Upward Bound students are going to college, even as attendance rates drop for lower-income students

Jul. 10—GRAND FORKS — A few years ago, Teri Counts wasn't even planning to go to college.

Then, walking through the halls of Dunseith High School, she saw a poster for a program called Upward Bound.

"I walk by it every day, and I know everything that goes on in my school," she said. "And if I don't know it, I find out."

So she asked her career adviser, barged into a classroom meeting and signed up at the last minute for a summer program run by Upward Bound at the University of North Dakota.

Three years later, Counts is set to become the first person in her family to go to college when she attends Bismarck State College in the fall.

All 30 of the recently-graduated seniors in Upward Bound are set to matriculate at colleges and universities across the fall.

The Great Society-era federal program has been pushing out first-generation, low-income college students for nearly five decades, but its success is particularly notable right now as lower-income students across North Dakota

appear to turn away

from college.

U.S. Department of Education data shows graduates of high schools with a higher prevalence of low-income students are skipping the federal student aid form known as the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), a predictor of college attendance.

At Dunseith High, for instance, FAFSA completions are down 53% from this time last year. Every one of its students qualifies for free or reduced-price meals through the National School Lunch Program, according to state data.

Phil Coghlan, assistant director for UND's TRIO programs, which includes Upward Bound, says students are increasingly reluctant to commit to college, particularly as attendance costs climb.

"We're seeing more and more students talk about the price tag," he said. "The term 'gap year' is more common."

But the program remains successful at placing students in college. Its leaders point to a few factors. One is how Upward Bound engages with students early and keeps that engagement up for years.

For instance, Juvenal Chavez, an East Grand Forks Senior High School graduate, says his aunt lured him into the program as a sophomore by telling him she would pay him a $100-a-month stipend to complete some extra coursework.

"I was like, 'a hundred bucks? I'm rich!'" Chavez said. "But then as I continued on I saw there were way more benefits than simply money."

Chavez has been with the program for three years now, and is set to attend North Dakota State University in the fall on the North Star Promise scholarship.

Adriana Riggs directs the Accessing Choices in Education program at Turtle Mountain Community College, another federally-funded program focused on educational opportunities for Native youth.

She works with many of the same students as Coghlan in schools like Dunseith High and Turtle Mountain Community High School and she says starting the conversation about college early opens up students' chances of eventually attending.

"When I meet students who are lost in that process and maybe I don't hear about it until May, it becomes a lot harder to engage with them," Riggs said. "I tell our partner schools starting junior year, or even freshman year, that conversation about college attendance is a big factor."

Other Upward Bound efforts like its summer program, known as pre-Bridge or Bridge, help to demystify college for students whose family members have likely never been.

Madison White, an incoming first-gen UND student from Grafton High School, says a "work-study" session at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences helped her discover medical laboratory science, which she called "everything (she) enjoyed." She's set to pursue her undergraduate degree in the field.

Perhaps most important this year, Upward Bound also aids its students with the oft-finicky, technical side of going to college — like filling out the FAFSA, which many students have struggled with since the rollout of a buggy new version of the federal aid form.

The FAFSA is particularly important for Upward Bound students, who are heavily dependent on Pell Grants and need-based scholarships to cover the cost of their tuition.

Coghlan said Upward Bound staff worked with almost all of the program's seniors to complete the form. Some students were still working on their financial aid applications going into the summer program, and at least two were still waiting for their financial aid awards as of last week.

Counts, the incoming Bismarck State student, worked with both Upward Bound and Turtle Mountain Community College to submit her FAFSA after she ran into one of the financial aid form's glitches.

She maintains she wasn't worried about it.

"Upward Bound is very pushy with it. The only reason I got it done was so they would stop mentioning it," she said jokingly.

Right now, Upward Bound reaches only a handful of North Dakota's thousands of low-income students.

UND Upward Bound serves fewer than 100 students per year in eight high schools, none west of the Turtle Mountain Plateau. The only other one of the programs in the state is based at NDSU, and largely serves students in Fargo-Moorhead, according to Coghlan.

"There's a whole lot of state west of there," he noted.

He's hopeful another North Dakota state school can successfully apply for the competitive federal grant and open the program to students in the state's western half.

School-level initiatives like added investment in college and career resources are helping, Coghlan said, and Upward Bound has worked to incorporate the state's career and technical education push as well.

This summer, state officials say an outreach program using direct mailings, public service announcements and paid advertising to encourage recent high school graduates to complete the FAFSA will target lower-income students and schools with low FAFSA completion rates.

Coghlan says that push will be good for some, but is skeptical of how much good that will do for the students he serves.

"I think that could be very helpful — I know it could be for some people — but for our students, they get the most forward momentum from that in-person assistance," he said.