Utah program shows minority students the way to higher education

By Lisa Schencker, The Salt Lake Tribune

December 28, 2009

The day before winter break, 22-year-old Quill Phillips guided 18-year-old Brenda Lopez through ACT registration.

She helped Lopez enter her grades and classes into the Web site. She led her through 72 questions about her hobbies and preferences. She made sure Lopez's ACT scores would get sent to the right colleges.

The deceptively simple process took about half an hour. Lopez, the oldest child in her family, said she probably wouldn't have bothered signing up for the exam if Phillips, a college-access adviser, hadn't been there to help her.

"I wouldn't know what I would have to do," said Lopez, a senior at West Jordan High who hopes to eventually become a nurse.

Over the past 2½ years, more than 4,000 Utah students like Lopez have turned to college-access advisers. The idea behind the program, which is part of the National College Advising Corps and is slated to run for a total of four years, is helping underrepresented minority, low-income and first-generation students find their way to college. The program trains recent college graduates, such as Phillips, to work in schools for two years, so they're still close enough to college to relate to students.

Aretha Minor, program manager for the Utah College Advising Corps at the University of Utah, said she and others are now looking for additional funding to sustain the program beyond next school year and expand it into more schools.

The program was started in 2007 and has grown. Most recently, a grant from the Texas Guaranteed Public Benefit program allowed the program to expand into two more Utah schools, bringing the state's total to 11 schools that employ the program. Nationwide, the program serves 37,000 students in 11 states with funding largely from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

"It's important for our first-generation students in particular because they may not have a person in their immediate family who has navigated the course of getting to college," Minor said. "We need to have more students who are college-educated that can contribute to the economic viability of our state."

As is the case in many states, certain groups of students are underrepresented in Utah colleges and universities. Last school year, for example, Latino students made up only 5 percent of all students at the state's public colleges and universities despite constituting about 12 percent of the state's population.

"Our population of students, they want to go, they just don't know how," Phillips said. "They don't know how to get started."

That's where the advisers come in. And it's work that busy high school counselors don't always have time to do because they have to see so many students.

West Jordan High Principal Paul Argyle said having a college-access adviser allows more students to get the help they need. Thanks in part to the recent grant, West Jordan and Hillcrest high schools got college-access advisers this fall. Though the program focuses on students from underrepresented groups, advisers don't turn any student away.

"This just takes it to an additional level of accessing opportunities out there we may not have had before," Argyle said.

Mike Zoellner, Hillcrest's new college-access adviser, said he'd like to see the program continue. He said in the short time he has been advising, he has helped students fill out applications for colleges ranging from Salt Lake Community College to Stanford University. He said he has talked to students who are determined to become doctors and English-as-a-second language students who weren't sure what the term "college" meant.

"It's such a tremendous asset to have someone here who can go to bat for students," Zoellner said. "There's so much information that can overwhelm them, it's nice to have someone sit them down and break it down nice and easy for them."

lschencker@sltrib.com