The Utah Monthly recently interviewed Diane Sampson, founder of the Gantry Group, a nonprofit whose mission is to help first-generation, low-income college students have a successful university experience. Much of the Gantry Group’s work involves helping, in particular, first-generation Latter-day Saint students from the greater New York area flourish during their time at Brigham Young University–Provo. Some questions and responses have been adapted for clarity.
How many students do you help?
So we’ve doubled in size every year. In 2019 we had six who matriculated. I think this fall we have over sixty matriculating, and then we have about 100 students I’m working with. Some of them have stopped, have stepped out for some reason, and I’m trying to help them get ready to go back. Or they’re [dealing with depression, anxiety, a lot of trauma] and we’re kind of working on that. And then we’ll probably have twenty kids who are eighteen applying to college this year. I talk in these vague numbers because part of the nature of deep poverty is that until my students have arrived in Utah and been in class for two days I have no idea if they’re attending. I don’t know how many kids are going to show up. I think it’s over 60, I don’t know. I had a student yesterday who said, “I got it together and I’m going”; we’re two weeks from school but I think he might actually make it. But it’s the nature of deep poverty, their lives are filled with chaos so things are constantly in flux.
What sort of aid do you offer?
Originally it was to help them apply, make sure they applied appropriately, and if I thought they were eligible for BYU and they’d never considered it, could I help them do that? [After realizing that applying to college was far from the only hurdle to their success], I started raising money so I could offer close-the-gap scholarships. I work a lot with them to find money. I help them find scholarships from need-based scholarship funds, and then there’s often a gap and we close the gap so that no kid takes out debt. So I did that right away and I also went out [to provide support as they got settled in]. Because when my kids went to college, I went out and I bought them laundry soap and I bought them a semester’s worth of stuff and I made sure that they had a non-insane roommate and you know, that kind of stuff. But a lot of times the kids I work with don’t get any of that. Well-meaning people would help them apply, they get in and they put them on an airplane. And then they arrive somehow at BYU at Heritage Halls with no idea how to do anything. That just seemed like okay let’s start with failure in mind. That’s a good failure in mind model. So that’s how we started. And then I realized that that wasn’t even, that that was all the easiest stuff possible. From the demographic that works with us, nationally their drop-out rate is 89%. I’ve got a list of 23 reasons [why students like mine drop out].
Of those 23 reasons low-income, first-generation college students might not make it, what are the top three?
So, undereducation. New York City is the most segregated school system in the country. Despite every effort to be otherwise, people who look like me learn how to game the system, and we make sure that our children go to the very best schools, and the parents who don’t speak English (which is a large portion of New York City), they don’t know how to know what are the best schools and their kids get assigned to [a low-performing school]. They tend to get poor instruction, they tend to attend schools that are violent or in disrepair. So they come out really undereducated. Then, kind of longer-term, I’d say social-cultural capital. The way kids like you get jobs is someone says “hey I know that in the history department this is how this thing happens, so you should talk to this person and they’ll help you figure that out.” So these kids from NYC don’t have anyone in their lives who gives them that sort of information. They don’t know that those things exist. They don’t know how you get [professional] jobs, they don’t know anyone who [needs] a resume. Everyone in my stake works in construction, in home healthcare, in house cleaning, office cleaning, line cooks, the labor of catering. Their parents are paid to show up at a particular time, keep their mouths shut, keep their heads down and go home at a particular time. Those are the opposite skills that when they arrive at BYU they’re supposed to exhibit. In New York City if you’re on the subway and you meet someone and you start talking to them friendly-like, you’re going to get beat up at some point—it’s not safe. So they get to BYU and people say you should greet your professors, you should talk to people—they spent eighteen years learning not to do that. And then if their parents are undocumented they’ve spent their lives avoiding anything that looks like authority because they could get a parent deported if they say “I’m sick” and someone starts to investigate, they could get a parent deported. So help-seeking behavior is dangerous [where they grow up] and essential at college.
