Abstract
Like most graduate students, I had moments when I wondered whether it was worth it. Despite fellowships and grants, research and teaching assistantships, I had to take out graduate student loans. Being so far from family and friends was tough at first, and there were times when I doubted my own abilities and talent. But the time I came closest to dropping out was because I feared that the urgency of the moment demanded more active participation in changing the world than could be had through research and teaching or even clinical work.
In the Fall of 1979, I was beginning my third year of graduate school in child clinical psychology at Yale University. I had just turned in my second year project, the equivalent of a Master’s thesis, which focused on social support networks amongst high risk adolescents. I was hoping my research would help inform the development of prevention and/or treatment programs for Latinx and African American youth from low-income backgrounds. Ideas for my dissertation were still at the formative stage, but I was interested in both “problem” behaviors, whether heightened depression or aggression, and in more “positive” ones, such as social competence and school achievement. Too often, at-risk youth were not completing high school and were even less often attending or completing college.
But early that November, on a crisp, clear Saturday as I prepared to take a walk with a friend, I got a call that would rock my world, and not in a good way. My brother had been murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party at an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, that he had helped to organize. Two years older than me, he was 25.
There is no way to overstate how devastating something like that is. In addition to the emotional toll that accompanies a crisis of this magnitude, it left me wondering how I could just wake up in the morning, go to classes, conduct interviews, and analyze data when there were so many urgent problems in the world, from hatred and racism to gun violence (sound familiar?). I was not sure what, but I felt I should do “something,” and being in graduate school preparing for life as an academic seemed like not enough. Were it not for a series of conversations with my mentor/advisor, Professor Edmund W. Gordon, my life might well have taken a different course.
My relationship with Ed was still young; earlier that summer, I had asked him to become my dissertation advisor. I was attracted to his intelligence, integrity, and research focus on “defiers of negative prediction,” young people with the odds stacked against them who nonetheless succeeded. (Today we would refer to them as resilient). He had a sterling academic reputation, a gentle manner, and he was one of the best listeners I have ever met. Having just exited a less-than-healthy situation with my previous advisor, I was already questioning whether I had what it took to complete a doctoral program. In those early stages of our working together, Ed had more confidence in me than I had in myself.
I was also attracted to working with Ed because of his accomplishments, not just on the pages of books or journals, but in the “real” world. Tapped by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, he helped design, and later evaluate, the Head Start program, the most comprehensive early childhood program to date. Head Start not only affected hundreds of thousands of children, better preparing them for their school years, but evaluations of its effectiveness found that it also served as an impetus for young mothers to return to school or otherwise raise their career expectations. His career showed me how scholarship could have an impact.
Ed urged me to not let grief and anger determine my actions and not to ignore the real pleasure and personal satisfaction I clearly derived from my work. He reminded me that teaching and mentoring those who were never expected to be college students was, in fact, subversive, and that there were many ways to participate in the change the world needed. It was up to me to create my own path, taking whatever time I needed. Almost 40 years later, I can say without a doubt that I am glad I listened. My research has had a direct impact on real people. For example, my research on youth homelessness was cited during debate about a bill that would provide more resources for youths who were “truant.” But perhaps my greatest impact has been through programs and policies I have helped shape through my work in academic administration.
Administration
I did not exactly set out to become an administrator, but life’s twists and turns, and advice from Ed, took me in that direction, and I learned to enjoy the ride (for a description of my administrative career, see Cauce, 2015). Almost as soon as I got tenure, I became our department’s Director of Clinical Training, and later I became chair of the Department of American Ethnic Studies. Next I directed the Honors program and chaired the Department of Psychology before entering “central administration,” sometimes portrayed by faculty as akin to one of Dante’s circles of hell. There I became the University of Washington’s (UW) first Executive Vice Provost, serving a brand new Provost who had been hired by President Mark Emmert, then beginning his third year. A first-generation student who rose from humble origins, and a UW alum, President Emmert wanted us to do a better job of serving low-income students, who were rare in top private universities and not well represented in state flagship universities.
It was 2006, and there were very few programs that existed with the goal of better supporting low-income students and increasing their participation in college. The Carolina Covenant, which had started 2 years earlier, was the first. At the heart of such programs is providing low-income students with financial aid-packages that make it feasible for them to attend, but the equation for loans versus grants, how much for tuition and how much for living expenses, could be hard to decipher. President Emmert asked me to pull together a team to develop a program for UW to meet a similar goal, making it possible for talented low-income students to come to and thrive at our university.
The initial work group of six to eight included our Associate Vice Provost of Enrollment Management, our Director of Financial Aid, and members of the Student Life office and the Office of Planning and Budgeting. We did the initial conceptualization over a week, putting together all the various pieces we had begun sketching out over one very long weekend, reminiscent of college all-nighters. Drawing from both my own work with low-income youth and the research literature, my mantra throughout was simplicity and ease of communication. The truth is that grants and scholarships for low-income students were already available, but rarely was this well known among precisely those students who needed the information most. There were thousands of young people out there who I knew would receive scholarships and loans if only they would apply to college, but most of them did not know that themselves. Indeed, my own brother started out at our local community college, thinking it was the most cost-effective choice, when at the urging of one of his professors, he applied to Duke, where he received scholarships and loans that fully covered tuition and most of the cost of living. I wanted to be able to tell low-income students something simple that did not require them to pull out a calculator. I had interviewed many young people from just this background while conducting research, and their perception of the high cost of college tuition loomed like an insurmountable barrier to them.
