The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) launched an initiative to help minority students who left college before graduating to re-enroll at 9 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs). UNCF is partnering with InsideTrack to offer personalized coaching to identified students in order to help them navigate the complexity of college re-enrollment, and to design a plan to successfully complete their degrees.
Students in the program will receive up to fourth months of one-on-one coaching, with the hopes of them re-enrolling in the same or a new institution that meets their needs.
InsideTrack coaches will assist potential students in setting goals, building skills to balance work and family commitments, and planning for financial commitments. Part of the training includes connecting students to on campus resources such as health services, academic support and financial aid.
UNCF Strategist Julian Thompson works on building long-term improvements for member institutions. Therefore, Thompson’s team closely aligned with member institutions over the past year and a half to gain a better understanding of HBCU needs during COVID-19.
“As the country began transitioning into online learning, the recession, we looked into how it all played out on the lives of low-income students and how we could create a financial model and structure moving forward for sustainability,” Thompson told Fierce Education. A survey of 4000 HBCU students revealed that due to the pandemic and racial unrest, students were facing academic, mental health and financial challenges, which ultimately impacted enrollment. So, UNCF accelerated its search for resources to support these struggling students.
“HBCUs are not only cornerstones of educational access and attainment, but fixtures of the Black experience in America, whose students develop meaningful and lifelong connections to the institutions they attend,” said Dr. Michael Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF, in a press release. “This initiative will empower returning HBCU students with high-impact resources and support to manage personal, financial and academic challenges of student life to the triumphant achievement of earning a degree.”
Thompson says that historically, HBCUs have done tremendous job with first-generation, low-income students with supporting them on a path to college completion. Still, he acknowledges the immense challenges that still lie ahead after this particularly tumultuous year. Some of the more hidden hurdles include mental health, family and community life, and racial injustice.
In this pilot program, InsideTrack coaches are trained to reach out to chosen students via text messages, email, phone and other forms of communication to connect the students with on campus resources.
For example, InsideTrack will show students how to use the UNCF scholarship resource site, which offers many opportunities for emergency financial aid.
“We’re looking forward to seeing how the coaching effort affects re-enrollment rates,” said Thompson. “Also, it will give us great insights into what specific challenges our students are facing.”
“The HBCU world demonstrated that the institutional focus on personalized attention and engaging students where they are and meeting their needs and challenges and authenticity and connection led to HBCUs not seeing the drop off we were expecting,” he said.
Moving forward, the UNCF sees the future of bachelor’s degrees as some sort of hybrid learning where students will complete course both online and in person.
“This is going to totally change how institutions strategize and engage with students for enrollment,” Thompson said. “Even if a student has moved into the working world or moved geographically away from his or her institution, there are still so many more possibilities to continuing their education compared with just few years ago.”