One of my areas of interest is this notion of college matching and how well students are paired with institutions of higher education.  Five years ago I began work with a team of researchers on designing and developing an early warning indicator system that would serve as a monitoring tool for student intervention.  At the time, these types of tools were not remarkably new or novel and educators have long studied the impact of attendance, behavior, and course work on student outcomes.  What made this system different was the complexity involved in determining the cumulative effect of these variables on student learning.  To summarize the model, each student through the weighting of critical success factors was identified in one of three categories representing degree of academic concern (which informed the level of support he or she may have needed).  The whole system embedded predictive analytics around graduation, and an extension of this work was exploring post-secondary pathways.  My interest was less around the acceptance/admissions process or persistence towards degree attainment but focused more specifically on whether students were attending schools of best fit.  The idea here being that a valedictorian probably is better suited for an academically rigorous college or university than a student who graduates in the bottom quartile of a given cohort.  I wanted to understand the factors that impacted these decisions and what milestones along the way contributed to the end result.  As an example, field notes collected by one of my researchers captured a reflection one campus administrator had about an exchange he had had with a former student.  In retelling the story, the campus administrator was asked by the student what score was required on the placement test used by the local community college.  He knew the answer and immediately shared the information only later to ask himself why he had not probed the student further on the matter.  By his estimates, the student was academically strong and involved within the school, yet he didn’t dig deeper into the initial question and learn more about why the student may not have been considering a four-year college.

My work on college matching is incomplete for now but I was reminded of it this weekend when reading a pair of related articles.  The first one can be found here in The Atlantic and reports on a new study that explores how important is it where you go to college (no spoiler alerts so read the article if you would like to know more – there are some surprises).  The second article was published in The New Yorker and follows the story of Dorian Ford as she attempts to graduate from Grambling State University, part of the network of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU).  She’s 34 and her higher ed odyssey has spanned fifteen years, with several starts and stops along the way.  I promise once you get to know Dorian like I did you will be moved – plus she and I had an immediate connection as we both grew up in the same town.

So do you have a cube rule? Here is the context – on a whim a 25-year-old created a food classification system involving six categories, each defined by the placement of starch.  It’s funny, creative, and original but if you’re light on humor you may want to pass on this one.

As we wind down the semester for winter break, let’s remember that one of our greatest gifts to students is the gift of hope.  Consider for a moment that you substitute the starch criteria above with opportunity instead, real opportunity.  How many sides of opportunity do we provide our students?  Do we give some the taco and others the whole enchilada, which according to the cube rule would only be one extra opportunity :-).  If you’ve had a student say “no thanks, I’ll just keep doing this” then you may have missed the mark.  Our job summed up in one cliché is to empower students to do what they think they can’t.  Similar to the cube rule, do we have our own informal or implicit taxonomy when it comes to students?  And if we do, are some getting toast while others get the calzone?  Happy Holidays and feel free to evaluate your food intake with the cube rule – I see a lot of salad (anything that doesn’t have a starch side) in my future!