How to Close the College Access Gap

0:00:11.3 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we’re excited to be joined by representatives from an organization called Matriculate, that arranges free one-on-one college advising and mentoring for thousands of eligible high school juniors and seniors. It’s an incredible organization that is making a real difference in closing the college access gap. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:40.7 Jonathan April: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Jonathan April, and I’m a managing director of College Greenlight at EAB, focused on uniting colleges and Community-Based Organizations, often referred to as CBOs, to reduce barriers and increase access for students who have traditionally experienced obstacles when applying to college. Those obstacles are often related to affordability, but they’re also tied to a complicated application and missions and financial aid process that doesn’t work well for today’s generation of college applicants, especially those were the first generation, their family to go to college.

0:01:14.7 JA: One of the best parts of my job is that I get to spend time with smart people from all kinds of organizations, who are committed to ensuring that more students from historically underserved populations, get a chance to earn a college degree. Joining me today on the podcast are three such people, representing an organization that’s truly making a difference in this area. I’m going to ask each of them to introduce themselves, and tell us briefly about their role at an organization called Matriculate, which connects high achieving low-income, juniors and seniors to highly trained undergraduate advisors, completely virtually, empowering students to attend colleges where they will thrive. Julia, let’s start with you and please also give us an overview of Matriculate’s unique model.

0:02:00.0 Julia Perkins: Yeah. Thanks Jonathan. And I love the introduction of smart people. I’m really glad to be introduced that way. I’m Julia Perkins. I’m the Senior Director of student recruitment and experience at Matriculate. At the core that means my job is split between two teams. The recruitment team, we think about and strategize campaigns that connect students across the country, to those who would benefit most to near-peer mentorship program. And then on the experience side of my team, we think about designing and implementing supplemental support that keeps those students engaged, informed, and empowered along their journey to eventually college enrollment at a best fit school.

0:02:40.4 JP: Just a little bit about Matriculate’s model, Matriculate, as you said, is a virtual program that is aiming to close the knowledge gap by providing free one-on-one college advising to over 3,500 eligible juniors and seniors across the country. And our model really harnesses the power of near-peer relationships by recruiting and training over a thousand college students to guide and mentor these core four students that they work through the entire college process, from applying to financial aid to finally enrolling at a best fit college.

0:03:14.9 JA: Andrew, can you go next?

0:03:16.7 Andrew Moe: Yeah. Great to be with you. My name is Andrew Moe. I’m the Senior Director of college Partnerships here at Matriculate. For the last 15 years, I’ve spent my time on the college admissions side, so most recently at Vanderbilt or excuse me, the beginning of my career was at Vanderbilt and most recently was director of Admissions at Swarthmore College. Today, I’m in charge of coordinating our college partnership portfolio. So that’s speaking with both prospective college partners as well as existing college partners. College partnerships are really critical to the work that we do. So we’re searching for colleges that graduate students on time, which means 70% and above within a six-year period. And that’s important to the long-term stability of our work, and being able to advise students. About half of my time I’m talking with prospective colleges, talking, them through what our model is all about.

0:04:10.8 AM: And that’s essentially starting a fellowship of undergraduate advisors on their campus, serving hundreds of high school students. And we’re also talking with colleges this year that don’t meet full financial need for students, but wanna do so for our students. So really excited about that new work. The other half of my time I’m spending with our college partners, so places like Yale and Williams and Indiana University and Emory. And we’re getting these institutions in front of our high school students whenever possible. So, our colleges are incredibly engaged in the work that we do and excited to admit our students, and increase advising capacity for high achieving low income students.

0:04:51.4 JA: Rajwantie, can you please tell us about your role?

0:04:53.1 Rajwantie Sahai: Sure. I am the Senior Director of Advising Fellow Experience and Impact. It’s a pretty long name, but essentially, we uphold the advising activities at Matriculate. Matriculate’s unique advising model provides a human-centered one-to-one, near-peer mentoring between an undergraduate student volunteer and a rising high school student. Both the volunteer and the high school student enter our program as fellows and commit up to a year and a half of college advising, starting at the end of the high school students’ junior year and lasting through their final enrollment steps, whether that’s early enrollments or regular decision timelines.

0:05:36.4 RS: My team carries out all of the activities that influence the participation and engagement of both the volunteer Advising Fellow and the High School Fellow and ensures that the relationship with the high school fellow leads to our college application and enrollment goals. We also identify any gaps or lags in that high school student’s progress and determine necessary interventions to redirect them back towards strong enrollment options.

