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Study abroad is tied to personal and professional growth for college students, but crossing the border can be an enormous hurdle for some learners or feel unattainable.

A new initiative at Bucknell University seeks to empower and support first-generation and low-income students who are interested in experiential learning and study away through workshops, financial aid and mentorship.

In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader spoke with Bucknell’s Chris Brown, Andrew Hartman ’71 and Joseph Fama ’71 Executive Director of the Center for Access and Success, to learn more about the center and how it reduces barriers to student participation in high-impact activities.

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

Inside Higher Ed: How does the Center for Access and Success fit into the mission and goals of the university?

Brown: The center was created in summer of 2023, and what we were created to do—and we’ve evolved since the creation—was to provide support and resources for students in five of our access scholarship programs. Those five programs have their own criteria for what qualifies a student to be enrolled. They range from some of our national partnerships, like the Posse Foundation, through some of our ongoing and internal campus developed programs, the newest of which is called the Gateway Scholars Program. It’s a program for all of our first-generation and low-income students.

We bring in a cohort of 20 students each year to provide mentoring and support resources.

The center is really looking at a few things. We say often, we are here to support the student’s pathway to and through Bucknell. We work closely with our partners in admissions and enrollment services and financial aid to develop outreach, to develop a pipeline and pathway to Bucknell. But then when the student is actually here at Bucknell, we’re working on resources to support their sense of belonging, to support their ability to explore goals, to set new ones, to really imagine themselves having the type of college experience that they’ve always dreamed of, and sometimes adding new things to that dream that they didn’t realize were ever possible beforehand.

Now, I say that the center’s mission has evolved. What we’re looking at is some very consistent characteristics of the students in our scholarship programs. We know that the vast majority of our [scholarship] students are first-generation students. Seven out of 10 of our students are students of color, coming from underrepresented backgrounds. The vast majority of our students are also Pell eligible and coming from low-income backgrounds.

As we were looking at this cross-section of identities, we knew that some students were falling between the cracks. They might not be in a cohort scholarship program, but they still had a lot of the characteristics that indicated that they could benefit from some of the support resources that we were offering the center. So this past summer, we revised our mission statement to include all of our first-generation students and include all of our Pell-eligible students.

Inside Higher Ed: Something that I thought was really interesting about the center was your access advocates. We know that students from different backgrounds may have less social capital when it comes to navigating higher education, and that can be a really big barrier to access. They’re in, they’re at the college, but they don’t really know how to reach everything that they need. I wonder if you can talk about that staff role and how those advocates support student success.

Brown: One of the things that we really were looking at when we created the center was how high-touch mentoring programs were a best practice, especially for students coming from underrepresented backgrounds.

We had a really strong program through Posse that connects students with cohort-based mentors. Through the Posse Foundation, they have a group of 10 students that meet regularly with a mentor, both as a small group and also individually. We wanted to take the best of the Posse model and adapt it for some of our other scholarship programs.

Our access advocates were created to help bring a sense of cohort to help students build relationships with other students in their scholarship program, but also provide individualized and tailored advice and support as they transition into Bucknell.

The access advocates work with a team of five to six students all within the same scholarship program. They do monthly events, so they’ll bring their group together to do dinner, to go to a show, to see a performance at the theater in town and whatever the group wants to do, to build up their relationships. But then that access advocate also serves as a one-on-one mentor figure.

We were really trying to be intentional about how we titled that position, because when we think about the mentors that we have in our lives, a lot of times, those mentors might have come from assigned roles, but they were consensual in the way that the title of mentor or the term mentor was developed. My mentors, I have identified them myself as a mentor, and they have also agreed and identified me as a mentee.

So the access advocates, we do believe that, as that program continues, that the students will identify their access advocate as a mentor, but we didn’t want to say that we’re assigning you this mentor role, because we really want the student to be able to explore who they see as a mentor. But that access advocate can help them to get connected with faculty, with staff, with fellow students, and to identify who their system of support will be.

