How to Identify and Invest in High-Achieving, Low-Income Students

College presidents who have found some measure of success often parlay that into a job at a more prestigious institution. But Daniel R. Porterfield, president of Franklin & Marshall College, will leave higher education this year to become president of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit policy group.

Porterfield already had a relationship with Aspen, and to some of its work trying to improve student outcomes. He is one of the founders of the American Talent Initiative, which Aspen runs and Bloomberg Philanthropies funds, whose goal is to expand the number of Pell Grant-eligible students at colleges with high graduation rates. Over seven years as president of Franklin & Marshall, Porterfield has raised the institution’s profile, and its enrollment, in part through directing more financial aid to high-achieving low-income applicants, and tripling the percentage of Pell Grant-eligible students enrolled to around 20 percent.

He spoke to The Chronicle about how to find talented students, how to gauge their potential, and what keeps him up at night.

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Why not stay in higher education?

I really have loved Franklin & Marshall. I couldn’t imagine working at a different liberal-arts college. But I can certainly imagine taking Franklin & Marshall College with me to Washington, D.C., to advocate for educational equity, for access to higher education, for focusing on the needs of our country and its future, and on strategies for collaboration and problem-solving on the hardest issues of the day.

You shifted Franklin & Marshall away from merit aid toward need-based aid seemingly without negative consequences. What was the secret to making that work?

There is no secret. There is an abundance of talent in every community in every ZIP code in this country. The students are out there.

We were able to renew the values and mission of the institution by developing a talent strategy that allows great kids from many communities to come here and to thrive. It’s been exciting to see that our retention rates of Pell Grant students have been the highest in the school’s history. And that the graduation rate of Pell Grant students has been, some years, above the graduation rate of the student body as a whole. Last year our Pell Grant students were overrepresented among our summa and magna cum laude graduates.

Franklin & Marshall has focused on a strategic plan that we call Claiming Our Future, in which the talent strategy was articulated dead center. I think that’s valuable and important for other higher-education leaders to recognize — that if their work is about finding talent, finding meritorious students, and supporting those students in all aspects of their college experience, and they call that essential and core work of their institutions, they will experience success.

How do you make an influx of lower-income students work culturally, with the students themselves and with faculty and staff? Were there missteps or risks along the way?

The key is to approach the work from the starting point of talent, and to understand what qualities of talent will be predictive of academic and all-around success. Every college should have a theory of talent. We developed that theory, and then went out and partnered with top schools, scholarship programs, and access programs in order to build pipelines of students with the qualities that we believed would make them successful at Franklin & Marshall College. We made sure that we met every student’s full demonstrated financial need with no gapping. And we invested, with the students, in learning about ways that we could grease the gears of our school so that it was particularly responsive to the needs of the first-gen students.

I don’t want to describe any campus in America as an Eden. But if you have a clear understanding of the academic preparation and talent base of students you’re recruiting, it should be relatively straightforward to work in dialogue with students to modify dimensions of the school to create a great educational experience.

What are you looking for in these students?

We’re looking for curious students. Students who are going to make their college experience count. Students who know how to work hard. Students who have the resilience to deal with day-to-day challenges and aren’t going to be radically thrown off stride by a challenging course. That’s as well as students who have taken a strong college-prep program and have raised their hand and said yes to opportunity in their lives, whether those opportunities have been offered in ample supply or not. Those qualities make up the talent, in composite, that we’re looking for. Those qualities, which are all over the country in first-gen and lower-income and moderate-income students, are predictive of success, and we’ve seen that happen.

By the way, our average SAT scores have gone up since we developed this talent strategy.

Where and how have you been identifying these qualities, which might not show up in an answer blank?

Through relationships with extraordinary educators in the pre-college space, like Nicole Hurd, founder of the College Advising Corps, which is providing college advice in dozens of communities, hundreds of schools, all across the country. Like Debbie Bial, founder of the Posse Foundation, who helps us identify 20 students a year from New York and Miami who will be great fits for F&M. Like Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, the founders of the KIPP charter schools, which have launched more than 50 students to Franklin & Marshall since I’ve been president.

It’s leaders who have been deeply immersed in cultivating the talent of low-income, first-gen, and moderate-income students, who know a great deal about where there are students, and which students are prepared for, want to be a part of, an academic community like Franklin & Marshall. Every college in the country ought to have a clear definition of talent, and then a commitment to building pipelines, so they can really find that talent.

We also enter into relationships with extraordinary pre-college honors like the Noble public charter schools, like College Track and College Match in California, like Sponsors for Educational Opportunity in New York City. We hope to learn from those partners, and also to give back to them. We offer a free summer experience to 70 low-income students every year, from different partners we work with, so rising seniors can come to our campus to take two courses with our faculty.

Doesn’t juggling that number of partnerships present its own challenges?

Not really. I actually think that the salvation of American higher education will be when we fully embrace the partnership we could have with pre-college education to create a more durable, wider bridge of knowledge-sharing and mutual support between our sectors.

For example, the Schusterman Foundation, based out of Tulsa, has generously invested in Franklin & Marshall College so that we could have additional financial-aid resources to recruit high-talent students who are DACA-eligible. We have been able to triple the number of students who are DACA-eligible in our student body over the past couple years. We’re recruiting them because they are talented, because they are high-achieving, not because they’re DACA. But because they’re DACA, there’s a risk they won’t be seen. And the Schusterman Foundation has made it possible for us to see those students more clearly.

Is there anything about your current job that still intimidates you?

What inspires me, and sometimes keeps me awake at night, is the astonishing talent and potential of the young people that I work with. For example, Akbar Hossain, whose family won the diversity-visa lottery when he was a child living in workers’ quarters in Saudi Arabia, which allowed them to start life over in America. Akbar and his brother Kabir both took their talents to Franklin & Marshall, excelled, and Akbar won both the Truman Scholarship and a Soros Fellowship for New Americans and now is at Penn Law School. Kabir is at Pace, a consulting firm in Washington, and is applying to law school.

I look at a student like Sheldon Ruby, from rural Pennsylvania, who was able to go to Franklin & Marshall, who was then selected as a Fulbright scholar, and is now in Indonesia teaching, and as a Rangel scholar will have a full scholarship to graduate school at Georgetown, and will join the State Department as a diplomat, if they’re hiring.

The talent, the aspiration, goodness, drive, and hope of young people inspires me — but it also creates a feeling of anxiety sometimes, because I worry that our society is not seeing and hearing that talent. That we are deferring our need to invest in all young people to other considerations that ultimately will be counterproductive in the long-term future of America.

If we don’t fight for educational excellence and equity, we’re ultimately not serving our society and our democracy. So I wouldn’t say that’s intimidating, but I would say that the talent and drive and needs and hopes and aspirations of Kabir, Akbar, and Sheldon, multiplied by many millions, should actually strike a little bit of awe in the hearts of people my age. We should ask ourselves, insistently, What are we doing to invest in today’s young Americans?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.