How Cleveland State University Is Moving the Needle on Equity

Brittany Wampler has spent the entirety of her career in higher education supporting students via advising, retention, student success initiatives, programming, graduate and professional school support initiatives, and in the last two years, overseeing the Office of Career Development & Exploration at Cleveland State University as Director. Understanding industry, where CSU is growing and going, elevating the experiences of graduates, and creating opportunities are at the core of her work to date. 

Recently, she participated in an exclusive panel interview with Kaplan university partners, sharing her insights on:

• Building an employer network for students

• Incentivizing students for career development

• Moving the needle on equity

The following excerpts are taken from the interview.

Tell us about Cleveland State University and what you’re most excited about right now.

Let me paint a picture of Cleveland State University and our urban, public institution in the heart of Cleveland, Ohio. We have about 14,000 students right now, and we are focused on social mobility. And for us, that is our number one goal, our number one mission. 

The way in which we take that work seriously is by serving every pocket of student that comes to CSU. We are grateful that about one-third of our students come in as first-generation college students. Another third of our student body is underrepresented minority students, most of who went through the education system here in Cleveland. And then, we serve a growing number of international students and a growing number of graduate students.

My office supports all students tracking toward careers, and what we are really focused on right now is: How are we launching careers and allowing students to feel that return on investment for their degree once they walk across the stage at graduation?

Talking about the ways in which institutions are addressing equity and education is a real passion point for me, and my career mission is breaking down the barriers that students experience.

I want to focus on building experiences because I think that's one angle of this work readiness piece that we're not necessarily addressing, at least at this point.

Work readiness is partnership with industry. And at Cleveland State, as a rule or as a function of our mission, we drive the economy in northeast Ohio. Around 80 percent or more of our graduates stay local after graduation, meaning that they are developing the economy. They're feeding the economy by going to school at Cleveland State. And so, the way in which we have been very strategic around that is by building better partnerships within the community alongside employers.

We've put a lot of effort over the past couple of years into building up the employer network, which is building out the opportunities for students to engage in internships. We're hoping to have more direct partnerships and more awareness around some of the barriers our students face when it comes to landing an internship. Probably 80 to 90 percent of our students are working while they're going to school, and not just working because they want money for the weekend, but working because they are supporting families or supporting their family, paying part of their family’s rent, living at home, supporting the food or bills that need to be paid, having families of their own, whatever the case may be.

And so, for our students, there is a need to educate them around finding an internship that will offer transferable skills and help them land that job after graduation. But in order to do that, we have to support paid internships. We have to support hiring international students for CPT and internships locally. So, we're trying to strategically build those partnerships.

And then there’s here on campus and what we're doing with our students to elevate those experiences. We hear about the sophomore slump; I want to change the language around that to be a sophomore start. You can go through your freshman year and work in the summer at a landscaping job, in the service industry, bartending or whatever it is that you want to do, but in sophomore year, you start launching your career. And our goal is to elevate the experience of our sophomore students. So, by the end of that year, they're landing their first transferable work experience for summer in between sophomore and junior year, and then again between junior and senior year.

We both know, and we all probably know, that internships will yield more job offers; internships will yield those work readiness career competencies; and internships, particularly when they are paid, will give students a better, well-rounded college experience. And if a student can't be paid for their time, at CSU, the likelihood that they're going to quit another job that they are being paid to do in order to seek out that experience is very low.

So we have come up with some ways in which to help fund internships alongside our local Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, alongside a third-party nonprofit organization, Elevate to Even Plus, to help companies pay their interns a wage that will be competitive with what they're making outside of that. Cleveland State brought Elevate to Even Plus to Cleveland, but this upcoming summer, we will expand alongside Case Western Reserve University and Greater Cleveland Partnership to fund 25 or more positions at non-profits specifically for students from underrepresented backgrounds.

The other thing we're focusing energy on in terms of building career development into the student experience this upcoming year is investing in it by paying students for their time for our programming. We are investing $100,000 toward incentivizing and paying students for their time to attend workshops, career fairs, events, programming, and other opportunities. At certain points, they will be able to get gift cards or cash to spend on campus as soon as they reach a certain amount by attending freshmen pre-professional orientation, coming in to get their headshot, or other workshops and programs that we know will help them develop. So, it's the idea that we value your time so much that we're going to pay you for it, and you're going to develop skills on the other side of it too.