0:06:06.2 JA: Thanks for sharing about your roles. Now let’s talk about the students. Julia, can you tell us about the students that Matriculate serves?

0:06:12.9 JP: Yeah. I would love to. So, Matriculate was founded about 10 years ago in a response to the Hoxby and Avery research that I think a lot of us are familiar with, that identified tens of thousands of students from lower income households who earn A’s and B’s, who don’t actually apply to a single college or university that’s an academic fit. And so those are our students, essentially. They attend high schools in all 50 states and territories. The majority of them are first-gen and underrepresented students of color and come from a household that has an income of under $90,000. Yeah.

0:06:52.0 JA: What kind of challenges do the students typically face, and what kind of expectations do they have about college?

0:06:58.8 JP: Yeah. As I said, our students are those who have proven their ability to really be successful on these college campuses, but come across a few common roadblocks to those best fit schools, mainly access to support. So 93% of our students are enrolled in public schools, and as we know, those counselors have hundreds of students in their caseloads. And so it’s access to that one-on-one individual support that can get them through that really rigorous college application process and financial aid. Beyond that, there are two core things that we also see from our students versus simply information access. We also know that the college application, financial aid enrollment process are really tricky to navigate, like what is percent need met? Why should I be looking at that and considering that? And in my college search. Why do I need to submit FAFSA early when I’m applying Ed?

0:07:50.8 JP: And basic things like what’s a liberal arts college? And so those… The information and support can feel insurmountable and overwhelming for our students and just not knowing where to begin. And the second is confidence and social capital. While many of our students are very… All of our students are equipped to take on the rigor of college, many don’t have that person in their immediate community who has gone through the college process, or gone away from home for college. And so that can be really scary. And having somebody in their community who has gone through that can be really helpful to navigate what that unknown is. And so Matriculate’s model really is trying to balance addressing both the information gap and also social capital gaps with this near-peer relationship.

0:08:46.3 S1: Andrew, would you mind telling us about the mission of Matriculate and the challenges that you’re looking to address?

0:08:52.8 AM: Yeah, absolutely. So, in addition to what Julia said about college undermatching, the fact that low-income students are not necessarily applying to high graduation rate institutions, more selective institutions. We also are really trying to tackle this dual challenge of college undermatching plus really high students counselor ratios in public schools across the country, providing that supplemental college advising component to our students who might not have access to either school counseling, college counseling, or other college access organizations in their community.

0:09:27.7 AM: We believe talent absolutely lives everywhere. It’s not just in the major cities like New York and Chicago and LA, but they’re in the rural towns and small towns across the United States. I’m first generation in my family to go to college, and I felt this, I didn’t know where to attend college. And I really would’ve benefited from an organization like Matriculate, where I had an advisor enrolled in one of these high graduation rate colleges.

0:09:54.9 AM: So, we are trying to provide not only content about college admissions, but additional social capital. And we’re trying to connect our students to these college partners and additional colleges, right? So, we want to encourage colleges to admit our students because they’re talented, because they have proven track records. And we’re doing it at scale, and we’re one of the few college access organizations that’s serving thousands and thousands of students. So, we’re trying to do that virtually because we recognize that we can’t physically be present in every community across the United States. It’s just not possible. So, being able to leverage undergraduate students to do this work is really important.

0:10:35.9 JA: One of the really unique aspects of Matriculate is the near-peer advisor model. Rajwantie, this is your area of work. Can you tell us about this, what this looks like in practice?

0:10:48.6 RS: Yes. So the near-peer advising model requires students to meet one-on-one with a undergraduate volunteer, who’s currently enrolled in a high graduating rate institution. And what’s appealing about that for most of our high school students is that they’re getting advice and coaching from someone who literally just went through the process themselves, and whose experience is current and on trend with what they would need to complete their own process. We do… One student… One high school students are accepted to Matriculate. They are matched with a volunteer advisor who we call advising fellows, following a list of intentional criteria that ensure that they are meeting as efficiently and effectively as possible. This includes things like time zones, location, but we also consider interests like their major, any specialized areas of interests like engineering or a medical school route. And then we also consider a few other criteria.

0:11:55.5 RS: The great feedback we’ve heard from students is that they often feel like they just met their best friend or they just met someone who they can remain friends with even after this experience. And so that’s always very reassuring for us. Those early conversations between an advising fellow and high school fellow, help them not only get to know each other, but develop a level of comfort in speaking about interests and even challenges that might prevent or slow down, or inhibit someone’s application process and eventual enrollment options.

