Student Union
- By Pete Musto
Many Students Quit College ThisClose to Graduation
Oscar Olson says he went to college because, well, most of his friends were going.
He studied communications at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts in 2004. He said he made good friends and enjoyed his experience. But, he often felt unsure about why he was there, he said.
By the time he reached what would have been his final semester in spring 2008, he had lost interest. By the end of the school year, his friends were graduating.
But not Olson.
After struggling to complete his final class into a fifth year, he gave up. It was time to pay the student loans he took out to fund his education. He struggled financially. His college friends had moved on. And his academic advisors had changed several times.
Olson said he felt less connected to his educational experience. He left Bridgewater without earning his degree.
Not unusual
The U.S. Department of Education reports that between 2014 and 2016, millions of college and university students left school without a degree. Research suggests that many U.S. college students who drop out have completed most of their program requirements.
In May, Civitas Learning released a study of 30 two-year and 23 four-year colleges and universities. The organization studied more than 300,000 degree-seeking students.
The study found that nearly 1-in-5 students who left school without a degree had completed at least 75 percent of their program requirements. And nearly 1-in-10 had completed at least 90 percent.
Mark Milliron is the chief learning officer at Civitas. He says that in recent years, many U.S. colleges and universities have aimed to improve access to higher education. Schools have tried to find ways to include minorities, low-income students and students who would be the first in their families to go to college.
There also has been a push to help older students enter or return to higher education.
Milliron says schools need to do more to help those students succeed once they are at college. Students in these groups perform well in college, he says, but they may not get the tailored support that other students are accustomed to: Those who have family members who have attended college or have enough money to pay for school – usually have support systems in place. The people around them often understand the struggles of getting a college education. They can offer the students advice. And they also can offer financial help.
But for many other students, money is a large issue. Health problems, full-time work requirements, or childcare needs are other concerns.
However, poor or first-generation students are less likely to have people around them who can help deal with these barriers, Milliron says. So, it has become the responsibility of the schools to provide those supports.
“Students have to be college ready, but colleges have to be student ready, especially for the students of today, who…have a lot of different kinds of wants and needs,” Milliron says.
Recipe for success
Del Mar College, a community college in Corpus Christi, Texas, serves a mainly Hispanic population. So in 2016, the Department of Education awarded the school with money to help its minority population by employing special academic advisors. Del Mar also partnered with Civitas to determine what else it could do to increase its graduation rate.
Civitas shared special software with Del Mar. The software helped the school identify 3,000 of its students who were likely to drop out. Administrators then used this information to increase the amount of contact they had with these students. The more likely the students were to drop out, the more communications the students received from the school.
The communications included reminders of the requirements the students still needed to meet, as well as invitations to special advisory events.
Improving the lines of communication seemed to help, says Rito Silva, Del Mar’s vice president of student affairs.
Through its efforts, Del Mar was able to increase its number of students who successfully graduated by almost 74 percent in 2017.
Both Silva and Milliron agree that there is no single solution to the problem. Every college and university is different; it is their responsibility to research and experiment with what works best for their students, they say.
But Silva argues that schools must work just as hard on ensuring students succeed in college as they do on getting them to college in the first place.
“I really think those two go hand-in-hand,” he said. “It would be kind of a false hope that we’re giving them if we just give them access without the opportunity to succeed.”
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US advisory council ends Nigeria visit, signs student exchange deal
Members of a U.S. presidential advisory council have approved a student exchange deal between an American college and a Nigerian university as part of the council's effort to strengthen collaboration on education, health, entrepreneurship and development between Africa and Africans living abroad.
The council also visited a health facility supported by the United States Agency for International Development in the capital.
Nigerian authorities and visitors chatted with members of the U.S President's Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement as they toured a healthcare facility in Karu, a suburb of Abuja, on the last day of the council's three-day visit to Abuja and Lagos.
The facility is one of many supported by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to improve the management of childhood illnesses, family planning, immunization and delivery.
The tour was part of the council's effort to promote African diaspora-led investments in technology entrepreneurship, education and healthcare delivery.
"They're doing a phenomenal job there, it really gave us a sense of what the healthcare system is in Nigeria," said Deniece Laurent-Mantey, executive director of the advisory council. "This is our first trip as a council to the continent and we chose Nigeria for a reason — the diaspora in Nigeria is very active, very influential, and they're really a source of strength when it comes to our U.S.-Africa policy. And so for us coming to Nigeria was very intentional."
The council was created by President Joe Biden in September to improve collaboration between Africa and its diaspora in terms of economic and social development.
Akila Udoji, manager of the Primary Healthcare Centre of Karu, said officials in Nigeria were pleased that the council members were able to visit.
"We're happy that they have seen what the money they have given to us to work with has been used to do, because they have been able to assist us in capacity-building, trainings, equipment supply and the makeover of the facility," Udoji said.
