Tag: Higher Education

The Simple Way to Keep Struggling College Students in Check

Posted on by robbie

One morning last summer, Zulmaly Ramirez, an academic advocate who advises undergraduates at the University of South Florida, logged on to her computer and saw a notification that a new freshman was at risk of dropping out. The student, an off-campus commuter, hadn’t been signing in to the course portal, where reading assignments are posted, and his grades were slipping, the software showed. Ramirez asked the young man to stop by.
In person, the teen confirmed exactly what the computer program’s algorithm had predicted. His half-hour drive to campus made him feel removed from the other students, he had yet to decide on a major, and he had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Ramirez proposed some quick fixes. She introduced him to the ultimate Frisbee team, helped him settle on a business track and personally walked him to the counseling center to make his first appointment.
Ramirez’s intervention can be credited to Civitas Learning, a software company that sorts reams of student data to warn counselors, in real time, which students are in the greatest danger of dropping out — before the semester has ended and grades have been posted. The company, based in Austin, Texas, also has programs designed to help students pick classes and allow administrators to track what impact they have on student performance.
Civitas, which has contracts with Texas A&M, the University of Arizona, Penn State University, Morehouse College and hundreds of others, has pledged to boost graduation rates by 1 million more students each year, before 2025. (Economists predict America must add up to 23 million skilled college grads to its increasingly tech-centric workforce, by 2025, to be globally competitive.) The company plans to reach that goal by completely revamping the function of advisers in higher education.
“Most students’ relationship with their adviser is fairly transactional. ‘What are the classes that I have to take next?’ And, ‘How do I enroll?’ Unfortunately, the conversation is hurried and infrequent,” says Charles Thornburgh, one of Civitas’s two co-founders. “Hopefully in the future, more tools will provide more personalized recommendations to students, with both the student and adviser coming in dramatically better informed about where the student is on the journey to success.”
Previously, most college advising departments merely guessed who might not graduate on time. These counselors often based their speculation on whether a student was meeting traditional markers of success, like a high grade point average — a policy backed up by intuition, not evidence. Civitas, by contrast, starts with a review of a college’s historical data to detect which factors recur among dropouts, a more accurate way to develop a school-specific predictor.
Often, the results of this analysis surprise even veteran administrators. One of Civitas’s recent findings, for example, showed that GPAs were nearly meaningless when correlated with retention rates. A student with a 2.0 was no more likely to quit than a high achiever with a 4.0. Rather, the surest sign a kid wouldn’t make it was his grade in a freshman writing course.
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Using Civitas, an administrator can easily see which students are thinking of quitting. They can also test how well an intervention can reverse a downward trend. Armed with a vast archive of historical data, Civitas’s software first digs up the records of past students with similar circumstances. Then, it analyzes how intervening would change the students’ learning trajectory, compared to the past. “There’s an opportunity there for educators and administrators, who’ve been operating in the dark forever,” he adds. “They can become more scientific.”
Of course, there’s a danger in placing too much faith in numbers. In the wrong hands, predictive analytics in education might divert resources (or deny college admission) from students who are careening toward failure anyway. But Civitas maintains that its approach is intended to direct help to those students who need it most, not to take it away from their classmates. Thornburgh notes that the education system already relies on an insidious predictive model. Fixed characteristics like family wealth, race and gender are seen as factors in student success — inherent conditions that, Thornburgh points out, can’t be changed or reversed. Luckily, as he’s found in his research, demographics aren’t the best way to predict who stays in school. “How students engage while on campus is dramatically more important than anything else, and that’s what really drives our model.”
Civitas emphasizes its role as a tool to support more personal academic advising. After the software flags a student, the intervention comes from a counselor, not a machine. “With our freshmen, even though they do use their phones and technology a lot, I’m always surprised by how much they enjoy just sitting down for 30 minutes or an hour,” says Ramirez. “I see students change dramatically when they have a meeting face-to-face, rather than receive alerts on their phones.” Especially when isolation drives disengagement, that human interaction can go a long way.
So far, it seems to be working. At the University of South Florida, retention rates that had plateaued for years finally surpassed 90 percent this year, reports Paul Dosal, vice provost for student success. And while the data’s not in yet, he expects that USF will finally crack a 70 percent graduation rate very soon, a huge step as the college looks to boost its prominence.
Across academia, researchers spend plenty of time conducting research in the humanities, sociology and the hard sciences. But they too rarely turn that critical eye to assessing the best way to teach the degree-seekers in their own lecture halls. With Civitas, these professors and administrators can begin to study themselves.
“There’s a lot of capital, time and energy spent on educating students, and we should find a way to make sure that we keep getting better at it,” Thornburgh says. “As educators, we have to learn from each other and every student’s journey.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
 

