Colleges turning dropouts into degree candidates

GOING BACK: Joe Botelho made unsuccessful attempts to finish college in the 1980s and ’90s. A return-to-college program has the associate at Re/Max River’s Edge in East Providence poised to graduate from RIC in December. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
GOING BACK: Joe Botelho made unsuccessful attempts to finish college in the 1980s and ’90s. A return-to-college program has the associate at Re/Max River’s Edge in East Providence poised to graduate from RIC in December. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

For Joe Botelho, 54, of East Providence, the pressures of completing a degree at Rhode Island College in 1991 were just too much.
With a career in real estate taking off, his in-laws were diagnosed with cancer in the same month, and a second child was on the way.
Having already left Providence College after three years of school in 1980 to take a promotion managing convenience stores, Botelho had gone to RIC to major in communications instead of psychology. But life got in the way, until he learned last year about a return-to-college program called “Finish What You Started” at the University of Rhode Island. When he called URI, the school referred him back to RIC, where academic adviser Dolores Passarelli, director of the Office of Academic Support and Information Service, helped him sort through a maze of requirements.
He is now finishing up two final classes this semester as part of RIC’s “Finish Strong” program and is poised to graduate in December.
“As much as I’ve been through in my life, going back to school was a scary prospect,” Botelho said. Passarelli “just made sure I did what I was supposed to do. Every step of the way, I gained more confidence. Every day I’d say, ‘It’s on my bucket list: I am going to do this.’ I feel like I’m on the verge of completing a journey I started 35 years ago.”
Botelho is not alone in abandoning his degree; some 111,000 people in Rhode Island are in similar straits, according to Deborah Grossman-Garber, associate commissioner for academic and student affairs in the Office of Higher Education for the R.I. Board of Education.
According to the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council’s “Moving the Needle” report, many Rhode Islanders (almost 20 percent of the state’s workforce) had some college but no degree, based on the Lumina Foundation’s analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census data, Grossman-Garber said.
Botelho is taking advantage of “Finish Strong,” a two-year-old program that is designed to help former students finish out their aborted college careers. Both “Finish Strong” and “Finish What You Started” were created to identify students who abandoned their degrees, whether because of academic, financial, personal or other difficulties, and reconnect them with their sense of purpose and plans for completion. Federal funding for this and similar programs at URI and the Community College of Rhode Island are available to facilitate this change, Grossman-Garber said.
“As a society, the goals of President [Barack] Obama and every state to increase the number of working adults who have some college degree are absolutely mandatory for the economy we’re heading into, which requires more sophisticated problem-solving,” she said. “We need to do a better job preparing the workforce or providing folks opportunities to develop skills pertinent to the workplace.”
RIC, URI and CCRI are all taking advantage of federal funding intended to counter the drop-out rate through a program that has been provided through a five-year College Access Challenge Grant now in its third year. Grossman-Garber’s office created the Rhode Island Access and Persistence Program to support the funding and is just now beginning to analyze two years’ worth of data to determine how effective the investment has been.
The totals in funding to date, including the current academic year, are $936,116 for CCRI, $1,060,680 for RIC and $1,238,954 for URI, Grossman-Garber said.
At RIC, college leaders have formalized past efforts to encourage students to come back and graduate by coordinating disparate academic and administrative departments working to help students find their way back to graduation.
The newest part of that initiative involves a Learning for Life grant that is part of the College Access Challenge Grant and targets the largest and most elusive subset of students who left school without completing their degree, said Holly L. Shadoian, assistant vice president for academic affairs, and Christiane Lambert, Learning for Life project director.
Students at RIC who haven’t completed their degrees fall chiefly into four categories: an estimated 150 August graduates who were eligible to walk at graduation in May but didn’t complete their degree in the summer; 406 students who were or are being readmitted through admissions, and 200 students eligible to be reactivated through records. The fourth group has been estimated at 629 students – those who are simply “missing in attendance” after completing 75 credits or more between the fall of 2009 and the fall of 2011, Shadoian said. “We know they’re close to finishing,” Shadoian said of that fourth group. “About 89 percent of them were Rhode Island residents, so they may still be around. Their address may have changed, and the email they came in with is highly unlikely to be the email they’re using now. That’s going to be a challenge, to locate them.”
A resource team now in place includes the bursar’s office, admissions, the advising center and the registrar’s office, Shadoian said. In addition, peer-to-peer support is evolving, said Lambert, and student “navigators” are working with those who need their help to make sure they have the resources to be successful.
“This effort wasn’t borne out of trying to increase recruitment numbers,” Lambert said. “It’s really borne of wanting to reach out and offer this opportunity.”
Thomas Schmeling, RIC associate professor and chairman of the department of political science, has come across “countless” students who would benefit from “Finish Strong,” he said. He once tracked down a former student on Facebook and successfully encouraged him to return to RIC and graduate.
“Sometimes they just get caught up in their lives,” he said. “The relationships that the students have here are with the faculty, and they are the ones who need to work hard to help these students stay on track through good advising and outreach.”
Since 2011, URI has worked with more than 550 students, helping them to return to school, said Dean Libutti, vice provost for enrollment management.
“We’d love to graduate two to three dozen a year,” Libutti said. “We’ve actually helped dozens of students re-enroll back at their former institutions. The key to success is one-on-one attention, flexibility coming back, taking classes at night, online [or] in person, and providing academic tutoring and skills coaching for those who haven’t been in school for a while.”
Students from ages 28 to their mid-60s who completed the “Finish What You Started” program got a big, square pin at graduation, along with the satisfaction of knowing they will be more competitive in the workforce and have fulfilled a personal goal, Libutti said. “We’ve been getting 25 to 30 inquiries a month with no advertising in the past year,” he said. “In this tough economy, I think people are seeing the value of finishing their degree and [are] glad there are systems in place to help them that are personal and caring.”
At CCRI, the student-services staff recently submitted a proposal for a program that would reach out to students who have stopped attending classes, said Kristen L. Cyr, the school’s public relations officer.
“We have many services and programs – particularly in our Success Centers, which provide tutoring, mentoring and skill support, and our Office of Opportunity and Outreach, which offers a variety of programs to help students overcome barriers that would prevent them from attaining a post-secondary education,” she added.
Of the students studying at the state’s eight private colleges and universities, nearly 73 percent obtain their degree within six years, said Daniel Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island. Of course, the 111,000 students statewide whose college career remains incomplete reflect on all the institutions of higher learning in the state, he said.
“The eight institutions have a variety of options and offerings that could assist many of those ‘noncompleters’ get to completion,” said Egan. “We’re more likely to be able to help them in our professional and continuing-education programs.”
Grossman-Garber said the private institutions have chosen not to avail themselves of the federal funding, though some did consider applying for it.
For URI graduate Elaine Drake, 56, of Warwick, family obligations initially kept her from completing her degrees with CCRI and Bryant. But when her children were grown, she headed to URI for a degree in communications, taking advantage of tuition benefits from Citizens Bank, where she now is communications and engagement manager.
She won the “Finish What You Started” Academic Achievement Award.
“I did as well as I did,” she said, “because I committed to it.” •

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