Earlier, the council signed a deal for a student exchange program between Spelman College in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta and Nigeria's University of Lagos.
Laurent-Mantey said education exchanges are one of the council's top priorities.
"In Lagos, we had the president of Spelman College — she's also a member of our council — she signed an agreement with the University of Lagos to further education exchange programs in STEM and creative industries between those two universities," Laurent-Mantey said. "And I think for us it's very important, because Spelman College is a historically Black university, and so here we are promoting the importance of collaboration between African Americans and Africans."
In March, the advisory council adopted its first set of recommendations for the U.S. president, including the student exchange initiative, advocating for more U.S. government support for Africa, climate-focused initiatives, and improving U.S. visa access for Africans.
The council met with Nigerian health and foreign affairs officials during the visit before leaving the country on Wednesday.
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5 killed, dozens injured in clashes over Bangladesh jobs quota system
At least 5 people were killed and dozens injured in two separate incidents in Bangladesh as violence continued Tuesday on university campuses in the nation's capital and elsewhere over a government jobs quota system, local media reports said quoting officials.
At least three of the dead were students and one was a pedestrian, the media reports said. Another man who died in Dhaka remained unidentified.
The deaths were reported Tuesday after overnight violence at a public university near Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The violence involved members of a pro-government student body and other students, when police fired tear gas and charged the protesters with batons during the clashes, which spread at Jahangir Nagar University in Savar, outside Dhaka, according to students and authorities.
Protesters have been demanding an end to a quota reserved for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971, which allows them to take up 30% of governmental jobs.
They argue that quota appointments are discriminatory and should be merit-based. Some said the current system benefits groups supporting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Some Cabinet ministers criticized the protesters, saying they played on students' emotions.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper reported that one person died in Dhaka and three others, including a pedestrian, were killed after they suffered injuries during violence in Chattogram, a southeastern district, on Tuesday.
Prothom Alo and other media reports also said that a 22-year-old protester died in the northern district of Rangpur.
Details of the casualties could not be confirmed immediately.
While job opportunities have expanded in Bangladesh's private sector, many find government jobs stable and lucrative. Each year, some 3,000 such jobs open up to nearly 400,000 graduates.
Hasina said Tuesday that war veterans — commonly known as "freedom fighters" — should receive the highest respect for their sacrifice in 1971 regardless of their current political ideologies.
"Abandoning the dream of their own life, leaving behind their families, parents and everything, they joined the war with whatever they had," she said during an event at her office in Dhaka.
Protesters gathered in front of the university's official residence of the vice chancellor early Tuesday when violence broke out. Demonstrators accused the Bangladesh Chhatra League, a student wing of Hasina's ruling Awami League party, of attacking their "peaceful protests." According to local media reports, police and the ruling party-backed student wing attacked the protesters.
But Abdullahil Kafi, a senior police official, told the country's leading English-language newspaper Daily Star that they fired tear gas and "blank rounds" as protesters attacked the police. He said up to 15 police officers were injured.
More than 50 people were treated at Enam Medical College Hospital near Jahangir Nagar University as the violence continued for hours, said Ali Bin Solaiman, a medical officer of the hospital. He said at least 30 of them suffered pellet wounds.
On Monday, violence also spread at Dhaka University, the country's leading public university, as clashes gripped the campus in the capital. More than 100 students were injured in the clashes, police said.
On Tuesday, protesters blocked railways and some highways across the country, and in Dhaka, they halted traffic in many areas as they vowed to continue demonstrating until the demands were met.
Local media said police forces were spread across the capital to safeguard the peace.
Swapon, a protester and student at Dhaka University who gave only his first name, said they want the "rational reformation of the quota scheme." He said that after studying for six years, if he can't find a job, "it will cause me and my family to suffer."
Protesters say they are apolitical, but leaders of the ruling parties accused the opposition of using the demonstrations for political gains.
A ruling party-backed student activist, who refused to give his name, told The Associated Press that the protesters with the help of "goons" of the opposition's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party vandalized their rooms at the student dormitories near the Curzon Hall of Dhaka University.
The family-of-the-veterans quota system was halted following a court order after mass student protests in 2018. But last month, Bangladesh's High Court nulled the decision to reinstate the system once more, angering scores of students and triggering protests.
Last week, the Supreme Court suspended the High Court's order for four weeks and the chief justice asked protesting students to return to their classes, saying the court would issue a decision in four weeks.
However, the protests have continued daily, halting traffic in Dhaka.
The quota system also reserves government jobs for women, disabled people and ethnic minority groups, but students have protested against only the veterans system.
Hasina maintained power in an election in January that was again boycotted by the country's main opposition party and its allies due to Hasina's refusal to step down and hand over power to a caretaker government to oversee the election.
Her party favors keeping the quota for the families of the 1971 war heroes after her Awami League party, under the leadership of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence war with the help of India. Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975.
