How NEON Is Transforming College Access

0:00:09.5 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we’re sitting down with the National Education Opportunity Network, also known as NEON, and discussing how their unique university partnerships are bringing college credit courses and real academic support straight into Title I high schools. You’ll hear about this model and the impact it’s having on college enrollment and what it can mean for the future of college readiness. There’s lots of great insight, so I hope you sit back and enjoy.

0:00:42.6 Jonathan April: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Jonathan April, and I’m a managing director leading EAB’s College Greenlight initiative, which is focused on uniting colleges and community-based organizations to reduce access barriers for students who have traditionally experienced obstacles when applying to college. I am very excited to host today’s episode because we’re going to be talking with an organization that is doing incredible and unique work to expand college opportunities and promote economic mobility for students from under-resourced school districts. The organization is called the National Education Opportunity Network, or NEON for short. They’re based in New York City, and since launching in 2019, NEON has served 50,000 young scholars across 34 states in more than 160 cities. NEON brings actual college courses taught by university professors from top colleges into Title I high schools nationwide, with built-in academic coaching and college advising. Students earn college credit and build critical skills to thrive in college and careers, fueling academic mobility and strengthening our nation’s future workforce. Joining me today are three representatives from NEON. I’m going to ask each of my guests… Laura, Sasha, and Kate… To introduce themselves and talk briefly about their role.

0:02:03.5 Laura Moore: Hi Jonathan, I’m Laura Moore. I serve as the Chief Higher Education Officer here at NEON, where I have the pleasure of overseeing our work with our college and university consortium to offer college credit-bearing courses to scholars across the country. I joined the organization from the Obama Foundation, where I served as Chief of Staff to the CEO, and before that I worked for more than a decade in education policy both at the national and local levels. I’m excited to be here today.

0:02:33.1 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: Hi y’all, I’m Sasha Bentley-Rohret, and I’m Director of College Access at NEON. I lead our work connecting students with college resources and opportunities, everything from organizing virtual and in-person admissions events to supporting students in requesting their transcripts and transferring those college credits down the road so they can really make the most of their NEON experience. I came to NEON about four years ago, and prior to that I was working in museum education and higher ed, really focused on giving students a sense of belonging once they got to college.

0:03:03.8 Kate Berkeley: And I’m Kate Berkeley. I’m the Manager for Strategy and Policy here at NEON, where I work closely with our higher education partners and develop and support initiatives with them in service of our scholars. And prior to joining NEON, I taught middle school and high school for several years abroad and in the Boston area before going to grad school and really focusing in on policy and postsecondary access specifically. But excited to be here and be part of this conversation.

0:03:35.2 Jonathan April: Thank you so much for all being here. I gave the short elevator pitch about what NEON does, but I know it’s more than just offering college coursework. Laura, I’d love you to teach us about the nuts and bolts of the program and the support network you established with students to make sure they’re set up to succeed and make a smooth transition to college.

0:03:55.5 Laura Moore: Thanks so much for that question, Jonathan. NEON is an education justice nonprofit, and we were really founded on the belief that talent is evenly distributed in our nation, but opportunity is not. We were really created and founded to work to change that, and we do that by partnering with incredible colleges and universities across the country to deliver and support college credit-bearing courses to low-income high schools nationwide, which is work that we do at no cost to students and at scale. Our model was really built to replicate the actual college experience and focuses on building critical skills as well as college mindsets and aspirations among our scholars. And there are four primary components to the work. The first really begins with those actual college courses that are taught on college campuses that are delivered to our scholars via videoed lectures. But from there we build on additional layers of support to ensure scholar success. So the second component of our model are the University Teaching Fellows. These are undergraduates or graduate students who are selected by the faculty who zoom into high school classrooms to lead live discussion sections and grade all assignments. Third, to be a part of our high school network, all courses must be embedded within the academic school day and have a classroom teacher who co-facilitates the course. And last but certainly not least, some have called this our secret sauce, is that we really work to foster a sense of national community, and we have lots of rituals of success and celebration built in… Things like big opening and closing ceremonies that create a sense of belonging. And we also work to bring additional resources and opportunities to give students the opportunity to hone their leadership and navigate the transition from high school to college. This bucket of supports and community is also where those resources come that help our students navigate their transition from high school into college.

