2018; Lewis & Oyserman, 2016; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017).

Previous research on identity-based motivation, for example, suggests that gaps between high aspirations (Oyserman, Johnson, & James, 2011) and low levels of educational attainment among underrepresented minorities (Jackson, 2010; Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004) can be explained in part by effects of social context on psychological processes (Oyserman & Lewis, 2017; Oyserman et al., 2017). Specifically, students’ social contexts—the neighborhoods they grew up in, schools they went to, and so forth—can influence how often their “student identity” comes to mind, whether they learn how to use strategies necessary to succeed, and how they interpret and make meaning of the inevitable difficulties that arise along the path toward educational attainment (Aelenei et al., 2017; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017). Understanding how these structural and psychological processes unfold can provide useful insights for developing intervention programs like the PI.

The PI was created because in the early 2000s, administrators at the Ross School of Business noticed that racial/ethnic-minority students were underrepresented. Why? Some speculated that it was due to discrimination during admissions; we were hesitant to jump to that conclusion. We spoke with admissions-office personnel about their process, then examined their data to identify drivers of underrepresentation. The data revealed some important lessons. First, if there was discrimination, it was not at the point of admission; any discrimination or racism came long before admissions deliberations (a point we will revisit). Instead, for structural reasons, many of these students were not as prepared for the business school curriculum as their more affluent peers.

Until recently, students were admitted to the university as freshmen, then applied to the business school at the end of their freshman year after taking prerequisite courses in calculus, economics, and accounting. An examination of the grade distributions revealed that performance in the prerequisite courses explained the vast majority of the admissions gap. That is, the majority of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in the applicant pool were eliminated from eligibility because of their performance in these classes. They did not earn the minimum grade in at least one of those courses (often more than one), and thus admissions could not consider their application. That data made it very clear that performance in prerequisite quantitative courses was the first challenge that needed to be addressed.

In addition, there were also gaps in cultural knowledge. Admissions essays from low-income and racial/ethnic-minority students showed that they did not know as much about the business world as some of their more affluent peers; the essays made it difficult for admissions officers to determine whether students really knew what they were getting themselves into, making them riskier to admit. This information made it clear that articulating their understanding of, and desire to enter, business was a second challenge underlying underrepresentation in the business school.

Impact of Historical and Contemporary Social Stratification

After learning about weaknesses in the business school admissions files of racial/ethnic-minority and low-income students, our next task was to figure out why those differences were there. All of these students were strong enough to be admitted to the University of Michigan, so it was not clear why there were such stark differences after their first year on campus; in theory, universities should be equalizers, not places where gaps widen. To understand this, we looked into the high schools, school districts, and broader neighborhoods that students were coming from. That made the problem very clear. This is where we learned that, as noted earlier, “discrimination or racism came long before admissions deliberations.”

The United States of America has long been, and continues to be, highly segregated by race, level of education, wealth, and other social dimensions (Diamond, 2016; Frey, 2015; Orfield & Lee, 2005; Rothstein, 2017). This stratification matters for social disparities (Aelenei et al., 2017; Lewis & Oyserman, 2016; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017). In the present context, low-income and racial/ethnic-minority people tend to live in areas that have low densities of college graduates and low performing (K–12) schools (Orfield & Lee, 2005). These contexts are risk factors, reducing the long-term odds of college completion (Kearney, 2015). Why? Living in wealthier places and places with more college graduates increases the quality of education in elementary and secondary schools (Diamond, 2016; Winters, 2015). Those schools often have resources to better prepare their students for college (e.g., they offer advanced placement courses or provide college counseling). They also provide cultural insights about collegiate life.

Once we understood how larger social forces influenced individual students, it was possible to build a program that addressed the multiple drivers of under-representation.

How the PI Operates

Each summer, we invited incoming freshmen to apply to the program if they (a) had expressed an interest in business and (b) had one or more “risk factors” that prior data suggested might lead them to underperform in the prebusiness courses—they were a first-generation student, came from a low-income family, went to a high school that did not offer the (quantitative) courses that were necessary to prepare them for success, and so forth. Because these factors disparately affect racial-ethnic minorities in the United States (e.g., Chetty, Hendren, Jones, & Porter, 2018), selecting on these risk factors tended to produce cohorts that had greater representation of racial minorities than was typical in the business school.

