Welcome to Educating to be Human, a podcast where we' ll explore what it means to be human in today's world at the intersection of education, technology, and culture. I' m your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Each week, I' ll speak with people who are supporting transformative change in education today. That is, ordinary people creating extraordinary impact. Thank you very much for listening. Well, welcome.
Today I am delighted to have Dr. Sarah Goldrick-Rab, and she is the author of Paying the Price, College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. She's a senior fellow at Education Northwest, and she's also an adjunct professor at the Community College of Philadelphia. Welcome, Sarah. So glad to have you today. Thanks for having me. So, you know, this podcast, this is our season one.
We've really been exploring what does it mean to be human, and really specifically, my interest is in saying what does humanity in its best form look like? And our first set of podcasts were really about community and connection, and how integral they are to humanity, and to our social, emotional, and psychological needs.
And we spent time reflecting on the importance of humanity in our society, and we spent time reflecting on the sort of different facets of community and connection, from shared mythologies to civic structures, from the importance of public spaces to how we cooperate. And the second set of podcasts were about the creation and curiosity, and how that drives us to explore, experiment, and innovate, and frankly, to find solutions, and to be expressing ourselves.
I would argue, as humans, we have a thirst for knowledge. We're always seeking about the universe and nature and ourselves. And in that set of interviews, we really explored how using creation and curiosity can help us stay true to our collective humanity, essentially. In this series, which we are just starting with you, Sarah, it's really about the capacity for change and adaptation.
Over time, we've seen, at least so far, that we humans have shown a remarkable flexibility in behavior, thought and culture, which has allowed us to adjust to different kinds of environments and evolving conditions.
And I would argue that this sort of adaptability and resilience has been essential for survival and progress, which is why I'm so delighted to have you as my guest today, because you have spent a lifetime as a researcher, a writer, and a teacher working on these mechanisms of change and growth, specifically in higher education, really producing some of the first ever research on issues of food and housing insecurity on our college campuses today and the impact this has on
our teaching and learning. So this arc, this third arc in our series, is really focusing on the capacity for change and adaptation. So Sarah, from your perspective, I guess, how do you see this theme playing out in the context of higher education? Particularly around student basic needs? Well, I think let's start by considering what higher education is even trying to do. What is this place that we call higher education?
In the American vision of it, it is sometimes positioned as a place where you go after you finished high school, and you do a little bit more learning, and then you get a degree, and you are done. It's I guess finishing school, in a sense, in that vision, right? To some, it's also a place where you go and maybe get something you didn't get, perhaps in secondary school. So maybe in high school, you were one thing, or you were just growing up.
And in college, you go and you go on this journey of discovery, and you transform in ways that, at their best, will help match you with the adult life that you' re going to have, the career, the family, and so on. And let's not forget, by the way, that we talk all the time about higher education for jobs now. It used to be the case that for women, at least, it was a missus degree, an MRS, that this is where women were supposed to go.
The only purpose of going there was so they could meet somebody to marry. So family formation has always been a part of this discussion, as offensive as, frankly, that can be to some of us now. But, you know, the other piece of that transformation is this idea that higher education is a place for social mobility.
Meaning, you know, if you are not economically stable, if you come from a lower income or even poverty- marked background, higher education creates a moment for you to change your circumstances and so-called have uplift. Okay, so all of those different visions of higher ed are at play. And they all rest on a set of visions that people have for what colleges and universities look like and do, who works there, and who goes there.
And those visions tend to center on the idea that students only go there if they are, quote, ready to learn. And we have learned over time that while many people feel they're ready to be there, financially, their readiness to be there is not always in place. And often, what they're going to pay is a surprise or just well beyond anything they could have expected.
And the end result is that they go without having enough to eat or a safe place to sleep or the mental health support that they need or child care or transportation while they're trying to go to school.
And this raises a lot of questions about, for example, who belongs, whether it's our job to help people to meet those needs so that they can be in school, whether we ought to do work that crosses into health or even human services work, and fundamentally about what we're going to be able to achieve if, for example, we're not going to be able to make everybody wealthy all at once, which seems unlikely, or only ensure the wealthy come to college.
And that has pushed us into a really interesting moment that I think it was peaked with the pandemic, where we have to grapple because the humans are right in front of us with these needs. We have to grapple with who we are, and we have to change and adapt to this reality.