0:12:30.5 RS: And what we hope is that the frequent live sessions that happen between an advising fellow and student help overcome those challenges. What we do expect is that our advising fellows and our high school fellows meet one-on-one live, at least monthly, but that they’re also maintaining frequent communication by text or email, shared Google documents, especially around college essays, for instance, on a regular basis.

0:13:01.5 RS: Additionally, on top of the live sessions with their advisors, high school fellows have independent access to Matriculate’s curriculum online, which they can access at any time from anywhere as they need it. Our staff also provide live sessions to supplement that coaching that they receive from advisors. So that can include things like QuestBridge webinars, all the way to how do they compare financial aid or financial aid awards, or looking at all of the options they have in front of them before they make an enrollment decision.

0:13:35.8 RS: Starting from that point of getting paired with each other all the way through the enrollment decision at the end of the year or earlier, if they’re on an early enrollment track, our staff are monitoring progress by either data points that are self-reported by the high school student or the advising fellow. And if we don’t have visibility on that, we get on the phone. And we do have live calls ourselves with those high school students or the advising fellow, again, all monitoring a student’s movement from interest in going to great colleges, all the way to actually enrolling in those colleges.

0:14:17.3 JA: Before your team can do the advising, you need to find the students to advise. Julia, how does Matriculate find and connect with these students, and what do they need to hear from you that will get them thinking more seriously about embarking on the college search journey?

0:14:33.3 JP: Yeah. There are a few ways that we think about this, but our most successful outreach strategy to date has been word of mouth advertising. As you can imagine, no one can speak more eloquently or more impactfully about the experience of being a part of our program than our students and advisors. And so we really rely on them to get the word out. We also partner with organizations like BigFuture, SchoolLinks, College Greenlight who advertise our program to their students. And then beyond that, we are really working on how we build relationships with the important adults in students’ lives who can refer our program to their students in their communities that would benefit from a program like ours. So those are teachers, counselors, CBOs, other communities members, librarians, aunties, everyone who would think like, my student needs this program, let me tell them about it.

0:15:28.8 JP: That’s also one of the core tenets that we’re working on, is that relationship building. And to your second question, what do they need to hear from us? Our team really relies heavily on our current students to help to inform and build our communication strategy. We are very feedback-centered and very much community-oriented when it comes to not only our staff and our advising fellows, but also thinking about how our high school fellows are informing that. So, these ambassadors have helped us to develop a suite of resources, webinars, and blogs that highlight the student voice experience and expertise, to provide key tips and insights to students beyond the four walls, virtual walls of Matriculate.

0:16:13.2 JP: And through this outreach, I think that those prospective students are really able to see themselves in our students and our advisors, who have gone through the program, and then begin to see the possibility of their dream becoming reality, through a program like ours or through access to information. And so that’s one thing that we’ve been really working hard to get more information out to students as well.

0:16:38.3 JA: As we all know, the last enrollment cycle was challenging for students, for families, for counselors, for enrollment leaders. We’d love to get your insights on a couple of the big, big, big topics. Andrew, I guess first, could you talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in university admissions and what that has meant to your students?

0:17:03.5 AM: Yeah. So as listeners know, I imagine most of your listeners are higher ed folks. The Supreme Court struck down race conscious review in college admissions last year. Meaning admission officers can no longer consider race as one factor among many, when admitting and building a diverse class. About 85% of our students are students of color that we serve at Matriculate. And this decision could have potentially devastating effects on our students, right?

0:17:32.3 AM: So not only in the admissions outcomes, but students start questioning, do I belong at these types of institutions? Do these institutions want me and want to enroll me? Right? When I was on the college admission side, I spent probably the first half of my career going to the high schools that the institution told me to go to. And these were mostly private, well-to-do suburban schools with a few charters and under-resourced schools sprinkled in.

0:18:00.1 AM: And then I sort of flipped the script and I started showing up 90% of my time at public schools. And had counselors talk to me about, you know, you’re the first selective institution to visit my school in X number of years. We need to show up for these students. And college admission officers need to ensure that students know that they care about them, and that they want to enroll these communities on their campuses. So what we’re trying to do at Matriculate is to mitigate those impacts as much as we can.

0:18:29.8 AM: So, Matriculate is leveraging our own social capital, our own social networks by highlighting students in our fellowship who intend to apply to any of our college partners, for example. So student profiles really help showcase the mission of Matriculate and how prospective students in our networks are being supported, what types of services that we provide to get them through the college admissions process.

