A remarkable mentorship and wraparound services program at a New Jersey community college has allowed Black male student outcomes to catch up to those of the general student population by one measure.
Lagging Black male achievement at higher education institutions is a common problem nationally, but UCNJ Union College of Union County, NJ has largely eliminated a prior lag between the Black male graduation rate and the overall student graduation rate over the past eight years through its Project Achievement program.
Project Achievement reinforces students’ sense of belonging by connecting Black male students to professional Black male mentors; tracking each and every Black male student’s classroom performance; and providing proactive academic and career advising, tuition assistance and life skills development.
The graduation rate for Black/African-American students has risen from 5% in 2014 to 32% in 2023 (see graph, below). That is roughly comparable to the 2023 overall student graduation rate of 34.8%, which is one of the highest graduation rates for any community college in New Jersey.
“They’ve taught me so much about trusting myself, trusting my ability, reaching for the stars and to never, never stop — never stop in my work, never stop being who I am,” says Joshua Kwashie, a 19-year-old sophomore majoring in health science who participates in Project Achievement. “At one point, I was very concerned about graduating on time and they helped me get through it.”
The hole in the doughnut
Project Achievement was preceded by a more general UCNJ initiative to increase graduation rates, Operation Graduation. When UCNJ President Margaret McMenamin arrived in 2010, there were low graduation rates throughout the institution. McMenamin launched Operation Graduation in 2014, which has succeeded in raising the overall graduation rate from 5.9% in 2009, the lowest among community colleges in New Jersey at that time, to 34.8% in 2023. It did so largely by prioritizing graduation as the metric that mattered; splicing and dicing the student body into subgroups with different needs and different UCNJ responses; and then focusing on the academic needs of individual students to help them graduate.
Still, despite significant overall student graduation rate progress under Operation Graduation by 2015, the Black student graduation rate had barely improved at the college. In 2015, McMenamin launched Project Achievement, a home for all of the college’s support services for Black male students.
A program is formed
Generally, Project Achievement doubles down on the Project Graduation approach — it keeps the focus on graduation rates and a cohort approach — but adds specific additional elements to address the particular needs and challenges of Black male students. Those challenges are remarkably similar across the country, notes Demond Hargrove, UCNJ vice president of student development, a Black executive who joined the college in 2017.
“Across the country, you will find these types of data showing limited or poor attainment for African-American male students at all levels of education, K through 12,” says Hargrove. “That carries forward to college: These young men have some of the lowest graduation rate among all demographics at two-year and four-year institutions. The reasons include socio-economic issues, that they have less support and less resources, as well as racial tones and microaggressions in the classrooms.”
The challenges are so severe that only Black male role models are likely to have an impact on, and get buy-in from, young Black male students by allowing them to see that Black males can overcome such challenges and by offering ways to do so, Hargrove says.
Leading Project Achievement operations on a day-to-day basis is LaVon Williams, associate director of student success initiatives.
“We give these Black men love; we are serious about what we’re saying; we don’t allow any excuses; and we provide them with the care that we know we wish we would have had,” Williams says. “And we are as honest as possible when giving them that information. We don’t hide anything; we talk about our personal lives. And we try to lead by example.”
Participation is voluntary. However, every first-time, full-time Black male student is included in the Project Achievement cohort. Then there is follow-up, including referrals for tutoring, face-to-face advising, and classroom visits and the use of software to see how student experiences are progressing.
Students participating in the program are flooded with positive messages of Black male attainment and messages of how they can progress, from professional demeanor to dress for success. It also involves exposing them to high-ranking Black leaders in different fields discussing positions to which they can aspire. Speakers are asked to explain how they overcame adversity to achieve what they accomplished.
It also involves field trips that can expand the world of many students who have not traveled far outside of Union County.
Demanding accountability and resources
Making Project Achievement successful also involved holding the entire college and surrounding community accountable for helping Black male students graduate rather than, as is often the case, ascribing their failure rate as the fault of the students or beyond the institution’s control. Addressing it involved blunt conversations with various stakeholders, including faculty to hold them responsible for tracking student performance and providing extra support to help Black male students succeed.
“We used to have a bunch of limousine liberal faculty members,” McMenamin says. “And I appealed to them and said, ‘You really do care about these poor kids, don’t you? We’re here to serve students who never had another opportunity. That’s why we went into this field, right? But if you’re running out of class and not doing your office hours because you want to go babysit your grandchildren and you’re not willing to stay here and help these kids, who need you to be here, It may be time for you to retire.’”
It involved no less direct conversations with the surrounding community. To Union County’s many successful African-American leaders and businesspeople, McMenamin bluntly asked if they found the failure rate of the Black male students acceptable.
“I said, ‘Do you think this really represents what Black people can do? And they said, ‘Absolutely not. Absolutely not.’ And I said, ‘Then help me address it,’” says McMenamin, who is White.
She urged them to engage and provide role models and they responded. One critical group of supporters has been the Plainfield, New Jersey, chapter of the Omega Phi Psi Black Fraternity.
“Those Omega men deserve as much credit for what we did as I do, because this program needed Black men. The community, the Black community in Union County, came out for this and supported us,” McMenamin says.
Providing such support to students, including tuition support for those who need it, is not cheap. But McMenamin rejects the notion that external support is necessary for educators to create and run a viable Black Achievement-type program: she says that the money exists at all institutions if higher education executives are willing to cut programs – and individuals – who aren’t delivering value to students.
“We just stopped funding things that didn’t work,” McMenamin says.
An example was the removal of some early Project Achievement leaders.
“We had to find the right leaders for this program; we fired some employees in the beginning of the program who did nothing but eat and didn’t do anything to help our [Black male students],” McMenamin says.
The secret ingredient
UCNJ students interviewed say Williams and Project Achievement student services generalists Kobe Penn and Clinton Miller, Jr., are leaders they respect and who help them by providing a more objective viewpoint on their options, as well as new potential options, and by providing a source of support.
Many times the conversations Black males have at home fail to help with the difficult choices they must navigate on campus, says Joseph Tumfour, a 2016-18 Project Achievement participant who is now an associate program officer with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, D.C. Tumfour and Kwashie note that there is a cultural tendency of Black parents to dictate their expectations to Black males, even when they are off the mark; an expectation that Black males must solve their problems on their own; and an association of seeking out help with weakness. Add all those factors together, and the anxiety level of these students when they reach higher education institutions is often sky-high.
Kwashie says Williams, Penn and Miller helped him change a prior program of study at UCNJ that represented the preference of parents but not his own and cut back on choices that were causing him to flounder at UCNJ, such as extensive work as a lifeguard to make money out of fear that he would not have enough money to support subsequent bachelor program studies. Kwashie is now on target to graduate UCNJ and plans to apply to four-year universities in New Jersey. Tumfour says Project Achievement helped him recover his stride after choppy early academic performance forced him to withdraw from an academic honors program.
Consistency is important, Williams says. “Many programs are hit and miss once a month — we meet once a week, every Wednesday at one o’clock for the school semester,” he says.
“To see the program from when it first started and to what it has grown into under Dr. Williams’ leadership is just amazing,” says Duane Reid, director of student success initiatives. “Back then, we were averaging maybe 10 students per meeting. And now we’re at 62 students on average per meeting, showing you the growth of the program.”
The success of Black males also feeds back into driving a culture of success throughout UCNJ, adds McMenamin.
“Everybody’s numbers went up because the Black men improved and the culture in the institution changed,” she says. “When everybody in the Black male cohort is talking about graduation, everybody starts talking about graduation.”