I'm curious if you could just tell us a little bit about your story, sort of how you, your pathway to get to this topic in this subject area in higher education.
Well, I come from a family that very much values education. And unlike many, many people, not only did my family value education, they were able to secure higher education. So both of my parents are college educated with advanced degrees. And on my mother's side, not only does she have those degrees but so do her parents. So my grandmother, Geraldine Ucha, was one of the first women to graduate from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. I also am the granddaughter.
So my grandmother's husband, my maternal grandfather, he went to college only because of the GI Bill, because it made it possible. And so Papa, who is really the father figure of my life, he came from a family that did not have access to education, although they valued it. And only because the GI Bill, after he served, allowed him to go to college, was he able to go. And it wasn't an easy thing. And he went to multiple colleges. So way before transfer was a big deal.
He shuttled around from one school to another in New York and in Florida, trying to find his fit. And then finally did get a degree and went on to get a graduate degree. So education is really a linchpin to how I was raised. But, you might think, well, therefore, the road through education must have been easy for me. The thing is that those educational advantages don' t ensure everything. So, yes, I was very successful in school on paper. I was identified as a gifted student.
At the same time, I was enduring some abuse in the home that I was being raised in. And my A's and sometimes B's caused people around me to assume that I was fine. And caused people around me to not look for any causes of any behavioral issues that I was having. So I didn't get support that I needed. And when my parents eventually divorced, it happened right on the brink of college, which made it very hard to pay for college.
And yet, I am one of those students who did not qualify for any financial aid. And so I worked my way through college, typically 40 hours a week as a waitress to get through school. And I went to graduate school only because I was paid to go to graduate school by an Ivy League university. So a lot of stuff that was happening beneath the surface that helps me understand students, and understands that what's on paper doesn't always tell the full story.
At the same time, the educational advantages that I have obtained have been a fabulous part of my life, to the point that I then decided to commit myself to being in education myself. And I'm an educator. Lisa: It led you to do some of the first research, really delving into the student experience in a way that many researchers hadn't. People would look at completion rates and, you know, if they were first generation college goer and how much financial aid they needed.
But you really began to look a lot more deeply at how are students showing up? What did they need? What did they eat before they came to school? Where did they sleep the night before? And I guess I'm wondering a little bit about how you even came to start looking at those issues. I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, to be honest, even since I was little, you know, I was a scientist. I was trained in science-driven schools.
So I understood like the idea that you would have a hypothesis and then you would go try to test it. And maybe the findings didn't come out the way that you thought. And there had to be like reasons. And I like that digging. And so I saw puzzles from the time that I was, you know, early in my undergrad and graduate sociology courses. Once I started working on issues of education, there was a lot of talk about people dropping out of college.
It was also a lot of talk about how we keep saying college is expensive, but really there's all this financial aid. We really just need to better communicate with students. They don't need to be so scared of affordability. And I did not know how to square that with the fact that everyone around me was saying that college was genuinely really expensive. And I was also really lucky that I was not just experiencing life on an Ivy League campus.
I was brought into a research project that brought me to community colleges and I was hearing people at these so-called less expensive schools talk about it being unaffordable. So to me, it said the numbers on paper are just not landing up with reality. And the first time that I was given that opportunity to look at a financial aid program, and that's what I was doing, I was looking at a private scholarship program. I said, let's go beyond the numbers. Let's go ask people how are they.
And let's not just say like, hey, how's your financial aid? Right? Or what do you think of your net price for college? Why don' t we just start with how you doing? Full stop. Yes. How you doing? Yes. Yes. And it was in response to how are you that a student said, not okay, haven't eaten in three days. And that opens it up.
Lisa: And I think also we have just seen through the pandemic, you know, even just in our workplace, you know, that question of 'how are you' is a real significant question that I think, you know, traditionally, from an academic perspective that faculty or even necessarily administrators in college, they didn't really think that that was their role to sort of recognize and address those kinds of needs of students, you know, beyond the basic sort of academic, are you going to graduate?