Bye-Bye ‘Brogrammers.’ These Hackathons Are All About Inclusivity

Posted on by robbie

At her first hackathon, Grace Hu, now a senior at Wellesley College, scanned the room and noticed she was on the event’s only all-female team. She shrugged it off and returned to playing around with virtual reality headsets. But as the computer science and math double major signed up for more hackathons, the persistent gender divide she saw every weekend irked her. “It can be a really isolating experience when you’re the only girl on a team,” Hu says. “It can get to you at a certain point: ‘Why am I the only person doing this that looks like me?’”
To right that imbalance, Hu and a classmate put on a woman-centric hackathon in October, where two-thirds of the participants were female. “We made this our kind of hackathon,” says Hu. Hosted over 48 long hours at Wellesley in Massachusetts, WHACK (for Wellesley Hacks) brought together 80 undergrads, largely from Boston-area colleges, to build projects for three nonprofits: UpLift, which combats sexual harassment; Partners in Health, which ships medical supplies to developing countries; and Wellesley’s Office of Disability, which makes the campus more accessible to those with a physical handicap. Faced with real problems that technology might solve, the participants got right to work. Since the event, their projects have been integrated into the nonprofits’ operations, extending the weekend’s impact, adds co-organizer Amanda Foun.
Conferences like WHACK are possible because of the support they receive from Major League Hacking (MLH), the official collegiate association that sponsors the 30-hour programming sprees. Think of them as the NCAA of computer coding. Every year, MLH sponsors 220 events across the globe. (During the first weekend of October, while the girls at WHACK tapped at their keyboards in Massachusetts, MLH hosted five other hackathons simultaneously in cities from San Diego to Baltimore.) Unlike professional hackathons, where attendees show up with a broad skill set, the league places mentors at each of the college meetups to offer instruction. In total, MLH teaches computer science skills to 65,000 students annually. The goal is to broaden tech’s availability, opening participation to amateur developers and minority groups underrepresented in tech.
“We help create events where student programmers, designers and makers can develop their technical skills and passions,” says MLH’s CEO Mike Swift, who co-founded the association in 2013. “Whether that’s making websites and mobile apps or self-driving cars, we offer the venue and the community to learn how to do those things and reach those goals.”
Hackathons usually begin with a pitch session, where a handful of attendees float their ideas, attracting others to work on their teams. The events adopt a freeform, build-what-you-wish structure, a far cry from how most computer science classes are taught. And for many participants, that’s liberating. In university classrooms, students “get a lecture from a professor or a grad student. The curriculum is mostly out of books,” says Swift. Walking into an MLH event, on the other hand, you might see someone building an Android app to design carpool routes, while someone else is making a device to translate sign language.
MLH goes to extra lengths to welcome first-time hackers, making a special effort to reach out to female engineering societies, women-in-tech conferences and other minority groups. The organization also offers scholarships for people who can’t afford the travel costs on their own. Once there, attendees can dive into hour-long workshops about, say, Javascript or the principles of user design. As they’re laboring over their projects, mentors circle the room to help troubleshoot error messages or offer lessons in connecting to the hardware.
Without the league’s support, it would be a challenge to put on a hackathon alone, says Hu. To get ready for WHACK, for instance, MLH blasted the event details to their contacts, supplied technical hardware, lined up a squad of mentors and judges and handled logistics like food delivery. The MLH liaison on-site was like “having 10 extra hands,” she says.
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For women in the room at WHACK, the diversity was a welcome change, says Hu. “When you hear about ‘brogrammer’ culture, caffeine shots and not sleeping for a day, there’s a lot to be intimidated by. That can often scare away minorities in tech, which includes females,” she says. By targeting the conference to girls, WHACK sent a message that women belong at hackathons. “It puts more focus on the project itself, rather than the kind of environment that I’m working in,” she adds.
At this year’s WHACK, as twinkling Christmas lights dangled from a “W” at the front of the student center, teams of four and five hammered away, sometimes doing so as late as 4 a.m., to come up with tech-driven solutions for the nonprofits. One group built a social media plug-in, using IBM’s Sentiment Analysis, to detect whether a message would be considered online harassment. Another group linked vaccine delivery with texting, so an SMS would trigger a shipment. One team, all first-time rookies, used a Pebble Smartwatch to build a hack that would warn students with disabilities about any nearby hazards, such as a steep slope. They took home the top prize.
For Hu, that’s indicative of just how open MLH-sponsored hackathons truly are. “You don’t have to have advanced skills to attend and build really cool things in a few days,” she says. “As long believe in yourself, there’s always something cool that you can get out of one weekend.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

