Steve Katsouros on Inclusive, Accessible College

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we are here to help. If you’re interested in learning more about our services and working with our team, email Jessica at GettingSmart.com or visit GettingSmart.com slash whatwedo. Steve, what’s the key to accessible college education for historically marginalized groups? Okay, a big question.

So I would respond to that by being very focused on students or prospective students, being very student-centered, and asking your prospective students, well, what do you want from this post-secondary ed credential? What are you looking for? What’s your goal?

What are you curious about? What are you interested in? I want to be as community-based as possible as opposed to the university being very top down and presumptuous. So that’s the baseline for me.

What are the students looking for? What’s their goal? Another piece of this would be it’s critical for all students, whether marginalized or not, to feel like they belong on a campus, to experience community on a campus, to feel support on a campus.

And we know no matter what your background is, if you don’t feel like you belong, it’s going to be very hard for you to persist and succeed and complete. So what does it take for a university to make a degree program, to make its campus one in which students, particularly first-gen students, students who are from low-wealth backgrounds, students maybe who are people of color and they’re going to a primarily white institution,

what will it take to make them feel like they belong? And how are their gifts and their assets celebrated to make your university community even stronger because they are present and enrolled on your campus? So there’s that. Those are all revolutionary ideas of starting with the learner and creating a place where

they feel like they belong. Call me madcap. But John Dewey was talking about this over 100 years ago. We’re still trying to learn the lesson. Hey, I’m Tom Van Der Rook and you’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast.

It’s a pleasure to be joined by Steve Keturus. Steve is the author of a terrific book that we’re going to talk about. Today he’s also the CEO of the Come to Believe Network. It’s an inclusive, accessible college model. That model is really based on the success that he and his colleagues built at Arrupe

College at Loyola, Chicago. It’s been recognized nationally as a terrific example of a small school that produced very high graduation rates for kids of color, historically marginalized groups that have had a tough time in college, or colleges that didn’t start with a learner and didn’t create a sense of belonging. Steve, it’s great to have you with us.

It’s a pleasure to be here, Tom. Thanks for inviting me. Steve, you were ordained in the Jesuit order back in the 80s, but you really spent the last 30 years as a teacher and a school administrator and university president. Do I have this right that you started at Nativity in Brooklyn?

So yeah, Nativity was that before the Jesuits? Because of Nativity and because of my students, I entered the Jesuits. So not to get too religious with you, but God’s working with and through all of us, and their students, and their experiences, and their successes, and their work really inspired me.

I thought, well, if the Jesuits are involved in this kind of work, there’s something long-term here for me. The original Nativity School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, and I entered the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits in 1987. I wasn’t ordained until 1998.

The Jesuits were the very long training program. But that also included in my training being part of a team that started another Nativity Model School. So these are elementary schools for kids often either immigrants or students from low-wealth backgrounds who are in underperforming school districts.

And this is another option for these kids. We started a school in Harlem. And from 1991, I was there, 1991 to 1994, I was one of the founders there, called the Gonzaga Program, and that was based on Nativity. There are over 15 Nativity Model Schools now around the country.

They’re not all Jesuits, they’re not even all Catholic, but they are all addressing a need for students for what the Jesuits call cura personalis, care for the whole person, lots of wraparound support services to get kids across the finish line and prepared for, in that case, for success in high school. Steve, I mentioned that because I’ve listened to your story a couple of times and I know

those life lessons about the importance of creating relationships, of starting with the learner, of creating places of safety and belonging. As you mentioned a few minutes ago, you’ve really brought those forward into the higher education, but they’re critically important lessons. You went on to start a Rupee College.

What’s the backstory of that and how in the world did you convince Loyola to let you start this program? Well, Loyola really convinced me. So I was recruited in 2014. I was working at the University of San Francisco, another great Jesuit school.

I was an associate dean there and I loved it. And, you know, part of my Jesuit training many years before was to study philosophy. I was at Loyola University, Chicago. Really liked Chicago, not the weather so much, but everything else was great. So Mike Garanzini, a Jesuit at Loyola, Chicago, the president of Loyola, Chicago, reached

out to me in 2014 and said, listen, I think I’ve got something for you. It’s risky, but it could be really worthwhile. So I thought, oh my God, you know, paleological students, this is a startup. I was in my 50s then. I thought, do I have the energy for a startup at this point in my life?

You know, San Francisco, great weather, great wine. Why am I leaving this? I went to check out Chicago dressed as, you know, in early May. I had a little windbreaker from San Francisco. I got off the planet over here.

