This article was made possible with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Elizabeth Ouanemalay slips on rubber gloves and wraps a black scarf with pink hearts around her face before venturing outside. She obsessively counts how many door handles she touches on the journey to pick up each of her meals: six. No one wants Covid-19, but she really doesn’t want it. She has lupus, an autoimmune disease.
The Wesleyan University freshman is fearing for more than just her physical safety, though. She is a first-generation student from a low-income family, and the virus has also upended her fledgling academic and financial security.
The California native spent part of high school homeless, living in a car with her mom and working as a waitress and at other jobs to support the two of them. She also struggled through her first semester at Wesleyan, withdrawing from one class and clawing through her others.
Now she is facing the threat of coronavirus, alone on a largely deserted campus and uncertain what her future at Wesleyan will look like.
The burden the pandemic is placing on many students has exposed the staggering class divides that have always existed in higher education. For many students, going home to study online — missing activities like team sports or even their commencement ceremony — represents a rough patch they’ll get through. But for students like Ouanemalay, this is a time of extraordinary stress.
Without campus jobs, they don’t know what they’ll do for income. Some are disoriented by the online migration; others don’t even have the internet. Some can’t afford to travel home, or have no home to go to. These are the students colleges say they desperately want to reach and serve. These are the students colleges are most at risk of losing in the months ahead.
Over the past several years, colleges have opened their doors to an increasing number of students like Ouanemalay. But the promise of higher education as an engine of social mobility rests on whether it can deliver on the commitment to get them to the finish line.
Those that have raised graduation rates for low-income students have often relied on wraparound services, addressing the needs of the whole student. That includes caring for their financial and mental health, and creating a network of support with cohorts, early interventions, and extra counseling. A “high touch” learning environment, as many advocates call it.
But how do you do high touch in what has suddenly become a “no touch” world? How do you support the financially insecure students you have enticed to join your institutions? For students who already struggle to stay enrolled, and for the institutions who say they are committed to keeping them, the Covid-19 crisis may be a make-or-break moment.
Colleges will need resolve and creativity. One model they might look to is Arrupe College. The two-year institution was established by Loyola University Chicago specifically to serve as a bridge to a four-year college for financially needy students.
In the argument that it’s life circumstances, and not ability, that reinforces higher education’s class divides, Arrupe College is Exhibit A. Nearly nine in 10 of the students who complete the associate degree go on to four-year institutions. That success is especially impressive considering that 80 percent of Arrupe’s students are eligible for Pell Grants.
Angelo Villazana is one of them. Villazana had attended something like a dozen different public schools by the time he graduated from high school. His grades were poor for most of high school because he was often homeless and school wasn’t a priority. He turned around his academic life during his senior year, when he finally found stable shelter in a group home.
By then, he thought, it was too late for him to be accepted by a four-year college because of his poor GPA. But he learned about Arrupe from a high-school counselor. The promise Arrupe has made to Villazana and other students is that they will be slathered in support. The college guarantees generous financial aid, easy and convenient access to mental-health services, and extensive individual contact with professors who are also trained as counselors. All students receive a laptop and free on-campus breakfast and lunch daily.
Like most colleges, Arrupe, which has about 300 students, last month moved all its courses online. “It’s very disorienting, because our focus here is on building community,” says Father Steve Katsouros, the college’s dean and founding director. “We’ve been committed to face-to-face instruction, and that’s been upended.”
Villazana feels strange without it. Asking professors about class, or just for general life advice, felt much more natural when he could just walk down the hall.
“Now they’re at home, and they have their own lives, and they have their own kids they’re worrying about,” Villazana says. “I’m trying to navigate that.”
Katsouros knows he risks losing vulnerable students. Summer classes will also be moved online, but he hopes the students are back on campus for the fall session. If he can manage that, he thinks, he won’t worry as much about them dropping out.
His strategy? “Communication. Communication. Communication.”
The college polled its students about how many had reliable internet service at home. It turned out many of them had access only at the college or at libraries or coffee shops that the pandemic has shuttered. So Arrupe rushed wireless-hotspot devices to the students.
On the Friday after in-person classes were canceled, the college held an online “coffee and conversation” for all of its students. The topic: “How Can I Engage With Others During Social Distancing?” That same week, the college trained its professors not just in how to use Zoom but also in how to deliver academic advising online. The college’s two social workers have also continued their work online.
“If we are successful in retention during this unprecedented, uncharted time,” Katsouros says, “it will be because of the relationships that were already developed.”
Relationships matter in the classroom, too. In interviews with students in precarious financial situations across the country, the discomfort with online education emerged as a key concern about this new era. It’s harder to stay focused when the professor isn’t standing in front of you. Asking questions can be more awkward and intimidating. It’s easier to suffer in silence.
At Wesleyan, Ouanemalay’s journey was already rocky. Now she has to navigate an entirely online world that she wasn’t expecting.
