B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021
education
The companies who founded
DC-CAP included AES Corp.,
AOL, the Morris & Gwendolyn
Cafritz Foundation,
ExxonMobil, the Fannie Mae
Foundation, the Greater
Washington Urban League,
Lockheed Martin, Marriott
International, the Catherine B.
Reynolds Foundation, Riggs
National Corp., Sallie Mae,
Charles E. Smith Cos., Verizon
and The Washington Post Co.
Rodriguez said that “we
created a college-going culture
among D.C. students and
families where higher education
is the expectation, not the
exception.”
Sports and business magnate
Ted Leonsis, now the DC-CAP
board chair, said that because of
Rodriguez’s “passion and
leadershi p, we are in an
excellent position to continue
this critical work.”
The organization’s counseling
function has been reduced as
the D.C. schools have invested
more in that responsibility.
What is needed, its leaders say,
is larger scholarships to keep up
with rising out-of-state tuitions.
DC-CAP is also looking more
closely at which colle ges have
the best graduation results.
That can have an effect not just
on D.C. students, but also on
young people from low-income
families all over the country
who deserve better educations
than th ey are getting.
[email protected]if she worked at it. Eventually
she realized she was there for an
education, not ente rtainment.
Linthic um-Seymour
explained to me a vital par t of
the DC-CAP approach. Students
like Sabree had parents who
had never gone to college. Her
father was a construction
worker and her mother a bank
teller. Neophyte undergraduates
like her needed to believe firmly
that their tuition dollars
entitled them to the same
services that middle-class
colle ge students received, and to
complain when their colleges
dropped the ball.
When D.C. students got to
colle ge, Linthicum-Seymour
said, th ey were “often afraid to
speak up or afraid to ask for
help. I provided a m edium for
Rashidah to be able to express
hersel f.” It was also important
that the D.C. schools provided
more challenging courses, such
as Advanced Placement, to
prepare students for higher
education.
DC-CAP has helped enroll
more than 35,000 students in
college, of which 14,000 have
gotten degrees and 6,700 are
still in school. It has awarded
nearly $55 million in
scholarships and helped develop
techniques such as raising
students’ personal expectations.
Retention advisers are now
employed by many
organizations across the
countr y.Her DC -CAP advisers,
undaunted, helped her prepare
her applic ation to Delaware
State and convinced her she
could succeed despite her lousy
scores. She got in, but that was
just the beginning of her
struggle.She was a vibrant young
woman who had enjoyed
Washingto n’s nightlife. The city
of Dover, where her Delaware
State campus was located, was
the state capital, but was ti ny
and drab compared with the
nation ’s capital. Sabree told me:
“The first year I hated it. I
wanted to come home. I was
homesick.”
To fight that feeling, her
advisers, Pamela Brown and
Andrea Linthicum-Seymour,
helped her with financial
problems and told her often
that everything would get betteralone in the country, were
unable to go to a state university
and pay in-state tuition. They
could go to the University of the
District of Columbia, but that
was not the right college for
many of them.
Graham recalled recently how
amazed he was to see Congress
unanimously pass in 1999 the
D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant
program. Today it gives D.C.
students up to $1 0,000 to pay
the difference between in-state
and out- of-sta te tuition at
public universities around the
countr y, or gives them $2,500 a
year if they attend a historically
Black college or university or
any D.C.-area college. In
addition, DC-CAP awards as
many $2,500 scholarships as it
can afford.
The business group began by
creating a $15 million
endowment for DC-CAP. It
opened college information
centers and placed full-time
colle ge advisers in D.C. public
schools, roughly doubling the
number of college counselors
available. It employed what it
called retention advisers to help
students stay in college.
In 2003 I interviewed
Rashidah Sabree, a bright
student who looked unlikely to
get into any college before DC-
CAP found her. She had not
taken the SAT. When DC -CAP
made that happen, her scores
were terrible — 320 in math and
340 in verbal skills.Leading that effort as DC-
CAP president and chief
executive has been Argelia
Rodriguez, a visionary who
previously ran her own
educational and management
consulting firm for universities,
companies, associations and the
D.C. public schools. DC-CAP has
benefited from her
determination to get things
done and her diplomatic skill
working with D.C.
administrators often tired of
hearing from outsiders what
they were doing wrong.
Now, Rodriguez has
announced what she calls her
graduation from DC-CAP. She
plans to step down at the end of
the school year. How did she
and her staff make such
progress?
Her organization emerged at
a time of great ferment in the
effort to make college real for
impoverished teenagers. When I
first wrote about DC-CAP in
2003, I noted several small
groups trying to help, including
College Bound, Hoop Dreams,
the Urban Alliance Foundation
and the Coaching for Co llege
Program. The arri val of
Rodriguez, her crew and their
private supporters gave such
efforts a h uge boost.