It was snowing. So I thought, confirmation, a burning bush. This is why I should not be here. But I also thought, this is what we ought to be doing. And you know, Jesuit schools, Catholic universities, all universities have language and rhetoric

about social justice, about DEI, about wanting to be with folks in the margins. You know, and this was a way of substantively putting meat on those bones of that rhetoric. So I say goodbye to San Francisco and move to Chicago in 2014. Not as president of Arrupe, but as founding dean. And that was an extraordinary first year, an extraordinary six years of my life, total

at Arrupe. The first year was the launch year. So I had about 10 months between the time I got off the plane in Chicago and the time we enrolled the first class to get accreditation, to recruit at first class, to raise funds, to hire people, to create a curriculum, to work on the design for an orientation for

the summer for the students, to welcome the students. So it was exhilarating. It was exciting. It was a little bit exhausting, but so were. How many students did you launch with that fall?

159. I’m helping you knew their names pretty quickly. I did. I’m a little bit like Rain Man when it comes to names. So you know, so that low number helped.

I mean, Steve, Steve, why was it was it contemplated as a two year program from the get go? And if so, why? That strikes me as an interesting idea. You know, we, it’s a great question. At the time we were recognizing that there are so many two year colleges like those in

Chicago where the graduation rates were low. And you know, universities like Laila would say, oh, well, we’re happy to accept transfers from to your colleges, but they weren’t graduating, you know. So we wanted to focus on a specific population. Students who are right out of high school who had B minus to C minus GPAs in high school

who had low ACTs, mostly because they couldn’t afford ACT prep classes or SAT tutors or that kind of a thing. So we thought of this as a bridge, a bridge from high school to going on to a four year or going into the workforce. And really sort of addressing the two year college conundrum that we were seeing in Chicago.

Now I mean, in Chicago at that time, there were over 100,000 students enrolled in seven city colleges. So 159 students was not going to be much of a threat for them. But it was also, I don’t know if Laila thought about this, but it became apparent to me, I think to my colleagues early on.

It was like Laila were missing out on great students, on great young people who, you know, because of their grades or because of their backgrounds or because of finances, they’d say, boy, Laila’s not the school for me. I’ll never get into Laila. I can never succeed at Laila.

That’s not for me. That’s for white people or that’s for smart people or rich people. These perceptions, right? And as I said earlier, these students at a Ruepe College really influenced and impacted the overall university in terms of, you know, all right, well, what works in terms of retention

for Ruepe students? How do we deliver a liberal arts curriculum more effectively, more efficiently because of the Ruepe students experiences? So they’re influencers and the overall enterprise is success and trajectory. So why did it work so well?

What were the keys to success? So if we fast forward, your graduation rates at a Ruepe have been phenomenal. Is it the small school environment? Is it the supports? Is it the personalized instruction?

Is it all of those? Yeah, I’d have to say, first of all, it was a Ruepe benefits from being part of the larger university. Loyola has a national brand that’s very positive and that was very attractive for these students. Also Loyola had the bandwidth to create this new academic unit.

So you know, lots of credit to Loyola University for saying, let’s try something different here. They had space on the campus, on the Water Tower campus, the downtown campus. So these students saw other undergrads and then began to think of themselves, oh, I like business.

I like accounting. I like statistics. I like philosophy. I like a polypsite. I want to go on and get my bachelor’s degree.

So the Loyola piece was huge. The faculty that we hired, I mean, they’re really the heroes of this story. They were also the academic advisors. And so we know this. This is no fault of anyone, but academic advisors and a lot of community colleges, the advisors

have hundreds, 500, 600, 650 advisees. And these are students whose parents are not navigating all of this for them. They’re working. They’re commuting. They’re, you know, school is just one of their many priorities.

Similar population with Orupe. Our faculty were trained as advisors and they would have loads of 20 to 25. And the advising style was called intrusive advising was based on my personality. Very intrusive. We also had a lot of wraparound support services, whether it was a very robust orientation program

where community was emphasized and built immediately, whether it was all the students for having access to free breakfast and lunch every day that there were classes. And that was to address food insecurity, but again, it was about building community, you know, I mean, from a religion where important things happen at a meal at a table. So, you know, similarly, this is, you know, translates to what happens at the student

commons at Orupe. Every student gets a technology, a computer, a laptop so that they’re on a level playing ground. It’s the same laptop that their faculty members have. So, you know, they’re not doing their homework on their smartphone or in the library or

nowhere, you know, kind of thing. They have access to the same amount of technology. To address mental health, we had two social workers full time working at Orupe. And when Father Garanzini recruited me, he said, now, listen, you’ve got to share this building at Loyola with another academic unit.