Are you going to graduate on time? You know, why are you falling behind in this course? They weren't asking the question, the basic question, like, how are you? Sara: And especially by the way, if you're a so-called low performer, you'll get flagged and maybe they'll give you more people to talk to. But there is this thing where, goodness, what if you're a traumatized person who actually is doing well at school because it's like the one thing you can control, but you're not okay underneath.
And then we're surprised when we have high, you know, top-achieving students who commit suicide. Why are we surprised? Nobody ever bothered to ask them how they are as humans.
So I'm going to, I'm going to maybe put words in your mouth, but I'm thinking, I want to ask you, you know, what role do you think faculty members should play in sort of recognizing and addressing these needs of students, you know, beyond the traditional kind of academic responsibilities that they may think they have been hired for?
Look, I mean, if I could, I would wipe out the word professor and replace it with teacher. And I think that we need to embody the role of teacher as it has always, you know, at least as my, from everything that I've read about the origins of teaching, good educators start with connection. And people, when you are, you know, working on connection, start with talking to each other at the most human level. So if you want a student to learn something, I don't care what it is.
I don't care if it's biology or calculus or sociology, which is my jam. I'm going to start by telling you that you have to get to know your students. And once you've established, you don't have to know everything, by the way. I'm not saying that you have to go in and do a life history with every student in order to teach them something. You have to establish that you understand each other well enough, that you trust each other enough to learn some material together.
If it were up to me, you know, those teachers would begin every semester with the first couple weeks being around building connection and trust with the students. The content comes next. The content is irrelevant in those first few weeks because the students are, and this is a bad part of higher education, the students are new to you. I wish we kept students for a whole year.
I really don't like the bouncing around from term to term of students and different professors and whatever because it's so hard to keep building the connection. But if that's how it's going to be, then we need a chance to build some connection. And, you know, to those who are worried about learning outcomes, I'm here to tell you I'm positive that we get better learning outcomes when we start, when we put the time in for connection because they're going to retain the content part more.
And you can make it more real to their lives because you're going to have to adapt your examples and to be able to reach them with your material. Yeah. Yeah. I can guarantee if we looked across a set of a hundred course syllabi, we probably would not see many where the first two
' Get to know your students'? I mean, you can think about this in medicine. I think it's worth just a quick example. You know, I mean, look, we know that when we go see a doctor or a dentist or whatever, I mean, we're taught to be very respectful and deferential. Like these are experts. And if they tell us we need to take our medication, we should take it. Nonetheless, we know that tons and tons of people don't take the medication they're assigned.
They forget, they are not sure about the instructions. It really might not work for their life. In medicine, they've learned that doctors really do need to start by building the doctor-patient relationship and by getting to know their patients a bit. And that if they do that, not only will they identify things like this schedule for the medication is not going to work for this patient' and I need to fix this, but the patient's also going to listen to them more.
And remember, this doctor really cares about me. And this doctor said, 'I need to finish all my medicine, so I'm going to keep going, right? This works. We're doing high-stakes medicine. I don't know why we wouldn't use similar strategies. Lisa: I wanted to ask you, Sara, for maybe just a little bit of the high level, some of the statistics that you have found around food and housing insecurity.
Because I think for most people, especially if they're not in community colleges or looking at this research today, they're not even understanding, don't have the realization of what the situation really is. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about from your research, what you've seen in this area. Sara: Yeah. It was hard for us for a really long time to get any sense of the numbers here, because I just want to- Lisa: Why was that?
Sarah: Yeah. It was hard because this wasn't something colleges and universities were asking about students. It also wasn't something the federal government was asking or state government was asking. It wasn't even something they knew to ask. It's kind of remarkable because, you know, if a student's in high school, for example, or elementary school, we're concerned about whether they have enough food to eat and we have a program for it, right?
The National School Lunch Program, free breakfast, free lunch. If they're homeless, we want to know about it. There are programs to assign staff to support them and support their families. We send school supplies to families and other kinds of supports for people because they don’t have the money.
In higher education, all we knew was if they filled out that FAFSA form, that Small American Bureaucratic Tragedy of a Form, that is supposed to represent what you can afford, which not everybody even fills out or can. If that form had some information about it that suggested that you might have financial troubles, then at the most, we knew that you had, in a generic way, financial troubles. We didn’t know whether that actually meant, for example, you had enough food to eat.