When our cohort arrived on campus, they participated in the core elements of the program, which were developed by drawing insights from previous research on educational interventions. We considered not only how students’ backgrounds and previous experiences might influence their preparation but also how their preparation (in contrast to that of their peers) might influence how they make meaning of their experiences on campus—whether they felt like imposters (Parkman, 2016) or like they belonged (Walton & Cohen, 2007), like this path was useful and worthwhile to achieve their long-term goals (Aelenei et al., 2017), or like the difficulties meant success was impossible and not worth their time (Smith & Oyserman, 2015). From our review of relevant literature and talking with students who had been through the business school, we developed program activities that simultaneously addressed structural barriers (course preparation) as well as psychological barriers—drawing on insights from identity-based motivation (Oyserman, 2015), belonging interventions (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2011), utility-value interventions (e.g., Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Priniski, & Hyde, 2016), self-affirmation interventions (e.g., Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009), and growth mind-sets (e.g., Yeager et al., 2016)—research that all suggested a variety of strategies for improving academic outcomes and reducing disparities. We tried to take insights from the existing research and combine it to create a potent intervention program.

The program had five core components. First, we began each year by socializing students for learning in college. Many of our students were rarely taught the skills and strategies that professors implicitly expected them to know (e.g., effective note-taking, what office hours are, effective study skills, time management). Because of that, when our cohort arrived on campus, we held an orientation-to-college session in which we (and invited professors) walked through strategies for being successful in college and how to put those strategies into practice.

Second, we provided support for learning prerequisite course materials. We required our students to meet with academic coaches (whom we provided) each week so that they could learn to master those core subjects that were bottlenecks in the past (i.e., calculus, economics, accounting). We did not want them to just pass; our goal was for them to be among the best in their classes—to master the subjects (the original name of the program was “The Mastery Project”). In addition to meetings with coaches, we also required students to come to 3 hr of “study tables” each week. For study tables, we reserved two rooms, one for quiet study and another for group study; it provided a dedicated time and space for our students to study together where academic coaches were available to answer questions.

Third, we provided a weekly opportunity for our students to be socialized for understanding the world of business. We offered a professional development seminar in which guest professors and business leaders came to speak with students about different aspects of business and how they could use business to achieve their various personal and professional goals.

Fourth, we provided support for translating their business understanding into personal essays. As part of the professional development seminar, students had regular writing assignments that required them to read articles from the newspapers and business journals that their peers grew up reading and that their professors assumed they were familiar with (e.g., The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times) and reflect on what they read by answering guided writing prompts. This allowed them to learn how “business people” think and talk and how to convey their ideas and passions using the language of business.

Finally, we provided support for motivation to persist. Our students regularly met with academic advisors and peer mentors who were additional sources of academic and social support. These are individuals with whom they could build relationships who were there to support them during the difficult times and celebrate with them during their moments of triumph.

Together, these activities comprised the core elements of the PI, particularly for our prebusiness students. In more recent years, we continued to offer professional development activities during our students’ sophomore through senior years after they matriculated into the business school, although offerings were less frequent than those for first-year students.

We structured the program in this way to address multiple barriers to college success. Students use their peers as standards of comparison for learning where they stand in academic settings (Antecol, Eren, & Ozbeklik, 2016). If they notice that their peers seem to “know what is going on”—how to study, what office hours are, and so forth—and they do not, they can quickly start to feel like imposters, like they do not belong (Parkman, 2016). If in class they notice that their peers are keeping up with the professor while they are trying to figure out what happened two lectures ago, they may begin to doubt that people “like them” can succeed, undermining motivation to persist (Oyserman & Lewis, 2017; Smith & Oyserman, 2015). Circumventing these processes requires simultaneously addressing the structural and psychological barriers to put students on a path toward success (Aelenei et al., 2017; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017).