Inside Higher Ed: I’ve heard mentoring relationships described as like dating, where sometimes you need to go and try on different mentors. The word advocate implies a cheerleader or somebody who is going to be there regardless. And then if you want that more formal mentoring relationship, you can “date” your way into it.

Brown: Exactly, exactly.

Inside Higher Ed: Beyond supporting first-generation students and others [to] navigate higher education and thrive at Bucknell, the center also has this program, Access to Global Education, which I’m super interested in. I wonder if you can give us the 30,000-foot view of what that is.

Brown: When we started the center, we were really intentional about how we tried to define what we mean by access and then what we mean by success, because we wanted to have a cohesive and an intentional, strategic focus on the work that we were doing.

One of the foundational pieces that we wanted to emphasize is that access is more than admissions and financial aid. A pathway to Bucknell is important; it’s the cornerstone of access. But access to Bucknell means access to everything that Bucknell promises its students.

So we were looking at a lot of the high-impact practices that are part of the student experience at the university—things like research with undergraduate mentorships and fellowships—we were looking at study abroad, we were looking at internships, we were looking at leadership experiences, and we wanted to see where we had a gap between the experience of students in our program and the students of the general Bucknell student population.

One of the gaps that we saw was participation rates in study abroad. So we wanted to look at, if we’re promising access, we’re promising support for the full Bucknell experience. We started with our partners in the Office of Global Education to say, “Well, how can we close this gap, and how can we encourage students in these programs to be more involved in the study abroad process, if that’s something that they would like to do?”

What we heard from a lot of our students when we’re trying to identify, well, what is the reason for this gap? Why are students not participating? Students were constantly saying, “I didn’t think that I could do it. I was aware that this existed, but I didn’t think it was for me. I didn’t think I would be available to do it. I didn’t think I could afford it.”

So we wanted to say, “All right, well, how do we break down that belief system? And how do we encourage students to actually tap into the need to study abroad, if that’s something that they want to do?”

We really relied heavily on our partners in Global Education to design out a series of workshops, and those workshops started with intro to study abroad. What does it mean to study abroad? What are the different resources and the different types of programs, programs that are sponsored by Bucknell, programs that are sponsored by consortium partners, programs that are connected with other institutions? What those different programs mean and how they’re shaped differently, the differences between a semester-long or a yearlong or a summer short-term program. We really wanted to dive into the details and make sure that students were aware of all the different options that they had.

We had another workshop that was specifically on financing your study abroad experience. How do you pay for it? What scholarships will continue? What scholarships travel with you? What are external sources of scholarships that you can apply for to receive additional funding to pay for the study abroad experience? That was a big one. We had a huge attendance at that.

We even had one workshop where we were getting into the logistics of, how do you get a passport? What we noticed is that students just wanted a little extra support in navigating the passport application process. We had a workshop to get your application done. We provided support for students who needed help getting their passport pictures taken in town. We also provided resources for them to pay for their passport application itself, if those financial barriers were a part of it.

In each of those workshops, we were really looking at what were the some of the logistical pieces that were preventing students from wanting to study abroad or feeling like they could study abroad.

We then also incorporated some of the cultural elements. We wanted students to be able to explore what it meant to do some cross-cultural experiences here on campus.

We partnered up with the Global Scholars organization, and they were hosting events called “My Country, My Culture and Me,” so the students were presenting and talking about the countries that they come from, the cultures that make that country so rich.

We were promoting the students in this Access to Global Education program to attend one of those so that they can learn more about cross-cultural familiarity, cross-cultural competencies, and start getting the experience of exploring a culture that is not their own, that would help them prepare to immerse themselves in a culture when they do study abroad.

We really wanted to help promote the idea that, yes, this is something that you can do, yes, this is something that you can afford, and yes, this is something that we can support you as you explore studying abroad.”