So I spent a long time with researchers just trying to get folks to let us ask these questions of students. We started asking those questions. The data started to come in. The data were very scary because what they said was that not only were a lot of students affected, perhaps as many as half of community college students were affected. That spiraled in a good way to growing state interest in having these numbers and then finally to federal interest.
So what I can tell you is that according to the federal government, at the last time they asked, which was in 2020 before the pandemic, around one in four undergraduates across all types of colleges and universities was dealing with food insecurity. It doesn't always mean they're hungry on a daily basis. I just want to be clear. It doesn't mean they're quote, starving. It means that they don't have enough money to have regular dependable access to food on a daily basis.
Those are different things. One's an extreme, right, and one's a broader case. 23% is the number that the feds have given us. Those numbers are a bit higher in community colleges, and those numbers may very well be an underestimate because they are just a point in time of when the survey occurs. It's not how many students experience it across a year. It's in the last month.
Secondly, we learned from the federal government that 8% of undergraduates, 8%, which means more than a million people at the time, had experienced homelessness in the last year, even though they were enrolled in college.
And homelessness here means sheltered or unsheltered homelessness, which may include, but rarely includes, living in a shelter, living in a car, living on the street, but most commonly means couch surfing, which means you're sleeping temporarily on the couch of a family member or friend who's letting you be there for a short period of time. By no means does that mean that you have access in a regular way to that place, to that bed, or to that home.
It means that you don't have a dependable place to live. In addition, my own research has also documented widespread housing insecurity, which is the condition that many Americans struggle with, which means that rent is really hard to pay. You may be late on those bills, you may not make rent every month, utility bills are often hard to pay, and/or people are living in unsafe or otherwise overcrowded circumstances. So, we might see six, seven people to a home.
I am not talking about a fraternity or sorority here. We may see people living in an apartment that doesn't have proper wiring, or the water's not turned on things like that that might get them a lower rent. My estimates are that almost half and sometimes even more, depending on the community college, more than half of their students, are experiencing housing insecurity.
I think it's really the leading issue, and I think we shouldn't be surprised because a huge fraction of Americans struggle on a regular basis with these issues, but this is what leading people to be so tight on money it's leading them to take on student loans when otherwise they wouldn't need it for their books or tuition, but the cost of attending college means they have to cover their rent and they have to be able to do that in order to take classes.
They're usually working at the same time that they are trying to get financial aid, at the same time that they're trying to go to school. Lisa: What have you seen about the research in terms of students who are experiencing food and or housing insecurity, in terms of their ability to stay in college, to complete their courses, to graduate or receive a certificate? Sara:
Yeah it's greatly compromised. So that can take many forms right so if someone is having trouble having enough to eat typically that really starts with lower energy. They're distracted, they don't get as good grades because again they don't have as much energy, they don't sleep as well. Those physical manifestations of not having enough to eat play out. They don't always drop out of college right away in some cases they'll be able to go to a food
pantry and they'll get some relief from this. But they're not going to do as well in school as other students. When students are housing insecure or homeless, that's when we really start to see these numbers go up in terms of people just leaving. It is incredibly time-consuming to be without a stable home or to be short of money for rent; it involves a lot of scrambling, it involves a lot of logistics, and just trying to make ends meet takes them away from the classroom.
It also leaves them really tiredI if you don't have a safe place to sleep or you're up working really late so that you can make your rent you're going to be exhausted, and that's going to make it hard to do well enough in the classes to keep your financial aid, so then they end up leaving. It's also clear that if we meet those needs, we can boost the odds that you stay in school.
So, I've also tested things like what happens if we give students a voucher so that they can afford to eat in the school cafeteria a couple days a week. At a college in Boston, my colleagues and I documented that increasing those vouchers to students enabled them to graduate at higher rates from community college. That was a randomized controlled trial. Very nice and clean proving this worked. I've also studied housing programs. Students who get housing through housing programs are very lucky.
It's very hard, even through a housing program, to actually end up in a safe place to live. But if you do, your odds of finishing college are much, much higher. So are other really nice things like your odds of working, your odds of being healthy, your odds of being able to take care of your kids. Lots of good things happen when we meet students' needs. Lisa: Those are great examples of interventions and programs that have been implemented to help students face these issues and challenges.
