Experiencing the college life
ROBERTA C. NELSON
Herald Staff Writer
SARASOTA - The students peered into tiny dishes of armyworms.
Some used tweezers to poke at pieces of uneaten worm food.
"Eeew! This one's ****," a student said.
"It drowned in its own excrement," another explained.
More exclamations followed.
The middle and high school students were near the end of a recent two-week outreach program at New College of Florida. The worm experiment, directed by biology professor Elzie McCord, was part of an introduction to health professions sponsored by the college, Gulf Coast South Area Health Education Center and Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
"This class was an introduction to science and nutrition. They learned the basic building blocks of nutrition," McCord said. "They entered their data of what the worms ate on Microsoft Exel. Then, they gave presentations on their conclusions."
As interesting as feeding the worms and working in the computer labs might have been, they were merely vehicles to a larger lesson - that a successful college career is fully within reach for these students.
New College and Manatee Community College both offer outreach programs for middle and high school students who need encouragement and support to apply for - and stay in - college. Students are invited to college campuses, where they become familiar with college life. High school students stay overnight at New College or University of South Florida.
"Sometimes, all it takes is one person to tell that child he can go to college," said Kristen Anderson, MCC program director for College Reach-Out Program. "Once a child is in our program, we begin to refer to him as 'college bound.' Some of them do not believe they are going to college, but we take them to the University of Miami, or Florida International University, Florida A&M University, Bethune-Cookman. We tell them, 'Look around at this campus - there are a lot of cool minority kids here.' "
While the programs are not limited to ethnic minorities, the colleges are interested in drawing participants from underrepresented groups. The programs can act as recruitment **** to the schools, but they are also community services provided by the colleges, said Tashia Bradley, director of Diversity and Gender Education Programs at New College.
Courtney Dunbar, an 18-year-old MCC freshman, participated in the New College program in 2004. There was never any doubt that she would go to college, as her brothers did, but the program at New College gave her more focus, she said.
"It gave me a lot of information I wanted and needed," Dunbar said. "A doctor came and talked to us. It prepped me for what I'd actually be doing in college, and it made me want to do it even more."
Dunbar plans to be a physician's assistant specializing in dermatology. She started classes at MCC this month, and plans to transfer to Florida State University.
Outreach programs such as those at New College and MCC originated in the early days of affirmative action, when college and university officials first sought to increase minority-student populations.
"These programs have been around long enough that we have good quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate their positive impact," said Hector Garza, president of the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships in Washington, D.C.
"Not only are these programs impacting the high school and middle school students, but the entire family," Garza said. "With minority and low-income families, the whole family is in need of information. One kid is usually the trailblazer, and gets invited to a program. All of a sudden, they tell the other kids in the family, and the parents begin to say other children in the family should go. The impact these programs have is tremendous."
Garza, a Mexican-American who grew up in south Texas, was recruited as a student by University of Michigan in the 1970s. He earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees there.
"The University of Michigan had a very aggressive recruitment program to diversify its campus," he said. "In 10 years, the University of Michigan had recruited the most talented Mexican-American students from my small town in south Texas. Other universities found out, and all of a sudden we began having a very nice-sized group of Mexican-Americans coming from south Texas."
A lot of college presidents lament the lack of a diverse student population, but do little to support programs, he said.
"We have been arguing that higher education has a social responsibility to dip down to the lower continuum in the community and provide services," Garza said.
He commended New College and MCC, which augment their programs with private and college foundation funds.
The New College program costs about $25,000 or approximately $1,000 per student, Bradley said. Students have campus activities, including pizza nights, movies, and field trips to Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Lakewood Ranch, Dattoli Cancer Center in Sarasota and Manatee Rural Health Services in Parrish.
The academics are more rigorous than some students anticipate.
"I thought it would be like a summer camp, a vacation," said William Donalson, 13, who wants to be a mechanical engineer. "That is what my mom told me."
Others have come back year after year. Agata Kurtek, an international baccalaureate student from Riverview High School, returned for a third time this summer.
"I was recommended by a teacher in seventh grade, and I've been coming ever since," she said.
Anderson said MCC makes a special effort to recruit minority boys, who are the most underrepresented group on college campuses.
"That's been our target," Anderson said. "We have 25 students in Summer Bridge this summer, and 15 are males. Typically, you get 70 percent girls, 30 percent boys. Girls will sign up, they will fill out the paperwork, they will turn it in. That isn't to say they will come. But, if you can get a boy to sign up, they are committed, and they show up."
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