Is BYU aware of these challenges, and are they addressing them?
Not coherently enough. There is awareness in areas, pockets, and various offices, but BYU is wired so that [these various offices don’t always communicate]. There’s not really a mechanism for them to talk to each other. So we were trying to work on a project where we were encouraging one part of BYU to model after a lot of Ivy League universities that bring first-generation, low-income students to campus for summer term. And then we went over and talked to another part of BYU and they’re thinking about how what BYU really ought to do is bring first-generation, low-income students here a couple of days before—you know that same idea is being talked about in various places, but not across the boundaries, so that’s problematic.
Then if you say we’re going to create a program for poor kids, a bunch of rich kids’ parents go ballistic. Especially if you say we’re going to make a program for brown kids, that we’re not going to cater to white kids, people go crazy over fairness, equity, meritocracy, you know. All of which are ridiculous words when you’re comparing these cohorts. And I see it on both sides. So you get the one side that I would say are politically conservative and believe in merit, or whatever. But then on the liberal side people are writing in Mormon blogs about BYU’s standards slipping because they’re taking kids with a 3.1 [GPA], without any sense that, ok, if you want BYU to be something other than a White school, you’re going to have to let in kids who didn’t have the same opportunities. There’s just not enough LDS, privileged students of color out there [who went to great schools], and if they’re wealthy enough they don’t want to come here. If they got a 4.0 they’re going to go to Brown or Harvard or Yale, they’re not going to come to BYU. Because why would they want to be the only black or brown kid in every class? I feel like there’s great empathy in a lot of pockets at BYU, and they’re getting squeezed from both sides.
If you had the opportunity to institute your reform wish list, what would you do first?
I mean that’s really hard, you’re just giving me the opportunity to hang myself here. So we’re running a program with BYU this fall that is an effort to address some of the things that I see as really problematic. We’re going to have a cohort, and they’re taking the same classes. They are adequately funded, they are going to get significant wraparound tutoring and support. The research on COVID learning loss and on undereducation says, actually all the research says remedial education is pretty useless. And so in the effort to say what works, it’s usually putting students in a class at speed, by providing either a sidecar class (so you go to Math 110 and you take then an extra one-credit class that is study time, tutoring, to reinforce what is learned) [or extra support] and a lot of students will hit speed by the end of the semester. So we’re going to try that. We couldn’t get sidecar classes, but we do have twice-a-week tutoring and other wraparound support that the students will get. And we’re using foundational-skills classes, so the math and writing, because those will structurally undergird all the classes they take after this. And then they’re also taking a class with Ben Gibbs, who is just a phenomenal instructor, and he’s going to be teaching Social Problems in America. Again, students who are first generation or students of color tell me when they take Ben’s class or [Jacob Rugh’s] class they feel seen and heard and understood. And I thought okay so let’s not wait until they’re juniors, their very first semester let’s say “no, there are people here who understand where you come from.” We’re going to do a high-impact physical experience with them because there is a huge gap with our students in having experiential learning of any sort, so we’re going to insert some of those across the semester. We’ll see—my daughter and I are going to be looking at okay do they perform at or better than students who are admitted by BYU under regular admissions? And then how about compared to students in their demographic of poor, low income, multilingual? And if so, then we may be coming up with something that's like a model for getting [stronger persistence]—if we could get them started more comfortably, then would they continue more comfortably?
Why do you think college is worth it?
Well the most immediate answer is the possibility of economic mobility. And we know that the length of marriage is often determined by [education], the better educated a woman, the longer she’s married. The better educated a woman, the more secure and educated her children. The more financially stable a couple, the more likely they are to stay married. Those are byproducts of an education that provides a stable career. You know all the research says that the straightest line to economic mobility is college. There are plenty of yes, buts—yet, but if you’re in tech, or yes, but if you can do that [other skilled work]. That’s all true, but what we know is that the broadest path and the straightest path to economic mobility is education. So that seems like a no-brainer to me.
