Dreams Realized

Gumbel was in some ways a surprising choice by the Kresge Foundation and The New Press,  a nonprofit publisher dedicated to social change, to pen the book. He wasn’t an education reporter, and he grew up far from the American South. British-born and Oxford-educated, Gumbel worked for several years as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, the Guardian and the Independent.

“I've been a professional outsider most of my life,” Gumbel said in a Zoom interview from his home in Los Angeles. “You can see things with a perspective that maybe people on the inside can't.”

What captured Gumbel’s interest was a desire to understand the story beyond the academic jargon that can obscure one painfully obvious fact about the American education system: Of the nearly 4,000 post-secondary institutions in the U.S., nearly all have vast gaps in graduation rates between their upper-income and white students and their lower-income, first-generation and minority students. How had Georgia State managed to crack a problem as pervasive as it was seemingly intractable?

Gumbel knew Georgia State had managed to boost its graduation rates by 23 percentage points in the last decade. He knew that it had eliminated achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity and income.

“I knew from the start what the outcomes were, but I didn't know anything about how it happened,” Gumbel said.

He wasn’t sure what he would find or whether it would even be very interesting. But he was determined to go beyond the university’s extraordinary results and get everyone to talk frankly about what happened behind the scenes.

“I didn't want a repeat of all the talking points in the university’s publicity materials. I wanted to go deeper,” he said.

He had one other ground rule: no acronyms. He recalled telling one administrator, after she tried to explain a particularly inscrutable bit of academese, “You're just gonna have to tell me that in English because I literally cannot understand what that is."

For a period of months beginning in May 2018, Gumbel made multiple visits to Atlanta, attending meetings and becoming a fixture around the university.

“He's funny, he’s engaging, he’s at times annoyingly inquisitive,” Renick said. “There will be no end to the number of questions he will ask when he wants to learn about something.”

Though the protagonist of the story is the Student Success team, led by Renick and championed by Georgia State University President Mark Becker, Gumbel interviewed close to 100 people from across the university community, including students, alumni, advisers, professors and deans, some of whom came and went long before the book’s main characters arrived on campus.

Gumbel finds tension and drama in the unlikeliest places, like committee meetings and strategic plans. There are heroes and villains, skeptical faculty and purse string-controlling politicians, all of whom needed to be convinced of the effectiveness of a data-driven approach to student success. The book’s 14 chapters describe how various reforms were identified and implemented, from the decision to centralize and grow the advising office to the development of the Summer Success Academy for incoming freshmen, both of which have boosted retention rates.

It also explores historical obstacles: One chapter details Georgia State’s halting journey to desegregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Another includes a vivid (and not particularly flattering) portrait of former university president Noah Langdale, whose “good ol’ boy” network was dismantled by Becker’s predecessor, Carl Patton, paving the way for Renick and Becker to push through a new philosophy.

Though they are from different backgrounds and arrived at Georgia State decades apart, Renick and Becker came to Georgia State with similar ideas about what was wrong with higher education.

“Tim and I share a commitment that every student should enjoy a level playing field, and they should not be a victim of the ZIP code they were born into,” Becker said. “Tragically, that is not the reality at the overwhelming majority of institutions in American higher education today.”

Gumbel’s sharp prose offers insight into the motivations and character of his subjects: Becker, a statistician and a first-generation college graduate educated in public schools and universities, and Renick, a religious studies professor who in his younger years had “a penchant for Doc Martens and skinny ties.” But he wisely keeps the story’s focus where it belongs: on the students. These are the parts of the book that will remain with readers long after they reach the final page.

“Every student should enjoy a level playing field, and they should not be a victim of the ZIP code they were born into." 

- President Mark P. Becker

Austin Birchell (B.A. ’20) was set to be the first in his family to attend college when his university career was almost derailed by a typo. A computer had misread the Social Security number on his financial aid forms, and the scholarship money he’d been counting on to pay his first-semester tuition just wasn’t there.

