Of all the people I’ve worked with at Colorado State University, few embody the spirit of the land grant university as much as Paul Thayer.
Soft-spoken and gentle in his manner, Paul is also an incredibly strong and persuasive person who seems always to have used those powers for good. He is the exact opposite of whatever it means to be self-promotional. Instead, he has a gift for looking into other people, seeing their enormous potential, and coaxing them into believing in themselves as much as he does. He seems to operate from a core conviction that people are generally good and deserving, that we owe it to one another to invest in each other’s success – and that we owe it to ourselves to invest our hopes and energy in a brighter future.
Paul found a professional home at CSU, where our land-grant mission commits us to provide access and opportunity to students from all walks of life. Armed with that mission, he spent his career knocking down obstacles and opening doors for students to enter in. He knew it was within his power to help students, even if it required him to push for systemic and cultural change. He did this for generations of students at CSU over his long career, which culminated in 2016 when he retired as our associate vice president for student success. Today, there are educators, professionals, and community leaders all over Colorado who will tell you they owe a share of their success to Paul Thayer and his belief that they belonged and deserved to be in college.
Thanks largely to his leadership, CSU became the first university in the country to offer scholarships to First Generation students in 1984. This quickly became the model that other universities around the country have followed. For the last 12 years, we have also offered CSU’s Tuition Assistance Grant, which ensures the lowest-income Colorado students automatically receive financial support that covers 100% of tuition and fees for four years, shielding these students from the impact of tuition increases. Since its launch, 50% of students receiving this award have been First Generation – that’s about 14,000 First Generation students who have paid no tuition or fees to attend CSU for the last 12 years.
The official definition of a First Generation student is defined in the Higher Education Act of 1965 as “(A) an individual both of whose parents did not complete a baccalaureate degree; or (B) in the case of any individual who regularly resided with and received support from only one parent, an individual whose only such parent did not complete a baccalaureate degree.”
Today, First Generation students are the most rapidly growing student demographic. They are the future of higher education, and as Paul would tell us, we need to do better by them.
First Gen students are critical in the higher education landscape. They are a part and parcel of providing educational access to students of color, veterans, and any number of students with intersectional identities. And we know they need help. These students attend college at lower rates, and when they do attend, they graduate far less often – with a failure rate more than double that of a student whose parents graduated college. When economic status is layered into the First Generation equation, we see that these students borrow more and are forced to default on their loans more often than non-First Generation students.
And while institutions like CSU can be rightly proud of their support for First Generation students, we should all be completely clear on this point: providing access to education without taking the steps needed to assure the success of these students is a cheat; an illusion. It is beneath what we should expect of ourselves, and what Colorado should expect from its universities. Scholarships to attend are just the first step and must be paired with a robust menu of supportive services including mentorship, tutoring, connections, and high expectations.
Today, at CSU Pueblo, about 1,100 students – 44% of the total resident student population – are First Generation, and they have a track record of graduating at a higher rate than the student body as a whole. At CSU Fort Collins, more than 5,600 students who are currently enrolled identify as First Generation, about 25% of our total student population, and the graduation gap between these students and majority students at CSU is less than half the national average – but there’s still a gap.
And as long as there’s any gap, we have work to do. Additional support for First Gen students should be a part of how we, as a society, fund higher education because we know the success of First Generation students does, in fact, improve with resources that fund programs we know are critical to whether these students graduate. As an example, at CSU, we are able to pair some First Generation Students with a Scholar Contact – a faculty or staff member who is there to answer questions and provide individualized support. Often, these Scholar Contacts were once First Generation students themselves, who know firsthand how disorienting and frightening it can be to travel a road that no one in your family has previously walked.
This type of support takes time, and it takes funding. We would like to be able to offer this support to every First Generation student because it has a real impact on whether they leave with a diploma in hand.
And every time we graduate a First Gen student, it shifts the trajectory of an entire family. Somewhere in the family of everyone who holds a college degree, there was a First-Generation student. Every family starts with one person who makes the difficult choice to break with family tradition and pursue a higher education. That choice brings with it all the rich benefits of education itself, as well as the countless ancillary benefits that we know college graduates see in return for their investment, including higher salaries and more career options over a lifetime.
By the time a First Generation student applies to college, many of them have already had a lifetime of overcoming obstacles. They’ve charted a course for academic success, and we should do everything in our power to help them realize it. It’s absolutely the moral thing to do, and it’s within our power.
– tony
Tony Frank, Chancellor
CSU System
This message was included in Chancellor Frank’s May newsletter. Click here to subscribe to the Chancellor’s monthly letter.