Breaking the Higher Ed Luxury Good Model

Ask any college president about their institution’s mission and you’ll receive a variety of answers. Create productive citizens, good community members, strong employees, global citizens, and the list goes on. For Dr. Pam Eddinger, President of Bunker Hill Community College, the answer is straightforward: "I can tell you my mission is very simple. We're here to bring people into the middle class. That's it." However, making this a reality for the 16,000 students BHCC serves across the Greater Boston area is anything but simple. To make social mobility a reality for an older, diverse student body, Eddinger focuses on three pillars: financial, academic programming, and wraparound services. She articulates why both institutional operations and policies that address these three areas are necessary to get students through a system that wasn’t designed for them in the first place.

College as the First Thing to Go

When a student stops out of college, Eddinger knows it isn’t because they lack ambition or ability. It is that college occupies a precarious position in the household budget of a student already struggling to make ends meet. "What higher education is for our first-generation and low-income students is a luxury good. When something happens in your life, it is the first thing to go. All right, so your car breaks down. You can't pay tuition this month. You stop school. You don't stop using your car, taking care of your family." For Eddinger’s students, calling back home to ask their parents to deposit more money into their account was never an option.

This is the reality for many of today’s students, but Eddinger refuses to accept it as the end of their higher ed journey. She knows that the payoff is simply too large to ignore. "This idea of generational poverty changes, it changes you because you're making a livable wage. But it also changes the way you look at your children, the way you bring them up. No one going through community college and succeeding will ever say, ‘Oh, my children, they're not going to college.’" This philosophy runs through not only how Eddinger conducts operations at BHCC but also how she advocates for policy changes that are needed to support a new type of higher ed ecosystem.

Tackling the Biggest Barriers First

To bring Eddinger’s vision of the infrastructure necessary for student success alive, she highlights three pillars: financial, academic programming, and wraparound services. First, she sees free community college programs as more than a financial perk, but as a policy imperative. In Massachusetts, Eddinger estimates that the state contributes roughly $78 million a year across all 15 colleges to make attendance possible for students who otherwise could not absorb the cost. She sees this as an important political policy decision that removes the first and biggest barrier students encounter. For many students, “opportunity cost is tuition, is fees.”

Next, Eddinger is ever aware of the importance of practical academic programming that leads to ROI and a successful career for students. She is careful to specify, though, that this doesn’t mean strictly offering classes that are aligned to technical job skills. She describes it as an art “to create academic policies and academic framing that allow the students to get the hard skills to be a nurse and all those things that we know are good careers… but also give them enough what we call professional skills or durable skills that allow them to function and engage civically, be a good citizen.”

Nobody Wants to Say They’re Hungry  

For a student caring for children and parents while living paycheck to paycheck, free tuition and solid programs often still aren’t enough. Eddinger described substantial numbers of students facing food insecurity, unstable housing, transportation gaps, and childcare, quieter obstacles that determine whether a student stays enrolled. These barriers also often lead students to question whether they belong on campus in the first place. To respond to these life challenges, BHCC created a food pantry and now actively promotes federally funded childcare programs, discounted transit passes, and housing referrals for students experiencing homelessness. All of this work is aimed at making the campus feel like it belongs to the people who use it. She explained: “We've created the sense that the college is really not only a hub for learning, but it's also a hub for social services…and we do everything that we can to create the kind of affinity for students on campus. So when they walk onto the campus, they don't feel like, oh, this is somebody else's house.”

Identifying need is its own challenge, since students rarely volunteer that they are struggling. Eddinger recalled hearing colleagues insist their campuses had no hunger problem, simply because no one had asked. "Have you asked the right people? Have you made it not shameful? Nobody ever stands up and goes, ‘Hey, right here, I'm hungry.’" BHCC built the topic into orientation and everyday interactions instead of waiting for students to raise it: "When a faculty member sees a student or when a staff sees a student, sometimes we say to them, ‘Have you eaten today?’ And if they haven't, we send them off to the food pantry."

Eddinger is direct about the thinking behind this approach. People often say that students need to pull themselves up, without acknowledging what that requires. "If you want people to come and get education and lift themselves, you’ve got to give them the boots for the bootstrap, right? These students, they were supposed to be pulling themselves up. Don't tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They've got no boots. So we're trying to provide the boots."

Redesigning the Transfer Process for Greater Permeability

A community college can do everything in its power to help a student get where they need to be, but often the college is just one stop in a student’s journey. For Eddinger, this begs the question of how all of those pieces interact with each other. K-12, community colleges, four-year publics, private institutions, and selective universities all exist as separate systems that a single student may need to move through, yet the connections between them remain disparate. "The wonder of our ecosystem is because all these things exist and they exist together. And one student can traverse all the pieces of the ecosystem in their career in higher ed. What we don't do is to make the barriers between those pieces of the ecosystem permeable."

One of BHCC's answers centers on redesigning the transfer relationship itself. For example, the college created joint admissions agreements with partners such as UMass Boston. "We do joint admissions, not just transfer. When we admit a student, let's both admit them, so they have the identity with you and they have the identity with us. If they do well, give them scholarships to go to you. Don't make them jump through hoops and do a damn transfer essay. Make it as easy as possible to traverse the landscape of higher education."

Leaning into Partnerships for True Change

Change of this size, Eddinger is clear, is not something any single college can produce alone. "The community colleges, higher education, we cannot do it all. The problem is too big. We're solving for poverty. So unless you get partners to come in, in a meaningful way... that is really the only way." For example, she would love to see a stronger partnership with employers to continue to grow apprenticeships. She would like to see apprenticeships become less transactional and more of a true co-ownership of a student’s training. However, she acknowledges that the right incentives aren’t in place. She points to Germany as a model where “Employers pay into a trust and the dollars in that trust come back around and fund these apprenticeships. So there is a source of public dollars.” Ultimately, she would like to see a system that is consistent and so ubiquitous that students recognize it just as much as a Pell Grant.

Systemic change is never easy, and Eddinger frames the work ahead not as a system in decline but as a system being rebuilt in real time. "You need to make change, but keep that critical hope that things will be okay. We will get there. Higher education is not falling apart. This is what change looks like. It's messy."