Action Project - College Accessibility - Monday, February 15, 2016 - The Daily Cardinal

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Action Project Issue, February 2016

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“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

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Action Project Issue, February 2016

An independent student newspaper, serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison community since 1892 Volume 125, Issue 60

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Embarking on the Action Project The Daily Cardinal tackles college accessibility, affordability and more JIM DAYTON AND EMILY GERBER management team

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n 2014, The Daily Cardinal first set forth on a series of three topic-focused issues, which we dubbed the “Action Project.” These issues explored diversity at UW-Madison, dissected the value of a college degree and delved into areas of sustainability both campus and citywide. Two years later, we’re tackling this project again.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Evjue Foundation, Daily Cardinal staffers have been able to dive into three new areas of focus, looking once again at what matters and what’s relevant to students today.

Not only are these exciting issues for our writers to take part in producing, but these are topics we feel should exist in forums where they may not currently. Day-to-day coverage does not always lend itself to bigger conversations; with the Action Project, we hope to give these topics the conversation they deserve.

Join us as we embark on this year’s Action Project. After exploring this issue on college accessibility, make sure to return March 14 for our second piece on political advocacy on campus, and again April 18 for our final installment on student mental and physical health.

About this issue

Education is arguably the most

The Daily Cardinal would like to recognize

The Evjue Foundation, Inc.

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important policy debate happening today, and having a college education has become more and more crucial recently. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that among full-time employees between the ages of 25 and 32, those with a college degree could expect to earn $17,500 more annually than those who only had a high school diploma.

With growing concern over income inequality, making college accessible is one of the most important things our legislators and policymakers can do for young adults.

But there’s far more to college accessibility than just the financial standpoint. How can we open up more doors for people of different racial and socioeconomic

backgrounds? How does one approach college at UW if English is not one’s first language? What happens to those who have disabilities that hinder their literal access to college classrooms?

But the questions and st r u ggles

don’t stop once the student is inside the institution.

When students do obtain that access, how can we make sure the college environment is inclusive and caters to different minority groups? If certain groups are ostracized or isolated, how can we combat this?

This issue strives to answer these questions and approach this topic from viewpoints that are oftentimes overlooked. We hope these stories can stimulate discussions on college accessibility, from topics of far-reaching consequence to more nuanced ones of equal significance.

What areas of our coverage did you enjoy? Was there an issue of accessibility that we missed out on? We’d love for our readers to be part of the Action Project conversation. Please send all comments and concerns to Jim and Emily at edit@dailycardinal.com.

This issue will be on stands all week. If you’re looking for our daily coverage, check out dailycardinal.com and stay up to date.

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THE JOB FOR YOU wages start at $8.80/hr

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for providing the funds to make the Action Project possible.

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immediate openings available

Apply today at www.housing.wisc.edu/jobs

University Housing values diversity and is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer.

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Action Project Issue, February 2016

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UW System schools feel budget crunch After the 2015-’17 biennial budget, institutions face challenges of funding, faculty retention Story by Madeline Heim

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oughly a year after Gov. Scott Walker proposed nearly $300 million in cuts to the UW System, along with significant changes to the way public higher education functions, UW-Madison associate professor David Vanness said he notices things on campus do not shine as brightly as they used to.

Vanness, also the president of the UW-Madison chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said faculty members who work in older areas of campus have seen increasing infrastructural issues.

“Over the years, our existing buildings are falling into disrepair,” Vanness said. “I’ve seen a lot of leaky roofs that don’t get fixed, a lot of things that don’t really put our best foot forward.”

Effects of the cuts extend far beyond leaky roofs, however.

Wisconsin’s 2015-’17 biennial budget allocated zero dollars to the General Fund Supported Borrowing for the State Commission All Agency Program, resulting in an approximately $100 million UW System deficit in funding for facility maintenance and infrastructure upkeep, according to a UW-Madison 2015 Budget Reduction Report.

UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in a recent address to the UW System Board of Regents that although complete data has not yet been collected on the most recent round of cuts, Wisconsin is still one of the only states that has declined in support for higher education.

Blank said the cuts have been particularly challenging for faculty retainment, because competing state universities across the country have started using their increased investment to recruit UW-Madison’s “best faculty.”

According to Blank, 85 percent of faculty who have recently received outside offers

have been retained and further efforts to prevent this type of raiding will be necessary, but costly.

“Altogether, it’s cost me $8 million in the last six months to achieve that type of success,” Blank said. “This is going to cost more. I can’t afford not to do this; this is the reputation of the university.”

However, unfilled positions for faculty and staff on campus remain a general concern, said Noel Radomski, director and associate researcher of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.

The computer science and engineering departments have struggled, according to Radomski. The student demand for those particular programs have increased, while budget cuts resulted in a loss of faculty members and a decrease in specialized classes offered.

According to the budget reduction report, UW-Madison’s largest college, Letters and Science, will eventually see 48 faculty positions and 44 academic staff positions cut.

Additionally, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences saw faculty departures and vacancies that cost the school an estimated $28 million in outside research funding.

Other UW departments face similar problems and have had to reduce the number and frequency of courses offered; Radomski said he believes such cuts could impact students’ time to degree completion.

The decline in state funding for higher education also affects the UW System’s approach to generating and distributing financial aid to students.

“By the choice of the governor and legislature, the costs [of a university education] are being pushed onto the student,” Radomski said. “And because of that, we’re becoming more of a private university.”

Although tuition was frozen for the second time in last year’s biennial budget, Radomski said there was no state increase in financial aid, and living costs are rising, causing more students to take out loans.

According to Radomski, private universities relying on donors and endowments to recruit students is a challenge UW-Madison has not faced before, as the university had previously been funded almost 70 percent by the state.

Radomski speculated UW schools will have to increase institutional scholarships and decide whether more of those scholarships should be needbased or merit-based, depending on what types of students they want to recruit.

Beyond the monetary cuts to the system, Walker’s originally proposed legislation included changing the Wisconsin Idea to replace core missions, like pursuing truth and improving the human condition with “to meet the state’s workforce needs.”

Amid statewide backlash, Walker called the change a “drafting error” and the original Wisconsin Idea went untouched.

However, Vanness said he thinks Walker’s focus on reorienting higher education toward workforce development is an idea still very much in play.

As universities look to reallocate funds after budget shortfalls, Vanness expressed concern as to whether those funds will be moved toward programs with direct workforce marketability and away from the liberal arts, which he said would affect students’ access to a “critical aspect of the college experience.”

“If we lose access to languages and language arts, if we lose access to philosophy, if we lose access to basic mathematics and mathematical theory— all things that don’t have direct market applicability,” Vanness said, “I think our students are robbed of the potential to achieve all that they can achieve as human beings.”

Alex Hummel, associate vice

president for communications for the UW System, said several campuses have taken significant steps to manage budget reduc-

tions and will implement further steps in the months to come.

However, Radomski worries about what the next biennial budget will bring, particularly for other UW institutions that lack the reserves and alternative revenue sources UW-Madison has.

