Boycotting the Bad Colleges No. 2

By Dr. Dean Chavers

Around the Campfire

      Last month in this column I wrote about the bad colleges and how we need to boycott them. Since I wrote the column, I have been reminded of several things. One is that the situation is actually worse than it appears at first.

      A newspaper reporter called me a few days after the column came out. She said that UNM, the college I wrote the most about, is not the worst in New Mexico. It turns out that, according to a state report, Western New Mexico University is the worst, with only 5.9% of the Native students earning degrees. Highlands is almost as bad, with only 13% finshing. New Mexico State is the best, with 25% of Native students finishing.

      I remembered one of the bright ideas I had when we first started the Native American Scholarship Fund, now called Catching the Dream. We should partner with colleges, I told the board, and have them do some of the work for us. We would give them block grants, which they would then give to students to help in their recruitment and retention efforts.

      We tried this for three years, mailing a notice to every college we could identify that had some Indian students enrolled. After three years we gave up without ever having selected a partner from one of the colleges. The reason: all of them were so bad.

      None of the ones who applied for our grant program could tell us what their dropout rate was. On a scale of 100 points, most of them scored below 50 points. None of them scored as high as 80 points, with three board members reading and ranking each one.

      A decade ago I put together a bar graph showing the Native dropout rates for 22 colleges and universities in the U.S. I got most date from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I added to it with institutional studies, newspaper articles, feasibility studies, and doctoral dissertations.

      Catching the Dream led the pack with only a 5% dropout rate. Haskell was the highest with a 93% dropout rate. Northern Arizona University was the second highest with 90% dropouts. Bacone College, where I used to be President, was third worst with 80%.

      Only eight of the 22 had a dropout rate lower than 60%. They were CTD (5%), Stanford (12%), Dartmouth (20%), Berkeley (32%), UCLA (48%), Colorado State (52%), the University of Colorado (57%), and Cornell (59%).

      All the big state universities for which I had data had high dropout rates for native students.

                        Oregon State 64%

                        The University of Arizona 60%

                        The University of Oklahoma 69%

                        The University of Oregon 72%

                        Washington State University 75%

                        Arizona State University 77%

                        Brigham Young University 80%

                        The University of Wisconsin 80%

                        The University of Washington 82%

                        The University of New Mexico 83%

      Using the total campus Indian enrollments, I eyeballed the national dropout rate for Native students to be between 80% and 82%. This clearly gives Indians the lead in dropouts.

      Unfortunately, almost none of the colleges has gotten better in the past decade. To my dismay, only one has tried. ASU hired Peterson Zah in 1995 to beef up its Indian program.

      Pete was hired as a special assistant to the president with authority to intervene in all areas of the campus affecting Indians.

      He has succeeded magnificently. When he came to the campus, the dropout rate for Indias was the highest of any ethnic groups on the campus. For the past five years, the rate for Indians have been the lowest. Indians on the ASU campus actually drop out less frequently than do Asians, which has to be the only campus on the U.S. where Indians beat Asians at anything.

      All freshman are now required to go through a summer program before they start their freshmen year. The campus now handles the financial aid program for Navajo students, and can use the financial aid program to monitor and keep in touch with students. Campus enrollment has almost doubled, from 675 to 1,200.

      I have seen no indication that any of the other campuses has done anything like what ASU has done. What a shame.

      I think we need a strategy to get other campuses to put a campus “Indian czar” in place . This person should be someone who is not afraid of power, and who knows how to use it. When Pete Zah wanted to have the ASU administration to go to the Navajo Reservation to meet with school people, he sent invitations to all of them. When he called to see if they were going, he got one excuse after another. Nobody–financial aid director, admissions director, deans, recruitment director, hursar, etc.–planned to go.

      So Pete went to the President, Dr. Lattie Coor, and got his promise that he would go. When he went back to the campus administration, he let them know Dr. Coor was planning to go. Suddenly all of them found they could go, too.

      The person should be attached directly to the office of the president, and not stuck down in some hole three or five levels from the top. On most campuses where there is an Indian person with authority over Indian programs, the person is powerless and sometimes invisible.

      The Indian czar should also have the support of the tribes and the Indian communities.

      When Mr. Zah tells a student he has to go to class and study, the student knows he means it, and will tell the student’s parents what the student is doing.

      The person should have personal contact with Indian students on a daily basis. I am still proud of the fact that when I taught at Cal State Hayward in the early 1970s that we had a high completion rate. We only had a 35% dropout rate there, which distressed me at the time. But later I realized that having 65% completion was a really high rate.

      We have two lawyers, one HUD official, one IHS official, one tribal development official, one gentleman of leisure, one college conselor, one legal services administrator, and one Indian health official from that group, which totaled only 14 students. One of the ones who did not finish is a tribal chairman, and one is a casino manager.

      The students at Hayward would sometimes drive me slightly crazy, but they were a great bunch. For instance, one time I needed to meet in the office with a student for advising, and asked the student to let me have the office for an hour. “This is our office,” one of them said. “You have to meet somewhere else.” They were very possessive about their office, which was officially assigned to me.

      Finally, the Indian czar needs to have strong outreach to Indian high schools to help them prepare Indian students fully for college. Indian high schools are slowly getting better, and some of them have gotten much better in the past decade. But the number that has improved significantly can still be counted on your fingers. There are 740 of them out there, and 730 of them have still not moved off the dime.

      Let’s star putting pressure on colleges to do a better job. Where tribes are getting little or nothing for their money, they need to steer students to other colleges.

Dr. Chavers is Director of Catching the Dream, a national scholarship and school ijprovement program for Native Americans. His address is CTD4DeanChavers@aol.com CTD has offices in Albuquerque.