The Test-Prep Program That’s Helping Low-Income Students Get to College

Posted on by robbie

It’s one of the most glaring indicators of inequity in the nation’s education system: Students from low-income families tested 166 points below the average on last year’s SAT and 396 points behind than their wealthiest peers. Put another way, the poorest students (whose parents earned less than $20,000) could barely meet the baseline for applying to California State University, Northridge, while most rich kids (whose parents rake in over $200,000) would have the same shot of getting into the higher ranked University of California, Los Angeles.
CollegeSpring, an eight-year-old San Francisco–based nonprofit with offices in L.A. and New York, is trying to upend those inequalities by helping low-income high school students boost their SAT scores, navigate the college admission process and complete four-year degrees. While the organization can’t make up all the differences that exist between the rich and the poor, CollegeSpring’s 80-hour prep program has helped 15,000 high schoolers in California and New York improve their SAT scores by an average of 183 points, effectively erasing the statistical disadvantage usually seen among poorer students.
“The SAT isn’t a test that’s trying to trick or trap you. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate what you know how to do,” says Julie Bachur Gopalan, CollegeSpring’s senior vice president of strategy and impact. “You can put up a number that you can improve pretty quickly over a short period of time. You can’t do that with a GPA by the time you get to junior year.”
Garrett Neiman, CollegeSpring’s co-founder and CEO, agrees. Upping SAT scores, he says, is a “point of leverage in the system” that has been overlooked by other educational nonprofits. Meanwhile, for-profit test-prep companies, like the one Neiman once worked for, have cashed in.
The need for CollegeSpring, which is free for qualified students, became apparent during Neiman’s sophomore year at Stanford (the school accepted him after he nailed a perfect 2400 on his own SAT), when he befriended several classmates on full scholarship. “They all credited some catalyst: a teacher, parent, mentor or a specific college-access program,” he says. “On one hand, it was disheartening. From a meritocratic lens, if they came from an inner-city background, [their acceptance to Stanford] wasn’t possible without that help. But at the same time, it felt like if there were more or better programs, the gap could be closed.”
Neiman decided to quit his lucrative job as an SAT coach. Tutoring had been “a great way to pay for school,” he says, but only a rarified group had the money to sit in on his lessons. In other words, he’d been exacerbating an economic disparity. During a social entrepreneurship course at Stanford, Neiman and his co-founder, Jessica Perez, crafted a new test-prep curriculum. After three pilot programs that summer, CollegeSpring emerged.
Recognizing that the simple tricks taught by for-profit SAT companies (like knowing how many choices to eliminate before randomly guessing) wouldn’t sufficiently boost scores to erase the gap, Neiman devised a curriculum that would help students sharpen the academic skills they already possess: High school juniors and seniors would take 40 hours of SAT prep, tailored to the needs of those with low-income backgrounds; follow that up with four full-length practice tests; and then receive another 20 hours of instruction about the college application and financial aid processes.
“We meet our students wherever they are when they enter the program, which is often at a lower baseline score, with a lot less knowledge of the test and the way it’s scored and not much information about the college application process in general,” says Bachur Gopalan. “That means that our curriculum itself has a lot of scaffolding; it doesn’t assume they know certain concepts. What we do is remediation, then apply the core academic concepts in an SAT setting.”
Unlike Kaplan and other for-profit tutors, CollegeSpring’s curriculum is taught by classroom teachers. That personnel choice is important because students need a foundation of trust before they dive into the forbidding world of college admissions, says Bachur Gopalan, a former high school teacher. “They don’t want to learn from people who make them feel they are not smart,” she says. “They don’t want to feel like charity cases.”

Students who completed the 2014-15 CollegeSpring program at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School.

