Bottom Line

Greetings from UMass Lowell!

As a brand new target college for Bottom Line, UMass Lowell presents some unique challenges for college counselors. Our inaugural class here is comprised of eleven students, all of whom are first-years. Each student is assigned to one counselor, Rachel Smith, who has very busy days when she visits campus at least once a month.

Bottom Line student Leon Shaw gives a tour of UMass Lowell

For many of our students, going to college is a huge step and one that is not always easy to take. Our first-year students often require a lot of support and we devote a great deal of our time to making sure that the transition is as smooth as possible. Today we are on campus to make sure all of our students have a study plan for finals and have registered for spring semester classes.

I am on campus today to support Rachel so that we can see all eleven students. I just finished meeting with Jamal Grant who was one of my high school students last year. It was great to see Jamal. He just finished his first ever season of crew and enjoyed himself despite the early wake-ups and cold mornings on the Merrimack River. He is also doing well in classes despite a difficult major: Mechanical Engineering.

Many of our students here are majoring in engineering fields, which means lots of science and math classes. (As a political science graduate, this sounds awful to me!) But our students here are dedicated and doing their best to connect with the academic resources they need to succeed.

Since UMass Lowell was a new school for Bottom Line’s College Success Program, it was important for our staff to learn the campus and develop connections with the various academic and administrative departments so that we can best serve our students. Over the summer, a team of Bottom Line counselors visited UMass Lowell and met with representatives from a variety of offices, including Financial Aid, Health Services, Academic Support Services, and Career Services. The staff members we have met in these offices have proved invaluable over the course of this semester. Countless times, Rachel has given Christine Robbins a call to discuss a student’s financial aid issue or emailed Maureen Souza to help a student find a work-study job. Having people on campus who understand Bottom Line’s program and mission makes our jobs much easier because it allows us to get fast answers to student problems.

We’ll be checking in with our UMass Lowell students again after the semester ends to assess their progress and address any challenges they’re facing. Hopefully we will hear good news about their semester grades!

Check back soon for more updates from the field.

Justin Strasburger
Transition Coordinator

“Over the past three decades, our nation has witnessed great increases in college-going rates—no doubt due in part to widespread efforts by education policymakers and college access practitioners. Yet despite progress, just over half of students enrolled in four-year institutions graduate within six years (NCES 2009).”

This disparity between college access and college success rates was the motivation for the Pathways to College Network (directed by the Institute for Higher Education Policy) and the National College Access Network to release a “Research to Practice Brief” on how social supports and self-efficacy affect the success of underrepresented student populations. The brief is part of the Pathways to College Network’s effort to promote the need for college retention support services that address both the academic and social needs of college students. To learn more about the college success field, they called on Bottom Line.

Bottom Line believes as the Pathways to College Network does: that students need to be supported as both academic achievers and, well,  as human beings. That’s why our College Success Program model focuses on four areas (academics, employment, financial aid, and emotional wellbeing), not simply academics. As the brief states, “In Bottom Line’s experience, the more confident its students are in their preparation and the more supported the students feel, the more likely they are to succeed in college.”

To learn more about the role of social support and self-efficacy in college retention, read a summary of the brief or the full brief.

A visit to Washington D.C. for the National College Access Network (NCAN) conference went from educational to exciting for our staff when Bottom Line was chosen as the winner of the 2010 College Access Organization Award of Excellence.  The announcement was made at the awards luncheon on Monday, October 11th by Kyle Malone, Senior Program Officer at USA Funds.  This was the 5^th year of the award and it comes with a $5,000 Donation from USA Funds.

As just one of nearly 300 members in NCAN who represent a variety of programs and services focused on college access and success we are thrilled that our work with thousands of students in Boston and Worcester has been recognized so highly.   We believe that our model of one-on-one support is necessary to improve the low college graduation rates for our population of disadvantaged students.  Currently we have a college graduation rate of 73% and we are on track to make it even higher.

From start to finish, the underlying theme of the conference was persistence through college.  Many of the sessions and the key note speakers, Jim Applegate of the Lumina Foundation and Martha Kantor, the under-secretary of Education focused on this issue in their remarks.   Because Bottom Line has been focused on college graduation since our inception we are hopeful that our selection as the winner of this award will further demonstrate that “getting in” is not good enough.

Thank you to the committee of voters from around the country who selected Bottom Line! We are honored by our selection and look forward to living up to the high standards this award represents.

Greg Johnson
Executive Director

Welcome to Bottom Line’s Blog, Getting Through!

As part of our newly designed website and as a unique place on the vast internet our blog will contribute to the dialogue surrounding the issues of College Access and College Success.

As one of the first community based organizations to make college student retention the focus of our work we are pleased to have this venue to share our thoughts and learnings about what it takes to help students get to and through college.  We expect that in this space, we will hear from our students, program staff and our management team as a way to foster an ongoing dialogue and to share what works in college retention.

Over the last decade and especially in the last couple years the conversation about “Getting Through” college has made it in to the mainstream.  This is a big change from the days when even our biggest supporters didn’t understand why we were spending so much time supporting college students.  However, the dialogue about keeping students in college, has raised some interesting questions that we explore everyday in our work and will share in this space. We anticipate discussing topics including: Which students are most in need of support? Where does the responsibility lie with helping students stay enrolled in college- with the high schools, colleges or somewhere in between? Can college retention support really be done from a community based organization?  What are the stories beneath the surface when students drop out of college?

We hope that you will learn with us as we address those questions and offer a laboratory of what works in college retention.  Again, welcome to our new blog and please return often.

Greg Johnson
Executive Director