0:18:52.2 AM: Additionally, three outta four of our students are first generation of college, which can still be considered in holistic review, and depending on how one identifies their home environment, around 10% of our students are rural and small-town students, which is also allowed under the Supreme Court’s ruling. So, there are a lot of factors in intersecting identities that can still be considered, and that we’re really trying to showcase and ensure that students know that these institutions might be really great fits for them.

0:19:20.6 AM: But for us, a lot is still unknown. Very few colleges have come out in the media or announced publicly the effect of this decision on their classes. I think we all suspect the percentage of BIPOC students will decrease in the classes that begin this fall, with a couple of institutions just very recently announcing that that is in fact what’s happening.

0:19:45.6 JA: Rajwantie, the other big topic has been FAFSA. I don’t think we know exactly how the delays and the rollout will impact fall enrollments. You can have a guess. What is your take on this and what you’re hearing from students and parents and the colleges that you work with?

0:20:04.4 RS: Yeah, this one I think threw a lot of organizations and families for a loop in the last year, but we got through it. In the last fellowship year, the high school graduating class of 2024, we observed a few challenges that interfered with regular spring enrollments that we anticipate will emerge again for fall early enrollments in the current class. Those challenges included time available for students to or families to correct paperwork ahead of enrollment deadlines, time to learn and fully understand the process, especially if this is your first time and you’re a first-time college student in your family, time to appeal award letters and receive potential improved award letters ahead of enrollment deadlines.

0:20:50.7 RS: We also saw in some cases that some colleges are able to produce awards without FAFSA information because of their endowed resources, but others may need to wait, and that can interfere with a student’s ability to make a decision around enrollment as well. Our students can get caught in the middle, are often making decisions without complete information. Those are some of the big challenges. Despite those challenges, in the last class of 2024, Matriculate high school fellows reported 85% completion rate of their FAFSA paperwork, and compared to the national average of 46% that NCAN reported in July, we gained even more confidence in the influence of that near peer interaction and the swift support that our staff can provide to students where we are able to identify those gaps or slowdowns in their reporting of completing paperwork or having conversations with their advisors.

0:21:51.7 RS: Some of those situations that come up that require staff support in addition to advising could be where students have a unique circumstance at home. There’s a household dynamic or a dynamic with guardians and parents that need someone to facilitate closer coaching through the paperwork, maybe even getting in touch with an actual representative from FAFSA… Other institutions that support the process. It can also be helpful to have staff step in when conversations around finances become very sensitive and a family member may prefer to speak to another adult, not a college advisor, and those are also situations our staff need the time to be able to step in on.

0:22:38.7 RS: We’re also still learning ourselves as an organization what amount of advising needs to be improved to better meet the change timelines between FAFSA and colleges to produce those financial aid awards.

0:22:54.2 JA: 85% completion in a very challenging year is very impressive, so congrats on that.

0:22:58.8 RS: Thank you.

0:23:01.3 JA: Certainly a big aspect of the work that you do is partnering with colleges and universities. Andrew, can you tell us about how much you really partner with institutions and what are the benefits of becoming a college partner?

0:23:12.3 AM: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re currently partnering with 10 colleges. We’re looking to add a few more to our college partnership portfolio this year. College partners are really important to us because they not only enroll many of our high school fellows, but they really help us increase our advising capacity to serve more and more students every year. So basically, colleges serve as our on-campus fellowship locations.

0:23:35.6 AM: Matriculate does nearly everything within our model. I like to talk to colleges about an almost out of the box experience for our institutions because we are in charge of recruiting and selecting and interviewing and training our students and maintaining the fellowship. We’re asking colleges for room space and some limited catering for our orientation program, as well as hopping on webinars and providing resource guide information and jumping on Zoom with us every now and then. But it’s a relatively low ask, especially compared to other vendors or non-profits that are partnering with colleges. Everything else is taken care of by Matriculate, which is really exciting, I think, for both parties and being able to partner on that front. For agreeing to become a college partner, colleges are really tapping into tremendous college benefits.

0:24:29.7 AM: And foundationally, what this essentially means is that you have exposure to our thousands and thousands of juniors and seniors through our webinar series. You’re in front of them in our database of high graduation rate colleges, in our newsletters. And we’ve also developed some additional resources like college cheat sheets and other resource guides or application fee waiver guide so that those barriers are broken down for our students. And our college partners are really in front of our students as much as we can. And then, like I mentioned earlier, we’re engaging in a new pilot program this year. So we’re venturing into financial aid territory to find additional places that are gonna be affordable for our students.

0:25:09.9 AM: So we’re looking for colleges that are high graduation rate colleges that can provide additional financial aid commitments to our high school students. So they’ll receive some of the really great benefits that our fellowship campuses also receive by meeting full demonstrated need for at least some of our students.