0:06:04.4 Jonathan April: Thanks Laura. Data suggests that NEON students who successfully pass your college credit courses are about twice as likely to attend a four-year college compared to peers from similar high schools, and they have higher persistence rates. Sasha, for you, what are the key elements of your programming that you believe drive that incredible impact?

0:06:25.1 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: Yeah, so I really think that the biggest driver of that difference is our model itself, which Laura just laid out so well. Students are experiencing true college-level rigor, but with extra layers of support from both the NEON team and our university partners. I think just imagine getting that kind of leg up before you ever set foot on a college campus. You’ve already learned how to manage your time, how to communicate with professors, how to use office hours. And our students get to connect with real college students while they’re doing this. Our teaching fellows… They share that near-peer experience on what it takes to succeed. We know that students are much more likely to listen to a college student who’s 19 or 20 than to hear the exact same information from one of us adults who’s old and no longer has anything in common with them. So I think that just, it really has an impact on students. And it’s even more powerful when those teaching fellows also come from similar backgrounds as our students. They’re living proof that our scholars really belong in those spaces. But even beyond the courses, we make sure that students have access to college exploration and admissions guidance. That’s a lot of my work. So, for example, in September… Shout out to Appily and Common App, two of our partners… Came together for a virtual event where students got to learn about both platforms and could ask questions and get practical advice about that college process. And that’s just one of our many admission series events that students can attend.

0:07:41.0 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: But I think that one of my favorite parts is when we have the chance to get students onto a campus in person. For so many, it’s their first time setting foot on a college campus. Even when they don’t end up going to that school, there’s something really special and that changes, I think, when they walk through the quad and see some students their age, like, heading to class with their backpacks and talking with friends, and suddenly it feels real and possible. There’s just that sense of belonging and readiness, I think, that sets in, that really sets our scholars apart. And I think Laura had told me a while back about something her mom had said, that was “you need to put their feet where you want them to go.” And I think that really speaks to getting students onto these college campuses so they can see themselves in these places. And as to your question about setting expectations for success, I think that’s absolutely critical. Too many of our students grow up surrounded by the toxicity of low expectations, messages that college isn’t for them or that they can’t succeed. So at NEON, we’re really trying to change that. When scholars take and they succeed in these real college courses, they start to see themselves as capable college students. It builds that confidence and growth mindset and the belief that they can do this, which I think is really key for them getting into college and also thriving once they’re there.

0:08:56.3 Jonathan April: Awesome. Thanks for sharing all that. So NEON works with top colleges, universities to offer these courses. Kate, I know this is close to your role. How do you select and onboard partner institutions, and how do you bridge your work with professors with the admission side?

0:09:13.0 Kate Berkeley: Thanks, Jonathan. So, as my colleagues have shared, at NEON, we’re really committed to propelling economic mobility for our scholars. And we do that work with a wide range of institutions, so large publics to private institutions, small liberal arts colleges, and HBCUs. But what these institutions all really have in common is that they’re, in the words of Raj Chetty, mobility engines. They are committed to creating social and economic mobility for the students who attend their institutions. And so that mission alignment is really key when we’re thinking about the partners that we work with and who we bring on. And then from there, we really work closely with our partners to help them advance their goals. And that can look like a number of things, like the admissions work that Sasha leads and also even thinking about the courses that they bring on. So, for example, Howard has committed to bringing on a number of math and data science courses, in part because of the gatekeeping effect that they were seeing on their own campus, where students who were coming onto Howard’s campus, wanting to take advanced math courses, engineering courses, but they didn’t have the math preparation that they needed. So in their work with us, Howard is trying to mitigate that effect by offering their college algebra course to now thousands of scholars across the country. We work with our institutions to choose courses, and then we get to work really closely with faculty to onboard them. We have a learning design team that works with the faculty to develop their course for our model. And there’s really a lot of creativity and flexibility that goes into that process.