She had already been struggling academically, and not for a lack of trying. She filled her day between classes and work with seeking help: Office hours. Peer advising. Tutoring appointments. Even so, she withdrew from her biology class last semester and instead poured all her effort into English and chemistry. She earned a B and a C, respectively. She thinks professors, recognizing her efforts, were being lenient with her.
A thought keeps nagging at her: Does someone like her even belong at a place like Wesleyan? It’s classic impostor syndrome, suffered by many who find themselves in competitive environments they have historically been excluded from.
Things have gotten worse in the weeks since classes moved online. Ouanemalay’s having a hard time taking notes. She struggles to pay attention. Ouanemalay recently received an ADHD diagnosis, she says, and suspects she may also have a learning disorder. She spent hours the other day trying to figure out what she’d done wrong on one equation in her chemistry class. Turns out she confused 79 with 97. When on-campus classes were in session, she had people around to help her catch mistakes like that.
The risks that online learning presents to vulnerable students are well known to Rebecca A. Glazier, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
A study she co-authored about transfer students who took all their classes online reached troubling conclusions: The students’ retention rate was lower than for those who took all in-person classes. And for the most academically unprepared students, those with low GPAs, the difference was dismaying: Retention was about 28 percent lower than for students in face-to-face classes.
“That’s what’s so scary about this,” Glazier says. “These classes were put together in a crisis, and our students didn’t sign up for them. We’re going to lose students.”
There’s some reason for hope. Glazier’s other research explores how to improve online-course retention rates, even with just a few tweaks. Professors need to humanize themselves. Post videos of themselves. Maybe put their cat in the videos. Talk about travel plans, or a book they just read. The goal is to be approachable so that students, especially those who feel lost, become connected and comfortable reaching out if they have a problem.
“If they’re just logging in, reading some notes, taking a quiz, getting something automatically graded, it’s easy for them to forget they even have an online class,” Glazier says. “They won’t feel that social obligation to participate in a class with a person they don’t really feel like they know.”
At Wesleyan, Ouanemalay is grateful that the Connecticut university has given students the option, as have other colleges, of being graded pass/fail instead of with letter grades.
The actions colleges take now are inextricable from their larger retention strategies in the months ahead, says Eddy Conroy, associate director of research communications at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. “The colleges that do a good job taking care of their students now,” he says, “are probably going to be in a better position down the road for those students to feel like they have a place they should be coming back to.”
Colleges have scrambled to cobble together support for vulnerable students, with various degrees of generosity. Many launched fund-raising campaigns for a pot of emergency money that could be used on a case-by-case basis for things like airfare back home, a rental deposit, and storage. Some have carved out exceptions for students with no other housing options to remain on campus, as Wesleyan did for Ouanemalay. Some colleges have committed to paying their student workers through the end of the semester, even though they’re not working.
Ouanemalay says the support she has received from Wesleyan has been crucial. But even at an institution like Wesleyan, which graduates students on Pell Grants at rates higher than 90 percent, students sometimes fall through the cracks. The university recently announced it would continue to pay students on Federal Work-Study, a program that provides part-time jobs to students with financial need. But some students, including Ouanemalay, had already exceeded their allotment through the program and were employed outside it.
Ouanemalay has financial obligations that other students do not. She sends money from her on-campus jobs to her sick mother. She used to, at least. She worked as a lab assistant and as a desk clerk at the student fitness center. The coronavirus ended those jobs, and she has no income for the time being. The kinds of off-campus businesses that tend to hire college students — coffee shops, bars, restaurants — are closed for the duration.
Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president, said last month the university had collected more than $100,000 for an emergency fund for needy students. He also said that the university would give students who opted to leave campus refunds on their room and board, even if the university had been paying the student’s bill.
“It didn’t matter if you used your meals or didn’t use your meals. It was prorated by the number of days left in the semester,” Roth said. “The university was refunding more than $10 million in room and board for half the semester.”
Ouanemalay sought help from the emergency fund. She has a hand-me-down computer that’s several years old. It’s fine for note-taking but tends to crash frequently these days when she’s trying to watch a lecture on Zoom or open PowerPoint presentations.
“They told me to take out a loan and said I was ‘loan eligible,’” Ouanemalay says. “It’s frustrating. My mom has debt, and I’m still trying to help her pay that off. I’m not in a good position to be going into debt, if I can avoid it.”
She is thankful to have a place to stay and meals taken care of at Wesleyan. But staying on campus means she turned down the lump-sum housing refund she would have received. For some low-income students, the decision was a cost-benefit analysis of choosing between free food and shelter to ride out the virus or a one-time infusion of cash. It wasn’t much of a choice for Ouanemalay.