The creation of the Office of Belonging, last school year’s focus on the Beloved Community—are these efforts effective in making BYU a better place for first-generation college students?
The forces that push back on efforts the admissions department makes, that financial aid makes, [that other parts of BYU make], those forces that are coming from the members of the Church. I can’t imagine how Carl Hernandez [the current vice president for belonging] gets past those, I’m not sure. We’d have to have many fewer parents calling, saying “Why can’t my rich, white kid be in that program you’ve got for very poor brown kids?”
I am hopeful about the Office on Belonging and what it can mean for creating the Beloved Community. When I started doing what I was doing, I went to Manhattan and I started talking to people and they said “we will not help our kids from Harlem into BYU or BYU-Idaho,” like “we send kids out and they come home broken, they come home beat and broken, we’re not doing it anymore.” And I’ve been doing this work long enough that I see that point of view, but a lot of the leadership of the Church comes out of BYU, and if we could make BYU a better place for multilingual learners, for first-generation students; if we can make it more of the beloved community, in part we would change the Church because a lot of those students would go on to be leaders who [influence education goals and economic opportunity in their extended families and in their congregations, and communities]. That’s overly optimistic but it seems like the best place to turn the boat a little bit.
What are things that BYU students can do to help?
Be patient when my students are slow to warm up. So my students come from a place where you don’t talk to strangers. Like seriously, if someone on the subway starts to talk to me I’ll get off the car and sit someplace else, because it suggests they’re crazy, it’s a scary thing. So when they come to BYU, they sit down and immediately people start talking to them, and usually people go first to ethnicity, and they’ll go where are you from, and they’ll go New York, and then the person will say no, where are you really from? I’m always telling my students, sometimes they’re being rude but 95% of the time they’re trying to give you an opportunity to tell them about yourself, and in Utah people ask intrusive questions all the time, it’s the nature of the college, nature of the state. Recognize that there are a bunch of gates for first-generation, low-income college students that aren’t gates to you because you know how to open them, and my students sort of stand and don’t know. First off, am I allowed to open the gate? And second, how would I, if I could? Taking Jacob Rugh’s class, [Sociology of Race and Ethnicity], feeling that it is incumbent on you to understand what you don’t understand about your own position in the US, your own position in the economy, I think is a useful suggestion. And supposedly no one does it better than Jake [Rugh].
What keeps you going? What gives you hope?
So when I was in my late thirties I was trying to decide whether to pick up my dissertation again and just finish it. I didn’t have that many chapters left, and then someone gave me [Tracy Kidder’s book about Paul Farmer], Mountains Beyond Mountains, and I thought ‘oh my dissertation is a waste of time. I’m never going to get a real job in the academy’ because that’s the way the labor force in the academy was at the time. ‘And I’m not going to make any impact that way,’ and so I gave up my dissertation. But one of the things in the book that was really important is that there was some criticism about the fact that Paul Farmer was such a negligent father, really, and husband. He was gone all the time. And he would say, “doesn't it say in the Gospels to love your neighbor as yourself, and my kid is fine, how can I sit with my child who has total safety, all the help, good education and know that there are children in Haiti that are dying?” If I’m going to live that law, then I can’t sit here because this kid is fine—I’ve got to be there. And that for me was just really powerful. And again I’m not in the same game as Paul Farmer, but I often think as I’m thinking about the kids, would what’s happening here for this kid be acceptable if it were happening to my kid? And if the answer is no, then it’s incumbent on me to fight the fight as long as I can. And you’re right the headwinds are—I walked out of my office the other day and I was saying to my husband that 9 out of 10 are going to drop out. I do this twelve hours a day, 9 out of 10 statistically are going to drop out of school. And actually we have way better stats than that, right now I’d say between 80 and 90% [of our students are still engaged with college]. But it’s constant battle.