After numerous iterations, we constructed a program, soon to be named the Husky Promise, aimed at addressing that barrier head on. The Husky Promise is as easy to explain as it gets—low-income students in Washington state, as defined by the requirements for Pell Grants or the Washington State Need Grant (i.e., those with family incomes up to about $60,000 a year), could attend our University, at any of our three campuses, and not pay any tuition. The Husky Promise, in essence, promises low-income Washington-state students that they can attend the University of Washington tuition-free.
Husky Promise
Typically, Husky Promise students also receive financial aid to help with the cost of attendance as well. The cost of rent, food, and books can also be barriers. But, the simplicity of the “no tuition” message made it easy to communicate. As President Emmert stated, “This is a very simple statement and commitment to the citizens of Washington that the University of Washington will always be accessible to them regardless of financial circumstances” (Frey, 2006, para. 4). In the same interview, I am quoted as well: “We want to give the message to the kid in eighth grade that is struggling with their homework that if they do their part, the UW is there for them.” (Frey, 2006, para. 8). My own research showed that the decision of whether to attend college is often cemented even before a student enters high school.
To launch the program, we sent faculty and advising staff from our three campuses to public schools across the state, followed by informative brochures that were mailed to every single public high school. I visited both a school in Aberdeen, in the most rural portion of the Olympic peninsula, and a high school in more urban Tacoma, just south of Seattle. I will never forget how excited some students were at hearing that the University of Washington was free to them! You could almost see doors opening up in their minds as new possibilities were being considered. There was no question but that this program would matter; the impact was obvious in their faces, and 10 years later, the data clearly support that impression.
Original projections were that about 5,000 students a year would attend the UW through the Husky Promise. Ten years later, almost 40,000 students have availed themselves of the program, which covers students for up to 5 years, and today we have about 10,000 Husky Promise students across our three campuses. Because the goal of the program was to allow more low-income students to attend our university, a doubling of the numbers of such students is the best indication of success. The goal, however, is not merely attendance, but graduation. As I tell audiences when I talk about the importance of access, it is not just about who gets into the university, it is about who graduates. In this sense, a second indicator of success is the steady increase in the graduation rate of Husky Promise students, which is now 79% over a 6-year period. Although this is still lower than the graduation rate for our general student population (84%), a gap that we will continue to work to close, it is considerably higher than national averages. Depending on which study you look at, the 6-year college graduation rate for low-income students is somewhere between 20% (Korn, 2015) and 50% (Whistle & Hiler, 2018). In summary, over a 10-year period, we have doubled the number of students served by the program and graduated those students at a rate well above the national mean, approaching that of students from more financially privileged backgrounds.
This year, in part because of Husky Promise, 35% of our students are the first in their families to attend college. The opportunities you offer to students such as these end up affecting younger brothers and sisters and, even more so, their children and grandchildren who will almost certainly end up college graduates, too.
In reflecting on the success of the Husky Promise, if I have a regret, it is only that I wish the program could serve even more students. In an ideal world, with more resources, I would love to be able to extend the Husky Promise upward into the middle class. For many families in Washington state, even the comparatively modest cost of UW’s in-state tuition combined with cost of living, is a financial challenge. But the very few universities that can offer free tuition further into the middle-class brackets (a group of universities that includes most of the Ivies and the UC system) can do so only by charging higher tuition for those who can pay full freight (generally families with incomes above $175,000). There is much to be said for such an approach, but when the Husky Promise was first launched, and indeed to this day, concern about rising tuition has dominated the public consciousness in our state; this concern has made the higher tuition charges—charges that make more robust aid packages for the middle class work financially—politically unworkable at the present time. Moreover, most of the private universities that offer that level of assistance enroll a much smaller proportion of low-income students within a much smaller student body (e.g., Princeton has about 5,500 undergraduates; UW has close to 40,000).
Through the Husky Promise, UW can create access to college at scale, improving lives and communities. M. Janel Brown, a 2011 UW graduate who was part of the original Husky Promise cohort, president of the Black Student Union, and director of community relations for student government while she was a student, may have put it best when she said, “The Husky Promise is the ticket to a world-class education. It afforded me four years of experiences, teaching and learning that I am not in debt for” (University of Washington, 2018, para. 13). And she is paying it forward as a teacher and founding director of curriculum and instruction at Sustainable Futures Public Charter School. Or as 2017 graduate Victoria Braun said, “Most people think that the Husky Promise is only financial aid. But it does so much more than that . . . . [It] meant I was able to go to college and earn a degree. And ultimately it provided me with the financial security to succeed” (University of Washington, paras. 22 and 29).
Every time I read about or talk to a student whose life was changed by the Husky Promise, I know that almost 40 years ago, when I was wavering about whether to continue my studies or take a different course, I made the right choice. My largest concern about choosing to become an academic, and later to enter into academic administration, was whether my efforts would have a real impact on people’s lives. Looking back, I recognize those fears were based on stereotypes of an “ivory tower” that is long gone—if it ever existed—especially at large public research universities that are so engaged with the communities they are located in and serve. The work I have helped to carry out, along with fabulous colleagues, many of whom I consider friends, has made a difference not only in the lives of people who mattered, but also in the lives of those who will be in important positions to pay it forward and make a difference for others. In just 10 years, you can see the ripples, and those ripples will only become stronger and extend further.
Footnotes
Action Editor
Marjorie Rhodes served as action editor and June Gruver served as interim editor-in-chief for this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.