I said, Mike, we’re Jesuits. We don’t like sharing. We’re not good at that. And he said, well, I’m sorry about that, Steve, but he said, who do you want to share with us?

So, we have a school of social work. Every MSW student I’ve ever met is looking for hours. We can be their hours and Orupe students can benefit from their services. What a great synergy of two different academic units, right? Mutually beneficial.

So, you can see we have all these career services person that’s working with our students to find employers that are interested. It’s students from Loyola and a diverse workforce. Sign me up. You know, this is tremendous.

So, and then a college transfer counselor that works with students as they finish their associates degrees, will they continue at Loyola? Will they go to Chicago or Illinois State colleges? Will they go to other Catholic universities? Do they want to go away?

Do they want to stay local? Can we help you navigate FAFSA? All of that. And then finally, a graduate support coordinator. So, that position really tracks, well, how are the students doing?

And holds alumni. But, I mean, you know, you talk about stats. So, you know, 88% of our graduates go on to four-year institutions. Almost 80% complete their bachelor’s degrees in five years time versus the national average, 14% of those who start in two-year colleges, one for 14% complete their bachelor’s degrees.

And six years time. So, you know, it didn’t just work at a root bay for the two years. That bridge served to get them to the finish line for their bachelors as well. So, Steve, I love the, I love the whole design. I love the wraparound supports, but that sounds like it costs two or three times with the normal

program does at Loyola. So, how do you make that so supportive and yet affordable? Yeah. So, we leverage being part of the larger university. So, like other academic units, we benefit from a building and that building custodian

with security, technology, our students have access to the university library, the rec place, the wellness center, you know, as a dean, I benefited from the legal council and HR and the advancement office and marketing communications. So, as a whole of that, the cost per student at a root bay was $15,115. All of our students, unless they were undocumented, more about that in a second, but if they were,

all of our students qualified for federal and state aid. So, that covered about 61% of my budget. I had to raise $2 million a year. Now, I am one of those rare deans that, well, I shouldn’t say that, but a lot of deans don’t like fundraising.

I really like it. And, you know, I just thought this was such a compelling thing for funders to support. And people said, well, of course, you know, I’ll support students and the breakfast and lunch program or computer for every student or these other resources. So, we always exceeded our goal of $2 million.

That’s why the Biden plan, you know, I was very interested in what he built into for those wraparound support services, because that’s what gets these students across the finish line. 20% of our students were undocumented. So they were ineligible for federal and state aid.

We partnered with the dream.us. So kudos to them. Don Graham from the Washington Post family started this. And he and his colleagues at dream.us would offer scholarships to offset what undocumented students were not receiving from the feds in the state.

And so that was student revenue coming from the dream.us. They were at, they’ve been outstanding partners. Steve, were and are most of the Rupe students, commuter students? Yes. You know, so that’s another cost saver.

Every 18-year-old wants to live on campus, you know, have a roommate, have that experience to be on campus already. However, that would put, you know, an additional financial burden on the university. So it’s a commuter school. We find that for the most part that works.

You know, sometimes I’m asked, well, you know, the students really able to participate fully as a loyalist student. And the answer is, well, remember they’re commuting. And so that’s an added layer of, you know, less of an opportunity that they lived on campus.

But, you know, from a cost perspective, it made it doable for the university for me as a fundraiser. And for, you know, I think the Rune Board at Loyola was just around $14,000, you know, times. The goal is, we maxed out at 350 students before the pandemic.

Well, you know, if they were living on campus, that would be a big night. So Steve, it sounds like four years ago, you wrote this down in a great book called Come to Believe, How the Jesuits Are Reinventing Education Again, which I think tells in a little more detail the story that we’ve just discussed. And then a couple years ago, you started the Come to Believe Network.

And you’re now in the process of helping other institutions take advantage of this model. Is that basically right? You’ve got the timeline. That’s right. That said, you know, before I left Arrupe, before I moved from Chicago back to New York

in 2020, I, we had already replicated the model once at the University of St. Thomas, the Darity Family College. And they’ve also experienced great success. Their president, Julie Sullivan, very visionary, you know, I sent folks from Arrupe up to Minnesota to the Twin Cities to advise them.

He sent folks to visit, you know, Arrupe. She brought her board to visit our students and our, you know, our building and to talk to my colleagues and me. And they’re remarkable. So I thought, okay, we’re an N of two.

And I asked Accenture, well, some funders said, you know, you need to get a replication feasibility study. So I hired Accenture to conduct that. And, you know, they said, it’s very replicable. You have to, the host institution has to have some key characteristics in order for the

host institution, like a Loyola or like a University of St. Thomas, to launch and sustain a successful two-year college. And so armed with that, you know, I got my 501c3 and the blessings of the Jesuits to offer this assignment. And so it sounds like they come to believe models very much like a Rupay.

