Georgia State, Leading U.S. in Black Graduates, Is Engine of Social Mobility [View all]

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Acceptance to a university and tuition assistance is only part of what many students need to succeed in higher education.

By focusing on retaining low-income students, rather than just enrolling them, the college raised its graduation rate to 54 percent in 2017 from 32 percent in 2003. And for the last five years, it has awarded more bachelor’s degrees to African-Americans like Ms. Jones than any other nonprofit college or university in the country.

That record is a bright spot for a state that ranks among the 10 worst for graduating black males from high school, according to a 2015 report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. It has also changed the educational landscape in Atlanta, home to some of the nation’s most renowned historically black colleges. They came into being because the State of Georgia used to reject or neglect black students seeking a college degree. But now a state-funded college is serving as an inspiration for them.

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Analyzing her background, administrators there identified her as “academically at risk” and required her to enroll in a seven-week summer session, where she was introduced to the college’s tutoring, advising and financial literacy programs.

The summer session is one of several experiments that have stuck at Georgia State, part of a broader vision generally credited to the university president, Mark P. Becker, a statistician who began his academic career at a community college, and Timothy M. Renick, a religious studies professor whose job title is now senior vice president for student success.

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To prevent dropouts, Georgia State has developed a series of linked programs meant to provide the kind of safety net for poor students that wealthier students usually get from their families. For example, in 2011 the administration began disbursing microgrants of a few hundred dollars at a time to help students deal with unpaid tuition and fee balances, citing a California State University finding that only 30 percent of students who stop attending for a semester ever graduate.

Shantil Jones met her adviser, Christopher Almond, at the summer program, and he monitored, counseled and prodded her for the rest of her college career. Advisers like Mr. Almond start each morning checking to see if any of their undergraduates have tripped one of the 800 alerts that could signal potential academic trouble, based on reams of previous student data. It could be something as small as a single poor quiz grade.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/us/georgia-state-african-americans.html