Doing What it Takes to Support Students

Elaqad experienced disparate educational opportunity while moving in her childhood

Dionissi Aliprantis

Could you tell us a little bit about your background?

Sara Elaqad

Sure. So, I think of myself as having grown up a little bit of a nomad, and I am a Clevelander through and through now. I've lived here over a decade, but I grew up really moving around a great deal. My family and I lived in Bosnia. I was born in the late 80s, and the war began there in the early 90s. My parents found themselves, without their own desire, displaced from their home in Sarajevo and eventually moved to the United States. We got refugee status before arriving and came to the US with nothing. Again, completely unplanned, and they started to rebuild their careers. They were academics and we moved across the US. We lived in Arizona, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor…lots of different places.

Dionissi Aliprantis

How old were you when you first moved to the US?

Sara Elaqad

I was almost seven years old, a week out from my seventh birthday when we came. You know, when you say, “Tell me about your background,” it all goes back to education every time. As we moved throughout the country and settled in different neighborhoods, my parents quickly realized that the education system in the United States is extremely disparate in quality depending on, frankly, where you live, who you are, and especially what your socioeconomic status is. And so, they did their very best as we moved around to assess what the best public school was that they could get me to, once they realized that.

And, for me, it was very eye-opening as a child to see that it was so important to my parents to try to figure out and pick the best school for me. And in some cases, that was the best of the worst, right? Chicago public schools in the 90s notoriously were in need of some repair, and I really got to see that firsthand, unfortunately. Fortunately, for me now, I've learned from it, but it really brought me to a place where I wanted to have an impact in education and the opportunities that students, especially students who have been chronically disenfranchised from their right to education, experience.

Intensive programming and a fierce commitment to students

Dionissi Aliprantis

What do you think makes Minds Matter so impactful?

Sara Elaqad

So, it's a few things. A big part of it is the special sauce of the mentoring relationships and the depth of the relationship, the focus on the relationship between the students and their mentors. Minds Matter is a really intensive program. It's a three-year program from 10th to 12th grade for our students who are there nearly every Saturday during the school year, and then have some work with us over the summer. So, we have a high expectation for everybody. And that relationship and that ability to have a consistent adult outside of your family who supports you, I think is a big part of it.

Another big part of it is just that we really pour into our students. We have a personalized focus. Our goal for our students is to have the best possible options when it comes to going to college, and we treat that very seriously. I like to say to my staff, "You have got to do what it takes. Don't do what you thought you were supposed to do. Do what it takes to support each student." You know, that's how highly resourced families operate with their children.

And so, at Minds Matter, we're not highly resourced. We're a small nonprofit, but we have the high resources specifically for this purpose. We have a holistic program; we work through ACT prep. We know the ACT to be a gateway to college that opens more doors for students. We focus on that a great deal. We support our students in writing and critical thinking skills, which are going to be integral to college success almost no matter what you major in. And we expose our students to college opportunities. We send them to, and we pay for, immersive summer college programs at top universities around the country, so that they experience the enrichment, the networking, and just the practice of being in college. You know, in a way, the intensity of the program and the level of resources that each student receives is the reason for the success.

Students are motivated by seeing that their efforts can pay off

Dionissi Aliprantis

I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about the students' motivation. How motivated are they initially in the program and how much does just having that relationship help to motivate them? What are the main factors in terms of motivation for your students?

Sara Elaqad

When you talk about motivation, right, motivation lags. It's not a consistent trait that any of us have, as we all know very well. But we present the opportunity to students, early in ninth grade, and then again, later on before they are invited to apply. But we really believe that seeing an opportunity, like, “your work can pay off,” is a big motivator. So, having information about the Minds Matter opportunity is in itself motivating perhaps for a student who may have been, like, “Well, I don't know. Why would I work hard in school? I'm not seeing how this will help me. I'm not seeing, perhaps, people I know getting really great opportunities, and so maybe that's not going to happen for me either.” So, getting the opportunity in front of students is important.

Initially, we're looking to see motivation and interest to go to college because that's what we need. Once they're with us, they want to go to college, they're willing to put in the work. We're there to support along the way and to motivate along the way. Having an adult who is going to be kind of your teammate in this journey to getting to college is important and it really goes for anyone. It helps to have people on your team, but it's really critical for young people.

Minds Matter Cleveland’s goal is not college access, it is college success

Dionissi Aliprantis

I'm curious to talk a little bit about some of the outcomes you all have had.

Sara Elaqad

So, 100% of our students over our time have attended a four-year college. We're currently researching our up-to-date graduation rate, but it tracks at over 91 percent, 92 percent.

Dionissi Aliprantis

This is college graduation, right?

Sara Elaqad

College graduation, yes.

Dionissi Aliprantis

For most students in Cleveland, I would imagine that their college completion rate is well, well below 90 percent.

Sara Elaqad

Yes, it is much lower nationally for low-income students from first generation families. And 100 percent of our students are from low-income families, with the majority also first generation to attend college. First generation students have a college graduation rate that tracks at about 11 percent.

Dionissi Aliprantis

That's an incredible number. So, these are people that have applied, and successfully been admitted, and have enrolled…11 percent of those complete college.

Sara Elaqad

Right.