It’s housed at a four-year institution. The goal is to serve as a bridge and to some extent a pipeline for that institution. It has all the, the model has all the supports that you talked about, social services, career counseling, access to mental health. I noticed one thing in the, in the come to believe model, it says it’s a year round

academic calendar. Did, did you do that at a Rupay or is this? Yes. Yeah. So the schedule at a Rupay is for the fall semester and the spring semester identical

with the rest of the undergrad calendar. Rupay students take four classes in the fall, four in the spring. And then from the Tuesday after Memorial Day into the last Friday in July, they take two more classes. So this allows for students who are commuters to focus on four classes rather than five.

And it also, you know, for some students that being a school year round was important, you know, for the community, for the other support services that a Rupay offers. And you know, I, I don’t know if a Rupay students would agree with this or not, but I just thought it was a good retention tool. You know, I think for, I mean, I really wanted to be in touch with these students year round.

And if we said in May, okay, have a great summer and we’ll see you in August, I was concerned that they might stop out, that they might, you know, be working full time or situation their family might arise that, you know, we can’t assist with. And then they wouldn’t, you know, this was really a way of addressing my concerns about retention.

So. Steve, what’s the, what’s the right size for a come to believe campus couple hundred students? Yeah, you know, so my thing is always a critical mass, you know, you want to offer a couple of different pathway degrees, maybe something in health sciences or something in, in STEM

or something in business or something in social behavioral sciences. Well, unless you’re just going to be one degree health professions or one degree business, you need enough students, you know, to, in order to populate those degree problems as associate degree programs and, you know, for the faculty to have full loads, you know, you have to have enough students.

So you know, for us, we were designed for 400 students. And you know, recognizing that there was going to be attrition along the way, recognizing that some students would stay on beyond two years, maybe it takes them two and a half or three years to complete the two year degree. But that was always the sweet spot for us to go to 400.

And that made sense to me. We had three degree tracks, you know, out of root bay. And that was, that was enough, you know, and we had 20 full time faculty. So that’s the size of traditionally great high schools as well. And as a head of school, you can remember everybody’s name, right?

Very important. Small supportive environment. Steve, does this model require separate accreditation? Is a school like a root bay separately accredited or does it operate as a division of Loyola? Yeah, that’s a great question, Tom.

So a root bay college, think of as, you know, Loyola’s business school or school of nursing or communication school or college of arts and sciences. This is their two year degree program. Because this was, because Loyola Chicago had never offered a two year associate degree before, we did have to go through an accreditation process.

And I remember, you know, we were already getting applications from students. And you know, so the accreditation team came in January 2015. And you know, we were very well prepared, but you never know until you know. And so the accreditation team came and they peppered us with a lot of questions and they reviewed our materials.

About two hours into their visit, one of the team members kind of took me aside and said, can my provost call you next week because we might want to do this on our campus. So I thought, okay, we’re out of the dog house. They like what they’re hearing, you know. Yeah.

Steve, did that take like two years to get accredited? No, no, no, no. We received provisional accreditation at that visit in January. And then we received full accreditation in the spring. But that January accreditation allowed us to do was begin to accept applications through

our website, through the Arroupay website that were designated for Arroupay College. You know. So therefore we were able to enroll the first class that fall. Steve, a couple of weeks ago we talked to my friend, Stig Leschle, who’s a tech entrepreneur that became a very successful charter school network leader.

And Stig is now trying to reform higher education accreditation. And he argues that what we need are a new generation of these small, supportive, two-year institutions that sound in many dimensions like Arroupay and the Come-to-Believe network. So do you buy that accreditation as a barrier to the sort of innovation that you’re promoting in higher education?

So I was just, I just taught a section of Stig’s class last month. So I’m very familiar with his desire to rebuild higher education. He has some good points, you know. I think the larger issue for me is that there are times when higher ed leaders forget their, one of their main purposes is to be an engine, a vehicle for social mobility.

And there are too many barriers that higher education can sometimes put forth and hang on to that get in the way of student success. So that might be a bigger topic for another time. But I just think that, you know, for, we have these extraordinary students who are worried about the demographic cliff, you know, lower birth rates are coming our way, you know.

In three years, the robust high school classes are going to disappear. But there is a population of first gen students of Pell eligible students, of undocumented students with great assets who have great contributions to make to higher education. And they are often overlooked because they are not the, I’m doing air quotes now, you know, traditional students.

