Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) is striving to make attending college the educational norm in Berkshire County.

Changing Aspirations in a Changing Economy: The Berkshire Compact

Some of the Berkshire County sixth-grade students visiting Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts had never set foot on a college campus before. On this visit, they met with English professor Rosanne Fleszar Denhard and several of her students, watched a multimedia presentation, and talked about their interests in things like graphic novels, filmmaking, and writing for newspapers or magazines. The sixth-graders learned that these topics were among the many they could study in college. Their enthusiasm was clear: “I’m definitely coming to MCLA and definitely want to make sure she’s still here,” one sixth-grader exclaimed after Denhard’s presentation. Denhard was thrilled with the response. “Sometimes, you can just see a spark in a kid,” she says. “Many of these students are going to be first-generation college students, and we’re showing them that college can be a warm, welcoming place.”

The college trip, organized for the annual Berkshire County Goes to College event, is part of a larger project called the Berkshire Compact for Higher Education. Initiated at MCLA with local and state partners, the compact is a countywide initiative that seeks to raise residents’ educational aspirations so that they view sixteen years of education as the norm. The compact also works to provide access to higher education for all interested county residents and equip residents with the skills they need to prosper in Berkshire County’s changing economy.

Changing Goals for a Changing County

Before the 1980s, Berkshire County, located in western Massachusetts not far from the New York state line, had a thriving manufacturing-based economy with large employers like General Electric and Sprague Electric, explains MCLA president Mary Grant. But in the mid-1980s, these companies and others like them downsized. “The entire world around here changed,” Grant says. “Before, you didn’t always need a college education—you’d get training in the workforce. But how do you inject into a region like this a culture of lifelong learning when there hadn’t been one before?” In 2003, county leaders approached Grant to help them find ways to think differently about higher education. Grant and MCLA helped pull together local partners—K-12 educators, the business community, cultural organizations, and three other local colleges—and conducted a study of the region and its needs. “We wanted to really understand the region before we presumed anything,” Grant says. In 2005, the Berkshire Compact was born, with the main goal of encouraging Berkshire County residents to view higher education as the accepted educational norm. “As a region, we set the goal that every person should aspire to sixteen years of education. It could be different for different people—college, skilled training in a trade, continuing education programs—but make sixteen years the standard,” Grant says.

MCLA is a member of both AAC&U’s LEAP Campus Action Network and COPLAC, the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, and as such is uniquely positioned to ensure that the compact’s vision makes the case that liberal education outcomes are essential to preparation for success in the new global economy. The first of the seven Principles of Excellence articulated in the LEAP National Report, College Learning for the New Global Century, is to “Aim high—and make excellence inclusive,” and the Berkshire Compact exemplifies this goal. It seeks to encourage all students—and especially first-generation college students—to see the value of higher education and experience the best practices colleges offer. At MLCA, for instance, students work closely with faculty doing independent research as early as the sophomore year. Grant explains, “We really have a responsibility to be connected to our region and our community. That’s one of the ways that the compact came about—looking into our own backyard and finding the catalyst for change.”

As part of a dual-enrollment robotics course at MCLA, high school students build and program robots made from discarded 3.5-inch floppy disk drives.

Starting Young, Providing Options

Because many Berkshire County elementary and middle school students come from homes where neither parent attended college—a college degree was not needed to succeed in the region's previous manufacturing-based economy—one of the Berkshire Compact’s main projects is to help students recognize from an early age that attending college is a realistic and attainable goal. All county students first visit a college campus in the third grade, and visit again in the sixth grade for the Berkshire County Goes to College program. During these visits, students see college dormitories, libraries, classrooms, and athletic facilities, talk to faculty and students, and perform hands-on minilessons in art, literature, biology and chemistry. The sixth-graders visit either MCLA or another of the county’s colleges—Berkshire Community College, Williams College, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock. “We want them to know that there are options—community colleges, private schools, public schools,” Grant says. “We want to get at kids at a young age, to make education one continuous pipeline.”

When Berkshire County students reach high school age, they can choose to participate in dual-enrollment classes at MCLA and their high school and receive both high school and college credits, says MCLA dean of academic affairs Monica Joslin. High school juniors and seniors in good academic standing can participate in a courtesy program that allows them to enroll in any MCLA introductory course. In addition, a new program, piloted last fall, allowed high school students to enroll in a calculus course team-taught by a high school teacher and a MCLA professor, and receive both high school and college credit. This spring, MCLA offered a similar team-taught course on computer programming at Berkshire County’s McCann Technical High School, explains Mike Dalton, the MCLA professor who taught the course with McCann high school teacher Perry Burdick.

Dalton taught the same material from his regular MCLA programming course to the dual-enrollment high schoolers. “I think the students found it challenging, but then, my college students find it challenging,” he says. “From the high schoolers’ perspective, I don’t think they realize it’s one of the more challenging computer courses on campus.”

Dalton and Burdick are teaching a similar dual-enrollment robotics course this summer. “We want to get high school students interested, excited, and really working on something,” Dalton explains. In the robotics course, students—many of whom have no programming background—are learning to write code to program robots made from old 3.5-inch floppy disk drives from obsolete campus computers. The class is held on the MCLA campus, allowing the high school students a taste of college life. “We’re really focusing on the STEM fields now, and we’re getting tremendously good feedback,” Joslin says. “We want to increase student interest in attending college and in studying science. For the computer programming course, we had to limit enrollment to sixteen students, but we had a lot more interested.”

The state provides funding for both dual-enrollment options, and in the past year, more than one hundred high school students participated in dual-enrollment programs, Joslin says. “We’re hoping in the future to work with high schools to align curriculum, closing that gap and assisting students in being prepared for college. The Berkshire Compact is creating a tremendous network.”

Looking Forward

The Berkshire Compact received a small allocation from the state of Massachusetts to cover staff support for working group meetings, transportation costs, and other expenses, and MCLA has dedicated matching resources to compact projects, Grant says.  But much of the compact’s work is completed entirely through volunteer efforts from MCLA faculty, students, and other compact member volunteers in the community. One example is NEXXUS, a student step-dance team at MCLA that teaches step dance to children in a housing development. “It’s about dance, of course, but it’s really about connecting the kids with college students,” Grant explains. Other projects include Inkberry, a local writing organization that pairs North Adams public school students with MCLA student writing mentors, and an annual women and girls in sports day that connects third- through eighth-grade girls with female college athletes and coaches. “It’s all very intentional. We’re trying to give kids exposure to college,” Grant says. Denhard’s college Shakespeare students also participate in informal service-learning programs with elementary students. “We really emphasize high-impact practices at MCLA,” Denhard says. “It helps our students learn when they’re thinking about teaching younger kids.”

MCLA’s goals for the Berkshire Compact are closely aligned with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland’s education agenda, which focuses on making higher education in the state affordable and accessible to any interested student, of any age, by 2020. The next challenge, Grant says, is getting Berkshire County parents and families more involved in compact projects. At a reception last November for high school students who had earned a prestigious state award, Grant remembers the parents of a high school senior approaching her and saying, 'Maybe it’s time we started to think about college.' “On the spot, I put them in contact with admissions counselors and got them information about applying for Massachusetts state schools,” Grant says. “We need to make college accessible for parents too. Teachers have students for only so long—we need our families to be really excited about lifelong learning.”

For more information about the Berkshire Compact for Higher Education, visit its Web site and download the project’s recent progress report.