A scholar-activist, I founded the #RealCollege movement to support students’ basic needs and advance a more just vision of higher education. 

Examples of my work include:      

• Spending 6 years learning from the experiences of thousands of low-income college students and writing an award-winning book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (University of Chicago, 2016).
• Advising the Obama and Biden Administrations on investments in community colleges and making higher education affordable.  I also wrote the first blueprint to make community college free and testified twice before Congress. 
• Founding The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, a vanguard translational research center which led dozens of scientific studies establishing basic needs insecurity among college students (especially food insecurity, housing insecurity, and homelessness) as a national crisis and evaluated a range of programmatic and policy solutions.
• Creating the #RealCollege Survey, the nation’s first assessment tool for understanding whether and how the essential needs of humans in higher education are being met. We fielded the survey at ~800 colleges and universities in all 50 states and led the effort to convince the U.S. Department of Education to ask similar questions on its own surveys.
• Co-creating a national coalition driving improvements to practices and programs at more than 1,500 higher education institutions. That coalition secured improvements in both state and federal policies supporting millions of students.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing a guide to supporting college students (downloaded more than 34,000 times in the first month following publication),  contributing to the Center for Disease Control’s Blueprint for Equitable Recovery and Resilience in Communities Across America, and advising the U.S. Department of Education and national foundations on the design and implementation of emergency aid funds for college students.
• Together with Jesse Stommel, developing the #RealCollege Curriculum, an online masterclass helping faculty and staff learn ways to help students by centering their humanity.
• Founding Believe in Students, the nation’s first national nonprofit devoted to helping college students meet their essential needs.
• Launching the FAST Fund (Faculty and Students Together), an emergency cash assistance program that has distributed more than $1M to students at 30 colleges and universities through trust-based grant-making.     

Here’s a bit about why I do what I do:

Having grown up in Fairfax Virginia, an uncommonly prosperous and diverse section of an otherwise Southern state, I’ve always doubted the so-called American Dream. During my lifetime, dramatic increases in financial inequality countered the meritocracy myths taught in the “gifted and talented” schools I attended. Being a sociologist helps me blend a commitment to science and facts with a strong desire to improve the world.  That drive for tikkun olam comes from my Poppa (my maternal grandfather, see photo on the left), who was raised Sephardic in the Bronx, at a time when such Jews were considered “dirty.” 

I spent several decades working for public universities before declaring my independence. These days you’ll find me:

• Translating lessons from my work into practice by teaching at the Community College of Philadelphia
• Supporting organizations across the country as they strive to improve how they work with students (learn more about my consulting with EduOptimists here)
• Serving on the board of the Student Basic Needs Coalition
• Boxing and helping a local nonprofit use boxing to reduce gun violence in our city
• Raising two teens with my husband in Philadelphia