“It’s those institutions that I fear for the students,” Radomski said. “The students are going to be impacted, so too will the faculty, but it’s going to be the students that are going to be hit so hard.”

Blank told the Regents UW-Madison has cut or redirected $34 million for fiscal year 2016 and tried to focus most of its larger reductions away from educational programs.

However, Blank said as the cuts continue in the months ahead, everyone at the university will feel them.

“We prioritized trying to cut administrative units a little bit more highly than educational units, we’ve given differential cuts to different programs in terms of our own prioritization,” Blank said. “But at the end of the day, you can’t take these sort of cuts without affecting every single unit across campus.”

BETSY OSTERBERGER/THE DAILY CARDINAL

Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015-’17 biennial budget allocated zero dollars to a fund used for building maintenance, leaving UW-Madison lacking in funds for facility upkeep.

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Action Project Issue, February 2016

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UW-Madison has more than 4,000 international students who come from more than 130 countries. The resulting language barriers often lead to feelings of isolation.

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Story by Peter Coutu

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W-Madison international student Xiaofei Xu struggled to integrate with the local community on campus—until he studied abroad in Paris with roughly 30 other students during the fall semester of his junior year.

Xu grew up in a city near Hong Kong and decided to attend UW-Madison in 2013, without ever visiting the campus.

Both the school’s history and journalism programs were ideal for him, Xu said.

There are more than 4,000 international students from roughly 130 countries currently enrolled at UW-Madison, though most are from China.

According to Xu, academic programs for international students at UW-Madison are geared toward students in science or engineering majors, which covers most of the students.

But Xu, however, studies in the humanities, saying he hopes to graduate with a double major in

history and journalism, while also learning French.

Students applying from nonEnglish speaking countries are required to submit either a TOEFL or IELTS score in their applications to ensure their English writing is proficient.

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Following their admittance, international students then need to take an English as a Second Language Placement Test to determine their placement for ESL courses.

Upon his arrival at Madison, Xu had to complete three courses to finish his ESL 118 requirement.

In his first year at UW-Madison, Xu also took classes to begin his studies in history and journalism, which were mostly writing-intensive courses.

While being graded on papers in history and journalism classes to pursue his degree, Xu was still taking the required ESL classes to learn and improve academic reading, writing and grammar in English.

“To some extent [ESL] did prepare me, but sometimes it doesn’t makes sense to me,” Xu said. “It’s a little bit too late for me because my case is kind of unique, because I’m taking his-

tory and journalism classes.”

Bomi Kim, an international student who earned her Ph.D. in social work from UW-Madison, said that even though the Writing Center can be a great resource for many students on campus, it falls short in some areas.

“It’s kind of notorious around international students because they don’t correct any grammatical errors at all,” Kim said.

Though many of his classes were writing intensive, Xu said speaking is also an important component

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not in any of his classes. “[In Madison] you share similarities with your fellow Chinese students,” Xu said. “Which is what enables those friendships to grow.”

According to Xu, UW-Madison’s programs provided for international students are adequate for academic preparations, but the programs did not help him integrate socially or culturally on campus.

He said he felt as if he was not involved in an international program, because he only surrounded himself with other international students.

Two years after his arrival at UW-Madison, Xu left for Paris for a study abroad program with about 30 other students.

He was the only international student on the trip.

“American students aren’t really trying to reach out to

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of many humanities classes.

Classes in the humanities often have a discussion or participation proponent to the course, which hinders international students like Xu who are not entirely confident in their English proficiency.

His uneasiness in classroom discussions paralleled his attempts to intermingle with local students.

He said he did not feel confident in either his cultural awareness or English proficiency.

Xu said through his first two years at UW-Madison, he practically only made friends with other international students, who were mostly from China, even though they were

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“Now that they understand what I felt back in the States, we have something to talk about,” Xu said. “That’s important too because you can’t make friends that you don’t even share anything with. But this thing in Paris is something we can share.”

Xu said he feels more comfortable talking to people outside of his bubble and joining discussion in class after returning from Paris.

While Xu’s experience was invaluable for his social integration, he said most international students at UW-Madison do not take the opportunity of studying abroad in another country.

According to Xu, UW-Madison’s international population could be of great advantage for the school; however, the student body tends to culturally segregate.

“It’s not really international, it’s just some bubbles. You have the Chinese bubble, you have the U.S. bubble, the Japanese bubble, the Korean bubble,” Xu said. “The sense of international that I understand is that you destroy

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other international students. But in Paris, they became the minority,” Xu said. “You could see how different they behaved, how they became more open-minded. They became more open to the society when they were in my position.”

Xu said his time abroad was the experience that ultimately made him feel comfortable as an international student.

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these bubbles and you mix people together. You make them communicate with each other. That’s the way you can destroy persistent stereotypes.”

UW-Madison Teaching Academy student discussions work to improve education Story by Noah Habenstreit

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tudents at large research universities often feel distanced from their professors, and vice versa. But a new program introduced at UW-Madison aspires to change the structure of teaching and learning on big campuses.

The Teaching Academy, a group of UW-Madison faculty and instructional staff recognized by their peers for their excellence in teaching, aims to include student voices in the discussion of effective teaching methods.

In January 2016, the Academy introduced U-CLaSS (Undergraduate Chat, Learn and Share Space) for undergraduates as part of UW-TEaCH (Teaching, Exploration and Collaboration Habitat).

According to Jamie Henke, a professor of music at UW-Madison and a member of the Teaching Academy’s Executive Committee, U-CLaSS marks an effort to improve teaching and learning through collaboration between professors, graduate teaching assistants and

undergraduate students.

“We wanted to branch out beyond doing events [for teachers], and to also have programs where we share our teaching ideas and expertise with other people and communicate with the students,” Henke said.

U-CLaSS “chats” provide a forum for students to speak with professors and academic staff about common issues, challenges and possibilities in teaching and learning, according to the Academy’s website.

The chats have thus far taken place at Chadbourne Residential College, where student peer mentors lead discussions and faculty members play a listening role.

During the chats, students are asked to share their suggestions for better student-faculty interactions.

U-CLaSS was born out of the belief that student voices are crucial to the Teaching Academy’s efforts, according to John Zumbrunnen, a political science professor and also a member of the Teaching Academy’s Executive Committee.

“You can’t set learning objectives and outcomes unless you know the students,” Zumbrunnen said. “U-CLaSS is part of that broad effort to understand our students

BETSY OSTERBERGER/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO

The Teaching Academy hopes student feedback can give insight into the value of classroom structure. better so we can teach better, and that means reaching out to students and asking them.”

U-CLaSS is not the only way teachers can get feedback from students on their teaching methods. At the end of each semester, students fill out course evaluation forms to share what parts of a class were most effective.

However, Zumbrunnen says traditional evaluations, while often useful, are limited.

“I just think actually getting together and having sustained conversations with students is a lot better of a way for faculty to get to know

their students and understand what they’re thinking,” Zumbrunnen said.

Since its establishment in 1993, the Academy has provided services for academic faculty members, but only recently has it expanded its benefits to other members of the UW-Madison community.