—Chris Brown, Bucknell University

As we were looking at these, all of the different series of events and activities, we really wanted to help promote the idea that, yes, this is something that you can do, yes, this is something that you can afford, and yes, this is something that we can support you as you explore studying abroad. So we’re hoping, as we track our data through this program, that we will actually see an increase in study abroad participation rates, that we’ll see the students who participated in this program take advantage of the opportunities that exist to study abroad through the university.

Inside Higher Ed: You mentioned a certain kind of student who might be interested but isn’t entirely sure how to navigate studying abroad. But there’s also the type of student who goes, “Oh my gosh, it’s so overwhelming. I just got to college and now you want me to leave the country?”

How do you navigate those conversations of encouraging students to take advantage of these global opportunities, but also addressing that concern of “I just figured out college”?

Brown: We see, oftentimes, actually, that come up with families as well; that the families of students say, “We work so hard to get our student to Bucknell, and now you’re talking about sending them somewhere across the globe.”

Part of that is really looking at like, what is it that a student is looking to get out of their Bucknell experience? And we try to bring that back to like, what are your goals? What are you trying to achieve as a Bucknell student? And then, how does study abroad fit into the picture of what you’re trying to achieve?

Rather than presenting study abroad as this like mystical thing or this far-off land that you’re going to go, right, we’re looking at, how does this fit into your plan that you already have that exists? How do you tap into study abroad as a way to achieve the things that you want to get out of college or the things that you want to do after you graduate from college?

One of the great workshops that we have planned for this coming semester in Access to Global Education is, once you’re returning, when you get back from study abroad, how do you incorporate that into your  résumé or your CV? How do you talk about your abroad experience in an interview for an internship or for a position? How do you leverage it for applications to graduate school?

We’re looking at the experience of study abroad not necessarily being some unattainable or special or foreign concept, but something that can be an integral part of how you get through your pathway through Bucknell. I think by breaking it down in that way, we see students being like, “Oh, OK, this is actually not just something that would be really cool or really fun, but also something would be really connected to the path that I see myself doing at the university and beyond.”

Inside Higher Ed: There’s this phrase that we like to use when it comes to equity work, “you can’t be what you can’t see,” like, we need to have role models or people who can help us identify with an experience or within a role. I wonder how you’ve leveraged either student or staff testimonies to help students see themselves as somebody who can take advantage of these opportunities, or that should be taking advantage of these opportunities.

Brown: One of the great partnerships that we have with the Global Education Office is really leveraging the folks in that office who are first-generation or who came from low-income backgrounds and are very public about that. They’re willing to share how their journeys in their study abroad experiences were connected to the identities that they bring with them, or that they brought with them to their own college experience.

The other piece that we were really excited to be launching this upcoming semester is a panel workshop with all of the students who are in our program who just got back from study abroad in the spring semester. So the students can hear from other students who are in the programs that they’re in, who share the identities that they share about what the study abroad program meant to them, about the things that they wish they had known, the things that they wish they had prepared for or even just the things that they learned while they were abroad.

That peer-to-peer education is something that’s really key to the next phase of access to global education. Now that we’ve got the logistics done, now we’re looking at, how do we continue to prepare students for the experience? So like you said, being able to see themselves in a study abroad experience, we’re going to be leveraging the fact that their own peers who are in the programs that they’re in are returning from their own study abroad experiences to help encourage other students to be ambassadors for the experience of global education.

Inside Higher Ed: We’ve talked about how on campus there’s a lot of really cool wraparound supports to assist these students in these specialized scholarship programs. How does that translate?

Brown: We really rely on the Office of Global Education. They do the translating for that. We’re checking in, like, “How are things going?” Global Ed has their entire process built out of how those ongoing supports operate through the programs that we offer.

I think one of the things that I found beautiful about my time at Bucknell is that the campus really buys into the work that we’re doing in the Center for Access and Success. There’s a strong recognition of the needs for these types of programs, recognition for the benefits of these programs.

