Metropolitan State College, where 1,177 students flunked at least one course last fall, is launching an ambitious overhaul to help at-risk students make it to graduation.
The four-year Denver college, which has about as many black and Latino students as the University of Colorado at Boulder and Colorado State University combined, will put 1,200 freshmen with the lowest grade-point averages and standardized test scores into “learning communities” next fall.
Those students will take the same courses and break together for tutoring with upperclassman mentors. They will have to get permission from a program director to drop a class.
Metro State president Stephen Jordan said retention is a problem for Metro students no matter what their race, but minority students are lagging behind their white counterparts. About 30 percent of the students who flunked a course last fall were minorities, though only 24 percent of all students are minorities, for example.
Jordan expects a larger percentage of minority students in the learning communities than in the general student population.
It’s a hand-holding approach Jordan said is necessary to overcome an abysmal projection for Colorado’s future.
An expanding Latino population with low college-going rates will drag down the state’s economy unless Metro State and other colleges do a better job educating minority students, he said.
Colorado, with a population about one-fifth Latino, ranks 41st in the nation in sending minorities to college, the state higher-education commission said.
Just 44 percent of minority college students in Colorado make it to graduation, compared with 55 percent nationwide.
Metro State leaders worry that after today’s workers retire, a burgeoning segment of the population will be qualified only for low-wage jobs.
“It’s going to come upon us before we know it,” said Dalinda Solis, a Chicano Studies professor setting up the learning communities. “We need to be sure they make it out of here with a degree.”
Provost Rodolfo Rocha said Metro State bears much of the responsibility for helping kids from Denver become the next generation’s middle class.
Just because Metro State has lax admission requirements – anyone at least 20 years old automatically gets in – “doesn’t mean that the students who matriculate here are not capable of succeeding,” said Rocha, a first-generation college student. “We just need to help them.”
The college’s new initiative, projected to cost $1.3 million per year when it’s fully implemented in 2008, will hold Metro State “accountable to the taxpayers of this state,” Rocha said.
The college’s goals include doub ling its minority enrollment from 24 percent of the student body to 48 percent and bumping Latino enrollment from 14 percent to 25 percent by 2010 – a distinction that would bring federal dollars doled out to designated “Hispanic-serving institutions.”
The key is not in drastically increasing enrollment for freshmen of color but in retaining minority students until graduation, administrators said.
Only 47 percent of African-American, 57 percent of Latino and 58 percent of white students at Metro State return for their sophomore year.
Other Colorado schools, including CU and CSU, link students in cohorts through courses and residence halls. Nationally, more colleges are developing learning communities because they have been shown to significantly boost retention.
“Students feeling like they belong to something is a significant part of success,” Jordan said.
The college is testing the cohort concept this fall with 100 students who are taking a first-year seminar and either English or political science.
They have built-in study hours – called “Rowdy Breaks” after Metro’s roadrunner mascot – and plan to celebrate milestones such as making it halfway through the semester.
By next fall, any freshman admitted provisionally – with roughly less than a 2.5 grade-point average or a 20 on the ACT – must join a learning community. Metro State also will create voluntary cohorts in engineering, science and other majors.
Erin Jones, a freshman in the pilot group, said she feels comfortable in class.
“You see the same faces, so it’s kind of like back in high school,” said Jones, who joined the learning community because of her lackluster high school grades.
In Jones’ first-year seminar course, she has learned how to get free math tutoring and found the writing center, where tutors helped guide her through an essay.
Professor Susana Vela-Pryor, who teaches the first-year seminar to 20 students in the cohort, exposes them to diverse religions, culture and politics with trips to mosques and Budd hist temples, and guest speakers on topics such as homosexuality and politics.
“When a student feels that connection, with other students, the professor or at least the course, they feel like, ‘Finally, somebody is talking about me,”‘ Vela-Pryor said.
Metro State also is trying to improve the campus climate for students of color, in part by hiring a more diverse faculty.
In the last two years, Jordan has hired 24 minority professors. Minorities now make up about one-quarter of the faculty.
The president said he wants Metro State to take such a prominent role in building up Denver’s economy that the college will become as important to Denver as the City College of New York is to New York.
“This is how we will achieve preeminence for this college,” Jordan said.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
80%
Denver Public Schools students who are minority
24%
Metropolitan State College students who are minority
31%
African-American Metro State students getting D or F grades from 2001 to 2004
26%
Latino students at Metro State getting D’s or F’s
19%
White students at Metro State getting D’s or F’s
10.6%
African-American students at Metro State who earn a bachelor’s degree within six years
12.5%
Latino students who earn a Metro State bachelor’s degree within six years
18.6%
White students at Metro State who earn a bachelor’s degree within six years
