Collateral Benefits: Thinking Broadly About McNair

In the fall of 2007, I began college at Wesleyan University with no clue about how to make the most of my time there. As my first foray into the world of private education after a lifetime of attending inner-city public schools, I brought a lot of fears and doubts with me to Middletown, Connecticut. Fortunately, by chance (because it happened to take place in my dorm) I attended an information session for the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program mid-way through my freshman year. This program, designed to increase the number of PhD’s among low-income and minority students, helped me get through college by providing important academic and social supports throughout.

Recent results from a National Survey of Student Engagement show that on the whole, first-year students who are from racially underrepresented groups (in particular, African-American and Latino students) reported lower-quality interactions with their peers and with faculty members than do white students. There is also a gap between students who are the least and most prepared for college-level coursework. However, given that both groups of students have high-quality interactions at some colleges, it is clear that individual schools have the ability to ensure that all students have a quality experience.

At institutions where students reported low-quality interactions, programs like McNair can serve an important role in increasing the quality of interactions for students like me from underrepresented backgrounds (both racially and economically) and underprepared students. The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program was established in 1986 in honor of Dr. Ronald E. McNair, an African-American physicist and one of the casualties in the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy. One of nine federal TRIO programs, its official goal is to encourage and support students from traditionally underrepresented groups to earn a PhD, at least two-thirds of whom must be from low-income backgrounds.

By joining McNair so early in my college career, my participation in the program had a huge impact on my academic experience. To be sure, there are plenty of other factors outside of racial and income biases that matter for success (such as institutional culture) and there were other factors that also helped me succeed, such as a solid academic foundation and academic advising. However, McNair made the biggest impact for me because it provided multiple layers of support throughout my time at Wesleyan. In my freshman and sophomore years, I received guidance on how to choose classes and advice on how to study and manage my time. During my junior and senior years, I became part of a small cohort of students. Together, we practiced giving research talks, learned how to reach out to faculty members for mentorship, visited graduate schools in the area, and benefitted from free GRE preparation classes. The summer between my sophomore and junior year, McNair provided a paid summer research experience during which I bonded with my cohort and spent the summer conducting research on campus with a faculty mentor, which later helped inform my senior thesis. McNair helped me overcome would-be obstacles by providing opportunities, a network, and knowledge--social capital in both the Bourdieu and Putnam sense.

McNair helped me overcome would-be obstacles by providing opportunities, a network, and knowledge.

The McNair program helped keep me on track throughout college, and got me on the path to my next degree. But it didn’t just help me. Since Wesleyan won its first McNair grant in 2007, one student earned their PhD, eleven students have begun PhD programs, twenty-five students either have completed or are enrolled in master’s degree programs, and eight students are enrolled in medical school. Nationally, 152 institutions have McNair programs that served 4,191 students annually at last count. That may seem a relatively small scale, given that more than 7,500 institutions enroll 20 million students every year--but to each of those nearly 4,200 students the program is valuable. Moreover, according to the most recent available statistics, 43 percent of McNair students are African-American and 24 percent are Latino--the two groups that acknowledged feeling most isolated in the NSSE survey.

Within the Ronald E. McNair program, there appear to be unforeseen yet positive policy outcomes. Namely, this program helps solve some tangential problems facing disadvantaged students in higher education, like navigating the college experience, increasing academic success by helping to build key skills, and helping students have a better overall experience. Even the Department of Education seems to recognize that the program’s value runs far beyond the stated goal of propelling underrepresented students into PhD programs. That’s because, far from being a PhD funnel program, McNair can often be a means to provide a variety of supports to disadvantaged and underrepresented students.

Strictly adhering to the desired outcomes of the federal program, I am not the ideal poster child. I don’t have a PhD, nor do I have any pending applications to doctoral programs. But I am currently enrolled in a Master of Arts program. And although I am undecided as to whether I will pursue a doctorate in the future, I am certain that I would not have had the research skills or confidence that I had navigating Wesleyan and now Georgetown had it not been for the experiences afforded me through the McNair program. My story is but one example of why the practices of the McNair program can and should be used to reach larger groups of students, even students who may not ultimately end up pursuing a PhD.

McNair might also be one part of the solution to the feelings of isolation and unhappiness that the NSSE survey found. Institutions that are generally less hospitable to traditionally underrepresented groups should consider bringing McNair or similar programs to their campus. In the fight to ensure that all students are having a quality college experience, it’s best to take an all-hands-on-deck approach.