0:25:27.9 JA: And Andrew, I assume we have colleges that are listening and wanna partner with Matriculate that they can follow up with you?

0:25:32.7 AM: Absolutely. Just go to our website and you can follow up with our team and we’d be happy to schedule a Zoom call with you.

0:25:39.9 JA: Julia, how does Matriculate work with and support other organizations and high schools that are working toward the same goal?

0:25:47.4 JP: Yeah, we see our program as a supplement to that. So we really think that we are here to provide additional support to the work that schools and organizations are already doing to guide students to those higher ed goals. And the way that we do that looks different for every school and organization. So reach out to me if you’re interested little plug, but for example, so for some orgs that aren’t able to provide advising to all applicants, they recommend Matriculate as an alternative program.

0:26:19.4 JP: So if they’re able to work with, you know, 50 of the thousand that could apply to their program, they would refer Matriculate as an alternative program to those students that they’re unfortunately having to reject. While others that maybe don’t have an advising arm to their program, we work directly with those students that they’re already working with to provide additional support. So for a program like AVID, for example, that provides incredible in-classroom programming to support students and academically prepping for college classrooms, we are there to then work one-on-one with them on that college application process. So it, yeah, just vast and varied how we work with and partners with schools and orgs.

0:27:00.2 JA: I feel like every school could have students that could benefit from a near-peer advisor in this program.

0:27:05.3 JP: Yeah, I mean, even if there’s just one, we would love to connect and meet and think about how we support that one. You know, as Andrew mentioned, we’re hoping to work with more rural and exurban schools, especially those that don’t have college access programs in their backyard or a brick and mortar program. And so please reach out to us even if you have the one that you think would be a really good fit. We really value those relationships.

0:27:30.0 JA: This has been a great conversation. Guys, I know we’ve only scratched the surface but our time is drawing into a close. Before you go, I would like each of you to share your top pieces of advice for high school or for high school counselors or higher ed leaders and how can close this college access gap that we have. Julia, we started with you before. Can we start with you again?

0:27:58.2 JP: Thanks. Yeah, so I’ve over 15 years of experience in college access, and I think that the thing that resonates for me, especially in the work that we do at Matriculate, is how much we emphasize the importance of student voice. And so I would just echo that being my piece of advice to use student voice as much as possible. As you’re thinking about addressing challenges in your programs at your campuses designing new strategies, think about ways that you can engage those students who will actually be impacted into those conversations. They know better than any of us how that’s going to impact them and what’s going to lead to the most impact. So I would just really encourage inviting them to the table.

0:28:38.9 JA: Andrew?

0:28:40.8 AM: Yeah. So what I’d say to higher ed leaders is simply to be open to conversations with college access organizations like Matriculate. The folks that I talk with every day are surprised to learn about our model and who we serve. And it really starts with just one short zoom conversation to be honest with you. Colleges, based on my experience at least, colleges really need additional tools to help close the college access gap. They’re just not in a position. College admission offices are not in a position to provide the type of advising we’re offering or counseling that happens in schools. And by partnering with us, colleges can then point to us as a resource, right? So after visiting with a group of students at an underserved public school you can point to Matriculate as a free college advising program that students can sign up for so that that conversation continues well beyond the college fair you attended or the school visit that you just completed. And you don’t have to wonder whether or not they have that support at that school. They can tap into Matriculates resources.

0:29:43.6 JA: Rajwantie, to you.

0:29:47.4 RS: I’d say when designing opportunities for students coming from those more vulnerable backgrounds to apply and enroll in your institution, consider providing ways to connect with current students or alumni who can provide the insights that often worry them. Things that we often hear from our high school students are concerns about what the day-to-day experience is gonna be like when they’re on campus from and especially campuses that are so different from the communities that they’ve grown up in. What are the ways that the college can continue to provide support, so that they can remain academically successful and not maybe fall behind peers that may have come from, more affluent or more supportive circumstances than they did. Partner with organizations like Matriculate. You’ve heard my colleagues say that as well. We work with populations of in incre… We work with these populations and we are, incredibly able to provide more additional, more insights into their experience, their needs and can help develop a program to not only appeal to these students but also, keep them in in your institution once they enroll.

0:31:01.6 JA: Great. Well Julia, Andrew, Rajwantie, thank you so much for sharing so much about your incredible work in Matriculate. Your work is having a huge impact. We are thrilled to share more with our listeners. Thank you all for joining us on Office Hours. Thank you.

0:31:17.8 JP: Thanks Jonathan.