I'm curious what kinds of policies you think we could be enacting at the institutional, state or even national level to address these issues? Sara: The good news is that there are very common sense things that we could do that would be wins for lots of different kinds of people. For example, what if we say it's time to adapt the National School Lunch Program to meet the needs of people who go from high school to college who already showed us that they need this support?
Lisa: Just because they were 17 and then they became 18 and went from 12th grade. To community college, right? Somehow those issues aren't there. Sara: I'm never going to forget the look on the face of a student that I met with at Bronx Community College in New York. I was asking him again about how he's doing.
And he said, can you explain to me what these experts are thinking when they decide that they tell me to go to college, I do what they tell me, meaning I graduate from high school, I get into college, I do everything they say, and they take away my MetroCard for the subway, and they take away my breakfast and lunch card. He said, what did they think was going to happen? And that' s my question for Congress. What do you think is going to happen?
Why wouldn't we do the exact same thing that we do in K-12, which, by the way, we know is not just a nice charity program, right? We don't feed students. We don't feed children because it makes us feel good. We feed children, number one, because the food that we feed them is coming from agriculture in this country and puts money in the pockets of farmers. It's good for business. And secondly, because it' s good for education, because the only way you can control the c
lassroom is if students have something in their belly and they're ready to sit in their seats and learn. It improves test scores and it improves learning. We're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. Let's just do this for the economic sense that it makes. Let's
create more business for agriculture. Let's put money in the hands of, I mean, let's just say it, the corporations that run the meal services of colleges and universities right now and give them subsidies so that they can offer, in addition to the $12 sushi lunch that maybe my child, who doesn't need the support, wants to buy, also offers a free meal. And by the way, I'm not even suggesting free sushi. I just want to be clear.
A free hot meal that has nutritional value of some type for the folks who need it, just like we do every day in America in K-12 education. I'll give you one more example. There is this interesting way that we create affordable housing in this country. The mechanism is called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. The acronym is LIHTC. LIHTC is a way to give private developers money to create housing and offer it at a low price point.
Unfortunately, LIHTC is not available to be used for people who are enrolled in college full-time. So a full-time community college student cannot live in LIHTC housing and get those subsidies. Lisa: Oh, that's so interesting. Sara: And that's because the assumption is that if you' re poor in college, it's poverty by choice. And we don't want to accidentally help you out with that decision.
So we have people right now who would like to build buildings around our community college campuses who do this for a living, who do LIHTC development, but they have no financial incentive to do it. In fact, they have a disincentive.
So all we have to do is amend the LIHTC rules to add community college students, whether full-time or part-time, to the mix, and we would stimulate the private sector to have more dollars and to create housing for people who really need it, which drives workforce development. I honestly fail to see why this hasn't already been done as bipartisan policy. And I think it's mainly because the number of people who know this is an issue, it could be done, is really small.
And we haven't put a coalition behind it. But it's eminently doable. And I've got a list of probably 12 other things that we could do tomorrow that don't involve, you know, having to make radical changes to the tax code. Or give everything away for free, although I am a proponent of free community college. There's plenty that we can do together. Lisa: You know, it seems like you're really speaking to sort of this bias.
I mean, you just said it, the words, which are kind of shocking, that somehow people think that poverty is a choice. Maybe you need, and I know you've talked about this before, where, you know, you need not just a first or second chance, but that you need a third or fourth or fifth chance. It's hard to even just fathom that people would want to be talking about going to college for economic mobility, but then somehow say that poverty is a choice. It's such a contradiction.
Sara: It says to me that you've never known or really loved someone who's lived in poverty. And if you have, you haven't had a real conversation with them. If you get up close to what it is to live in poverty, you know that nobody would choose it. No one. And it reminds me, one of the reasons I got into this work. From a professional standpoint, is that I, as a graduate student, got a chance to really dig into Bill Clinton's welfare reform, which happened in 1996.
He actually became a governor of Arkansas and then ran for president on the platform that he would change, he called it ending welfare as we knew it. And he said it's because, and this is real interesting, he said his mom was on welfare and he said that he could see it wasn't good for her, that somehow that being on the government dole, so to speak, made her dependent. There is so little scientific evidence that that's actually what happens. People do get trapped in poverty. That is true.
