How colleges can help immigrants put their education to work.
Most of us are familiar with the risks of “brain drain,” but have you given much thought to “brain waste”? The phrase was new to me, but the concept certainly wasn’t. Still, I hadn’t realized the extent of the challenge. More than two million college-educated immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers living in the United States are either unemployed or working in jobs that require no more than a high-school education, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Many of them are doctors, nurses, engineers, and architects.
Reducing “brain waste” has been on my mind since a Chronicle session at SXSW EDU last month, during which the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, Juan Salgado, talked about the new Chicago Welcome Back Center at Richard J. Daley College. Created last summer in partnership with the Chicago Bilingual Nurse Consortium, the center is helping foreign-trained professionals get licenses to resume their careers in the United States or find other options that make use of their education (think a doctor turned medical educator). The collaboration seemed like such a natural fit, I wondered why I hadn’t heard of more such centers at colleges around the country.
As it happens, the reasons are myriad. But as the City Colleges system is showing, the barriers are surmountable. “Anybody who’s willing to do it needs to be pretty committed,” says José Ramón Fernández-Peña, a Mexican-trained medical doctor who created the first Welcome Back Center with two California institutions 22 years ago. The idea grew from his own experiences struggling to staff the health-education programs he was running at a community clinic. “The demand was in my face all the time,” he said. He’d meet plenty of potential staff members with the language skills he needed, but even as doctors and other professionals, they lacked the licenses to practice in the United States.
I spoke with Fernández-Peña last week, just a few days into his retirement as executive director of what is now the Welcome Back Initiative, a national nonprofit that helps colleges and other organizations train staff members to operate centers. (His successor is Manuela Raposo, president of the Rhode Island Welcome Back Center.) Ten centers are now operating in eight states, while others — including that first one, created in partnership with San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco — have closed.
Since 2001, the centers have served more than 22,000 immigrants from 167 countries. But Fernández-Peña told me, “I don’t think we’re anywhere near meeting the demand.”
Colleges have been part of the equation from the get-go. In the early days, the San Francisco college presidents made a point of introducing Fernández-Peña to many of their colleagues, including leaders at Bunker Hill, LaGuardia, and Highline community colleges, which now also host centers. But he doesn’t think the centers are as obviously a natural fit for many institutions as I had assumed.
For one, the centers aren’t necessarily a source of new enrollment. “It’s not about the colleges’ needs,” said Fernández-Peña. Some colleges might also need to hire new staff members to advise, for example, medical doctors on their new career paths.
And, he added, opening a center requires a long-term commitment.
At Daley College, Patricia Aumann, the interim vice president of academic and student affairs, told me students could spend 18 months taking English classes and doing other prep work at sister colleges before they are ready to take the national nursing exam. Others may be retrained for related careers.
It may be years, Fernández-Peña said, “before you can talk about the outcomes” — and that might be frustrating for college leaders or funders eager to see results. And of course, finding that financial support is often a challenge, although Fernández-Peña said that several of the centers, including the one at Bunker Hill, are now built into the budget.
Political winds, notably the backlash against immigrants in the wake of 9/11 and Trump-administration policies have sometimes held back the organization’s growth. And anti-immigrant sentiment remains strong in many states today.
Colleges, grounded in their communities, make good partners, Fernández-Peña said. But the Welcome Back Initiative expands with caution. “We are never looking, but we are always open to inquiries,” he said. At that stage, the organization will help assess the viability. Is there a local population that will benefit? Who from the college, state-licensing boards, and the community needs to be involved? How can a center be financially sustainable?
At Daley, a grant from the Chicago-focused Walder Foundation helped get the program started, while state money pays for the ESL classes. Since August, the center has received inquiries from about 200 immigrants in the area and is currently working with 67. While the plan is to serve immigrants with a variety of educational backgrounds, Janine Janosky, the college’s president, is eager for the program to help solve some of the region’s health-care hiring shortages. “The culture, the partners, and the will,” she told me, “are here in Chicago.”
“Culturally competent” approaches to first-gen students.
When it comes to first-generation students, colleges need to shift their thinking, Ashley Rondini, an associate professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College, said during a recent Chronicle virtual forum. Instead of focusing on potential deficits, or regarding students simply as “feel-good inspirational stories,” she said, campus leaders can take what she called a more “culturally competent” approach.
Here are two takeaways from the forum, which was underwritten by the Ascendium Education Group as part of a yearlong series on student success, and moderated by Ian Wilhelm, an assistant managing editor at The Chronicle.
Student grit isn’t an institutional strategy. “The default contingency plan can’t be to rely on students’ grit and ingenuity and resourcefulness,” Rondini said. “Those are admirable individual qualities, but they are not appropriate institutional strategies.” Possible options: funding to support internships, more substantial emergency funds — and better promotion of those resources.
Serve not only students, but families. First-gen students are often motivated by the need to financially support their families both during and after college. Many will have family obligations — and make decisions with their families — throughout their academic careers.
El Camino College, in Torrance, Calif., created programming for the families of STEM students, including tours and dinners where they could meet faculty members who were first-gen students themselves, said Cynthia Mosqueda, the faculty coordinator for the college’s First Year Experience Program.
Allison Otu, the associate vice president for outreach with Educational Outreach and Student Services at Arizona State University, emphasized the need for authentic messengers who can reach families and “establish early trust.” In ASU’s college-readiness program WeGrad, facilitators are often local teachers or alumni of the program. —Graham Vyse
Let’s catch up at ACE and ASU+GSV.
During ACE, in Washington this week, swing by the Chronicle booth. I’ll be there on Friday afternoon from 5 to 6 p.m. A few of my colleagues are also presenting a session on higher-ed trends on Friday at 2:15 p.m.
At ASU+GSV, in San Diego, expect to see me often in the Hyatt lobby between sessions — or outside in my floppy brown sun hat. And please be sure to come by next Wednesday at 2:10 p.m., when my colleague, Ian Wilhelm, will be moderating a session on “What’s Next for Student Success,” featuring MJ Bishop of the University of Maryland Global Campus, Casey Evans of Arizona State University’s EdPlus, and Amber Williams of the University of Tennessee.
A ChatGPT take on education disruptors.
I’ve been avoiding writing about ChatGPT, mostly because I’m not still not sure what to make of it and hadn’t seen an example especially relevant to The Edge. But the Century Foundation’s Robert Shireman recently ran a relatable test: Write the mission statement and strategic plan for a new university “focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, using as much jargon as possible.”
The result was, well, let’s call it uncomfortably familiar. To wit, this excerpt from the mission statement: “We strive to cultivate an ecosystem of innovation and collaboration where students, faculty, and industry partners can work together to generate impactful solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.” Can you handle more? The full six-paragraph version can be found on Shireman’s LinkedIn page, here.
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