I’m thinking about scalability. Do you hope that there’s dozens of models in the Comptably Network? What’s the potential here, the total addressable market? Could there be 100 of these two-year supportive, affordable, accessible units within land-grant colleges as well?

So, you know, we were, when Accenture and my team at Arrupe and I worked on this replication feasibility study, it was almost, gosh, going on three years ago now. We, because the, we were an N of two and the two were two Catholic private, you know, colleges, we looked at that as our universe. And we identified some key criteria, you know.

The university has, first of all, the president of the university has to be a champion for this. And the university has to be in a place in its life cycle where it can take this on as a priority. Also, the university has to have stable enrollment.

And, you know, we look at endowments of 200 million or higher in terms of, you know, can you raise the funds to support what student revenue doesn’t cover? If that’s all in place, where’s the location of the university? Are you in an area where there are lots of eligible students that can easily commute to your campus?

Do you have space in your campus? Because it’s so important for these students to see themselves as college students. This is not the traditional community college, which is in the neighborhood where the students live, but rather students traveling to be at your university. Are you in an area where you have high-performing community colleges?

If you do, then maybe this isn’t needed because the students already have a good to your model and then they can easily transfer to your four-year program because they’ve completed the associate degree successfully. So those are all the fit criteria. We looked at, you know, population centers.

So obviously I’m in New York, LA, I mean, you know, where there are hundreds of thousands of Pell eligible students, tens of thousands of undocumented students in high school right now, who will be Pell eligible, I should say. And we’re talking to universities in these high population areas. Now we’re getting inquiries from other universities, Jesuit, non-Jesuit Catholic, and non-sectarian

in smaller cities. So we conduct a little mini feasibility analysis to say, all right, well, you know, what’s the strength of your university? Do you have the bandwidth to take this on? Is your president really interested?

Where are the students? Do you have enough, you know, Pell eligible students that can easily commute to your institution? So that’s a very roundabout response to your question. My goal is 10 of these in five years. That’d be a huge contribution.

I think Steve, the other path to scale is that every other institution that’s trying to improve their graduation rate is going to borrow many of the successful features that you’ve innovated at a rupee. We’re seeing some of that happening at land-grant institutions. I know Georgia State has taken on many of the features that you have in order to boost

their graduation rate. So they have. We’re going to wrap with a quick segment called one-to-one. I want to start with, I’d love to have you tell us one person that really inspired or informed your success at a rupee.

I would say a student who was extraordinary and they all were. But she was undocumented. Her father was deported during her enrollment with us. And she was on the dean’s list every semester. It was maddening because she couldn’t work.

She didn’t have papers. And the family really needed income, particularly after the father was removed. And I would find people to hire her for six weeks. I’m being regulated. This can’t be a long-term thing.

And that student had such tenacity and such, I don’t know, calm. And she was so committed to her studies. And now she is a special ed teacher in CPS and Chicago public schools. So what I think, I mean, just she was in my office one time and talking about what happened the week before with her father.

And I had an immigration attorney who helped her and her mother and the family. But I so respected her and I thought, God, when I was 18, I couldn’t have kept it together and do so well academically. And if there’s so many financial concerns and living in two language worlds and commuting and all the rest, she was really extraordinary to me.

That’s a beautiful answer. Two insights from your work, valuable to higher ed leaders. Two secrets of success. I’m going to postulate that it was affordable and supportive. Were two things that were important about a rupee.

Would you agree or add another one? Oh, no, that was okay. That was okay. Affordable and supportive, yes. And supportive in the fullest sense of the word, right?

Relational, support academically, creating a sense of community, the identity and belonging in all of those senses. So what’s one additional insight or inspiration that you’d like to leave with higher education leaders? Be bold.

You know, I mean, don’t be incremental. I’m glad I did. Otherwise Asia, who works with me, I wouldn’t know her. And we really benefit from her. So that would have been a big loss for come to believe had she not been in that first

class in 2015. So I don’t want to be too in your face, but just changing names of buildings, taking down statues, having panels, our colleagues of color, our students of color see that as like, you know, at best, superficial, kind of shallow. How about doing something really substantive in the DEI world and do it with what you do.

Offer people classes, teach them, which is what universities do. Give them degrees, but do it in a way so that they feel supported, so that they’ll be successful and so that they don’t incur a lot of debt. We’ve been talking to Steve Kitsaris. He’s the author of come to believe how the Jesuits are reinventing education again.

He’s the CEO of a great, relatively new nonprofit called come to believe network, which is helping to revolutionize higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and successful for more young people. Steve, we deeply appreciate your work and thanks for being with us today. Tom, thanks for the great conversation.

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