But it's not from the help that they're receiving. It's from the dead-end jobs. It's from people looking at them like they can' t do anything and not allowing them to get an education. So, interestingly, in his effort to help so-called 'help' poor women, the rules he made for them, including making it harder for women to go to college if they were poor, actually trapped millions more women, parents, and children in poverty.
And we're living that result right now, and it all starts from this incredible disconnect from understanding what it's like to be in poverty and why it's happening.
Lisa: When we really think about this topic around capacity and change, I think the work that you're describing, that you do, and both the research and the interventions and the things you're suggesting that we could be doing at a policy level, we really are talking about how do we make these kinds of changes and adaptations, but how do we build the capacity of the system to actually do that? It seems to be sort of like the lingering question, right?
The issues are, you know, you've so well articulated what these issues are, but how we actually build the capacity of the system to do that? It seems to be the—I don' t want to say it's a daunting challenge. It actually seems, as you said, quite doable by some very simple kinds of changes that we could be making. I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit more, you know, sort of like current day.
I would love to hear sort of how this path that you've taken, how has this impacted your own work as an educator? Sara: Well, that was the—that was really the question that I had to face once I felt like I knew some things from the studies. Once I saw in front of me these numbers about how many students were affected, and I saw the rates at which they were leaving college and so on, I would do those studies and write them up and talk about them, and separately, I would walk into my classrooms.
And early on, when I started seeing those results, it did help me, for example, to be a little bit more understanding and tolerant of students who, for example, would fall asleep in my class, right?
So I often tell a story about the first time that a young woman fell asleep in my classroom and how I was insulted, and I jumped to conclusions not just about her but about how she spent her time and, you know, and about her commitment to education and had a conversation with her where I found out she'd been working really late, working the graveyard shift, which aligned perfectly with my data, by the way.
And then, you know, worked with her to resolve, you know, to help her find a job that she didn't have to work at night and watched her stay in school. But the bigger changes that I've been making in the most recent years required me to learn new things. And specifically, I had to really learn how to teach, not just learn how to, like, let go if somebody fell in a classroom, right, or, you know, fell asleep.
I needed to learn how to think about the assessment that I was doing, how to think about the pedagogical techniques I was using in the clasroom. And this is hard because, as PhDs, we' re really taught that's not our gig. We are sages on stages. We preach. We tell people stuff. They listen or they don't. But what ended up happening was that I connected with an amazing colleague of mine at the time at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, Jesse Stommel.
And Jesse and I had a very honest conversation where I admitted I had never had a conversation about how I did what I did in the classroom. About the underlying ways I constructed a syllabus. About the ways that I set up conversations. And we talked about my goals. And over a period of multiple years, sometimes in the summer, sometimes just one-off conversations, sometimes training, I started to learn how to teach.
And the way I teach now embodies everything that he's taught me and a lot of lessons from my studies. So, for example, I do spend several weeks at the beginning, getting to know the students. I use multiple techniques, including letting them get to know me a bit, including giving them space to talk to each other, including asking them to fill out a welcome survey, including contacting them to talk to them.
I do not design my entire syllabus in advance of the semester because I don't know my people yet. I don’t know how much reading I think they’re going to be able to really work into their lives. I don’t know what techniques I need to use in terms of lecture versus interactive stuff versus projects, et cetera. So I have a general vision of where I want the class to go. And I map the first set of weeks. And then as I get to know them better, I map the rest and I iterate and I evolve.
What everybody else finds out is they set this plan up and then the best laid plans don’t work. And then you’re kind of in this, oh, I got to revise. I don’t have to revise because I didn’t make it in the first place. Another quick example is I use a lot of techniques from un-grading. I have very high standards. I just don't believe that the number of questions on a quiz necessarily tells me how much you learned such that I need to then label it.
And I've learned, for example, if I'm teaching a man who, when he was 16, got C's and D's in school and has put in his head that he's a C and D student. And now he' s a 32 -year-old. And he takes his first quiz and he gets a C. His whole understanding of what his capacity is is going to be marked by that.
I would much rather ask him, number one, to tell me how many questions he got right and what he thinks about it, what barriers he had to learning more, and then have him go throughout the term taking more and more quizzes and projects and whatever, and then ask him to describe the learning trajectory to me and grade based on that at the end of the term. In other words, I want their input, and I want to use some qualitative dimensions to the assessment, and I want to think about trajectory.