Dionissi Aliprantis

That's just an incredible number.

Sara Elaqad

For our students, we see them be successful. Our goal is not college access, right. It's college success.

Social networks are an important part of students’ success in college and in the labor market

The time spent in Minds Matter over three years is intended to prepare students to be successful in college, not just to have the tools and knowledge and skills, but to know how to build those skills that they need in college, to know how to advocate for themselves, to know where to find support and resources. That includes at their college, but also includes the people in their lives through Minds Matter. We typically have students reach out to us for all kinds of things, and we're actually building an in-college support program to have a more formal system of support.

But we'll have students reach out, like, “Hey, I'm looking for an internship in local media. Is there anyone that you know that I can talk to?” And anytime a student reaches out in that way, I will either find someone I know, or someone on our team will. Or we will ask someone else in our Minds Matter network to find someone.

And that's what I'm talking about; it is knowing that there are people that you can go to and say, "Hey, can you connect me to someone, or how do I even do this? How do I access, in this case, a career in journalism?" So, we maintain strong ties with our students and that's also important for their success.

There's a lot of research around consistent, sustained adult relationships by Dr. Robert Balfanz at Johns Hopkins and many others that says that it is a game changer for students to have those kinds of relationships. And I want to be clear that that's not to indicate that families aren't supporters of students. There's often discourse around low-income families not caring, or not putting in investment in their students. That's absolutely not the case that we see in Cleveland. Parents and caregivers absolutely do care. It's just a little different when you have someone outside of your family, when it's a person who has gone to college who can share the ins and outs of that with you, and make sure that you have the information you need to be successful.

Dionissi Aliprantis

It's interesting. It's like that's the missing resource, in some sense. Like, that's the missing piece to the puzzle for a lot of those kids that you're working with, right? Those networks. Maybe some tacit knowledge about how to navigate the education system.

Sara Elaqad

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our program, at the core of it, it is about academic tools and building strength, and things like that. But it is about building social capital, and social capital is having access to relationships, information, and support. The way that many people become successful or remain successful is knowing people who can support them in their goals. We want to build and strengthen that for our students as well.

Starting a virtuous cycle

Dionissi Aliprantis

Do you have some students that have made it onto the labor market, and how are they doing there?

Sara Elaqad

So, we don't have research per se, but we do monitor our students and their success. Our goal is for them to get into careers, and that means stable jobs that will allow them to be a part of the type of work that they want to be a part of, to have the kind of life that is thriving and successful and flexible in the way that it needs to be. A lot of our students do go into careers. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of our students go into professions where they are looking to make an impact in the world.

So, we've had a handful of students become teachers, both in other states and also here in Ohio. We've had students start nonprofits. We have a student who worked for a maternal health nonprofit in Cleveland. We actually have a Minds Matter Cleveland alumnus who works for Minds Matter in New York. So, we see a lot of students dedicated to helping and making the world a better place. Oh, and I completely missed a couple. We've got a student who is the head of community impact at Microsoft. We have a student who, in the last couple of years, built an ed tech startup. And so, I tend to think that our students see how impactful others have been in their lives, and so they, too, see that that's possible, and they want to do something to help others and make a difference in their community, or in their country and the world.

Dionissi Aliprantis

Really virtuous cycle there. Pretty cool.

Programs supporting high-poverty school districts

Dionissi Aliprantis

So, I do want to ask if you are speaking to Eric Gordon, the [former] CEO of CMSD (the Cleveland Metropolitan School District). What specifically would you think about in a conversation with someone like that or the head of Chicago Public Schools? If you take a step back, what do you think are the lessons from your work for the entire K–12 system, and maybe even more broadly, the interaction between our education system and the labor market?

Sara Elaqad

I think with regard to K–12, Eric and I talk about high expectations for our students, and we're both on the same page around that. Having people in your life and understanding that the society around you believes in you and that you can be successful is critical. I think that that's something that CMSD has worked to build into their culture. I think that's number one.

Number two, and maybe tied, is as much individualized support as possible. We've got the biggest urban school district in Ohio, which is in the highest poverty city. And that means that the schools alone cannot fully impact students’ lives and their success. We have built unprecedented levels of support in the Cleveland schools that are wraparound attempts to support students and families. But it's hard to be like, “Hey, you, CMSD, or you K–12 district, you've got to do what we're doing” when you've got so many different levels of students. We've got lead exposure at the infancy level, and then we have to support students who have been poisoned by that. And CMSD and other districts have to work with a lot of different challenges that are a little bit—they're not insulated from Minds Matters in any way—but they're responsible for students every single day almost all year long.

Dionissi Aliprantis

It almost sounds like, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but almost that you see yourself and Minds Matter as more of a kind of a support for public schools. I don't know if it's a direct support of public schools, but just that what public schools are dealing with, there's so much that it's hard to put it all on the public schools.

Sara Elaqad

Yeah, absolutely. So, we've got to support them as much as possible, and Minds Matter is one of those ways. We're the add on. “Hey, you don't have to do all this individualized college advising, and sending students to summer programs, and doing a whole ton of ACT preparation. We're going to do it.” And schools can focus on the other things that they need to focus on and the educational environment within a school.

Hal Martin and Andrew Zajac contributed to this article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the participants and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.