What Effect Has the Program Had?

In 2016, we commissioned an independent program evaluation from the Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research to assess outcomes of students who participated in the first decade of the program (2005–2015; Samuels & Cui, 2016). By that time, 328 students had participated in the program, a number sufficient to be able to assess whether the program has had any effect on outcomes. The evaluators used propensity-score matching (DesJardins & Flaster, 2013; Reynolds & DesJardins, 2009) to estimate how participation in the PI affected student outcomes. This approach is, of course, imperfect, but because students were not randomly assigned to participate in the program, it allowed the evaluators to estimate the impact of the program on students (DesJardins & Flaster, 2013; Reynolds & DesJardins, 2009; Samuels & Cui, 2016). PI students were compared with a sample of students at the University of Michigan who were matched (using registrar data) on sex, race and ethnicity, upbringing in a single-parent family, parental educational attainment and income, SAT/ACT scores, ² course level of students’ first-year University of Michigan math placement tests, and a measure of students’ intention to pursue a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. The University of Michigan Institutional Review Board (IRB) determined that this evaluation was exempt from IRB oversight (HUM 00117189).

What did they find? With respect to course grades, Samuels and Cui (2016) concluded that the

PI had a substantial impact on students’ grades in most courses required for admission to Ross. In other words, had they not participated in PI these students’ grades might have been worse. Students’ use of PI coaches, advisors and mentors was also associated with higher GPAs in some courses. (p. 3) ³

To highlight a few courses: “On average, PI students earned 0.76 points higher GPAs in Economics 101 than they would have had if they had not participated in PI” (p. 15); in Calculus, “On average PI students earned grades that are 0.51 higher than the grades they would have received if they had not participated in the PI” (p. 15); and in the freshman writing course, “On average PI students earned grades that are 0.22 points higher than the grades that they would have had if they had not participated in the PI” (Samuels & Cui, 2016, p. 16) Participation in the program also had a substantial impact on graduation rates:

PI students graduated in higher rates than similar U-M students who did not participate in the program. On average PI students graduated within four years at a rate that was 13 percentage points higher than if they had not participated in PI. (Samuels & Cui, 2016)

There is certainly room for improving the program, but these findings provide a “stone of hope” (King, 1963) in our minds—hope that intervention programs like this can meaningfully reduce the dismal disparities that often leave us in despair.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We live in a time in which there seems to be a risk of some social conditions getting worse (e.g., rising inequality), which would create a greater need for programs like the PI. Some evidence suggests that spending on public schools is declining (Isaacs, 2016), yielding particularly damaging outcomes in high-poverty, racial/ethnic-minority districts (e.g., Gary B. v. Snyder, 2016). If this continues, then universities may have to fill in the gaps left by K–12 education systems and thus figure out what it takes to successfully develop and scale intervention programs like this one (see also Horowitz, Sorensen, Yoder, & Oyserman, 2018).

As they do, a few lessons are important to keep in mind. First, people’s positions in social hierarchies and the affordances (and drawbacks) that come with them have both direct effects (e.g., economic) on life outcomes and indirect effects on psychological processes (Lewis & Oyserman, 2016; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017). Students’ social positions can influence whether academic success feels attainable for people like them, whether strategies such as going to office hours feel congruent with their identity, and whether the inevitable difficulties experienced in school feel worthwhile and thus worth enduring (Oyserman, 2013; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017).

Second, because of this interplay between social structure and psychology, interventions must consider (and potentially simultaneously address) both structural and psychological barriers to student success (Oyserman et al., 2017). Students’ experiences—their sense of belonging, whether school feels like a useful and worthwhile path, how they interpret experiences of difficulty, whether they feel affirmed—do not occur in vacuums; they are influenced by interconnected social systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Whipple, Evans, Barry, & Maxwell, 2010). Thus, to reduce disparities requires considering factors at multiple levels of analysis and potentially intervening at more than one of those levels to maximize intervention impacts and produce the greatest amount of change (Earl & Lewis, 2018; Lewin, 1936, 1946).