Courtesy of Black Enterprise
What does it take to succeed in college and then, later, in the workforce? We think we know—but do we?
Higher-education institutions and employers clearly believe measurements like ACT scores and grade point averages are the right yardsticks. But, sadly, these gauges cause us to overlook too many young people who could flourish in school and in the workplace.
Take Tony, for example.
He graduated high school at the top of his class, went to college as a finance major and landed prestigious internships at places like Chicago investment firm Loop Capital. After early success in college, his home life began to fragment. He had to sit out a year to live at home and help his mother. He re-enrolled locally at a community college after that, still needing to work two jobs to take care of responsibilities at home and save money to pay for school.
Because of the challenges Illinois is facing to get a budget passed, Tony is unable to get the grant money that low-income students who attend school in-state have typically been afforded. He used the little money he had saved to register for class but did not have extra money to buy books for his classes.
Understandably, his GPA suffered. And yet, his struggles helped him to hone tremendous leadership skills like persistence, resilience, teamwork and a remarkably strong work ethic. Unfortunately, he will not be in the pipeline for many companies upon graduation because his academic standing alone will rule him out. And that’s a loss for him and for the community at large.
As head of the Chicago Scholars Foundation, my charge is to transform the depressing statistics that overshadow my field and to get more young people on the path to success. My team and I work to break down barriers that low-income and first-generation college students face. The journey is arduous, and one of the biggest challenges we face is the long-standing focus on ACT scores and GPA as primary measures of success when evaluating our students.
That wrong-headed focus on academic performance is holding our economy back. For years, we’ve been trying to improve education, and despite progress that should not go unnoticed, we have yet to see a critical benefit of a more educated populace—improved diversity at leadership levels in organizations. This, we know, is where real systemic change will happen. Only five CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are black and only nine are Latino. Of course, not everyone can be a CEO, so we look deeper to discover that only 2 percent of executives at these companies are black and only 3 percent are Latino. There is only one African-American in the U.S. Senate, and only four have served in the history of our country. The list of disappointments goes on.
A focus on academics is too narrow. The real movement needs to become a leadership movement with an accentuated focus on the noncognitive skills we know are critical to success. We must encourage decision-makers to craft alternative and more holistic ways of evaluating our students.
Michelle Obama says there are three people youths need in their lives: one who walks ahead who they look up to and follow, one who walks beside them who is with them every step of their journey and one who they reach back for themselves and bring along after they’ve cleared the way. We need to not only be the people who youths look up to but the people who reach back for them, fight for them and bring them with us along the way. To do so, we must change the paradigm for college and career acceptance.