When Kaplan reached out to talk through the idea, it was around the same brainstorming stages that you all were having [to create this new model] and painting a picture of what this might look like at a school like Cleveland State. I thought about our mission to really enhance social mobility for our students. I used to be the Director for Pre-Professional Health Programs before bringing that office along with me to join our old career services office and create career development. Now, we support all students tracking toward any career goal, whether it's entering the workforce or graduate and professional programs.

I had started piecemeal with Kaplan scholarships years before, so we already had a strong relationship. To address student barriers to professional programs, I started with fundraising to reduce the financial barriers of applications and interviewing. Then we addressed with experience barriers, so now we have research, volunteer, leadership and job pipelines for pre-professional health students that allows those without a network to come in and hit the ground running with our network. Pre-COVID, we were sending around 150 pre-health students out into the community per semester to engage in volunteering.

So, we were working on all of the barriers that pre-professional students face, with financial as one of the biggest. But the finances of applying to graduate, professional, health, or law school are sometimes too much, and when the All Access License was presented, that was an answer to not just reducing a barrier for some students, but eliminating a barrier for all students.

We are just wrapping up our first year right now, and when we navigated that contract initially, we were playing around with numbers, and should we set a bar for this number of students per test? And then we threw that out the window and said, no, it should be all students, period. It doesn't matter what they want to do. All students means all students. And so that's what we did.

And the first deal started enrolling students this past year, and we have just under 500 students that have taken advantage in year one. All of our nursing graduates have done NCLEX^® prep. The next most popular test is the MCAT^®, with about 23% of our students registering for either a self-paced or live MCAT^® course, and our students pick what works for them. If they want to take a live course, Monday/Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00, that's what they sign up for, just like any student who would be paying out of pocket on their own. There is no difference in the classes that students at CSU have access to versus what any other student would pay for buying the course on the website; they have the exact same access as anyone else does, and potentially more as we are negotiating the amount of time a student has access to their materials as well.

We have saved students just under $450,000 that they otherwise would have paid out of pocket this past year, and that eliminates a huge financial barrier.

» Read the full CSU All Access License case study.

In addition, we've been able to do more with our fundraising dollars because we aren’t pulling from that money for test preparation anymore. Test prep is one very important piece of the puzzle and it impacts every single student who has a dream and can get there in terms of getting through the coursework and getting to that readiness to start preparing for an exam, but there is more than test preparation to the application process.

And so now, a student who doesn't have the financial capability to get to medical school, we can provide financial resources every single step of the way. Not only are they getting MCAT^® prep and individual pre-professional coaching from our career specialists, but they are also able to get their test paid for, financial assistance for applications, interviews, interview attire, whatever it takes.

Future trends: Five years from now, what do you think is higher education’s biggest opportunity for student success?

Three quick hits. One, NACE has reported that the percentage of underrepresented students in internships is starkly disproportionate to white counterparts. We need to move the needle on this intentionally for Cleveland State University and across the country. More efforts and programs like Elevate to Even Plus can assist in this effort to disrupt these challenges. Partnership across any aisles where possible, employer and industry, partnerships on majors and hiring.

Also, integrated degrees, pairing a degree like computer science and graphic design, because we know that there are 3D modeling jobs and animation jobs that would highly value these skillsets; Cleveland State has about 20 of these degrees incoming and the opportunity to align skillsets and needs of employers could be better targeted through this type of partnership across discipline in academia.

The last one is micro-credentials, stackable credentials that enhance someone's degree experience. I know that that's something that will be rolling out alongside Kaplan. But that's also something that CSU is trying to wrap its arms around in our All Access License. But also in continuing education, in the College of Business, and really finding a way to enhance the competitiveness of micro-credentials, which also includes partnering with businesses to make sure that the micro-credentials are going to be valuable and finding ways for students to pay for them or to pay to train for them.

It really is about: How are we navigating higher education to be more competitive? Here's what we know. An associate's degree might not get someone out of poverty after they complete the degree. It might, but it might not, and probably won't. A bachelor's degree has a better trajectory for getting someone out of poverty for their generation and their lifetime. A professional degree will absolutely get someone out of poverty for them and for generations to come. We have to navigate where we are and show that we are moving the needle on poverty. We're moving the needle on equity. We are moving the needle on competitiveness in terms of experience, and we have to, as higher education, band together to prove that worthiness.

Watch the full interview.