People are buying into the goals of we want to have a more equitable experience for our students at Bucknell. So, when our outreach to campus partners has started, we found very receptive audiences in the different offices that provide support services, because they see how our collaboration is also fulfilling the goals that they have in their own departments or in their own areas, to increase their outreach, to increase the representation of the students that they’re serving.

We’re really leveraging the fact that we’re not trying to recreate the university under the Center for Access and Success. We want to make sure that we have strong pathways, that we’re intentional about how those pathways are built, but that those pathways lead to the other support resources that already exist on campus. So like, I don’t want to become Global Education for Access and Success, right? I want our office to lead students there so that Global Education and that their team can really do the things that they’re fantastic at doing.

Inside Higher Ed: Financial aid is such a big barrier to student participation. How are you all addressing that?

Brown: One program that we launched this past year—and this is independent of Access to Global Education—was a grant program for high-impact student experiences. We were able, and very lucky, to identify a generous donor, a Bucknell alum, who was willing to sponsor and put money forward to help students participate in things like study abroad, research, internships, community programs and community projects, with the recognition that high-impact student experiences are really key to a student’s satisfaction with their Bucknell education, their retention, their graduation rates.

We were able to develop the Candland Educational Impact grant, and that grant asks students to identify some of the things that they would really like to do as a Bucknell student where finances might be a preventing factor. After all is said and done, when a student has done their financial aid applications to apply for grants and resources, if there’s still a gap in funding that would prevent a student from being able to study abroad, they’re able to apply to the Candland Educational Impact grant for additional last-dollar funding.

One of the things that we have noticed is that about 75 percent of our applications that are coming through this grant program are for study abroad. We realized that having this additional financial resource available was really hitting at some of the reasons that students were not participating in global education.

We’re really happy to be able to combine both our work with Global Education, with the support that we have from our donors and the university advancement arm to help really make sure that the promise of access is really something that we can live up to.

Inside Higher Ed: This is obviously very important work that you’re all doing on your campus, but you’re also not the only campus to be striving for equity and inclusion and supporting access and success for students. If you had to give advice or insight to a stakeholder at a different campus, what would you say that you’ve learned in this work, or what’s an insight that you would provide?

Brown: I will say, don’t bite off more than you can chew, because I did not.

Our first vision for this program, after students did this whole [workshop] series, we were going to incorporate our own trip abroad. We were going to be taking students to another country during spring break and we were going to do that with virtually zero lead-up time for planning and implementation.

I think our eyes were a little bit too big for the type of program that we wanted to do, and we realized as things were starting to feel like they were a little overwhelming to get this whole program launched and off the ground, we can scale back year one. We can do all of these workshops. We can do all of the support resources to help bring students to global education before we’re planning our own trip during a spring break experience.

Now as we’re looking at year two ahead, for the ’25–’26 academic year, we do want to do that actual trip so that students have a very low-stakes experience with crossing the border, with going through customs, with what it means to actually use the passport that they might have gotten while they were participating in this program. That’s all part of our longer-term plans for access to global education, but we realized that doing it all in year one, we needed to slow our pace down and be intentional and being able to be successful in rolling out this new program before we started actually taking students on an international trip.

Inside Higher Ed: When it comes to measuring the impact and the effectiveness of this program, you talked a little bit about getting that student feedback after they’ve been abroad, and tracking who’s participating in study abroad experiences. What other kind of metrics or measures of success are you looking at?

Brown: We’re looking at some initial student evaluations after each workshop. We wanted to look at how useful the information was, how … they feel like they understood the information that we presented. What are some of the topics that we haven’t covered that students wish that we had covered? We’re taking some of that evaluative feedback after each individual workshop to pull together some of our assessment work.

Then the big piece that we’re really relying on, that we’ll be looking at in year two, is, for the students who participated, did they actually go abroad? And are they going abroad at least the same rate as our general student body? That’s the baseline metric that we really want to see: Are we closing the gap in participation rates and getting students at least to the level of the general student body?

Listen to previous episodes of Voices of Student Success here.

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