Helping Students Find the Right Higher Ed Fit
Yohlunda Mosley Hill, Madison College’s Transfer Center and Services Director, uses here training nd experiences to help students make a seamless transition to four-year colleges.
By Jonathan Gramling
Yohlunda Mosley Hill, Madison College’s Transfer Center and Services Director, experienced a rocky undergraduate career. Born to working class parents who had come to Waterloo, Iowa as a part of the Great Migration, Hill was a first-generation college student who pretty much had to do it on her own.
“Both of my parents had gone to college, but neither of them graduated,” Hill said. “I knew that I was supposed to go. I didn’t get a lot of information, especially from my parents, about how to go. It’s funny that when my daughter was going through her search, my mom was like, ‘You pretty much did everything yourself.’ I don’t know if that was a good thing. I made a lot of decisions that in hindsight, especially with the work that I do now, I don’t know if they were good.”
To begin with, Hill applied to one university, the University of Iowa.
“I wanted to go to Howard, but I couldn’t afford the tuition,” Hill recalled. “I wanted to go to Georgetown, but couldn’t afford the tuition. I remember a school counselor talked to me about going to Dartmouth. ‘With your grades and ACT scores …’ I had never heard of Dartmouth. I said, ‘No, not interested.’”
In her own words, Hill had a terrible freshman year because she was ill-prepared to sustain herself once she got to campus.
“I had financial issues,” Hill said. “I didn’t know how I was going to pay for things. I was homesick. All the things that happen with a normal college student, I experienced. But when you throw in the financial aspect, I was frustrated. I went to the financial aid office to get some assistance. I was told to drop out. My first year was my most challenging. I was on the five-year plan.”
And if it weren’t for some “divine intervention,” Hill may not have even graduated.
“I received a letter that I was going to get kicked out of the residence hall because I couldn’t pay my housing bill,” Hill said. “I went to the financial aid office. I talked to a financial aid counselor, an African American woman. She said, ‘Drop out. Go work at McDonalds and then come back in a year.’ I went back to my room and cried. I called my parents who were both feisty folks, products of the civil rights movement. Don’t take no for an answer. They called everyone from the president all the way down. And the only way I was able to stay in school was my aunt knew the director of financial aid. She called him and they released my financial aid for the spring and gave it to me in the fall so I could pay off my fall bill. That’s the only reason I didn’t take that advice to drop out. I graduated, went home, and worked for a year.”
During that year, Hill reflected on what she wanted to do professionally. And she decided she wanted to be that aunt for students who were either struggling or prevent students from ever getting to that place so that they can fully partake in what higher education has to offer. And so she went back and got her master’s degree focusing on multicultural issues in higher education.
And for the past 30 years, she has been that “aunt” to hundreds, if not thousands, of students. But along the way, she became disillusioned because the higher education institutions weren’t fulfilling their mission to help students succeed.
“My daughter wasn’t doing great,” Hill said. “I wasn’t necessarily enjoying the institution I was at. I was like, ‘Let’s just take a break to figure out what the next step is.’ So I did some consulting work for a year with a non-profit called Bottom Line. It’s a national organization that works with first-generation, mostly underrepresented, underserved students in helping them figure out their trajectory to college. I don’t even know how I saw this job at Madison College. I saw it and was like, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting. I like doing things different and new that I haven’t done before.’ I hadn’t been a counselor before. Most of the campuses I had worked at have been campuses where two-year institutions are feeders. I understood the four-year perspective of recruiting and going after transfer students. I felt that gave me a perspective on how to help students transfer out of Madison College. When I met with Dr. Daniels, he talked a lot about the HBCU focus. And that’s another thing when I saw the position, I was thinking, ‘It would be amazing if there was a pathway that we could create with HBCUs.’ When he talked about it in the interview, I was like, ‘Okay, I want this job so bad.’”
Hill assumed here duties in November and hit the ground running. While she has a small staff, the the work she does has a huge impact on the lives of Madison College graduates.
We have a very small, but what I call ‘mighty’ team. I have an administrative coordinator, Carolyn Kosabucki. I have a lead coordinator, Luis Rey who does a lot of the work. He has worked as an advisor at Madison College for a couple of decades. He is very informed about the curriculum on campus. He does a lot of the work as we are building articulation agreements to make sure that it is maximizing as many of the credits and coursework that our students are taking as possible. He meets with the program directors and deans for the academic unit. And then I share a person with career services in advising us on our marketing work. But I kind of feel building the relationships and giving some of that infrastructure and establishing the strategies is what I have been working on since I got here, the strategy for coop programming.”
At the core of Madison College’s mission is to have positive outcomes for its students, whether that means finding a family-supporting job upon graduation or successfully obtaining a degree at a four-year institution before finding meaningful work. Madison College develops agreements with higher education institutions like UW-Madison and Edgewood College and increasingly Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs, so that there is agreement on which Madison College courses will be accepted for credit that will lead to a four-year diploma at the institution.
And then that is where Hill’s education and experience kick in, to help the students navigate the pathway to higher education, understand the requirements of the collegiate environment they will be transitioning to and make the right decisions to have a successful college career.
“I wouldn’t advise a student to do anything that I wouldn’t advise my own child,” Hill said. “With my own daughter, what are the things that she needs to be aware of and the questions that need to be asked so that when she gets there, she has the right resources? She has a lot of support. She can get assistance when she needs it or even assistance when she doesn’t even know that she needs it and doesn’t know to ask for it, things like scholarships, grants, student activities and working on campus. All of that are ways to support and retain our students. Living in the dorms, being involved in activities and performing service work, all of those are things, especially if our students are spread really thin, they may not take advantage of those, but those are the things, as institutions, we have to be mindful of. How do we give those experiences to students who don’t see that they fit in their schedule or even if you are a non-traditional student, it might not be something that they are comfortable with or should do? How do we create that comfort because that is how they end up being successful? That’s how they begin networking.”
For Madison College, it’s all about positive outcomes for the students.
“Once they leave us, we continue to care about them,” Hill said. “Once they transfer to that four-year campus, what does their completion look like? Getting to us is the first step. Leaving us is the second step. But then graduating from that four-year campus is ultimately what we want to see happen.”
It is making student dreams come true that is at the heart of what Yohlunda Mosley Hill and her team does. And they do it well.