0:11:03.6 Jonathan April: What are some of the most popular classes that students are taking?

0:11:08.6 Kate Berkeley: Oh, that’s such a fun question. I can start us off. I think all of our courses, they all get filled, and so they’re all popular in their own ways. I mentioned Howard. I think our courses from our HBCU partners, we see just enormous demand for. I think for a lot of our scholars, learning from professors who look like them, learning, working with teaching fellows and just having exposure to these amazing institutions is really powerful. Beyond that, I think we see a lot of popularity for some of our English classes like Brown’s “Fantastic Places and Unhuman Humans.” The list really goes on. There’s courses that I really want to take, but Sasha and Laura, I don’t know if you want to add on with any other courses that are particularly popular.

0:12:01.4 Laura Moore: I think the only other things I would add is a plus one. But also we see lots of interest in our personal finance courses. We’ve got one that’s offered by Wharton as well as Arizona State University, and those are huge classes. I know it aligns with policy and curricular priorities in a lot of states across the country. And just beyond that, really see scholars excited to dig into topics where they can immediately see the relevance to their day-to-day lives. So definitely see lots of interest there. And in our growing group of artificial intelligence courses as well, which is an area where we’re working to grow, see lots of demand in.

0:12:42.1 Jonathan April: Awesome. Yeah, it’s amazing how you are creating really unique opportunities for students. So, Laura, question for you. What makes NEON different from Advanced Placement and other kinds of dual credit offerings in general? And I guess how do you see that NEON provides a unique structure and provides potentially different or… I don’t want to say better, but they may be… Better outcomes?

0:13:10.8 Laura Moore: Yeah, I would say what makes NEON special is that at our core we were designed and really hold solving educational inequities as core to our mission, as we only partner with Title I or Title I-eligible high schools. We’ve had lots of other schools who’ve come to us to engage in this work, and we’ve really held the line since we were founded in 2019 that that’s the group of schools and scholars that our work is squarely focused on. I think another piece is that while we provide guidance to our high school partners when they’re selecting students to participate, we don’t have a strict GPA cutoff, which I know can set us apart from some other dual enrollment opportunities. And beyond that, we actively encourage our high schools to advocate for students who maybe had a hard semester, but they believe that if these students are given access to the opportunity that they would more than rise to the challenge. We really welcome and encourage that as a key part of our model. I think given that approach, one thing we found is that our scholars are more likely to mirror the broader demographics of the high schools that we’re working with, which is something that is really important to us just at the core of our being as an organization. But during the courses themselves, you’re right that we are intentional about building in those multiple levels of support. And it’s something that we think really critically about. And as we see additional things that would be really key to supporting students, we’ve built those into the model.

0:14:32.0 Laura Moore: So having that university teaching fellow as a near peer is a critical piece that we actually didn’t know at first what impact that would have on our scholars. And I think both in the quantitative data and also just in the qualitative feedback we get from students, just hear how powerful it is to have, as Sasha was saying, a 20-year-old who maybe came from your community and is just a couple of years ahead of you, but looks like you… You can really start to imagine that you belong in college. Because that mindset piece is a big part of our work too. And then that high school teacher piece, that’s another component of our work that we learned was crucial to really helping students be successful. In our early days, we thought, well, maybe we could do this after school or over the summer, and just found that the outcomes weren’t as strong for students and so made that intentional move for having the courses embedded within the academic school day with that high school teacher on the ground who can build community, who knows the students and can keep them motivated… That just being such a crucial part of the work. And then lastly, because our courses are those actual college courses that are offered on our partner campuses, our students are gaining additional skills that maybe they would not be able to in other opportunities. Things like time management and self-advocacy, asking for help as a strength and not a weakness. They learn what a syllabus is, just all of these like hidden curriculum pieces. We also find that that’s a crucial part of our model that’s special and unique and promotes student success.

0:16:32.4 Jonathan April: Colleges obviously play an important role, and so do the high schools that you work with. What are the most… In fact, most important… Factors that you look at to determine which high schools are ready to adopt the NEON model? Kate?