That's just another example. There's a whole bunch of things I do differently around attendance. There's a whole bunch of things I do differently around building connections in the classroom. The great thing is this didn't diminish my status. I'm still a PhD. I still have power. I'm still the, quote, professor. It didn't take anything away from me. It made me more effective. It made my job more joyful.
And I got to tell you, since I've been doing this, I have not once had a student ask me to change their grade. I don't deal with any of that nonsense at the end of term. Students know who I am. They feel connected to me. They believe in what we've done together, and they feel that things are fair. And those are huge, huge things to be in place for whether or not they will ever take another class.
I want to shift a bit to talk about, I mean, you talked about being a student somewhat of means who could afford college and who got there, partly because of your family situation. So many students today, particularly in the community colleges, are coming in with a lot of hardship, economic hardship. Maybe it's as individuals, maybe it's because they themselves are raising families. And so, I think within our institutions, we often sort of see these students and say, okay, well, they're coming in. They, you know, they're living in poverty. They're not really going to be able to do what needs to be done here. I know that you've done some work in thinking on this about how and why we should sort of shift that narrative to really better reflect kind of the circumstantial nature of something that might be perceived as a challenge like that.
Okay. So that perspective is normal. I mean, it's very widespread. There are a lot of folks who look at this situation and yes, there are students who come in who do not have the markers of what even like researchers would say are predictors of success. Whether they don't have the academic background, whether they don't have the financial strength, whether they even might have challenges that will help them to sit in their seat during class, right? It's easy to say, this is not part of the job or these folks aren't going to succeed. I've even had people say to me, it's in their best interest for us to make sure they know they're not going to make it here and get them out of here, which I find, you know, it's paternalistic, especially when you're doing it to adults, it's particularly unacceptable. But let me just put it this way. It's also economically really unwise. Higher education is going to live or die by whether or not, you know, students want to come there. It is a choice right now. It's not compulsory. If we push out every student who has a challenge that we think might not allow them to succeed rather than figuring out how to meet those needs, we're not going to have a lot of students to teach. That's just the reality. It's also the reality of the fact that life is getting a lot harder for a lot of people in this country. The number of, the fraction of people who can say, ' Im totally financially secure, even through an emergency, my health is great, no matter what comes down the pike, I'm going to be good,' is vanishingly rare now. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is it misunderstands what those so-called barriers actually mean about a person. Poverty is not a cognitive deficit. Poverty can have effects on a brain. And our brains are amazing. They are malleable. So, you know, one thing that poverty does to people is it stresses them out. And if you take stress and you inflict it on yourself, you will find that you're going to have a harder time remembering things or processing difficult material. And if you alleviate the stress, you're going to find that your brain bounces back. You can do things again. And so, you know, if that, if that world of medicine and biology interests you, there's a book called Scarcity that I highly recommend that people can read to understand, you know, that's a wonderful thing. We can alleviate scarcity and we can see changes in the human body and in their performance. Similarly, sometimes the things that students are dealing with are situational. So, if we take them as, you know, characteristics of the person and it's a context-dependent situation or it's something that happened because of a temporary, you know, a job loss, gosh, it's a shame to treat it like it's forever, right? So, that's another kind of piece of this.
The other thing is that sometimes what's showing up to like a professor or a staff member or whatever is a signal that they're misinterpreting. So one example is I have lots of colleagues who are very frustrated when their students don't come to class on time. It's not uncommon in the community college world or in the university world, right? If you have 30 students, for a third of them to be there when the so-called bell rings, it's not even usually a bell, right? Class has started. There's a third of them there. There's 10 people in the room. And somehow in your head, you framed it as there are 20 people who are registered for my class who don't care enough to come to class. It's a very dangerous assumption. And then some people will wander in or not even wander in, rush in 15 minutes late, 30 minutes late, 45 minutes late, five minutes before class is over. And we're going, they don't respect me enough to show up on time. I would encourage us to reframe that to say, those people who just came in are trying so hard to be here that they're coming even though they're going to be late. It's a sign of commitment. And those who didn't make it may very well have a need that if we could help them with it, a transportation issue, a childcare issue, and so on, could quickly go away and put them right back in that classroom. And so is it really to our benefit to just assume it means they don't care and don't want it and don't belong and exit them? Or might it actually be part of our job to partner and adapt and support each other?