The majority of students who have participated in U-CLaSS are in their first year, but the Teaching Academy hopes to expand the program to a wider range of students in the future.

“We’ve had two U-CLaSS sessions now at Chadbourne, so we have

that as a home base,” Henke said.

“We’re now looking at how to engage other students who aren’t necessarily in Chadbourne.”

Zumbrunnen sees U-CLaSS as a long-lasting way to maintain student involvement in discussions on teaching and learning.

“The thing we really want to do is to get people earlier in their UW career participating in these U-CLaSS events and then build that over time so they stay with the program,” Zumbrunnen said. “There will be more ways coming—we’re just getting started.”

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The homeless population in Madison has only received attention and publicity in the past couple of years, according to Ald. Zach Wood, District 8.

Students hurt by lack of emergency housing Story by Julia Gilban-Cohen

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he first time Brooke Evans saw the word “homelessness” related to higher education was when she was filling out the FAFSA (or Free Application for Federal Student Aid) in 2010, where it wasn’t well-explained and implied that she was not homeless, even though that was not the case.

Evans, a senior at UW-Madison, experienced homelessness as a sophomore at UW-LaCrosse and then early on after she transferred to UW-Madison in the fall of 2012.

Upon her arrival at Madison, Evans said there were no resources a homeless student could utilize; emergency housing and explicit affordable housing did not, and do not, exist.

“How does someone do everything right and then become homeless?” Evans said. “There’s this mentality that if you’re homeless it means there’s something defective, deficient, deviant or disabled about your decision-making or your agency. That’s not true.”

Evans stated there is a generational and societal divide between how individuals perceive homelessness.

According to Evans, the “lowest hierarchy” of being homeless is to be sleeping outside, completely subjected to the elements, sexual exploitation, assault and theft.

“We want more impoverished people to be in college.”

Brooke Evans senior UW-Madison

However, Evans thinks that is one case, and on a college campus, circumstances can differ.

“To be couch surfing is to be homeless,” Evans said. “Living in your car is being homeless.”

Part of the invisibility of this

demographic comes from a lack of data.

The Wisconsin HOPE Lab, run

by Sara Goldrick-Rab, has been the only organization gathering statistics for homeless students at UW-Madison and throughout the state of Wisconsin.

Within a city of 250,000 people, an accurate measurement of homeless students remains largely unstudied, according to Ald. Zach Wood, District 8, who is also a UW-Madison alum.

There are theoretical ways in which data could be collected, Wood said; however, the dilemma of homeless students and the lack of affordable housing is a relatively new issue that UW-Madison and universities across the country are facing.

According to Wood, this demographic has only been brought to the city in the past couple of years.

“Just because it’s brand new in the news doesn’t make it new,” Evans said.

Wood said there are other universities that have on-campus student emergency housing, or that allow students to stay in dorms at reduced rates, but UW-Madison does not offer such accommodations.

Carmen Goséy, a sophomore at UW-Madison and ASM Legislative Affairs chair, said if she was an outof-state student from a lower socioeconomic background, she would be hesitant to attend this university; tuition is incredibly high, and housing is a separate entity.

ASM recently created its own food pantry, allowing lowincome students access to adequate nutrition.

But this action does not solely address the demographic of homeless students.

Goséy said if there was a n

affordable option to live on campus it would be utilized.

However, she thinks affordable housing and emergency housing do not coincide.

“You have full-time students here. You have students investing here,” Goséy said. “It’s our job to help aid people’s success. It is up to the entire university to do this.”

According to Goséy, raising awareness is the first and most important step in addressing this issue, which has been greatly underreported.

Awareness exposes the circumstances homeless students face, and those who listen are morally forced to respond, Goséy said.

Hayley Young, administrative assistant at Seventhwave and UW-Madison alumna, said homelessness among students is not something people ordinarily expect.

Young is currently in the running for the County Board district 5 seat and said she hopes to address the issue of homelessness in Madison if elected.

According to Young, what many students face is housing and food insecurity, where the plan a student has for tonight and the plan for tomorrow might not necessarily be the same thing.

“We need to normalize the fact that people do have financial struggles in college,” Young said. “When we’re talking about tuition and when we’re talking about student loan finance reform, you’re having a broader conversation about people having a successful college experience.”

Young emphasized the importance of utilizing the resources available for UW-Madison students in financial distress, many o f

Betsy Osterberger/the daily cardinal

According to UW-Madison senior Brooke Evans, Madison rental companies lack resources to help homeless students. which do not realize such are available to them.

The ASM food pantry, Tenant Resource Center and Tenants Rights Organization are pillars students can access when in need of advising.

Those resources don’t completely solve the problems students face; they are not all specifically aimed to students and they are not necessarily well-advertised by the university, despite the growing number of students reporting housing insecurity, according to Young.

“It’s not acceptable that we’re keeping someo n e

from being able to receive the degree that can change and direct the entire trajectory of their life because we can’t come up with enough resources to make sure that they’re successful,” Young said.

According to Evans, professors have either approached her with concern or have detached themselves from her in fear of academic nepotism; she thinks administrators search for something about students like herself that somehow constitute them not being Badgers.

But Evans addressed the belief that everyone who gets to higher education somehow becomes middle class as false.

“We want more impoverished people to be in college,” she said.

“That’s good for equality, but once they’re here you have to do something about them.”

Graphic by jim Dayton

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Approaching diversity through UW’s key players Students’ experiences spark campus activism Story by Peter Coutu

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he transition from high school to college can bombard a student with many sudden changes, but while most students are shocked by the size of the lecture hall, Kenneth Cole was shocked by the lack of people of color in it.

He would look around a class of more than 100 students and see one, or maybe two, black students in the room.

Cole, a current UW-Madison senior, grew up in a low-income Los Angeles neighborhood. He attends UW as a Posse Scholar, a four-year, full-tuition scholarship program based on multicultural leadership.

Cole said he experienced a culture shock upon his arrival, and the university’s lack of diversity and cultural literacy has strongly influenced his experience at UW. “There is an overall lack of competency on how to interact with people and how to interact with other cultures,” said Cole.

Throughout his first semester on campus, Cole stated he was regularly stereotyped.

A student asked Cole at Camp Randall why he was not playing in the football game, and in another instance he was questioned if he was affiliated with a gang because of his clothing.

Another Posse Scholar, UW-Madison sophomore Tyriek Mack, said his experience at UW has been similar.

“Once you get here you start feeling inferior because how people look at you, because how people talk to you, how people treat you,” Mack said.

During Halloween of 2015, Mack said he talked a white student wearing a sombrero about how detrimental cultural appropriation can be to minority students.

The conversation ended with the student yelling a

racial slur at Mack.

“It really makes us feel like college isn’t really a space where we’re wanted in a sense,” said Mack.

He believes racial disparities result in isolation, pushing minorities to create their own community and further perpetuating tension surrounding race on campus.

“I believe that it is our moral obligation as students and as people to fight for the issues we believe in.”

Kenneth Cole senior UW-Madison

The daily, nuanced forms of racism that both UW-Madison students said they experienced coincided with a national conversation regarding diversity at historically white institutions.