0:16:46.9 Kate Berkeley: So, as Laura shared, we exclusively work with Title I or Title I-eligible high schools, just as that baseline. So generally, what we’re looking for when we’re looking at these high schools is schools where maybe there haven’t been opportunities in the past, but with scholars who are motivated and excited and want to take college-level courses and really challenge themselves and prepare for college. The other piece is the critical role of the co-teacher… That co-teacher who’s on the ground in the classroom with scholars. It can be a counselor or a teacher or a librarian or an assistant principal. We’ve seen all sorts of school team members step into this role. But what’s really critical is that they can provide that on-the-ground classroom support and really be that cheerleader, that co-facilitator of learning who’s going to be there with scholars. We’ve even had teachers who’ve learned to program alongside their students because it’s new to them when they’re taking the course, and that’s really powerful. And then the other piece that we look at… We now have schools that have taken dozens of courses with us. We’ve been a school that’s taking five in one semester this fall. And so with our schools that are really looking to expand the number of course offerings with us, we actually have a new initiative called Project Pathways, where we’re inviting schools who would like to take a multi-year sequence of courses in a particular subject area. So you have a cohort of students who might take six courses in a criminal justice pathway, or a computer science and AI pathway, or an education and social science pathway. So what we’re seeing is schools are really deepening their engagement and enabling students not only to deepen their content knowledge in a subject area but really kind of stack those experiences that allow them to prepare for college and also accumulate a serious number of credits and avoid what some might call “random acts of dual enrollment” and give them that continuity semester over semester.

0:19:01.7 Jonathan April: What is the feedback you’re getting back from high schools that is causing them to deepen their relationship? Now it’s a new question.

0:19:13.1 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: I’m happy to chime in. First, I was just looking at data earlier. I think it was like 93% of co-teachers… These people in the room helping facilitate these courses… Said that this is an experience that they would recommend to others, that has helped them feel more engaged in the work that they’re doing and want to keep doing it. And so I think that that speaks really highly to it having an impact not only on students but on the folks connected with students, whether it’s the co-teachers. Teaching fellows also have really high rates of coming back semester after semester while they’re in… To be a teaching fellow for the same course or the same professor… Because they really love the impact they get to have on these students and in these communities. So I think in the schools, it’s just the people who are doing it want to keep doing it, and they see the impact it’s having on the students.

0:20:00.8 Laura Moore: Yeah, and just to add to that, I think for some of our high schools too, it’s a real differentiator for them to say, “We’re offering courses from Brown or Cornell on our campus.” And so it really helps them not only market themselves locally but, I think, provide opportunities to students that help broaden their horizons and help them see themselves in… Maybe institutions that they were ready for but maybe didn’t think that they were ready for. So I think that’s a big part of it as well. And Sasha mentioned that co-teachers are so likely to recommend this opportunity to others, and what we see in our survey is that those co-teachers are really feeling like it’s professional development for them as well… That they’re able to work alongside these incredible professionals from amazing institutions. And that’s exciting for folks and is maybe different from experiences that they were able to have before. So I think we’re seeing this opportunity really be able to sort of meet multiple needs and multiple goals that our high school partners have. And I also think the courses are really fun and interesting. Kate was joking there were some she wishes she could take, and I know we all… We all want to fill up our audit card too. And I feel like that excitement extends to our high school partners as well.

0:21:21.2 Jonathan April: It’s amazing how you are having impact at scale, and scalability seems to be a huge buzzword that people think about. But it’s often… It’s the individual student stories that I think are the most important things to hear. Are there any individual student impact stories that you might share about students who have had phenomenal outcomes, love working with you all?

