Understanding and Engaging Under-Resourced College Students Workshop

Under-resourced and first-generation students now comprise the majority of students entering college, but colleges and universities sometimes fail to recognize their unique strengths and challenges. The result is astonishingly low rates of retention, persistence, and graduation.

How does poverty impact college student success, and what can campuses do to improve outcomes for students from poverty and those who are first-generation college students? How can we help students take on the role of knowledge creator to influence both their human agency and the social structural forces at work in their community and on their campus?

This workshop moves from understanding the what and why of under-resourced college students to developing how-to teaching approaches and program-design strategies for success.

Participants will gain tools to improve retention, persistence, and graduation rates. Expected outcomes include:

Enhance empathy and insight.

Understand the concepts of economic class, social knowledge, and cultural capital as they relate to student success.

Broaden perspectives on poverty and first-generation students.

Build students’ resources for stability, access to power, and informed choices.

Implement proven strategies.

Learn the social knowledge (hidden rules) students bring to campus.

Use language to negotiate and navigate environments of poverty and middle class.

Direct-teach cognitive skills for increased achievement.

Use mediation to move students from concrete learning to the abstract thinking and planning required in college.

Retain and graduate more students.

Create transformational relationships of mutual respect.

Use motivational interviewing and a process of change.

Change the college landscape.

Create a College Achievement Alliance.

Include students in program design and systemic change.

College Achievement Alliance Trainer Certification will be offered June 23, 24 and 27 live online. Check out the details making students and your higher education institution more successful.

Watch this video about first-generation college students experiencing success in Colorado.