Cole said the Chicago Black Tribune’s call for national solidarity sparked a movement on UW-Madison’s campus. More than 100 members of the UW-Madison community marched Nov. 12 to show solidarity for students at the University of Missouri, who were protesting against hate crimes and the response of university administrators.

The event was the beginning of UW-Madison’s BlackOut, led by Mack and Cole.

BlackOut has protested two Board of Regents meetings and has met with UW System President Ray Cross in an attempt to “actively engage with stakeholders that

create programs and invest resources so that students of color and white students can better handle race on this campus,” Mack said.

According to Cole, the initial meeting seemed productive but has since been marred by miscommunication and a lack of concrete efforts to respond to the group’s demands.

“I want to believe that President Ray Cross is looking for change for underserved students on campus,” said Cole. “But in the back of my mind I still believe that many and most of the administrators who we are dealing with will continue to be oppressors in the fight for liberation of minority students and underserved perspectives on campus.”

The Board of Regents did not allow BlackOut, with members from other UW schools, to speak at either meeting.

“We go to Board of Regents meetings and they don’t want to listen to the perspective of multicultural students and they continue to talk over us,” Cole said. “They continue to go to recess and leave the room as we express concerns—serious concerns— about our friends and our fellow scholarship members and our fellow scholars having to leave campus because of mental

issues, killing themselves because of mental health issues, because of being in Madison and the environment that is created and the lack of inclusivity and diversity.”

UW-Madison students of color have had to leave campus because of the lack of inclusivity and diversity, Cole said.

During the Feb. 5 Board of Regents meeting, BlackOut issued a sixth demand that focused on the application process to UW schools.

“Standardized testing is highly correlated with socioeconomic status,” Mack said.

Because of this, BlackOut has called for the removal of mandatory standardized testing to increase college accessibility for historically underrepresented groups.

Both Cole and Mack believe this change to applications would greatly impact the social

demographic on campus, in addition to serving the group’s other five demands.

The BlackOut movement, which has received national attention, has grown significantly since the first protest. According to Cole, BlackOut is meant to unite the student body, including both students of color and students in the majority.

“I believe that it is our moral obligation as students and as

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EMILY BUCK/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO

UW System President Ray Cross issued a statement on the efforts to improve diversity throughout UW schools.

n recent months, diversity advocates expressed concerns about the UW System’s approaches in improving the experiences of minority students and Wisconsin’s educational disparity between white and black students.

Members of the UW administration recognized the need for overall improvement in students’ experiences and the achievement gaps separating students of color from white students.

The administration remains committed to modelling inclusive behaviors through programs and services offered on UW campuses.

UW System President Ray Cross met with the United Council of Students late last month, and discussed the criticisms and challenges faced by minority students.

“It troubles me,” Cross said in a statement. “And that’s why I’m glad all of us in the UW System continue to work on important, very tangible action items to ultimately improve the experiences of all students, staff and faculty

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people to fight for the issues we believe in,” Cole said.

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UW faculty, administration aim for diversity

Story by Kelsey O’Hara

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members. Can we and should we do more? Yes, and I have asked the students to help us in that effort.”

Cross said faculty members across the UW system want to open the dialogue for minority students to discuss challenges that stem from educational disparities and injustices within society.

“We need to remember that many UW System students of color at the institutions throughout our state have not had the time or space or platform to share their experiences, be they good or bad,” Cross said. “We need to listen to their issues carefully and thoughtfully.”

“Equity has to acknowledge the differentials in opportunities for success that people are born into.”

Aaron Bird Bear interim assistant dean UW-Madison

Faculty on the UW-Madison campus are proactive about recruiting and retaining a diverse student body through programs that forward working across differences.

Aaron Bird Bear, UW-Madison’s Interim Assistant Dean for student diversity programs, said UW institutions understand the lack of opportunities for certain groups of students and therefore use programs like POSSE or First Wave to deal with educational inequality.

“Equity has to acknowledge the differentials in opportunities for success that people have been born into,” Bird Bear said. “Equity is the focus of how we trying to figure out how to continue support and sustain diversity at the institution.”

According to the Academic Planning Institutional Research office, there is a significant difference between Wisconsin’s nonminority and minority high school graduates in “preparedness” for UW-Madison courses.

In 2010, 25 percent of white high school graduates fit the “wellprepared” category, while only 2 percent of black graduates were well-prepared, according to the APIR pipeline update.

Despite racial disparities among students, diversity programs offer pre-college, undergraduate and graduate programs to help underrepresented students connect with faculty and other peers to build a network of support.

Bird Bear acknowledged the upcoming social movement from the eroding race relations in the United States.

He said it is important to focus on commonalities instead of differences as the administration continues to improve the experience of minority students on campus.

“Students of color, without expressing that they’re dissatisfied with the relationships and experiences they are having, are humans within our community,” Bird Bear said. “And one of our roles [as faculty] is to make sure students feel supported.”

hen Jacqueline DeWalt was a UW-Madison graduate student in 2000, she enrolled her son in the PEOPLE (Pre-college Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence) Program, created in 1999.

After enrolling her son in the program, DeWalt soon began working for PEOPLE, eventually becoming its executive director.

“People say there’s an achievement gap as though it’s the students’ fault,” DeWalt said. “I say there’s an opportunity gap, because students aren’t getting access to opportunities that might excite them.”

PEOPLE has provided educational opportunities for the past 17 years, preparing low-income and minority students in Wisconsin for college. The program has expanded from 66 students at its inception to more than 1,300 students today.

According to DeWalt, the program’s extensiveness separates it from other pre-college programs and its structure has contributed to its considerable success.

PEOPLE runs from elementary school through high school, offering after-school tutoring, summer classes on the UW-Madison campus and internship opportunities. The program supports students across Wisconsin, including those in Madison, Milwaukee and all 11 federally recognized native tribes in the state.

Students who complete the PEOPLE Program and meet UW-Madison admission requirements are eligible for a full-tuition scholarship and continuous academic support throughout their undergraduate experience, including access to tutors and advisors.

According to the program’s statistics, 100 percent of PEOPLE students graduate from high school, and 94 percent attend higher education institutions; nearly half enroll at UW-Madison.

The infrastructure of PEOPLE would not be as prosperous without a dedicated staff, according to Jerome Flowers, student services specialist at La Follette High School in Madison.

“The real power of our program is in the bonds formed between students and their peers, and between staff and students,” Flowers said. “It is the care, patience and compassion which every staff member of our program puts into their work that makes our program successful.”

The program’s success aims to compensate for social disparities in Madison public schools.

In 2012, the graduation rate for the Madison Metropolitan School District was 86.7 percent for white students, but only 63.2 among Hispanics and 53.1 among blacks. For low-income students, the graduation rate was 55.4 percent.

“A person will never aspire to be something they don’t even know exists,” DeWalt said. “So it is critical that we reach underserved students in these underserved communities.”

According to the UW-Madison Academic Planning and Institutional Research, 652 targeted minorities (Hispanic/Latino, African American, American Indian or Southeast Asian students) were enrolled at UW-Madison in 2014.

