New kind of adviser helps hone life and study skills
Matthew Gonzales Sanchez calls it his “midterm crisis.” Halfway through the first semester of his freshman year here at Our Lady of the Lake University, he considered dropping out. He had failed all of his midterms.
“It scared me because, man, I was giving it my all,” says Mr. Gonzales Sanchez, 22. “I thought, ‘What am I doing wrong? They say college isn’t for everybody, and maybe that’s me — maybe I’m not one of those people who belongs in college.’”
But he rebounded, and he finished his first semester with a 3.0 grade-point average. How? He credits his personal-success coach.
Last fall, AT&T gave Our Lady of the Lake a $1-million grant to offer personal coaching services to all of its 264 first-year and transfer students. Eighty percent of students here, who are predominantly Hispanic, receive Pell Grants. Most, like Mr. Gonzales Sanchez, are first-generation college students.
The coaches motivate and counsel students, many of whom need more than positive reinforcement and time-management tips. Coaches also help some students navigate the public welfare system for sick relatives, or explain to their parents why they should go into debt to complete their degrees.
Officials at Our Lady of the Lake say it is too early to judge the effectiveness of the nine-month-old program, but many students here believe they would be lost without their personal coaches.
“It was just knowing that somebody was there and wants to see me succeed,” says Mr. Gonzales Sanchez. “My coach saw the potential in what I could be and not only told me that, but really drilled that into my head, how I could accomplish that.”
Quelling College Fears
The road to a college degree is often littered with potholes of self-doubt, and sometimes those are deep enough to discourage even the most ambitious students. If the
transition from high school to college were easy, the average six-year graduation rate at four-year institutions in the United States would probably be higher than 63 percent.
To improve those numbers, colleges and universities across the country have added an array of student-support services, including peer counselors, academic advisers, and tutors. Many institutions have summer programs that bring underprepared students up to speed academically, and some even have wellness centers that offer free massages before exams.
A Natural Extension
When Tessa Martinez Pollack became president of Our Lady of the Lake five years ago, she announced that she wanted to improve the institution’s six-year graduation rate, which stood at 65 percent. The small university already had many support services in place, and Ms. Martinez Pollack added a peer-mentor program and hired an outside vendor to provide online tutoring to students 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Adding personal coaches seemed like a natural extension of those services, especially for low-income students, who often struggle to adjust to college. Now all students at Our Lady of the Lake begin their first semester by working with their coaches to figure out their academic and personal goals. During weekly meetings, coaches encourage students and help them connect those goals to their daily habits and actions. They often ask questions to determine what roadblocks the students might face.
“We have to be proactive in getting them to come up with action plans on how they might handle potential problems,” says Alan Tripp, chief executive and founder of InsideTrack, the company that hires and trains the coaches for Our Lady of the Lake and 35 other institutions. “Because if we wait until the student comes in and says they have to drop out, it’s too late, and they’ve already lost motivation.”
According to Lynise Harris, InsideTrack’s director of coaching at the university, many of the first-generation students she sees interpret academic setbacks as proof that they are not college material. Some feel tremendous pressure to make their parents proud and to set an example for younger siblings and cousins. When their relatives disapprove of their college plans, they feel guilty for not earning money to help support their families. In either case, they are often overwhelmed and easily discouraged.
At those moments, the coaches remind students of their initial goals. During his midterm crisis, Mr. Gonzales Sanchez says he and Ms. Harris discussed the impact of not earning a college degree. As discouraging as his grades were, imagining a future without that diploma was worse.
“We talked about what kinds of jobs I would get, and mapped it all out on paper,” says Mr. Gonzales Sanchez. “When I saw that visually, it brought me back to the realization that I really don’t want to be like everyone else in my family, living paycheck to paycheck.”
That conversation motivated him to create a plan for improving his grades. He determined that he needed to study at the library instead of at home and take advantage of the free tutoring at the academic-support center. Ms. Harris also used role-playing exercises to coach Mr. Gonzales Sanchez on how to ask his professors for extra help.
Comprehensive Help
The solutions the coaches devise seem obvious. So why hire an independent coaching company?
Administrators at Our Lady of the Lake say the coaches are useful because they are impartial observers. Many students who feel out of place on a college campus are too intimidated to approach professors when they are struggling. They do not realize there are other helpful resources on the campus, like tutoring centers, until their coaches suggest those services.
“We have a lot of programs, but this one deals comprehensively with all of the challenges a student might be facing,” says Cindy L. Skaruppa, who was the university’s vice president for enrollment management until May. “The coaches are there to help the students connect the dots and find the right services on campus to help them, whether it’s the financial-aid office, mental-health services, or academic support.”
Yadira Chavez, a sophomore from a single-parent home in El Paso, left her first math exam in tears because she had finished only one-third of the questions. Though her older sisters were attending college, she was the first to go away to school. She felt guilty that she was not at home to help them care for her mother, who was then undergoing chemotherapy.
“It seemed selfish to call home with grade problems, so I just went to the coaching center,” says Ms. Chavez. “I thought about if it had happened to my sister at her school, she probably would have just gone home, cried, and tried to study more.”
After meeting with Ms. Harris, Ms. Chavez received a referral for mental-health counseling to help her deal with her family stress, and she created a plan to improve her math grade. It worked: she finished the course with an A.
Sometimes the coaches even help students find off-campus services. Adrianna Soto, another InsideTrack coach, was startled one morning when a conscientious student told her she was withdrawing from her classes. The student said she could not keep up with her studies because she had to drive back and forth from her home to the campus twice a day to care for her ailing mother and grandmother.
Instead of accepting that explanation, Ms. Soto jumped into action. She gave the student a list of people to contact at public agencies, including the state department of health services. In follow-up calls with the student, Ms. Soto helped her find a state-financed nurse who could care for her relatives during the day, which allowed the student to stay in college.
The Summer Test
Officials at Our Lady of the Lake hope such personalized coaching will inspire more students to stay enrolled.
From the fall semester to the spring semester, 89 percent of freshmen returned to continue their studies, a five-percentage-point increase over the previous year. The rate was even higher, at 93 percent, for students who attended at least seven coaching sessions. In contrast, 69 percent of students who attended only one session came back for the spring semester.
The preliminary results are encouraging, but university officials say the real test of the program’s efficacy will come this fall. (Students are more prone to drop out over the summer than between the fall and spring semesters.) Typically, 38 percent of freshmen at Our Lady of the Lake do not return for their sophomore year, but university officials hope to decrease that rate to 25 percent.
During a recent meeting, Ms. Harris, the coaching director, said she and her colleagues planned to call each student twice a month over the summer to see how they are doing. One administrator suggested that the coaches encourage local students to come to the campus for meetings. Ms. Harris liked the idea, as she and the other two coaches have made a habit of patrolling the campus during their free time, trying to track down students who had missed their coaching meetings.
When Our Lady of the Lake first introduced the coaching program, some faculty members were suspicious, says Ms. Harris. Even now, some professors at the university have told the coaches they think the program offers too much hand-holding for students who are supposed to be learning to live on their own.
But Mr. Tripp, InsideTrack’s chief executive, says that college is far different from the real world.
“In every form of organizational life, both before and after college, you get more immediate feedback, whether it’s from teachers in high school or bosses in jobs,” says Mr. Tripp. “It’s time for colleges to give a lot more thought to what they can do to motivate students to be engaged and successful.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 53, Issue 46, Page A25
