The willingness to step into that intersection — a spot too many treat as the Bermuda Triangle of education and try to avoid at all costs — is one way this coaching organization seems different and important to me. Without new approaches, says Berndadotte, the system will keep working all too well at doing the wrong things.
“Higher education was designed to compound privilege,” she says. What she’d like to help realize is “a system that centers the voices of students who weren’t at the table” decades or centuries ago. More on that in a bit.
In the podcast you can hear about Beyond 12’s philosophy of “co-active coaching” (it doesn’t assume students “need to be fixed”), its approach to technology (it blends automation with a human touch), and how the pandemic has delayed its aspirations to scale up to serve one million students nationwide, about a tenfold increase from today.
This was my first chance to speak with Bernadotte, though I’d encountered Beyond 12 before. Years ago, it was one of the organizations enlisted by the U.S. Department of Education, during the Obama administration, to help displaced students from Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services after their abrupt closures. The nonprofit was also one of the finalists in a contest I wrote about in 2015 to describe the growing use of prizes to promote change in higher ed. Beyond 12 didn’t win — no one did — but that’s a story for another day. For now suffice to say that the experience, which included a pilot of the organization’s MyCoach app at the City University of New York, at least demonstrated the merits of a model that relies on not only technology but also humanity to encourage students’ academic progress.
Bernadotte came to the United States from Haiti as a child, and in the podcast, you’ll also hear how her path to the Ivy League started with a conversation among doctors at Carney Hospital, in Boston, overheard by her mother, a phlebotomist. Dropped off at Dartmouth College by a 10-car caravan of proud relatives, Bernadotte didn’t flourish at first. She recalls that she “bombed” her freshman year and was able to right herself thanks to a sociology professor, Deborah Karyn King, who stepped up to help.
Beyond 12 focuses on students from backgrounds similar to its founder’s: low-income, first-generation, and in many cases, in need of a little guidance to navigate the unfamiliar territory of college life. And it hires recent college graduates who identify with those challenges as “near peer” coaches. And the coaching seems to work, with higher graduation rates for coached students than for peers who aren’t part of the program.
But what excites me most are Beyond 12’s plans for the future, which include working with the design firm IDEO on campus challenges to rethink the shape of higher education. The nonprofit is also starting a paid design fellowship to train students to identify and advocate for changes in how colleges work. So much talk about “reinventing” higher education these days doesn’t include those voices. I for one am eager to hear how conversations will change with more of these students at the heart of them.
Quote of the Week.
“When I decided on a career in student affairs 25 years ago, no one told me that one of my duties would be checking the names of shooting victims to see if any were connected to my university. I’ve done this regularly enough now that I know it is part of the job description.”
— Will Simpkins, vice president for student affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver, in a post on Twitter the day after a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in nearby Boulder, Colo.
Colleges’ embrace of digital courseware is real.
Well, this new survey wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked in the newsletter last week how the market for commercial versus open educational resources might change as a result of the pandemic. But the data do put some numbers behind one of the findings I had reported anecdotally: The use of digital materials has gone way up. According to this survey — conducted in concert with several groups that promote online education — 71 percent of faculty members and administrators said their institutions had made “considerable” use of digital materials in teaching since the pandemic, compared with 25 percent before.
And only about one-quarter of respondents expected to make less use of digital materials post-pandemic, while more than a third thought the use would increase, and a similar share said it would remain about the same.
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