“Going back home wasn’t even an option,” she says. “My mom has been struggling and has moved around a couple times. Would the money be enough to sustain two people for however long this lasts, or would it be better if I just didn’t go back? That’s how I ran through the calculations.”
Students’ options vary, and caring for students on some campuses requires a different response than on others. At Berea College, for example, administrators took the extreme measure on March 10 of asking faculty members to consider how they could wrap up their courses by March 13. Going online wasn’t a realistic option: Almost all of the Kentucky college’s students are Pell-eligible, and many students come from rural parts of Appalachia with spotty internet access. Since then, instructors have used email, telephone, and postal mail to continue instruction. The college also decided to keep paying students for their campus jobs.
At Metropolitan State University of Denver, the median age of its 19,000 students is 26, and more than three-quarters work while in college. So the university decided it would continue to pay its student workers for the hours they would have worked for the rest of the semester, says Will Simpkins, vice president for student affairs.
“Many of our students are caring for their own family, whether elders or their own children,” he says. “It complicates the traditional responses that a university would do.”
Like Berea, the university recognized that computer access would be a barrier for many of its students and would make it more difficult to stay enrolled. Metro State’s solution was to ask professors that any course not already scheduled to be online be formatted in a way that it could be done entirely via smartphone. They also tried to get laptops into more students’ hands.
To address the longer-term care and retention challenges, the Denver campus is planning to build a system to reach out to students who withdraw in the months ahead. “We’re starting to pivot to the planning stage,” says Simpkins.
Some colleges are relying on investments they’ve made in recent years to help navigate the coronavirus era. Georgia State University, for example, had created an elaborate computerized system that tracks students for 800 risk factors and had hired a small army of counselors to intervene at the first sign of risk. Campus officials credit those investments with eliminating all racial- and income-equity gaps in retention and graduation rates.
All of those 120 advisers last month took part in a campaign to connect with every student over the phone and reinforce the message that they are there to help. “Many students are much more likely to respond to the call because they know who this person is,” says Timothy M. Renick, senior vice president for student success, “because it’s someone they’ve met with multiple times over the course of their academic careers.”
But even colleges that don’t have the advanced advising infrastructure or culture of Georgia State can rethink how they communicate in the coronavirus era. Messaging must be clear and frequent across many media — email, text, phone, a chatbot.
“In higher education, we need to be a lot more proactive than we’ve been, and often than we imagine we should be,” Renick says. “We think students know something because we send an email, or we say it once. But it takes multiple means of messaging, and it takes reinforcement.”
It was messaging that got Ouanemalay on the pathway to college in the first place.
Already homeless, she didn’t think college could be affordable. But in her junior year, a counselor told her about QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization that connects low-income students with selective colleges. She started to imagine a different life for herself.
“I realized I didn’t want to be waitressing forever,” she says.
Ouanemalay speaks with the chaotic energy you would expect from a cheery and carefree freshman. Even so, it’s easy to forget she is just 19. She has long had to make the best out of difficult circumstances, like the time she figured out gym memberships are a cheap and efficient way to get access to shower and bathroom facilities while homeless. Only a fool would bet she won’t overcome this latest challenge.
But everyone has a breaking point. Is seeking a college degree under extreme stress and financial insecurity always worth the hassle? Colleges must prove that the answer is yes, if they are to retain more students like Ouanemalay.
In her case, the setbacks keep piling up. She had another one a couple of weeks ago. For a few years, she has used the drug hydroxychloroquine to manage her lupus. For the first time, she couldn’t get her prescription filled because of the deluge of Americans snatching it up after President Trump, against the measured skepticism of medical professionals, suggested it could be a cure for Covid-19.
She’s been put on a priority list at her pharmacy, but there’s a backlog and no guarantee she’ll be able to get the medicine. She is already feeling the effects. Her body feels pummeled. She has sore throats and headaches. Is it just an inflammation, she constantly wonders, or could it be the virus? Her plan for now is to get to an emergency room fast if her condition becomes severe.
Amid the frustration and fear, she is optimistic. She hopes she’ll receive some money from a crowdfunding effort by and for low-income students at Wesleyan. As of press time, the effort had collected more than $250,000. Nearly 300 students’ names appeared on the spreadsheet meant to hand out cash without what organizers describe as the bureaucracy of the official emergency fund.
Ouanemalay’s hardware situation has also improved. After relying on her “barely functioning” cellphone for classes for a couple of days, she learned from an upperclassman about a loaner laptop program. She now has a properly working computer.
The challenges for the months ahead, however, have just begun. She is pleased to see the outpouring of support from professors. The pass/fail option also provides relief. But she still worries that colleges — the graduate and medical schools she may one day want to apply to — won’t be so understanding.
This semester, she hopes, will have an asterisk next to it.
This story is part of a series, Broken Ladder, examining the role of higher education in social mobility. It was made possible by a grant of $149,994 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has no role in our editorial decision-making.
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