Creating Supportive Neighborhood-Based Associates Programs as Transitions to Higher Education: Harcum College at Congreso:

Mr. Kaufman, a Teach for America alumnus, who worked for three years in Camden New Jersey as an English teacher, works with team members Lisa Heredia and Carlos Garcia to serve the growing number of students accepted in to their program. Mr. Kaufman, Ms. Heredia and Mr. Garcia work tirelessly to ensure that each one of their students receives the support they need to succeed in the program of their choice and ideally continue their education at another institution. Working under the umbrella of Congreso de Latinos Unidos enables them to form the college experience to fit the needs of the students, rather than follow the traditional ideology that expects students to fit a predetermined mold.  With quick access to more than sixty service programs offered through Congreso, the team can also refer students to the health-care, housing, parenting, and counseling services to make graduation an odds-on likelihood for every student.

Q: How did this program start, and become connected to Congreso?
A: It was important to Congreso that the program made sense in the context of our neighborhood.  Access to higher education is great, but access to higher education that is culturally and economically relevant is better.  Harcum College at Congreso was started because the leadership at Congreso recognized that  our neighborhood needed the right model to ensure the greatest possibility of success for the students who enrolled.  A partnership with the Institute for Leadership Education, Advancement, and Development (I-LEAD) was formed to help create an off-site Harcum College campus, and we’re finishing our second academic year.

Q: What kinds of programs do you offer for your students that are different from traditional 2 or 4 year institutions?
A: The degrees themselves aren’t really different at all.  We offer Associates degrees in Early Childhood Education, Law and Justice, Human Services and Leadership Development.  What is different is the level of support we offer students in navigating the often confusing logistics of higher education.  We begin by working individually with students on how to complete all of the financial aid and registration paperwork involved with enrollment.  Over the course of the program, we incrementally remove those supports so that students become self-sufficient in navigating the institution.  We also provide tutoring for students who need it, and social support through Congreso’s programs for students who want help overcoming difficult personal crises outside of school.

Q: What is the benefit of having your program located at Congreso in North Philadelphia?
A: We can refer students to expert services across the street.  It also provides the community oriented piece. If you can talk to someone about your child’s health care needs, or about trauma that happened in your life in the same space that you complete your Higher Education in you are much more invested in sticking around. I read somewhere that compared to more affluent communities, residents in a neighborhood like ours are six times more likely to experience a life shock that puts them at risk of dropping out of school.  If those life shocks are going to happen regardless, then we need to find ways to keep people moving forward against those currents.  Most of our students have experienced some form of instability, violence, or trauma in their lives. These personal struggles don’t have to hold them back from getting a rigorous education, and can even help them to be able to understand clients or people they may work with in the future, but they do need the time to address the issues that they are dealing with and they need to have teachers and professors who understand what they are bringing in to the classroom with them.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges for the students you serve in traditional Higher Education institutions?
A: Well, think about it like this: Many of the rules that still govern the administration and instructional delivery in institutions of higher education were decided on a long time ago by society’s elite. The reality is that if we’re going to have an educated workforce, we have to help everyone get a degree one way or another.  Students still get the message that higher education “isn’t for you”.  And the way higher education operates, in a lot of ways it isn’t.  So we fully reject the sink or swim mentality.  If you throw someone who can’t swim into a pool, it won’t take long for them to drown.  That’s why the first year in a lot of programs sees so many dropouts.  But if you take the time to show them how to swim, a lot more of them will make it.  We give students a lot of time to learn how to be college students, if that’s what they need.  If a student starts to sink during their first semester, we get under that student.

Q: Does the School District or other IHE’s recognize you guys as a valuable institution and how do you recruit students?
A: We need to do a better job creating a “buzz” about Harcum at Congreso.  We are valuable in that we are interested in closing the academic achievement gap, in the same way the school district is.  We can continue to close the achievement gap beyond K-12, so that when students finish here they are ready for a bachelor’s degree program where they wouldn’t have been at graduation.  We recruit year round, especially for non-traditional students who have been out of school for more than 5 years.  Some have gone to other area colleges or universities and for one reason or another decided to stop attending, and others haven’t been in school since graduating high school.  We often don’t ramp up recruiting traditional students until the Spring.  We accept applications through the beginning of August, and value the students who are late in “figuring out” what they want to do. We want to serve those students in particular.

Q: Who are the staff and teachers at Harcum at Congreso?
A: We hand pick a lot of our teachers. If they have a masters degree they can teach a class so we try to find people we know or who we’re connected to who understand our neighborhood and can really provide a hands-on experience for our students. For example, one of our social workers at Congreso teaches a class on primary client management.  She lives the content she teaches during the day, so she can tell them first hand how she would deal with particular situations.

Q: What kind of support could you use from traditional Higher Ed Institutions?
A: We’d love to have more junior- and senior-year college students to come and help tutor our students in various subjects. We did have students from Arcadia work with us and it was a great experience for our students, but the logistics were sometimes hard because our students take classes in the evenings and work during the day.  The Arcadia students were really great at building relationships with our students though, and they seemed to get a lot out of it as well.

Q: What are some of the academic barriers that your students face?
A: We try very hard to provide classes that are academically challenging, but many of our students experienced very little academic rigor in their schools, let alone consistency.  How can we promote rigor when students may not have a gauge for what an “A” means and how to work to achieve it when their previous academic experiences were inconsistent?  They still have to learn the “soft skills” of education. We have to help students understand how to interpret the rules of a class, figure out how to best spend their time and how to rise to expectations. Some students will get frustrated trying to read every word of a book and will stop trying altogether when time could be better spent looking for themes and trying to get the main idea. We want students to love learning but we also want them to be able to navigate the academic system.

Q: How do you think big institutions could better support their academically “at-risk” students?
A: Instead of accepting a student, then realizing they are not prepared, putting them on academic probation and then allowing them to drop out with lots of debt, school counselors could refer academically under-prepared students to an institution like Harcum at Congreso.  If they deferred for two years we could prepare and support them and send them back to that institution when they are ready. We are gathering data on how our students do once they graduate so we can start building support for that kind of relationship.

Q: If you had the capacity to grow, what kinds of projects would you like to do?
A: I’d like to see programming aimed at keeping our graduates in the neighborhood.  Too often a degree is viewed as a ticket out of this neighborhood.  And if one of the most reliable predictors of an individuals educational attainment is the educational attainment of that child’s parents, then our graduates absolutely must stay if generational poverty is going to be lifted out of our neighborhood.  We have a vision that Harcum at Congreso will be an active player in rebuilding our neighborhood. For example, we’d love to have our students get academic support and grants to start small businesses in their neighborhoods that directly address the needs of their community. This is the kind of education we want to provide and that we need more resources for. We are combating neighborhood decay and violence by putting energized, educated people into their community with skills and resources.   We’re fighting the same fight that a lot of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods are fighting.  But if we continue to pull out “the best” students and leave the rest behind, Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods are going to stay that way.

Contact Information to Get Involved with Harcum at Congresso:
Dan Kaufman
Operations Manager
HARCUM COLLEGE AT CONGRESO
2800 N. American Street  •  Philadelphia, PA  19133
M 267-243-9710  • T 215-763-8870 ext. 7245  • F 215-425-0423