College Access Collaborative shows Patrick County high schoolers ‘what college can be’

On a rainy morning in April, Patrick County High School senior Nathaniel Whitaker clambered down the steps of a school bus and set foot on a university campus for the first time.

He and about 15 classmates looked around and marveled at the buildings clad in glistening Hokie Stone before making their way to meet with faculty, alumni, and students from the Pamplin College of Business’ top-ranked Howard Feiertag Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

“Virginia Tech is beautiful and also very big,” Whitaker said. “But most of all, being on campus definitely has opened my eyes to what college can be.”

He and the other students were touring Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus as part of the university’s College Access Collaborative, a department within Enrollment Management that aims to increase academic preparation for and access and affordability to college for underserved and underrepresented students.

Sarah Wray, who organized the tour, said Nathaniel’s experience is not uncommon among high schoolers in Patrick County, about an hour south of Blacksburg.

“Plenty of rural high school students are blazing trails as the first in their families to aim for college,” said Wray, who leads community engagement efforts at the Reynolds Homestead, part of Outreach and International Affairs, and is also the College Access Collaborative’s regional outreach coordinator. “Students like Nathaniel might never have even stepped foot on a campus before. It’s not about lack of interest, but more about the distance and the unfamiliarity, leaving them to carve their career paths without those campus tours,” she said.

Patrick County has some of the highest on-time high school graduation rates in Virginia, at 92 percent. However, it also has some of the lowest rates of students who go on to pursue postsecondary education, at just 28.8 percent, lagging far behind the state average of nearly 60 percent.

Since 2014, Wray has been working to change that.

Supporting college access for all

Wray is a first-generation college student from Patrick County herself and is finishing her master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the School of Public and International Affairs. She has a special understanding of the barriers many rural students face.

“We have a high rate of potential first-generation college students who need additional awareness and knowledge of how the higher education process works. Many of these students are facing barriers such as a lack of reliable transportation or the inability to take time off from work. That combined with the distance they must travel makes attending campus tours difficult,” she said.

The Reynolds Homestead’s work with the community and local schools sets a solid foundation for a college access program in the region. For more than 50 years, the homestead has been helping the university fulfill its land-grant mission by helping the community identify and address needs and serving as a gateway to the vast resources of Virginia Tech. 

In 2014, Wray started taking interested high schoolers in groups of 14 — the number that would fit in the Reynolds Homestead’s bus — on college campus tours. Meanwhile, she built a partnership with a local company to fund a yearly trip to Blacksburg for Patrick County ninth graders. In 2016, when Virginia Tech launched the College Access Collaborative, Wray became an outreach coordinator, aligning the Reynolds Homestead’s work with the larger university initiative and bringing more investment and services — and therefore a greater impact — to the region.

The collaborative has had measurable success in creating a pathway to college for first-generation, underrepresented, and underserved high schoolers. Applications to Virginia Tech from the collaborative’s 24 partner high schools have risen 134 percent, while enrollments from accepted students soared by 78 percent. Meanwhile, its initiatives are reflected in Virginia Tech’s more than 30,000 undergraduate students, of whom 36.8 percent identify as underrepresented or underserved.

In addition to college visits, the collaborative educates students and their families about financial aid, helps with the application process, and provides fee waivers. VT GPS, a new multiyear collaborative effort to recruit and retain students who have demonstrated financial need, will include not only outreach to high schoolers, but also STEM tutoring and financial and academic support for students as they transition to college.

“In the spirit of our motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), and our identity as a land-grant institution, it is most important to serve students and families throughout the commonwealth — especially students who are from underserved communities and are underrepresented in higher education and whose access to information and resources to best prepare for postsecondary education may be limited,” said Mary Grace Campos, College Access Collaborative director. “We know from research that postsecondary education leverages social capital for students — not only in terms of employment and salary earnings, but also in terms of health and civic engagement. That social capital is directly aligned with our university mission to be an inclusive community of knowledge, discovery, and creativity dedicated to improving the quality of life and the human condition within the Commonwealth of Virginia and throughout the world.”

For teachers, the collaborative offers continuing education units through workshops and other trainings that help educators better prepare their students for the rigors of college.

“Our work directly supports Virginia Tech Advantage, a commitment to offer a broad educational experience to undergraduate students from Virginia who have financial need,” Wray said. “By partnering with communities that typically graduate a lower number of college-bound high school students, we are bringing the opportunity to consider college as a realistic next step to students who otherwise may not have thought it was an option.”

Connecting interests to careers

On this trip, the Patrick County students met with professors, alumni, current students, and hospitality professionals working on campus at The Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center, including hospitality and tourism management alumni Hillary Simpson ’22, who is the inn’s conference planning manager, and General Manager Damon Strickland ’99.

They also visited the University Club of Virginia Tech, where they met Executive Chef Scott Watson, Director of Restaurants Sheldon Mooney, and general manager Ali Halatayi to learn about the ins and outs of managing a members-only club.

Tom Duetsch, assistant head of the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management gave an overview of the program and the many career paths available to graduates. “Our hospitality and tourism management students don’t just understand hospitality but also how to lead. This is a career that can take them around the world or back to their hometowns,” he said.

The goal is to give the high schoolers a way to start thinking about their interests and connect them to careers available right at home that they may not have considered before. Some students were doing just that. Nathaniel, for example, said he had never thought about how data analytics are used in the hospitality and tourism industry, such as when setting hotel room rates.

For Wray, that lightbulb moment was a big win.

“Helping students understand that they’ve got opportunities — regardless of the circumstances at home, regardless of money, regardless of any other barrier that might be in the way — and giving them the information they need to decide for themselves is life-changing.”