UVa Has a Thing or Two to Teach Public Education

The News & Advance
Published: May 24, 2008

Just up the road in Charlottesville, the folks at the University of Virginia just may have found the answer to one of the most perplexing problems at all levels of education: how to engage minority students intellectually and graduate.

The Washington Post reported last week that UVa holds the distinction of graduating more black students with an undergraduate degree in six years than any other public institution of higher education in the country. Better than the University of California at Berkeley. Better than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Better than the University of Texas at Austin. Better than any public school.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education pegs UVa’s graduation rate at just under 90 percent, well above its public peers and just a few points less than Harvard, the national leader, which has rates in the mid-90s. And UVa has been the public leader for the past 14 years, under the able leadership of President John Casteen who’s nearing 20 years at the helm of the state’s flagship university.

Casteen has made it a priority of the university to increase black and minority student enrollment and graduation rates and the number of minority faculty, all while maintaining UVa’s preeminent national standing. And he’s largely succeeded.

UVa has achieved its phenomenal black graduation rates through a series of measures: recruiting exceptionally well qualified students, providing generous financial aid packages and having in place a large and extended support network that includes dedicated deans and administrators. One of those the Post singled out is Sylvia Terry, associate dean of African American Affairs, who’s taken on almost a mother-like persona for many of the school’s black students.

Terry’s personal story and family history show why she’s so good at her job. She grew up in a family that valued education and instilled that in her; she later attended the historically black college many in her family had graduated from. At UVa, she took the lessons learned in those nurturing environments and recreated them on the Grounds in Charlottesville. One of the most important secrets to UVa and Terry’s success has been the peer mentoring and advising network, pairing up third- and fourth-year students with first- and second-years in the early going.

UVa, like many predominantly white educational institutions, has its problems with race, but with support from the top, that history has been confronted head-on, not swept under the rug.

Which brings us to how UVa’s success with black and minority graduation rates can be re-created in primary and secondary education systems.

The cynic may say that UVa, with its deep pockets and ability to recruit the best of the best, has nothing to teach public schools, but that’s not the case.

Yes, it’s true that UVa goes after and admits the top minority students in the country, unlike public schools which serve students of all abilities. But what UVa does after those top students are admitted is where public school administrators and teachers can see the light at the end of the dark tunnel that minority students face.

UVa’s strong support network of peer and faculty creates a sense of family, something important to any college student away from home the first but even more so to a minority student in a sea of faces not like his own.

It’s that support network that can easily be re-created in a public school setting, drawing in teachers, administrators, older high school students paired with middle and elementary schools and pulling in community members and institutions.

Much of this is taking place already right here in Central Virginia, with such institutions as the Jubilee Family Development Center, after-school tutoring programs and churches.

But it’s a widely dispersed, far-flung network that’s sometimes so large you can’t see its entire scope. What’s needed, perhaps, is Lynchburg’s own version of a Sylvia Terry, someone with the institutional backing and resources to pull it all together in a very visible way.

Even so, one person — one office — can’t be totally successful unless the seeds of success aren’t first planted in each child’s home.

That’s a challenge far greater even than the one public schools face internally.