June 10, 2010 — vol. 45, no 44
Interview
Greg Johnson, executive director of Bottom Line, with his assistant Claudine Johnson, a Bottom Line alum from O’Bryant High School. She worked for Bottom Line for five years after graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 2005.
Q. What problems did you see that motivated you to develop “Bottom Line?”
Bottom Line was founded to alleviate the challenges that urban students from low-income families face in pursuing a college education. Many of these students get accepted to college, but more than 60 percent of them drop out. We understood that there was a need for support from the application process through college graduation.
Q. What does the name “Bottom Line” mean?
Bottom Line’s name came from the belief that “getting in is not good enough.” While it’s important to help students through the college application process, that work goes to waste if the student drops out. A college degree allows a student to access higher-paying jobs, build a meaningful career and live a happier and healthier life. So graduating from college is the “bottom line.”
Q. How do you determine which students can benefit from your program?
We want to help the students who are ready to succeed at a four-year college, so we work with students from low-income households who have a 2.5 GPA or higher. These students often lack a support network that can help them earn a college degree. Bottom Line works to bridge this gap.
Q. How does the College Access Program work?
Students regularly visit our offices during their senior year of high school to meet one-on-one with our counselors. During these meetings, they receive help with everything from researching schools and writing essays to applying for financial aid and finding scholarships. Each student has his or her own set of challenges, and by working with them individually, we can resolve problems during the application process, and prepare for the challenges that will emerge once a student reaches campus. Assisting our students in selecting a college that best suits their academic, financial and personal needs is a large focus of our program. Choosing the right school can greatly determine a student’s ability to stay enrolled and earn a degree.
Q. What is the College Success Program?
We currently provide on-campus support at 21 colleges in Massachusetts. Students who go to these “target schools” benefit from continued one-on-one guidance for up to six years or until they graduate. Our counselors advise students in four areas, which we call DEAL: degree, employment, aid and life. Counselors help students pick classes, select their major, write a resume, find internships and relevant job experiences, renew their financial aid and resolve any other issues that could prevent them from persisting in their studies. With Bottom Line advisors and mentors, the graduation rates of our students match the rates of more affluent students.
Q. How does Bottom Line recruit its counselors? What are the criteria?
Bottom Line looks for individuals that either identify with the challenges our students face because they have experienced them or have an affinity for working with youth. Consequently, we’ve had a number of Bottom Line students later become Bottom Line staff members. We also hire a lot of recent college graduates who have had experiences teaching and mentoring youth.
Q. What is the scope of the program? How many students are helped? How long has it been operating?
Bottom Line was founded in Boston in 1997. That year, there was just one counselor helping 25 high school seniors apply to college. We now have more than a dozen counselors supporting 500 high school seniors and 711 college students in Boston, in addition to 125 high school seniors and 38 college students in Worcester. The scope of our program has become pretty large.
Q. What is the measure of success?
Our ultimate goal is to see our students graduate from college, so graduation rates are our biggest measure of success. Since our founding, 72 percent of our students have earned a degree in six years or less. This is on par with the national graduation rate of the wealthiest students, with few financial concerns, and about double the rate for students from Boston. Our long-term goal is to graduate 80 percent of our students, and we expect to achieve that rate soon as a result of the improvements we are always making to our programs.
Q. To what do you attribute the failures?
We never expected 100 percent of our students to graduate. The fact is, some students end up taking other paths that allow them to achieve success in other ways, such as attending a trade school or joining the workforce. In Bottom Line’s infancy, the Success Program focused on crisis management. Now with the DEAL model, we can actually identify potential problems facing our college students before they occur and we have a procedure to help resolve each one.