Enter Pounce, an artificial intelligence chatbot championed by Renick to help students navigate the financial aid paperwork, immunization records and other bureaucratic barriers that were leading nearly one in five incoming freshmen like Birchell not to show on the first day of class. Birchell asked Pounce about his dilemma, and soon he had an appointment to meet with someone in the financial aid office, where the error was straightened out.

Sharon Sample's (A.A. ’14, B.A. ’15) story is featured in "Won't Lose This Dream." She enrolled in college to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher, and she now teaches history in DeKalb County, Ga.

Birchell’s is one of many poignant stories featured in Gumbel’s book. Another is that of Sharon Sample (A.A. ’14, B.A. ’15) who had resorted to setting up a GoFundMe to come up with the tuition money for her last semester of classes. What she didn’t know was that Renick’s system had already flagged her as being the kind of student who would benefit from an innovation he piloted called the Panther Retention Grant: emergency, unsolicited debt forgiveness for students the system deemed likely to graduate were it not for a relatively small financial shortfall. When Sample logged into her account to see how much she owed, she saw her balance had been zeroed out, and she was able to graduate on time.

Anecdotes like these illustrate how simply and elegantly Renick’s ideas paid off for the university and the students it serves. But the heartbreaking story of Gabriel Woods shows just how sorely such interventions were needed.

A gifted music major who grew up in poverty in South Georgia, Woods (B.A. ’11) had already overcome incomprehensible odds just to get to Georgia State as a transfer student in 2007, before many of the data-driven interventions were in place. There, as Gumbel recounts, he faced one hurdle after another, from learning his community college credits hadn’t transferred to dealing with professors who were unaware of the problems he faced. The chapter is excruciating to get through, as Woods is told for the umpteenth time to crisscross campus to get this or that form signed by this or that official, only to find the office closed. Meanwhile, his grade point average (GPA) continues to slip, and his financial aid runs so low he eventually finds himself sleeping in his car and pawning his beloved trombones.

Gumbel learned of Woods’ story from a Georgia State adviser named Crystal Mitchell, who specializes in intervening in “last-chance” cases. She shepherded Woods to the finish line, helping him earn a degree in 2011. The lengths Woods went for his education, and the lengths Mitchell went to help him get there, are arresting.

As Gumbel listened to Mitchell tell Woods’ story, both of them were reduced to tears.

“I said, ‘I need to talk to this man,’” Gumbel recalled. “‘Where can I find him?’”

He managed to locate Woods almost by accident, via an email to an outdated address Woods just happened to check. Reluctant to revisit those painful years, it took three months for Woods to finally agree to speak with Gumbel.

Even today, Woods said he’s nervous to read about himself in the book. When he attended Georgia State more than a decade ago, Woods felt students weren’t the priority. Now that he’s a professor himself, at Savannah State University, he has empathy for the pressures and demands that faculty face.

“I just hate that I got lost in the shuffle,” he said.

As Gumbel writes, “For decades, campuses across the country had leaned on the golden-hearted dedication of people like Crystal Mitchell … to rescue students who fell through the cracks without acknowledging that they were merely pecking away at the edges of a vast and deeply embedded problem. What was needed was a comprehensive overhaul to address the causes of the crisis, so intervention of the sort that Gabriel Woods required became a rarity, not the only safety net on offer.”

Crystal Mitchell (right) is a Georgia State adviser who specializes in intervening in “last-chance” cases. She helped Gabriel Woods (B.A. '11) finish college, and he's now a music professor at Savannah State University.

Now a nationally recognized music educator, Woods doesn’t want to make the same mistakes with his students, which is part of the reason his Savannah State faculty ID hangs from a Georgia State lanyard draped around his neck. Though his master’s and doctor’s degrees are from other institutions, it’s a reminder to himself to put his students first.