Fifty of those students, roughly one in 13, were PEOPLE students.

Brandon Alvarez-Carrera, a former PEOPLE student who now works for the program, believes PEOPLE is what pushed him academically. “[They] knew dreamers like me, and many other students in the program, could do more than be a statistic,” Alvarez-Carrera said.

However, growing success has made access to PEOPLE more competitive; the demand far exceeds capacity, with only one in three applicants accepted into the program.

Still, PEOPLE works to improve the lives of as many students as it can.

Although DeWalt honors the Wisconsin Idea, she believes the notion could apply to even more types of people, from all backgrounds. “[UW-Madison President Charles] Van Hise said he would not rest until the benevolence of this university reaches every home in Wisconsin. And that’s what PEOPLE does,” DeWalt said. “Reaching some of those homes that have not been connected to the university.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF UW COMMUNICATIONS

The PEOPLE Program provides academic services for low-income and minority students in Wisconsin.

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t’s something most students are aware of through a few lines on a syllabus or a brief mention in lecture, but for scores of other students, the McBurney Center is a lifeline to ensure academic success on the UW-Madison campus.

In accordance with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the McBurney Center works to determine whether students meet the legal standards for possessing a disability.

The center arranges for a vast array of accommodations, including supplying sign language interpreters, braille and note-takers, providing closed captioning of media used in classes and making arrangements for test taking.

Additionally, the center will collaborate with University Housing and other departments to arrange accommodations for students, such as modifying dorm rooms.

“We’re working with the student to figure out what they need to have reasonable accommodations and equal access in the classroom,” said McBurney Center Director Cathy Trueba. “It’s not necessarily at the front of people’s minds.”

Despite the efforts of the McBurney Center, a lack of time and financial resources can constrain faculty in providing accommodations for students.

A 2014 report from the Secretary of the

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Faculty highlights the need to support individual professors and departments who want to, in turn, help students.

“Not many departments are equipped to take on the responsibility of arranging an accommodation,” the report read. “There needs to be support from the Provost or central administration to help departments understand the importance of accommodations and make them feel supported in carrying out the accommodation and funding those efforts.”

Trueba credits faculty for their work with the center, stating on the whole the relationship is a positive one.

“We’ve really refined our process to make it easy for faculty to work with us,” Trueba said. “We do training ahead of time, we contact them ahead of time …

For the most part, once they understand the need, they make time for it.”

Despite the activism of the McBurney

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Center and numerous student organizations on campus, barriers are still present for disabled students on campus.

The replacement of free disabled parking spots around campus with parking that requires a permit has received attention in recent months.

Students with a disability who need to utilize those spaces must pay upwards of $650 to obtain a permit from the UW-Madison Transportation Services, according to the department’s website.

For students without the means to obtain a parking pass, getting around campus is difficult.

U W- M a d i s o n Transportation Services Director Patrick Kass said the free handicapped spots were not adequately servicing users and noted the university is experimenting with a free circulating shuttle bus for disabled students.

“The program was not keeping up with

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what was needed for campus,” Kass told The Capitol Times in 2015. “We charge fees to we can build and maintain parking and run the bus and shuttle system.”

According to Trueba, the overall climate on campus is mostly positive amid massive shifts in attitude towards people with disabilities.

Such change is a standard for activists on campus, as the emergence of different populations require that the effort to provide equal access, guaranteed by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, is available to all Badgers.

“When I started out in this field 30 years ago, we were really thinking about wheelchair users, vision and hearing and [learning disabilities],” Trueba noted. “Then we added ADHD. Then we added mental health. Then we added people with chronic medical conditions, now we have students with autism and traumatic brain injury. We now have whole new groups of people who are part of the community. It keeps the work really interesting.”

The McBurney Center aims to continue to improve standards for people with disabilities on campus to the point where accommodations could be built into the academic experience.

“We’re really building towards this future of a more complete kind of access,” Trueba said.

“We always joke that our ultimate job is to build ourselves out of a job ... That’s the goal.”

Tipping serves student workers’ income Story by Tony Oates

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n the UW-Madison campus, tip-based service jobs play a pivotal role in student income; and, given the rising cost of college education, income proves to be essential in making the opportunity of higher education accessible to all.

According to a 2011 U.S. Census

report, 72 percent of college undergraduates worked while enrolled.

With the knowledge that such a large portion of the student body is employed, the question beckons, are tip-based student jobs actually helping to make college education more affordable for students?

Tipping, believe it or not, used to be extremely unpopular in America.

Viewed as elitist and undemocratic, several attempts were made in the early 20th century to make the practice illegal. Eventually, the

difficulty in enforcing such bans allowed the European method of compensation to become firmly embedded into American culture.

States adopted laws to offset the tip income received by servers.

The pieces of legislation dictated a “server wage” that was allowed to be set below the federally or state mandated minimum wage.

“I’d say I prefer a tipping-based system over minimum wage as a form of compensation,” said UW-Madison junior Andrew

ROBERT DARLINGTON/THE DAILY CARDINAL

Some student workers use their income from tipping to supplement the cost of college tuition.

Nichols. “There is much more of an incentive when we work.”

Nichols attends UW on a scholarship awarded by the Army ROTC program and is a part-time employee at Madhatter’s bar in downtown Madison.

Yet, the concept of leaving a tip perplexes economists.

What force could possibly incite consumers to spend money when there is no legal requirement or tangible benefit in doing so?

The answer seems to lie in human behavior.

According to the International Journal of Economics at Northwestern University, “Tipping may result in a positive utility from feeling generous and because consumers often feel empathy for the worker who serves them, and want to show their gratitude by leaving him a tip.”

Some students at UW-Madison said they are supportive of the practice.

“On a Saturday night you can walk out of [Madhatter’s] with more than $15 an hour, which is pretty cool,” Nichols said.

“Bartenders can make way more.”

Part-time server jobs of 10-15 hours a week may not be able to cover the brunt of a student’s tuition, but they play an important role in providing spending money.

Tuition is not the only cost for a self-supported college student, however.

Expenses such as rent, food, books and social outings with friends all are supplemented by

part-time income.

“ROTC pays for tuition and most of rent as well as my books,” Nichols said. “[My] summer job covers the rest of rent [while] Hatters is usually money for going out, food and other miscellaneous stuff.”

Although there are several other part-time jobs available on campus, Nichols believes tip-dependent jobs such as bartending are attractive to students independently financing their college education.

“I’d say working at a bar as a server is pretty ideal based on hours and pay, but there are other jobs like working at libraries which allow you to homework,” Nichols said. “I guess the trade-off is your ability to do homework instead of making as much per shift.”

Hours for bouncing can run late with bar close being 2 a.m.

“Sometimes I work nights during the week where I have physical training in the morning and I’ll sleep for a couple hours and have to catch up afterwards,” Nichols said.

He quickly added, “However, being able to go to [Hatters] while you’re not working and see all of your friends is a really nice perk.”

Although these jobs fall short of mitigating tuition costs, the tip-based server industry enables students to access the additional opportunities that encompass the college experience.