Lisa: What I wanted to sort of end with is really calling out how remarkable it is to be able to see the kind of evolution that we can actually make when we as humans help each other build that capacity for change, right? That we really see, in this case, the students not as this person to grade or to collect tuition from, but really as a human first, and then helping them on their pathway to learning.
And I think, ironically, that's not something that we talk about every day in, certainly not in our higher education institutions. I don't know if you have any kind of final comment you want to say about that, but I really want to at least leave our listeners with the sense that this is a conversation that is not happening regularly in our higher education institutions. And, in fact, there's such a, there's such a backlash against higher ed institutions today.
And, you know, what you have just really articulated here today with us is, is in fact a way forward in a way that I, I think many more people need to understand. Sara: It, I think it is. I will. You know, especially as a sociologist, I do want to point to one really important factor, though, in the extent to which we can do this kind of thing. And it's structural. People who feel supported and who feel safe enough to make changes in their practice will make changes in their practice.
People who constantly feel the threat of financial insecurity in their own jobs, or feel attacked politically for their work, or feel otherwise unsupported and unable to make changes in their make changes will not adapt. I am an adjunct at a community college who doesn' t need the job for the money. I'm doing it for the joy.
And frankly, even when I was teaching at universities, the teaching part of the job was not the part that, you know, that was, that I was even being evaluated or promoted on, which is its own problem. That's one of the reasons that I was able to find the space in my life to rethink some of the teaching. And it's also why I felt brave enough to make changes. We're going to have to talk about the way we treat teachers in higher ed if we want them to be able to teach.
And I think their working conditions are bad and egregious in some cases. In other cases, they're actually quite good. And let's be honest, if we could go to the places where they are actually relatively well-resourced and just change how they teach, it would help with a lot of people who are struggling even in spaces that have a lot of money in them.
But in the community colleges, we can't ask faculty who are teaching eight and 10, and you know, 12, and juggling, and all of this, and living out of their cars, to just meet students where they are. We have to meet them where they are too. And I think that's a big thing. And I also think that from a structural standpoint, even when we talk about policy change, we have to acknowledge that I think most people are operating from a place of just a lot of fear.
And our structures, even for making policy, are based in fear. They're based on the idea that somebody's going to cheat. So we put up a bunch of red tape to keep the cheaters out. We put layers upon layers before making any changes, again, as ates. We haven' t built structures that say we're brave, changes are going to be okay. And if we make a mistake, we'll learn from it. So we've got to set the table better. I think there's a lot of revising to do here.
I think the inputs part of this conversation needs to be had. With community colleges, frankly, I think, I don't even know. I mean, if I had to put a number to it, I think community colleges are getting the resources they need on a per-student basis of about a third. It should be at least tripled, maybe quadrupled. And then we could really talk about how this teaching happens.
And in the meantime, we should look for it wherever we can, particularly among those of us who do teach there that do have this space in our lives. Lisa: Ironically, that's kind of turning the pyramid right on its head, right? Because what we know now is in the private research universities, those are the most well-resourced and not necessarily the places where the majority of our students are today. And those students who really are going to rely on higher education as a way forward.
Sara: Absolutely. But the best job is that the community college. I'm here to tell you, I've taught in all of them. Lisa: And I happen to agree with that. So thank you. Sara, I just want to take a moment to thank you again for joining us today and for this very thoughtful and thought-provoking conversation. Thank you for the work that you do. It takes a lot of courage to put yourself out in this space where you have been swimming upstream in some ways.
And I think we're going to have a lot of fun. And I think we are at an inflection point where these conversations are now being heard. And we're starting to ask not just what is a professor and what is a student, but what are we learning and how do we ensure that happens as teachers? So thank you again very much. Lisa: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you everybody for listening to the show this week; this has been Lisa Petrides with Educating to be Human. If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for links and information on our guests, and don' t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. We' ll see you next time. To Be Human, That Is Edu To Be Human. This Podcast Was Created By Lisa Petrides And Produced By Helene Theros. Educating To Be Human Is Recorded By Nathan Sherman And Edited By Ty Mayer.