Before he became CEO of Robin Hood, one of the nation’s largest antipoverty organizations, or founded BridgeEdU, a technology-and-coaching company for the transition from high school to college, Wes Moore spent a lot of time pondering the role that destiny plays in people’s lives.
His best-selling book, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, tells the story of his life and that of another young black man from Baltimore who shares his name and some of the same childhood experiences. But while this Wes Moore went on to be an honors student at the Johns Hopkins University, a Rhodes Scholar, a captain and paratrooper in the U.S. Army, and an international banker, the other Wes Moore was convicted of murder in the death of a police officer and is serving a life sentence in a Maryland prison.
The book, based on five years of correspondence and conversation between the two men, has become a popular choice for campus- and community-wide reading programs, and (with an assist from Oprah Winfrey) helped elevate Moore to celebrity status. He considered running for mayor of Baltimore a few years ago but decided to stick with BridgeEdU.
We do not have a college-completion crisis in this country. We have a freshman- and sophomore-year crisis.
Today, as chairman there and head of Robin Hood, he aims to keep the forces of fate from derailing the education of first-generation college students or dooming needy families to hunger and homelessness. In the current political environment, he says, that work can be fraught. “In many ways, the war on poverty has become a war on the poor. We are spending more time telling those living in poverty why they’re to blame for their own poverty instead of spending time actually creating solutions to address it.” Civic and political leaders, says Moore, must call attention to and work against systemic factors.
Moore spoke with The Chronicle about the value of nonacademic support, the need for education in prisons, and the power of momentum in helping students succeed.
The power of someone believing in you comes through in your book. How do we make that about more than just luck?
That’s part of the challenge that we have as a society. Luck shouldn’t be a prerequisite. Luck isn’t something that’s scalable.
Someone once said to me, “It’s a real shame that you lived up to your expectations and the other Wes didn’t.” I said, “Actually, the real shame is that we both did.” That was one of the big lessons from this story — that the expectations we have of ourselves come from the expectations other people have of us.
What’s missing in the ecosystem to change that, especially for young men, who are now outnumbered by women in higher education?
Think about students who are first generation, students of color, those for whom going to college wasn’t something they were talking about at the dinner table. Think about the reasons so many students are not matriculating and not completing.
For some it’s academic. They walk onto a college campus, and they’re not quite prepared yet for college-level work. But when you look at the fact that 16 percent of all students who attend community college around the country are homeless, you understand that what’s going to help is not simply, How can we help them with their mathematics or biology?
You’ve got to come up with wraparound support. That also means reworking early-childhood education and our siloed system of education.
What influenced you to create BridgeEdU?
For me the transition into higher education was not simple. I entered college not fully sure of what I wanted to do. And many students around me, particularly those who came from similar kinds of neighborhoods or backgrounds, would give it a try for a semester or two and then tell me, “I think I’m going to take time off.” And I knew what that meant — that I’d never see them again. And in most cases I never did.
You look into the data, and you realize that those were not anomalies. And 85 percent of colleges and universities in this country are either open-access or noncompetitive. For many of them, retention is a significant challenge. What I wanted to do with BridgeEdU was simply ask how we could add basic elements to make sure students coming into a process that felt foreign could get a greater level of support and momentum.
Students who go into their sophomore and junior years with momentum, those generally are students who are going to complete. So in many ways we do not have a college-completion crisis in this country. We have a freshman- and sophomore-year crisis. The idea is not to leave students disillusioned, frustrated, and hurt because they feel like the whole process they were entering into turned out to be a lie.
What do you mean, “a lie”?
We talk about higher education like it’s 13th grade, and it’s just not. Students could and should be thinking about that transition in a completely different frame. There needs to be more honesty about that.
Why were you able to navigate the transition better than some of your peers?
I finished competitively in high school, started at a two-year college, and the Army was helping to pay. So I had certain things in place. I had advisers and support that were useful and important. Another thing I had was luck, which we can’t ask students to rely on.
What did you learn at BridgeEdU and change along the way?
One of our theses was that every student needed to have some form of internship. I still believe that deeply. All the data show that internships are really helpful for students’ long-term success. But for lots of students, it’s not an option, because if they have a couple extra hours, they are using them to make a little extra money for their families. So how can we be creative in addressing the problem while understanding the economic realities that students oftentimes face? We had to adjust the guidelines we were going to push.
I keep thinking about the part of your book where you and the other Wes talk about second chances versus last chances. Do a lot of people even have first chances these days?
Far too many people are born into situations that are just completely unfair. So our collective responsibility, then, is to make sure that some level of equity and parity becomes part of those young people’s lives. Otherwise it’s just a simple fulfillment of expectations already laid out for them before they can even articulate what that means.
Do you still go see the other Wes Moore?
I do, probably every other month, and we talk often on the phone.
Are you still learning from him?
All the time. When I think about the ways that my life and his life have changed because of our relationship, it’s amazing to me that it all started with a simple letter. He is currently in year 17 of his life sentence. The reason he’s there sits with me daily. But the intellect and what I’ve learned from this person who’s in a five-by-seven cell right now sits with me daily as well.
Does that inform your thoughts on prisoner education?
Absolutely. This country has to be honest and realistic when it comes to educational supports for people who are in prison, because the truth is that 95 percent of them are coming home. We have to do a better job of preparing them for their re-entry. And we have to do a better job of preparing society for their re-entry. When that happens, then re-entry has more of a chance of success.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
