Arrupe College’s support system

Starting any job is hard. Starting a job on August 1, 2020? Unusually so. That’s when Father Thomas Neitzke, S.J., former president of Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, took over as Arrupe College’s dean, a position he thought he “could really sink” his teeth into. He would be the second dean in school history and the first hired in the ugly heart of a pandemic.

That meant Neitzke took gradual bites at the beginning—mostly in small Zoom meetings with students and faculty, trying to put names with virtual faces. By Christmas, he and a few members of his administrative team were working in masks from an eerily empty Maguire Hall. This past April, he met one of his direct reports for the first time in person, 271 days after he assumed the reins.

To Neitzke, it quickly became clear how challenging the pandemic had been for Arrupe’s student body, too. Enrollment had dipped. Arrupe social workers saw an uptick in referrals, mostly by way of their student peers. Arrupe staffers, meanwhile, were jamming grocery donations into carts typically reserved for Loyola University Chicago move-in day, a signal of spiking food insecurity.

Danielle Cochran, a clinical assistant professor of literature and writing at Arrupe, has an office right off Maguire’s third floor elevator. Normally, it’s an excellent location to check in casually with students as they flow through the building, to stay connected. That connection was trickier to maintain when students—enrolled in remote classes and understandably preoccupied—weren’t using the elevator at all.

Before he was hired, Neitzke had read and admired Come to Believe: How the Jesuits are Reinventing Education (Again), a book written by his predecessor, Father Stephen Katsouros, S.J. On a subsequent visit to Chicago (but before his own interview process began), Neitzke was struck to find Katsouros in his office on the phone with a dentist, trying to nab an appointment for a student. That level of care is exactly what motivated Neitzke to enter the Jesuits in the first place. A huge percentage of Arrupe students graduate—the average two-year graduation rate is 43 percent, compared to 23 percent for city colleges and just 13 percent of low-income community college students nationally—because of what Neitzke calls its “reach-in culture.” It’s patently harder to reach through a screen.

“What makes Arrupe so successful are the wraparound services, all the social workers and student support, and our faculty being able to see students and advise them every day,” adds Neitzke. “We’ve done our best to do that online, but it’s a struggle.”

Retention has always been something of an obsession at Arrupe, which was designed as a bridge program for students with the capacity and motivation to thrive at a four-year college but who could use extra financial or educational support to do so. The cost to attend (subsidized through a combination of fundraising, grants, and financial aid) is minimal. Class sizes are modest. On the premises, there’s a writing center, a peer tutoring center, a career counselor, a graduate support coordinator, and multiple social workers on call. The academic program, meanwhile, is rigorous, with faculty members simultaneously serving as advisers. Arrupe students carry with them different expectations than a student who signs up for classes at a local community college.

“I’m not teaching you like this is a two-year degree,” Cochran says. “I’m teaching you like we’re across the street [at Loyola]. And I think that they end up respecting me for that.”

COVID-19 introduced unpredictable disturbances. Interacting with strangers became a health risk. Major sectors of the economy went dark. Schools went entirely online, forcing parents to improvise child care. The pandemic was also disproportionately painful for America’s working class, the population most served by two-year colleges. Of the nation’s 5 million community college students, about 40 percent are Black or Latinx and nearly half are low-income. On balance, they live in smaller homes with less reliable bandwidth than their peers and often work in jobs that require their physical presence.

“For most community college students, being a student is not their main identity,” says Lorenzo Baber, an associate professor and program chair for higher education in Loyola’s School of Education. “They’re a parent, a partner, a worker. Even if they are at home, carving out two hours for a class can be very difficult.”

And so the coronavirus, among everything else, created a non-traditional college crisis. At two-year colleges in the United States, enrollment fell 10 percent from the previous spring. Nearly 40,000 fewer Illinoisans signed up for two-year college than the year prior, according to data from the Illinois Community College Board. That same report made clear that the pandemic “most adversely affected the college trajectories of first-generation, underrepresented minority, and lower-achieving students from higher-poverty communities and high schools.” In other words, the type of students Arrupe College was explicitly created to educate.

Among higher education experts, there’s mounting concern that two-year college students who paused their studies might slip away permanently. Retention is a challenge at this level, even under the best of circumstances. It’s why the Biden administration, as part of its $3 trillion recovery plan, proposed investing $109 billion in two-year colleges and another $62 billion to strengthen retention and completion efforts specifically. Affordable and inclusive but chronically underfunded, these institutions were once celebrated as “people’s colleges.” The president and the first lady, herself a two-year college professor and a one-time Arrupe visitor, understand their distinct value.

With this risk in mind, the spring and summer presented Neitzke and his colleagues with an excellent opportunity to take stock and examine Arrupe with fresh eyes. The worst of the pandemic was, blessedly, in the rearview mirror. The school’s new leadership was more or less settled. What, then, is still innovative and durable about the model, an associate’s degree program in name but one that’s intentionally distinct from any other two-year college, thanks to its instructional methods and comprehensive student support? What can Arrupe’s staff and faculty do to tweak or improve how the school operates, especially after this painful year? And how can they leverage their relationships with other Loyola researchers—a unique resource among two-year schools—to do so?

Julia Pryce is a professor in Loyola’s School of Social Work and an expert on non-parental mentorship. Over the summer, she’s partnering with Arrupe leadership as they revisit their advising model, ensuring faculty members have the tools and support they need to foster productive student relationships. Those are not always the most natural to build and maintain, especially if the mentee has a completely different life experience from their professors. “A lot of my work,” Pryce says, “is really trying to help mentors develop the skills they need to connect with these kids when the signals the kids are giving are not always the ones that the adults will expect.”

Later this year, Cochran and Baber will launch their own research project investigating the experiences of men of color in two-year degree tracks, and analyzing in particular programs like Black Men for Success, which offers Black students at Arrupe social-emotional mentorship and career counseling and which Cochran is now directing. Cochran wants the end product to be practical, not just theoretical, “improving and enhancing lives.”

Housing security is another issue that’s front of mind for Arrupe’s administration. Without a reliable place to stay each night, it’s nearly impossible for students to keep on top of their coursework. At any given time, Neitzke estimates that 10 to 15 Arrupe students are sleeping on someone’s couch. That’s why his team is launching a three-year pilot program with Loyola’s Residence Life to house 20 students in Baumhart Hall, across the street from Maguire on Water Tower Campus. Two donors are covering room and board.

Widening pathways for Arrupe graduates—80 percent of whom already continue on to pursue bachelor’s degrees—is also front of mind. This will be boosted by a $2.2 million grant that the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration just awarded Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing. With that money, Niehoff will expand to 33 its successful partnership with Arrupe, in which students start Loyola’s nursing program while still pursuing their associate’s degree.

It’s Neitzke’s dream to see Arrupe reach its full capacity. To do so, he knows he’ll need to attract new students and raise money for an endowment in a difficult environment to do either. He’s spent the bulk of his first year on the job burnishing Arrupe’s reputation across Chicago, speaking with nonprofits, pastors, elected officials, school superintendents, and more. “We’re only 6 years old,” he says. “We’re just becoming who we are. There’s room to grow.”

Like Cochran, he’s also desperate for the full Arrupe community to get back onto campus. Earlier this summer, he walked past Wintrust Student Commons and spied a group of seven students who’d come in to study but found themselves glued in conversation with a faculty member. After six months of relative solitude inside Maguire, the activity was a novelty for Neitzke. He found it exhilarating.

“They were in there having a great time, and they weren’t talking about anything in particular,” Neitzke says. “You could just see the relationship they had with our faculty really was genuine. He cared about them and they cared about him.”

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