The academic pedigree of the University of Maryland Baltimore County doesn’t leap off the page.
At Yale University, the graduation rate is 96 percent. At UMBC, it is 68 percent. Dartmouth College has produced 73 Rhodes scholars; UMBC, none. The state’s flagship public university is in College Park, not Catonsville.
(Mark Gail/The Washington Post) - UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III has visited the White House and co-chaired a panel on higher-education with the president of Harvard.
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A generous contributor to the university, he will be in line to take over board leadership in 2015.
40 states and D.C. now have federal waivers to free them from some requirements of education law.
Half of the old schools are among those scheduled for closure by June 2014.
But a closer look at UMBC reveals an institution that has built a reputation for teaching to rival the higher-education elite. In recent years, UMBC has been alternately hailed or dissected by Time magazine, “60 Minutes” and various college rankers. Its president, Freeman Hrabowski III, has visited the White House, dined with Queen Elizabeth II and co-chaired a panel on higher-education excellence with the president of Harvard University.
UMBC is an insider’s university, a place professors send their children, an academic brand as familiar to presidents and provosts as it is unfamiliar to the general public.
But after years of acclaim, that may finally be changing.
Each year, U.S. News & World Report asks college leaders to pick the top institutions for undergraduate teaching. Dartmouth and Princeton topped the list this year, along with some Ivy League peers and elite public schools such as the College of William and Mary. All in all, it was an utterly predictable exercise — save for UMBC, tied with Yale at fourth place.
The school is known for African American scholarship in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Many higher-education leaders say no institution does a better job of seeding black students into the sciences than UMBC and that no one knows how to do it better than Hrabowski. To those observers, UMBC and its 20-year president are indistinguishable.
“He has looked so systematically at what attracts students to science education, what inspires them to stay in it and what support they need to succeed in it,” said Drew Faust, Harvard’s president.
UMBC faculty are leading a quiet revolution in science education.
Introductory chemistry classes have moved from passive lecture halls to a “chemistry discovery center.” Students work in four-person teams with a whiteboard, and each is assigned a role: manager, researcher, scribe or blogger. The concept is comparatively simple, based on a group learning style borrowed from elementary schools. But for colleges, it is new.
In six years, the chemistry failure rate has gone from 30 percent to 15 percent. And the concept has spread to introductory biology, now taught in a cavernous hall called the “active science teaching and learning environment.” Students sit around tables and collaborate on problems while the teacher roams the room wearing a wireless mic, a pedagogical master of ceremonies.
“Sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium,” said the instructor, Sarah Leupen, looping around the tables one recent day. “I’m loving the sodium, people. You don’t need to memorize this formula, but you need to be friends.”
At UMBC, the overall 68 percent graduation rate seems modest. But black and Hispanic students tend to graduate at about the same rate as whites, a feat almost unknown in higher education. A National Science Foundation report reveals that 48 African Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees from UMBC went on to earn doctorates in science and engineering from 2005 to 2009, the largest number from any college without a black student majority. Sixteen percent of UMBC students are African American.
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