Donald E. Graham, then the
chair of The Washington Post
Co.’s board, led the DC-CAP
board. He and his many allies
pointed out to Congress how
unfair it was that D.C. students,In 1998, the
District of
Columbia Public
Schools were
doing such a bad
job preparing
students for
colle ge that when
local business
executives asked how many
graduating seniors went to
colle ge the year before, district
leaders didn’t know.
Dismayed, the business
people took action. They set up
a priv ately financed college
counseling organization for D.C.
neighborhood schools, whose
12th-grade counselors had
neither the time nor the
expertise to handle college
applic ation issues. The regular
counselors had to focus on kids
with serious personal problems,
such as flunking courses,
missing school and be ing
homeless.
The business-funded effort
was called the D.C. College
Access Program, DC-CA P. Before
it was born, only about a third
of seniors even tried college.
Only about 15 percent of former
D.C. students received college
degrees.
This year, after two decades
of work by DC-CAP, about two-
thirds of D.C. graduates — close
to the national average — g o to
colle ge. About half of them
graduate within six years. The
numbers need to be better, but
D.C. has come a long way.
School district shrugged o≠ college for most students until DC-CAP got involved
Jay
Mathews
“We created a college-
going culture among
D.C. students and
families where higher
education is the
expectation.”
Argelia Rodriguez, DC-CAP
president and chief executivetheir flu shots by Oct. 29, a
deadline scheduled to precede
Thanksgiving break. “That’s al-
ways a vulnerable time for us,
when they leave and come back,”
Patterson said.
George Mason University, in
Northern Virginia, required res-
idential students to get the flu
shot last year, when officials
were concerned about over-
whelmi ng the campus’s corona-
virus testing infrastructure.
But this year, with coronavi-
rus vaccines available and more
robust on-campus testing,
“there’s less of a reason to
mandate the flu vaccine than
there was last year,” said Ste-
phen Wintermeyer, the univer-
sity’s associate medical director
of student health services.
George Mason leaders instead
are running flu vaccine clinics
and strongly encouraging stu-
dents and employees to get their
shots, Wintermeyer said. And
officials hope that pandemic-era
policies of mask-wearing, regu-
lar hand-washing and staying
home while sick will ward off flu
outbreaks, too.
“In general, students have
taken things very seriously,”
Wintermeyer said. “I think peo-
ple are more aware of transmit-
ting viruses than they were in
the past.”
[email protected]kins, schools such as the Univer-
sity of Miami and Maryland’s
McDaniel College, as well as the
entire University of California
system, have all shared plans to
mandate flu shots.Elon University, in North
Carolina, will enforce a mandate
for the second year in a row, said
Jana Lynn Patterson, associate
vice president for student life
and dean of students.
“Our number of positive cases
just plummeted,” Patterson said
of last year’s flu season, by which
point much of Elon’s student
body had already returned to
campus.
Elon’s students this year will
have to prove they’ve receivedGeorgetown has already had
to contend with two viral out-
breaks this year, including 65
confirmed cases of influenza A
on the main campus and at the
medical center, according to the
university’s student newspaper,
the Hoya.
“That fits with what we had
expected... lower population
immunity, early rates of infec-
tion,” Mishori said of the flu
cases. “What we did to address
this expectation is we created
two early — earlier than usual —
vaccine clinics for students.”
The Northwest Washington
campus will not enforce a vac-
cine mandate, but officials are
urging students and employees
to get their shots.
“College students are more
open to hearing these messages
because of covid,” Mishori said.
“Students are very willing to get
vaccinated.”
Influenza vaccination rates
among college students typically
are about 50 percent, according
to survey data from the Ameri-
can College Health Association
— but the number of students
who reported having had a flu
shot within the previous 12
months shot up to 61 percent in
2020 as the pandemic rage d.
This year, college health offi-
cials want that percentage to be
even higher. Besides Johns Hop-because their bodies did not
create the barriers needed to
fight the virus.
Now, with students back on
campuses and many Americans
back at work, experts are warn-
ing that the dangerous flu sea-
son that was predicted for 2020
will finally take hold.
“The expectation is that...
this year, potentially, is going to
be harsher,” Mishori said.severe outbreaks of the two
viruses at once — last year.
But “very few people had the
flu last year, because everybody
was home trying to avoid covid
and everybody was wearing a
mask,” explained Ranit Mishori,
Georgetown University’s chief
public health officer. Millions of
people who avoided exposure to
the flu last year may have weak-
ened immunity, Mishori said,vost for academic affairs and a
professor in its Bloomberg
School of Public Health. “I think
people see the value in trying to
control the flu, given that we’re
still in a high level of covid
transmission.”
Health experts expected the
confluence of the coronavirus
and flu to spur a “twindemic” —
FLU FROM B1
Johns Hopkins and McDaniel among schools mandating flu vaccine this year
LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A patient receives a f lu vaccine last year in Mesquite, Tex. With students back on campuses and many
Americans back at work, experts are warning that a dangerous flu season will take hold this year.“I think people see the
value in trying to
control the flu, given
that we’re still in a high
level of covid
transmission.”
Stephen Gange, Johns Hopkins
University executive vice provost for
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