“I’m very proud of Georgia State. I’m thankful for those experiences. If I didn't go through them, I wouldn't be the person I am today,” he said, noting that his students face obstacles like those he faced when he was in school. “I want students to know they can do it, and I need professors to understand, too, that each student has a special ability, and we need to see that in people.”

Gumbel says Woods’ story impacted him viscerally and marked a turning point in his reporting.

“It completely changed my view of what those students are facing and what their potential is,” he said.

“If Georgia State can enroll the student body that we do and eliminate equity gaps with regard to graduation rates based on race, ethnicity and income level, then the question immediately emerges: ‘Why doesn't my campus have the same sort of outcomes?’”

- Timothy Renick, senior vice president for student success

Parts of the Georgia State student success story have been told before — in The New York Times, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, at conferences like the one in Johannesburg that led to the publication of “Won’t Lose This Dream.” President Becker hopes the book takes things a step further, going beyond celebrating one university’s achievement to fostering lasting, systemic change across higher education.

“What I want to come out of this is that people stop making excuses for persistent inequities,” Becker said. “The book tells you it takes a long-term commitment and it's hard work. It doesn't happen overnight. And it's not magic.”

One commonly heard excuse is the same belief Gumbel held before starting the project: Equity gaps are predetermined years before students ever set foot on a college campus.

“The most important thing Georgia State is doing is telling everyone that's a lie,” Renick said. “There is something we can do after the students arrive at college that can have amazing and positive impacts at reversing those equity gaps. That's the message that needs to get out.”

Some of the battles Becker and Renick fought are not unique to Georgia State. Just as they did in “Moneyball,” the data-driven protagonists of this story clash with an old guard resistant to change. The book includes characters who were skeptical of Renick’s push to focus admission criteria on high school GPA over test scores, even though data shows it’s more predictive of college success. While Renick pushed to hire a small army of advisers, like Crystal Mitchell, who could turn things around for the Gabriel Woodses of the future, others would have preferred to keep advising in the hands of the individual colleges and schools. Overcoming entrenched interests across campus was not always easy, and Gumbel does not gloss over those opposing viewpoints.

“I kept telling him, we're not looking for the hero narrative,” Becker said. “This work is complicated, and if the reader doesn't get that, it's not going to be useful.”

Some, including a professor of history who wrote about “Won’t Lose This Dream” for the L.A. Review of Books, have criticized the Georgia State model for being too singularly focused on metrics and graduation rates at the expense of the qualitative features associated with higher education — a charge Gumbel said smacks of elitism.

“There is no indication that anything that has happened to improve the outcomes of students has been at the expense of the richness of their academic experience,” he said. “If anything, it's been the opposite.”

Renick suspects such reactions are rooted in defensiveness.

“If Georgia State can enroll the student body that we do and eliminate equity gaps with regard to graduation rates based on race, ethnicity and income level, then the question immediately emerges: ‘Why doesn't my campus have the same sort of outcomes?’” he said.

To that end, Georgia State is now working on a way to share its methods more efficiently, instead of just sending Renick off to yet another far-flung conference or arranging tours for an ever-growing number of educators from other institutions (some days there are up to 90 visitors on campus who have traveled from as far as South Korea and New Zealand). Renick’s operation is in the process of establishing an outward-facing National Institute for Student Success that would act as both an incubator for new ideas and a place where others could come to learn from Georgia State’s example.

For Gumbel, though, the Georgia State story isn’t just about higher education. It’s about American society at a moment of racial reckoning, a moment when the gulf between rich and poor has finally grown too vast to ignore.

“Georgia State really shows how you can materially improve the futures of people whose families have spent generations struggling to escape cycles of poverty,” he said.

And the outcome is something all Americans can get behind.

“There is a future out there that doesn't just have to be about conflict, hyper-partisanship in politics and endemic racism,” Gumbel said. “It’s something that everyone can feel good about, wherever they are on the political spectrum.”