Besides arming teachers with the curricular resources to coach low-income students, the nonprofit employs top undergraduates from area colleges to reinforce the teacher’s lessons in a small-group setting. In what’s known as “near-peer mentoring,” these students, who’ve successfully enrolled in college, instill confidence in the younger students who are just embarking on their post–high school journey.

That’s exactly how it went for Karimah Omer, a Yemeni immigrant who came to the US in 2000 to live with 17 relatives in a one-bedroom apartment in East Oakland. “Coming from a family of nine siblings, it was hard to think about my parents being able to afford college,” says Omer, who thought, if anything, her parents could save up for her younger sister’s education. But her CollegeSpring mentor, a junior enrolled at UC Berkeley, entranced Omer with her description of the university as another world unto itself — a message that resonated because the mentor was from Oakland too. “We’re so underestimated. We’re expected to get local restaurant jobs and live off that. The whole group was happy we had someone from our city, doing really great things, who went to Cal. She showed us what it means to be a leader for the community.”

With CollegeSpring’s help, Omer devoted her energies to improving her SAT score in the hopes a school would notice her determination. She watched the tallies on her practice test rise, “little by little,” until her final score on the real exam rose 325 points. With that score, Omer matriculated to Mills College, an all-female liberal arts school in Oakland. She’s now a sophomore with an eye toward earning a master’s to work with autistic children. She’s also paying it forward, having become a CollegeSpring mentor herself.

Since 2008, about half of CollegeSpring’s students have gone on to four-year colleges, which generally have higher graduation rates than community colleges. (Nationally, 52 percent of low-income students who finish high school enroll in either community college or four-year programs.) About 80 percent of those alumni, Neiman adds, are on track to finish their degree. With each additional correct answer on the SAT, thousands of first-generation college-bound students are springing out of their disadvantaged circumstances.

Giving Poor Kids a Leg Up in Youth Sports, Recruiting Vets to the Ivy League and More

Posted on by robbie

 
Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.

The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger

Posted on by robbie

Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
 

The Easy Ways to Reduce College Dropout Rates, Why Systems Thinking Is Necessary for Progress and More

Posted on by robbie

 
Tiny Interventions Can Help Reverse Our Sky-High College Dropout Rate, FastCo.Exist
Less than two-thirds of students at four-year universities complete their degree within six years. Even worse? Only 29 percent graduate from a two-year school within three years. A recent report from Ideas42 reveals that simple solutions like supportive text messages and built-in study blocks can help solve this systemic problem.
Why Social Ventures Need Systems Thinking, Harvard Business Review
Some companies led by a single innovative thinker have brought about great change. But as Evan Marwell’s success with EducationSuperHighway demonstrates, it really takes a serial entrepreneur to tackle large-scale issues in order to revolutionize an entire system.
Five Voices on Reforming the Front End of Justice, The Marshall Project
Local innovation is reforming the criminal justice system. Five experts from various sides of the issue reveal how community and law enforcement collaborations reduce recidivism and crime rates, lower costs and save lives — all the while keeping citizens safe.
MORE: This One Bill Could Make Criminal Justice Reform a Reality
 

If Universities Made This Course a Pre-Requisite, Campuses Would Be Safer for Female Students

Posted on by robbie

Before Sandra Scott left home for college, her mother asked her to take a self-defense class — just in case she “encountered a situation where someone wanted to hurt” her. The 19-year-old Stanford University freshman from New Port Richey, Fla., did some research but never got around to signing up. When she got to Palo Alto, Calif., the sun-splashed campus seemed perfectly safe. Yet, when her resident assistant mentioned a new, student-run self-defense seminar starting the next quarter, Scott enrolled in it — partly out of a sense of obligation to her mom. In the company of 15 females, Scott says the class’s candid discussions opened her eyes to a different reality at the college.
“I had generally felt safe on campus. … I wasn’t exposed to anything — or to that much — but hearing from other women and how it had affected them, I realized sexual assault is a problem at Stanford,” Scott tells NationSwell. After taking the nine-week class, “I don’t know if I would say that I feel safer, but I definitely feel less naïve.”
Current student Daly Montgomery, a senior double majoring in aeronautics and African-American studies and rugby player, created “Protecting Your Bubble,” a self-defense course to empower female classmates to protect themselves. The class provides context about the prevalence and psychology for campus rape at large, explains the response systems in place at Stanford and teaches physical techniques to disable an attacker. Montgomery stresses that most participants probably won’t ever have to, say, knee a guy in the groin or scratch him, but that’s not the point. Rather, it encourages a woman to define her personal space — aka, her “bubble” — and to assert herself and feel she has the strength to back it up when someone tries to violate it. (In previous sessions, Montgomery also taught men and gender-nonconforming students.)
“If you are feeling unsafe, you are allowed to do something,” Montgomery tells her students. “That’s something they haven’t heard before. I realized through the class how important that was and how it’s not really emphasized anywhere else,” she says. “Much of what I aimed to do in my class was empower my students to realize they know more than they might think.” 

