Georgia State University began its fall semester Monday facing the immense challenges of the coronavirus pandemic which threaten its enrollment growth and efforts to increase graduation rates for Black and Latino students.
Author Andrew Gumbel spent months talking to university administrators and students about Georgia State’s growth for his new book, “Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System.” The book chronicles how university leaders used data analytics to focus helping students meet their financial and educational needs. The university now has the largest enrollment of any university in the state and some research shows it graduates more Black students annually than any school in America. The book is scheduled to be released on Tuesday. Gumbel is scheduled to discuss his work at the AJC Decatur Book Festival in September.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution talked to Gumbel about what he learned and about Georgia State’s future. Here are some excerpts from that interview. Gumbel’s answers were edited for brevity.
Q: What is your outlook for Georgia State in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and issues faced by higher education?
A: With Georgia State, yes this is a moment of crisis, but it’s also a moment of truth because if the model that Georgia State has set up over the last decade plus is to be worth what everyone at Georgia State believes it to be worth, then it should be able to deal with this crisis. As best as I can tell, you see this happening. You see all the ways in which Georgia State students were trained to use online platforms to be part of university programs in one way or another, to receive assignments. ... When the emergency funding for the CARES Act came through, Georgia State already had a system to monitor student finances. They used that same tracking system to understand how much money students needed, where they were with their university accounts and within 24 hours of receiving that money from the federal government, Georgia State had distributed $22 million in increments of $200 to $2,000.
Q: Without those (data) tools, how successful would Georgia State have been?
A: Data tells you things that you can use to help students. But what data also does is it gives you a factual basis on which you can build your argument to go to faculty, to go to students, to go to the administration, to go to the (Georgia) Board of Regents, to go to the state Legislature looking for money to finance program and say ‘Look, this works. We can prove that it works because here’s the data.’
Credit: Rosen-Jones Photography
Credit: Rosen-Jones Photography
Q: What was the biggest surprise?
A: The biggest surprise was the students. I will confess I had some variation of perceived wisdom in my head. I did think that if you don’t go to a particularly good high school or if your family doesn’t have money that these were obstacles that were very difficult to overcome. What was incredible to me not only in terms of Georgia State, but meeting individual students, was just the sheer tenacity of people who come from very challenging backgrounds and their absolute determination to get ahead. They will work two jobs to stay in school. They will do their homework. They will reach out to their professors. They will network as best they can to get internships. And on and on and on. I was blown away at who these people are as human beings, the challenges they’ve had and how they’ve overcome them.
Q: Georgia State has received a lot of acclaim for its work in helping students of color graduate at above average levels. What are your thoughts about how they’re addressing some of these additional challenges (of racial inequity)?
A: Universities as a whole, and Georgia State is no exception, tend not to have a staff and a faculty that is as diverse as the student body. (About 75% of its students are nonwhite, but about 32% of its faculty are nonwhite, according to a 2018 state report.) This is an issue that has been around as long as people have been talking about the student success piece and in the last couple of years President (Mark) Becker has been more proactive about addressing it. He would argue it was difficult when it did not have the reputation that it has today to attract what is a relatively small pool of non-white candidates for senior positions and Georgia State didn’t stand a good chance of attracting those applicants. The opportunity is there to address high-caliber candidates and the opportunity is there if you’re graduating a lot of minority students to try to cultivate those students as future academics, future administrators and future staff members.
Q: After completing this book, what do you see as a challenge that Georgia State must address?
A: The thing that concerns me when I talk to students, the ones who’ve struggled the most just to make ends meet, is the notion that at some point, there’s a limit of how much Georgia State can do on its own. When I talk to people in the university administration, people in the University System, there seems to be a consensus that a merit-based state scholarship, the HOPE Scholarship, is not enough. You need to have some element of needs-based state aid. .... As I understood it, before the COVID crisis, Gov. (Brian) Kemp and his staff were actively looking at options of how they could supplement HOPE with some kind of needs-based aid system. Where it stands now with COVID and the huge hit that state governments are going to be taking, my guess is that’s going to be on hold. But I think the need for it, if anything, has increased. The challenge that students face is even more daunting than before.
BY THE NUMBERS
54,000 - projected fall 2020 enrollment
9,000 - estimated first-year students
3.54 - average grade-point average of incoming first-year students at Atlanta campus
Source: Georgia State University
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