From that pricey Accounting 100 book to those tickets for the next show at the Majestic, part-time gigs such as Nichols’ are an important financial contributor to students on campus.

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Take a stance: Free college tuition For Hae Rin Lee opinion columnist

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ne of the most prolific, yet highly controversial, agenda items from Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt, campaign is the establishment of free tuition for public colleges. Many people call it the most radical policy change ever suggested in the recent presidential campaigns, but it is not as radical as people assume it to be. Our society is already somewhat radical for it to allow the fact that students taking on massive loans and debts for college tuitions it is an acceptable norm.

Capitalism, like any other economic policy, can be despicable and radical.

Shouldn’t there be access to success for individuals who aspire to achieve in society? I think one way to yield a personal aspiration is through affordable college education. Education is one of the most potentially effective tools for personal enhancements and its cost should be affordable to the general public.

ates are forced to pay interest rates of 5-7 percent or more for decades.” It is true that the college loan interest rates are costly. According to the Federal Student Aid website, interest rates for the direct subsidized loans for undergraduates disbursed after July 2016 is 4.29 percent and same for the direct unsubsidized loans. For the private banking loans, the interest rates could be higher.

Since as we all know, the federal government aids are not available to everyone, so many students are

Let’s think of logistics for the optimal tomorrow, but let’s not just sit around instead of standing up with a voice for change.

I will be writing to support freetuition, or, at least, affordable tuition rate policies in public colleges. I will refer to the official Bernie Sanders’ campaign page, where he states, “Stop the federal government from making a profit on student loans. Substantially cut student loan interest rates. Allow students to use needbased financial aid and work study programs to make college debt free.”

I won’t be able to cover all the major points from his currently proposed agenda, but I will talk about the student debt and interest rates.

According to the Pew Research Center report from Oct. 7, 2014, the cost of college tuition is becoming overwhelming and leads to more borrowing with likely higher interest rates—therefore, more debts than before. Compare 1990-’91, where the annual student borrowing was about $24 billion, to around 2012-’13, where the annual rate surfaced around $110 billion, indicating the annual student loan issuance is up around 352 percent since the 1990s. The increasing trend for college loan rates was observed universally among all the income levels. The lowincome class saw growth from 67 percent in 1992-’93 to 77 percent in 2011-’12, the lower-middle class from 45 percent to 70 percent, the upper-middle class from 34 percent to 62 percent and the upper class from 24 percent to 50 percent.

So why did the loan borrowing rates increase so much? Based on the same report, due to the Great Recession destroying the household wealth by 39 percent, increased availability for federal loans and increased private banks supplying higer-interest loans to students with low credit experiences. The increased trend for borrowing in general since the financial crisis all contributed to the rise of borrowing rates for college educations. But the problem doesn’t end there, as loans are followed by the interests to increase the burden on the tired shoulders of college students and graduates.

The Bernie Sanders’ campaign page says: “It makes no sense that you can get an auto loan today with an interest rate of 2.5 percent, but millions of college gradu-

forced to seek private loans, causing the interest rates to skyrocket. So, yes, interest rates for the tuition loans are pretty overwhelming, with the inflations on tuition rates and increased borrowing rates among students.

This is not a small issue to ignore.

I support Bernie Sanders for the fact that he is the most active candidate to seem genuinely committed to addressing the currently difficult college tuition systems that students and future workers face. Democracy, emancipation, civil rights movements, women’s rights and recovery from the Great Depression—what we all once thought to be impossible and radical has established a foothold today. Then why could the same reality not be true for free college? Why give up the chance just because it seems radical? Why do I support the relatively radical idea? Because it at least makes a serious attempt to address and solve the issue of student debt.

Wouldn’t there be a greater chance for a real change by attempting the solution than there would be with not trying the plan, just because it seems unachievable?

Without trying, there comes no change. Without change, there comes no growth. We all know that changes do not occur without trials and attempts. Why should we let the fear of failure overrule our chance for a change? It is a legitimate concern to worry about how to carry out this seemingly radical idea, but should we let this be a permanent deterrent to our attempt for a positive future? Let’s think of logistics for the optimal tomorrow, but let’s not just sit around instead of standing up with a voice for change.

Hae Rin is a sophomore majoring in history. Do you think college should be free? Do you agree more with Charlie?

Let us know what you think. Please send all comments, questions and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.

Against Charlie Hoffmann opinion columnist

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he United States of America’s higher education system is in dire need of reform. It used to be that a college student could work a job or maybe a job and a half over the summer and be able to pay their semester tuition. This idea no longer exists because college costs have greatly outpaced the rate of inflation in this country. In the past 35 years, college tuition has increased by four times and shows no chance of slowing down. To fix this system, Democrats have offered to make college “free” by increasing the federal government’s role in funding higher edu-

cation. Not only would this end up being i n c r e d ib l y costly it would also only exacerbate the problem. To truly update our higher education system our policymakers must reduce the role of the federal government in inflating college costs and h o l d universities accountable to their students.

No other commodity has increased in price like college tuition has in the past 40 years. Interestingly enough, this increase in cost has been accompanied by an ever-increasing amount of public subsidies. In our current system students are encouraged to borrow whatever is necessary to get a college degree.

Universities know that students will pay whatever they have to to get this degree and can raise tuition without any negative consequences for themselves. The increases in tuition, unfortunately, have not made a college degree that much more valuable. Instead, these increases have lead to an increase in more outlandish university buildings and more administrators.

Reforming the actual cost of a degree is only the first step in fixing the system, and something must be done for those who have already graduated.

This idea is known as the Bennett Hypothesis, which is named after Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary, who noticed that more federal subsidies only increased the cost of higher education. More federal involvement and federal spending will not be the solution to

fixing our broken system and have only seemed to make the problem worse.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt, has promised to make tuition at public colleges “free,” but it doesn’t take an economics degree to realize that nothing in life is actually free. Making college “free” would only shift the cost of college from the individual to the collective taxpayers. In doing so, Sen. Sanders’s plan offers no way of actually slowing down the cost and more federal subsidies will only lead to a higher cost of tuition.

Sen. Sanders’s idea of “free” college makes for a good talking point but in reality the plan is not only incredibly expensive but also does nothing to fix the system. Instead, his plan would only shift the cost to the American people and does little to incentivize the universities to ensure that they are keeping the overall cost of a college degree.

Universities know that students will pay whatever they have to get this degree and can raise tuition without any negative consequences for themselves.

Reforming the actual cost of a degree is only the first step in fixing the system, and something must be done for those who have already graduated. Currently, the average college graduate owes $30,000 in student loans, and the collective total of outstanding student loan debt has passed $1 trillion. An idea that has been supported by both Republicans and Democrats would be an income-based repayment system. This would ensure that the borrower would still be able to pay off their loan without it taking up too much of their personal expenses. Student loan payments can and do take up a significant portion of many recent college graduates expenses. Students are foregoing buying cars, homes or other expenditures because their loan payments take up so much of their budget. Shifting to an income-based repayment plan would lessen the burden on recent graduates and would help stimulate the economy as well.

