Higher Education: Recruitment and Retention

"Our work is to shed light on the fact that you have these beautiful young adults, these kids in the city, who have so much potential, and all they need is the access. All they need is an extra push, or an extra hand, or somebody to listen to them."—Tiffany Tardy

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Higher Education: Recruitment and Retention

Clip: S2 Ep2 | 1m 30s

How can colleges and universities improve graduation rates for students of color?

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Tiffany Tardy

Tiffany Tardy

Tiffany Tardy is the Program Director for All-In Milwaukee, an organization providing financial aid, advising, program and career support for limited-income college students from the Milwaukee area. She has a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master’s of Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

TRANSCRIPT

Tiffany Tardy: Many campuses, especially when it comes to D&I and, you know, it’s such a buzz term right now, this whole diversity/inclusion thing, which, I mean, it’s great, I mean, I’m glad that folks are starting to pay attention to this more because the issues aren’t new. We’ve been talking about the same issues for probably a hundred years now, right, when it comes to the achievement gap and the challenges that we’re seeing in our communities around education and higher education, but I think that our campuses tend to focus on, how do we recruit them, how do we get more and more here, how do we do that, but there’s never a retention strategy.

It has to be a part of everything that you do. It transcends department.

So it can’t just be the multicultural office or the D&I office, or we can go and see the VP of Diversity/Inclusion, and then, we’re good. That’s not how this works, right? Because that one person or that one office is not in that classroom with that student who has a racist faculty member. But what we can do is, I think, what we’re trying to do is recognize that there are structural issues that are gonna take some time to address, but then how do we equip our students and our team with the tools to navigate the structures that exist already?

Angela Fitzgerald: Watch more Why Race Matters online and on the PBS app on your phone, tablet, Roku, or any other streaming device. ECHO is on.

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