0:21:42.9 Laura Moore: Absolutely. There are so many student stories that I just like hold in my mind and think about every day when we’re navigating the day-to-day logistics of doing the work. But one young man we talk about a lot… His name is Donovan Blunt. He was one of our early scholar alumni. He’s from Far Rockaway, Queens, and took an Introduction to Engineering course with us. And actually a couple of weeks into the course, Donovan reached out to our team in a panic and was worried that he wasn’t ready for that course. He was questioning more broadly if college was a path for him because he would have been the first in his family to take that step. And long story short, I think, as a part of that multiple levels of support that we provide, Donovan not only completed that engineering course, but he finished first in the nation. He went on to take three or four other courses with us, and he graduated this past spring from SUNY Buffalo as an engineering major, and he’s already off working as an engineer at Angie’s List. And I think Donovan is one of so many scholars who really show what the impact of this work is. It’s not just about providing scholars with access to incredible content, but it’s really about helping them deepen their belief in themselves and their abilities and what’s next for them. So Donovan is a young man I think about a lot. There’s another young woman, Maria Arencibia, from Miami, who came to the US just like a handful of years ago, didn’t know any English, and then she went on to become the valedictorian of a professional communication course that we offer through Morehouse. And it was just really powerful to hear her talk about how she was really shy and didn’t know English, and now she not only has a command of English but feels really confident in her abilities to go on and be a lawyer. And she talked about how crucial the support in her classroom was to her success in that course and her deepened belief in what’s next. I could really go on and on, but I will stop there with those two.

0:23:55.2 Kate Berkeley: Can I add one more story that’s completing… So another story that’s coming to mind is a student, Tashina, who is now a sophomore at Stanford, and she is from Gallup, New Mexico, on the Navajo reservation, and took a number of classes with us, including a course from Stanford. She said, “I really want to take the Stanford course. Like, maybe I could go there.” Did really well in these courses and then made her way to Stanford. And one thing that she talked about was that through some of those courses that she took, she really felt like she gained a competency on some of those softer skills that Laura was talking about… Like going to office hours and understanding a syllabus and knowing how to email a professor. And she said to us, “When I got to Stanford, I just knew that I belonged there because I had taken all of these courses.” And I think about Tashina a lot when I think about the work that we do because I think that real college touch points… That’s so important. And I’m just so glad that it’s made a difference for her now that she’s in college. I think it just…

0:25:06.3 Jonathan April: Thanks for sharing those stories. I know we’ve only scratched the surface here, but I want to be respectful of your time. Before we go, please tell us what’s next for NEON. Laura, what are the aspirations? And please tell us how high schools and colleges interested in working with NEON can get in touch with you.

0:25:24.5 Laura Moore: Absolutely. So as an organization, we have a big, audacious goal to serve a million scholars over the next decade and be available in every Title I high school in the country. And so we’re continuing… We’re looking forward to continuing to work with our college and university consortium but also welcoming others into the fold who want to expand their impact beyond their gates and support our incredible scholars in this way. We think it’s not only so impactful to the students themselves but something impactful that universities can do in this climate that we’re in. So we’re really excited to build more relationships, and if folks are interested in joining the work, they should just reach out. We would love to have a conversation. And I think the other part that we’re really excited about is just continuing to build on the work that we’re doing around transferability of our credits when students take that next step, and also expanding and deepening our relationships with admissions officers. So just making sure that the work is not just about the courses but not only set students up for success in the classes but in college as well.

0:26:38.8 Jonathan April: For high schools that want to partner, who should they be reaching out to?

0:26:44.0 Laura Moore: They can reach out to our team as well. We have an incredible school success team that we would love to get them connected with. We would love to have them. We want to be in all 50 states, so we’ve got a few to go.

0:26:56.3 Jonathan April: Okay, awesome.

0:26:57.0 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: For specifics, they can go to… Oh yeah, sorry. Just for specifics, they can go to neonopportunity.org and click on the contact link, and they can get in touch with us there.

0:27:07.6 Jonathan April: Thank you, Sasha. That’s important. What’s it again?

0:27:12.1 Sasha Bentley-Rohret: Neonopportunity.org and click on contact.

0:27:16.0 Jonathan April: Awesome. Well, thank you, Laura. Thank you, Sasha. Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much for joining with… Joining me and EAB today.

0:27:23.0 Laura Moore: Okay. Yeah, thanks so much.

0:27:25.9 Kate Berkeley: Yeah, thank you.