Higher education reform is muchneeded in this country. The federal government has essentially created a student loan bubble by increasing federal subsidies which has led universities to raise their prices year after year. This is the root cause of out-of-control higher education costs.

College costs have outpaced nearly every other commodity in the past 40 years, and something needs to be done.

Increasing federal subsidies will not keep costs lower and will only continue to encourage universities to raise their prices. Attempting to make college “free” will not fix this prwoblem but instead will only increase the actual cost. Students graduating with high amounts of college debt are holding back our economy and reform is needed to unleash the potential of these individuals.

Charlie is a senior majoring in journalism and economics. Do you think students should still have to pay for their college? Do you think college is overpriced? Do you agree more with Hae Rin? Let us know what you think. Please send all comments, questions and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.

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Campus bathrooms not userfriendly for all UW students view Cardinal View editorials represent The Daily Cardinal’s organizational opinion. Each editorial is crafted independent of news coverage.

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magine any university building.

Find a bathroom. Now find a bathroom where you feel safe.

This is a relatively simple task for the majority of UW-Madison students. However, for students who do not identify within the confines of the male-female gender binary, it could be threatening, extremely anxiety-inducing and, at the very least, inconvenient.

For transgender, non-binary and queer students, some of the anxieties associated with having to choose which bathroom to use could be lessened by the university’s commitment to providing a wide array of bathroom options, including genderneutral alternatives.

“Students are doing this constantly, running from class to class with no time at all to find the nearest available bathroom that isn’t sex-designated,” said Finn Enke, a professor of history and gender and women’s studies who identifies as transgender.

Enke described a potential situation in which a non-binary student may spend all 15 minutes between classes searching for a restroom, causing them to be late to class or forgo using the bathroom.

According to Director of University Housing Jeff Novak, dining halls, residence halls and the majority of academic buildings are equipped with at least one gender-

neutral bathroom, but many students are not aware of their existence and location, emphasizing the disconnect between university officials and students, and that visibility of these facilities needs to increase.

“...no one should be harrassed for wanting to go to the bathroom.”

Mariam Coker chair ASM Equity and Inclusion Committee

“The fact that students really believe that there are not enough bathrooms … that’s on the university’s part, not on the students’ part,” said UW-Madison sophomore and ASM Equity and Inclusion Committee Chair Mariam Coker.

“If it’s not visible enough, UW just doesn’t care enough to tell people that [these bathrooms are] there or even saying that these students don’t exist to use [them] when that’s not the case at all.”

Another discrepancy exists in the perception of demand.

“I don’t think the demand is there enough right now that [a genderneutral bathroom] is needed on every floor, but certainly making them very

accessible and locations known is very important,” Novak said.

Enke noted the dissonance between the university’s intent and actions, stating, “You can have a nondiscrimination policy, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t change the structures of the university, in ways that actually affirm the diversity that is potentially present as well as that is present.”

Since Enke arrived at UW-Madison in 2001, efforts to improve inclusivity have been made, such as providing the option to indicate one’s preferred pronouns and name within university administration.

Access to safe bathrooms is of utmost priority given the fact that a large portion of violence against non-binary people occurs in relation to bathroom use. Coker, who also sits on the Hate and Bias Committee, cited this as a recurring theme. “[An incident] that comes up often is people who don’t know that these non-gendered bathrooms exist going to a gendered bathroom and then getting harassed,” Coker said. “It’s an issue because no one should be harassed for wanting to go to the bathroom.”

Coker and Enke both noted that choosing a bathroom can be interpreted as making a statement about one’s gender identity.

“Because bathrooms are locations where people make a statement about their gender identity, the use of bathrooms can out people in different ways,” Enke said. “It can affirm their gender identity and it can also completely make it difficult to affirm their gender identity in any safe way at all.”

Guest column: Making the American dream accessible Andrew Dossman guest columnist

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ifty-four percent of students in the highest-income quartile earn a college degree, while 9 percent of students in the lowest-income quartile earn a college degree. We are taught that the key to obtaining the American dream is through education.

Americans must utilize education as a means to live a richer and fuller life regardless of race, economic status, or gender. However, daily we observe that low-income and traditionally underserved minority students are underrepresented in higher education and overrepresented in the judicial system. This is because many factors inhibit these students from having the opportunity to obtain a college education.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is a system where students who are not receiving additional educational or social assistance have a greater risk of being arrested or incarcerated. Schools are doing a disservice to their students by funneling them out of the school system and into the criminal justice system. By using policies like suspension, expulsion and arrest, minority students are targeted in schools. Maybe this phenomena exists because there is a lack of high school counselors at low-income high schools. High schools in

underserved communities can have counselors that serve up to 1,000 students while the national average is one counselor per 470 students. It is important to provide all students with an adequate amount of qualified counselors to ensure that they have a future after high school.

These tactics used by school districts are shockingly strategic.

The majority of American children attend largely segregated schools; by the 12th grade 66 percent of black students attended schools that were 50 percent or more of the students were black, while 99 percent of white students attended schools where 50 percent or more of the students were white. Nationally, Black-Americans have schools with fewer laboratories, fewer books in their schools libraries, and outdated textbooks. Minority students lack resources that are statistically proven to help students graduate high school and compete for a higher education.

“Signal influences” also affect low-income and traditionally underserved minority students.

Signal influences makes individuals feel devalued because of the connotations of their group membership. For example, as a black student at the University of WisconsinMadison where the percentage of black students is a mere 2 percent, I travel a hard, lonely path. Signal

influences like that can additionally lead to lower scores on standardized tests. When going into a testtaking setting, minority students may feel discouraged because they are aware that people from their background do statistically worse on standardized tests. These psychological factors stress students, in turn reducing their performance.

Standardized tests serve as a huge determinant for disadvantaged students applying to college.

Changes must be made in the educational system to close the gap between these students. We must push for an increase in the college preparatory facilities and the quality of teachers in underrepresented schools. Students should get help instead of being suspended, expelled, or arrested.

What’s the role of white America?

Promote and uplift a positive image of us. Educational disparities stop when we as a society speak up! Without an investment of thought, time and passion, we will never adjust this system to fulfill our human right to learn.

If you believe that all lives matter, then so should all minds. How are you going to act?

Andrew is a sophomore majoring in EMS and pre-kinesiology.

Let us know what you think. Please send all comments and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.

Courtesy of creative commons

All UW-Madison dining halls house gender-neutral bathrooms.

An infrastructure for genderneutral bathrooms could be realized in a number of different ways, all of which carry benefits and dangers.

One option supported by Quasia Heru, a UW-Madison student who identifies as non-binary, is modeled after the restroom configuration at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where all campus bathrooms are classified by the presence or absence of a urinal, and thus are not necessarily reliant on the gender binary.

Such a set-up allows potential for all bathrooms to be used by anyone.

Leigh Wilson, a UW-Madison graduate student who is also nonbinary identifying, said this arrangement would be least discriminatory.

“If [the bathroom] is next to a women’s restroom and a men’s restroom you’re still asking someone to out themselves or other themselves so really the most equitable and accessible situation is to just un-gen-

der all bathrooms,” Wilson said.

