USC’s Caslen thinks he can get more SC students to attend college. Here’s how

University of South Carolina President Robert Caslen thinks it’s his responsibility to get more S.C. students to attend college.

That’s why the state’s flagship school will launch an initiative in January with the Fairfield County School District that gets USC students to mentor high school students and encourages them to attend college.

The initiative, dubbed “ALL4SC,” will take the form of athletic clinics, STEM (science, technology engineering and mathematics) conferences, ethics conferences and more, Caslen said.

“We want to increase the number of in-state eligible students,” said Caslen, who became USC president on Aug. 1.

The program has been one of Caslen’s key talking points as he travels throughout the state meeting with Rotary Clubs, newspaper editorial boards and K-12 school districts.

The program is meant to do more than just recruit, Caslen said. Rather than competing with other colleges for students who already want to go into higher education, the goal is to increase the amount of students — particularly minority students — attending college, he said.

In other words. Caslen doesn’t want “a larger piece of the pie,” but rather to “grow the pie,” he said.

“We want to see how it works in Fairfield and take it statewide,” Caslen said of the program.

The program — brainchild of faculty and administrators throughout 12 colleges at USC — was originally funded and approved while Harris Pastides was USC president. But since Caslen has taken over, he has been a strong supporter of the program, said Barnett Berry, the director of ALL4SC.

“Often kids from low-income backgrounds don’t have the ability to see ... what they want to be,” Berry said.

“Very quickly, President Caslen saw the value in this,” Berry said.

As of late November, it’s unclear which schools ultimately will be involved in the initiative nor how many students would be involved, Berry said. However, it’s something he thinks can scale up in a short period of time.

“We feel this is something we can move across the state pretty quickly,” Berry said.

Caslen implemented a similar program while he was the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which helped increase diversity at the school from 6% African American students in 2013 to 16% African American students when he retired in 2018.

It’s common for colleges to have some presence in high schools to help recruit students, something Caslen refers to as “planting the seed,” but this program will be different both in its goals and execution, he said.

“The key thing that’s different here is the relationship,” between the high school and the college student, Caslen said.

Should USC take the program statewide, it would be the first to do so, but it’s not the first college to have a local mentoring program. In February 2018, Wofford College partnered with local nonprofit Citizen Scholars Institute to create the iCAN (College Access Network) program, a mentorship program between Wofford students and Spartanburg County high school students.

“The whole idea is to provide advice and guidance in the college admissions process,” said James Stukes, who oversees the program at Wofford. “Who better to help high school students than people who just went through that?”

Mentors and mentees meet in-person once a month, plus during sanctioned events, such as “FAFSA Night,” “Latte and Learn” and the senior banquet, according to iCAN newsletters.

While Wofford’s iCAN program focuses on high achieving, low-income students and those whose parents didn’t attend college, the key difference between Wofford’s program and Caslen’s proposal is “these students were already college bound,” Stukes said.

Caslen’s proposal would have USC students “inspire” high schoolers who may have low-or middle-of-the-road grades to attend college, he said.

Wofford’s program is also much smaller than what Caslen is proposing. Currently, there are 32 Spartanburg County high school students enrolled in the program, but by 2022, that number is expected to swell to 170, Stukes said.

Despite its size, iCan has shown progress. Its first graduating class was small, only nine students, but all nine of them graduated and attended college, Stukes said.

This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 10:59 AM.