In both 2013 and 2014, 26 Stanford students experienced a forcible sexual offense.

As universities across the country revamp their sexual assault prevention education to comply with federal law, self-defense classes often aren’t included — despite strong evidence proving their efficacy. This student-led class at Stanford adds a new dimension to prevention on a campus that’s struggled with sexual violence.
In 2013, according to campus crime statistics made public by the Clery Act, the university disclosed that 26 students experienced a forcible sexual offense — equal to the total number of robberies, aggravated assaults and car thefts on campus, combined. (In 2014, the most recent year available, Stanford students reported another 26 rapes and four cases of fondling.)
Clery Act data can be problematic: A comparably high number of reports may be evidence that a school has created an environment where reporting is encouraged, rather than hushed up. (Or, it could indicate a real problem.) Conversely, a low number could underrepresent the number of criminal acts. An official campus climate survey at Stanford in 2015 suggests the former: 6.5 percent of female undergraduate seniors reported being raped, and 36.8 percent reported sexual misconduct.
Led by the provost and philosophy professor John W. Etchemendy, Stanford’s administration responded to the violence and student outcry by overhauling the school’s reporting process for rape survivors and by mandating students take an online module about “upstander” (Stanford’s preferred term for bystander) intervention before they arrive on the palm tree-lined campus. The majority of the 11 students NationSwell interviewed at length over a four-day visit to campus this January, however, felt Etchemendy’s response did too little too late. (A Stanford spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, denied several requests for interviews.)
During a rally in 2014, Stanford students demand better protections for victims of sexual assault.

In response, student-led initiatives, including “Protecting Your Bubble,” began popping up across campus, centering their discussions on Stanford specifically. In Montgomery’s class, Scott says that hearing anecdotes from upperclassmen made sexual violence real for the first time, in a way completing the online course “from home on a computer” had not. Students in the course picked one session as their favorite: the fifth week’s module on “sticky situations.” In it, the group brainstorms hypothetical situations when someone else’s actions would make them uncomfortable (someone follows you home or touches you on a plane ride or public transit). In pairs, the girls act out how they would respond.
Thinking over a solution to each hypothetical dilemma made junior Esther Fan Melton realize that “self-defense is not about the other person, it’s about me and protecting my space.” Lex Schoenberg, one of Montgomery’s rugby teammates who took the class, echoes her, saying, “I think the most important lesson I’ll take with me is that I don’t have to feel powerless in uncomfortable or threatening situations.” She continues, “I now feel more confident in my ability to recognize and get out of certain sticky situations before they escalate too far.”
Schoenberg’s sense of empowerment aligns with clinical research on self-defense classes. A review of empirical studies shows that women who forcefully resist are more likely to prevent a perpetrator from completing a rape. In the past two years, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and one conducted by the University of Oregon found that a seminar-based university course like Montgomery’s could effectively reduce rates of sexual assault. With college campuses full of sexually active, young people, “there’s lots of opportunities for hooking up and partying,” says Martha McCaughey, sociology professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C, and author of “Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense.” In that environment, “there is certainly a need for both sex ed and rape prevention education on campus,” including self-defense training.
Despite these results, self-defense itself remains a sticky situation, hemmed in by opposition from all sides of the ideological divide, McCaughey says. Offering self-defense classes seems to be a natural fit, so why are they excluded? Some feminists take issue with placing moral responsibility on women to fight off an attacker, rather than on the perpetrator himself, while other left-leaners emphasize a nonviolent approach. And then there’s the group of gender traditionalists who contend women aren’t strong enough to defend themselves (or don’t want them to be), perpetuating a damsel-in-distress narrative that underlies some bystander intervention trainings, adds McCaughey, who also runs the blog See Jane Fight Back.
Those concerns quickly fade away with properly designed classes that empower women, like “Protecting Your Bubble,” which situates self-defense strategies within a broader look at the forces that either facilitate or discourage sexual violence. Interestingly, both its instructor and its students also report wanting to participate in the larger movement to change Stanford’s policies and procedures. When NationSwell first spoke to Montgomery in January, she noted that she hadn’t been “hugely involved in the broader campus response, just my little piece of it with my class.” But three months later, halfway into her second quarter of teaching, Montgomery says she feels more invested. “Before, I would say, I felt kind of disconnected from the overall activism. Teaching the class made me realize I have a very real stake in this — this is something I can contribute — and I’m more interested in trying to fit my portion into the overall movement.” Kaelyn Varner, a junior studying the intersection of science, technology and society echoes her sentiments. “I feel like I finally have knowledge and a platform to speak from.”
Graduation is only one week away for Montgomery. She doesn’t know who, if anyone, will take her spot leading “Protecting Your Bubble” next year — a perpetual problem in the four-year cycles of campus activism. (SARA, the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse, Stanford’s direct services for survivors, has asked Montgomery to develop programming they could teach.) Effective methods to promote self-defense are clearly in place; it’s up to underclassmen or the university to see that the benefits reach future students.
MORE: This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses

Investing in Future Innovation: This Visionary Program Gets Students Hooked on STEM

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In calculus class, you’d never use the phrase “star student” to describe Chris Deyo. He was slow to complete assignments about strange-sounding concepts like solids of revolution and related rates, staying behind to get extra help as his classmates jeered that the subject just “sucks.” To them, all they needed to know was enough to pass the test. After several after-school sessions, Deyo learned upper-level math well enough to tutor his peers. But instead of teaching straight out of the thick textbook like many teachers do, he showed how the lessons related other subjects. “The same kids who were saying they hate math could do it and were good at it when taught in a method that they identified with,” he noticed, causing him to wonder, “Is it really math or the way we’re teaching?”
Feeling accomplished, Deyo headed to the University of Texas at Austin with the thought, “I love [teaching and math] so much, I should try to make a living out of it.” There, he signed up for UTeach, a national program training math and science majors to become high school instructors. After graduating from UTeach last spring, Deyo began teaching math at a charter school in Austin. Frequently seen wearing a bowtie, the 23-year-old Deyo doesn’t look much older than the seniors in his calculus class. But he hopes to get them interested by teaching in ways that suit them, rather than just lecturing to teens that have tuned him out already. “From a young age, I realized those are the teachers that are making a difference,” he says.
Bored and intimidated by math and science, American teenagers are disengaged from the classes that prepare them for today’s tech-driven labor force — making UTeach needed now more than ever. The United States ranks a disappointing 35th in math and 27th in science out of 65 countries. Recruiting STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors who often arrive at college with no intention of teaching, these undergraduates “represent the most promising pool from which to draw future teachers,” says Kimberly Hughes, director of UTeach Institute, who expanded the UTeach model from eight Texas colleges to 35 more partner universities nationwide.
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No high schooler is eager to do math problems without end, which is why UTeach trains its teachers to create hands-on, collaborative, real-world projects (a teaching method dubbed “project-based learning”) that are exciting to both educators and pupils. Recently, instead of solving systems of equations on the whiteboard, Deyo divided his class into groups and asked them to develop the problems themselves. Groups came up with equations that involved splitting pizza, controlling the amount of money spent on clothes and even comparing Spotify, TIDAL and other music-streaming services. “We try to be a student-led program, where students are taking initiative for their own learning,” Deyo says, speaking with a fast cadence, the enthusiasm about his students emanating in quick sentences. “They are coming up with the questions they want to answer.”
In response to the shortage of STEM professionals in our country, UTeach has already certified 2,676 instructors and is certifying 6,280 more in the next four years — just one of many ways it’s placing valuable 21st-century skills at the center of today’s education.
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Case in point: Manor New Technology High School, a secondary magnet public school in Manor, Texas that employs only UTeach educators for math and science classes, is using project-based learning to instill a love of STEM in an unlikely student body. Unlike most STEM-focused magnet schools, Manor New Tech opened in 2007 to provide 21st-century-learning skills to economically disadvantaged minority students. These teenagers are statistically expected to be behind their white peers in biology (26 points for blacks, 16 for Hispanics), as well as in algebra (13 points for blacks, four for Hispanics). Yet, Manor New Tech eradicates the achievement gap to match state test scores in math and far exceed them in science, despite comparatively lower scores in the surrounding district.
Impressive? Yes. But for schools nationwide to replicate those results, a huge influx of passionate STEM educators is desperately needed. UTeach-trained instructors staff at least 1,120 schools in 34 states, but 43 states and the District of Columbia are short math or science teachers. Filling that gap will only happen as UTeach expands, Hughes believes. “Leveraging the universities in our country as places from which to prepare excellent math and science teachers is key to addressing the shortage of teachers nationwide,” she explains.
Statistics tell the numerical story of UTeach’s impact. But Deyo’s ability to convince math- and science-loving young people to be teachers is how the program truly creates a lasting impression. Problem solving ignites a passion inside Deyo, but more than that, he loves “seeing other people appreciate and fall in love with math and see the value in it. That’s what makes me want to teach.”
“Math, as a whole, to me is one big puzzle,” Deyo says. There may be one final right answer most of the time, but there are so many ways to arrive at it. UTeach may not be the only way to improve STEM education in America, but it’s clearly one of those vital pieces.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