At the same time, Enke pointed out that ridding bathrooms of gender designation entirely could conflict with students who, for religious reasons, “cannot occupy the same space for those activities across sex and gender.”

Certainly, the administration has continued to work on creating a campus that is user-friendly for all of its students. Nevertheless, it is imperative to communicate openly and be proactive when considering all students’ identities.

“This is a systemic, institutionalized thing that we’re battling,” Heru said. “The goal is to not only change bathrooms in the university but change the way that people think in terms of binary to have people recognize that people exist all outside and within and without the binary.”

Send all comments and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.

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Balancing school, sports and a new life Story by Jake Powers

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t a small Catholic high school near Antwerp, Belgium, a 6-foot-10 basketball player took classes heavily based on discussion and conversation. In Bournemouth, England, 325 miles to the west, a tennis star in the making left his hometown, known for its stretch of beaches on the northern shore of the English Channel, for a small boarding school in Surrey.

And across the Atlantic Ocean, in the urban hub of Toronto, Canada, another basketball stalwart more than a foot shorter than her Dutch counterpart attended a private school which, combined with an adjoining public school, had a total enrollment of about 4,000 students.

Andy Van Vliet, Josef Dodridge and Dakota Whyte hail from different parts of the globe. They grew up in wildly varying cultures, moved their way through different school systems and played the game they loved along the way. Now, they’re student athletes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, still playing the sports they grew up with but acclimating to an academic setting they’ve just now come to learn.

The adjustments from high school to college for these three student athletes range from the comical to the alarming. Van Vliet had no idea what grade point averages were when he came to Wisconsin, and Whyte laughed about how her professors early on worked with her to transition from traditional Canadian prose and spelling to the standards at UW. “Kohl Center is spelled ‘center’ as in c-e-n-t-e-r and we spell it c-en-t-r-e,” Whyte said. “So just little things where I got certain marks off and I kind of had to meet with tutors and they would like ‘you can’t say it this way.’ A lot of my teammates were like ‘you say things so backwards,’ and that’s just because of how I’ve grown up, we have a different way of saying things.”

Dodridge, who attended Reed’s School in Surrey, England, felt the jolt of moving from a school with an enrollment of around 600 to Wisconsin’s vast campus flooded with 43,389 students.

“There were 100 kids in my year and there [were] four tennis players in my year,” Dodridge said. “It was a normal school, it wasn’t like a tennis school, but there [were] only 100 kids.”

Van Vliet’s culture shock perhaps hit the hardest out of the three, as he

grew up speaking and learning primarily in Dutch, but was knowledgeable in French, German and English as well. As it turned out, he didn’t know English as well as he thought he did.

“The biggest adjustment for me was having class in a different language,” Van Vliet said, almost too matter-of-factly. “That was so weird at the beginning. It was like, ‘OK, I know how to speak this language, I know how to understand it but you listen to class for a full 50 minutes and that was like, ‘OK, what did he mean by that?’ and then he was already on to something else, explaining something else.”

Their introduction to education at Wisconsin is typical of the nearly 4,000 international students representing 124 countries at UW. There’s the transition into larger class sizes, more impersonal ways of learning through technology and the simple shock of being a college student living away from home. What sets the international student athlete apart, however, is that sports provided an opportunity to move away from a home they knew so well to a culture and an academic setting literally a world apart.

“I think the biggest thing was for me, if I was going to go to a British university, the sport and the academics, they don’t really go alongside each other,” explained Dodridge, the Badgers’ first singles option with a 13-8 record this season. “Whereas here, it’s more established where you can play the sport and do the academics at the same time. If I was to go to England, it’s more like you either go pro or you study, and the studies, I think, are a bit more rigorous. The sports aren’t very—they aren’t taken as seriously.”

Dodridge has discovered in his pursuit to further refine his tennis game that college is easier in the U.S. as opposed to England, where “the studies are a bit more rigorous.” Van Vliet, who is in a similar situation on the basketball court, has found the opposite to be true in the classroom.

“That’s what I heard, that the university over here is a lot easier than Belgium,” Van Vliet said. “Sometimes they compare schools, university in the states to high school in Belgium.

That’s what it’s compared to. Some of my other friends who go to college [in the U.S.] and high school in Belgium, they’re saying sometimes it’s a joke.

robert darlington/cardinal file photo

Despite the challenges, Dakota Whyte believes being an athlete has helped her as a student.

I haven’t really found that out here because it’s kind of a tough school.”

Acclimating to a new school system made accessible primarily by physical talent while simultaneously pouring countless hours into sports has both its advantages and its drawbacks. Needless to say, that tension is emotionally taxing.

“It’s something you have to adjust to,” Whyte said. “I know my freshman year, I was just all over the place. I struggled a lot with balancing school and balancing basketball.

If I would have a bad practice, for a week, school would just be thrown out, I wouldn’t even focus on school because basketball isn’t doing well.

“It definitely carries over, if you’re doing well on the court, you’ll do well in the classroom, and if you’re doing poorly on the court, you’ll probably do poorly in the classroom. That’s one thing that I’ve learned, that they definitely correlate with each other.”

The resources available to athletes to help alleviate those stressors span far and wide. Tutors and advisors, knowledgeable in a wide array of subjects, play an enormous role in helping student athletes select classes, manage their time and plan for their futures. The vast facilities and deep staff dedicated to helping student athletes at UW certainly help ease the tensions of “constantly working and working,” in the words of Dodridge, but men’s tennis head coach Danny Westerman believes the biggest factor in helping international athletes acclimate is the fact that they belong to a team.

“I think being an athlete also really helps the international student athlete, more so than, maybe a little easier than the regular international [student] because you’re kind of automatically a part of a family,”

Jessi schoville/cardinal file photo

Andy Van Vliet’s freshman year at Wisconsin has not gone as he originally planned.

Westerman said. “When a freshman comes in, whether they’re international or not, you have an upperclassman showing you the ropes, showing you around, showing you campus, so I think that’s really helpful.”

Dodridge is on the same wavelength, as he acknowledged that because his tennis skills earned him not only acceptance, but a scholarship to Wisconsin, he feels added pressure to do well in school.

“It helps me in that I think we kind of set ourselves goals and I think the fact that we’re just working hard constantly, it’s like almost a better thing,” Dodridge said. “If we’re working really hard here [at practice], I think it’s almost easier kind of going quickly and then going on to study hard.”

A student athlete’s life is all about balance. It’s finding equilibrium

between their hours on the practice field and their time spent studying.

For international student athletes, the process of finding that balance is made further arduous by the shock that inevitably comes with adapting to a completely new style of schooling. Despite that difficult transition, the sports that make college accessible to a number of international student athletes also provide a path to academic success.

“There’s definitely more positives than negatives being an athlete, you’re given so many different resources having tutors, the Fetzer [Center], having guidance from your coaches and having a different set of ears with your teammates and always having that resource that you can always use to look to for advice from everyone,” Whyte said. “It’s definitely amazing.”

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