Rutgers University Admits Unlikely Student Body, Journalists Use Reporting to Urge Politicians to Act and More

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A University That Prioritizes the Students Who Are Often Ignored, The Atlantic
Traditionally, America’s colleges seek to attract the best and brightest to their hallowed halls. Committed to cultivating local talent regardless of status, New Jersey’s Rutgers University is bucking that trend, recruiting low-income, public-school graduates with mediocre GPAs and test scores — the very students that other schools shun.
A Plan to Flood San Francisco With News on Homelessness, New York Times
Can journalists advocate for a cause while remaining unbiased in their reporting? Next month, writers and editors from 30 Bay Area media outlets plan to do just that while collaborating on coverage focused on San Francisco’s homeless problem. The goal: To serve as a catalyst for solutions to the seemingly intractable problem.
This City Is Giving Away Super-Fast Internet to Poor Students, CNN Money
No longer are the poorest families in Chattanooga, Tenn., forced to visit a fast-food restaurant so their children can access the Internet needed to complete their homework. Two new programs are bringing citizens online in the Southern city, where 22.5 percent of the population lives in poverty.
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduate from College. This College Is Going to Change That

Sin City Goes Green, Philanthropic Investments That Reap Incredible Returns and More

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Behind the Bright Lights of Vegas: How the 24-Hour Party City Is Greening Up Its Act, The Guardian
It may be known as Sin City, but that doesn’t mean the indiscretions taking place in the Nevada desert must include harming the planet. A new leafy oasis now offers vacationers a respite from the bright-as-the-sun neon lights that illuminate the Strip all night long. The Park, which features native Southwestern plants, a 40-foot-tall statue originally from the Burning Man festival and large metal structures that keep visitors shaded and cool, might be the only actual green space amongst the seemingly-endless stretch of casinos, but it’s one of many ways that Las Vegas is reducing its environmental footprint.
How to Bet Big on the American Dream, The Atlantic
Despite politicians’ proclamations, the American Dream isn’t dead or even on its last legs. But how much philanthropic investment is necessary for low-income residents to have a shot at upward mobility? The nonprofit advisor Bridgespan Group examined how impactful $1 billion dollars invested in each of 15 different philanthropic ventures would be at reducing poverty. As with any investment, the payout isn’t certain. But with returns estimated at being between $3 and $15 for each $1 spent (not to mention a high probability of drastically increasing program recipients’ lifetime earnings), these are bets that seem to be worth taking.
New MOOCs for Rising Leaders, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Why is it that things are usually out of reach to those most interested? Social entrepreneurs often can’t afford or get to leadership development programs. But now, educational seminars are going to them, thanks to the release of two new MOOCs (massive open online course). Free video classes from Philanthropy U provide students insights from social enterprise greats such as the cofounder of Kiva.org; Leaderosity, which charges tuition, touts among its instructors leaders from The Presidio Institute. Both programs provide access to personnel development that’s desperately needed in this sector.
MORE: Big Bets: How a 12-Month Boot Camp Transforms Low-Income Youths into Whiz Kids