The city is nearing its 25% goal, but there’s still more work to be done

Growing up in Newark, Desiree Crespo had a plan: Although no one in her family had ever finished high school, she would enroll in college, earn a bachelor’s degree, and start a career in social work. 

She was halfway through a four-year B.A. in sociology at Kean University when an unplanned pregnancy changed her trajectory. Continuing her studies amid pregnancy complications felt too difficult, so Crespo dropped out of college, expecting to return later. 

But life intervened. “Everybody says once you leave, you never go back,” says Crespo, now a 32-year-old single parent. “And that's exactly what happened.”

Over the next 12 years, Crespo raised her daughter and held a variety of jobs, eventually landing a social work position at Newark’s nonprofit New Community Corporation. But she knew the lack of a college degree was holding her back from the promotions, and the pay, that she wanted. 

It was time to return to school—and yet the project felt overwhelming. “It had been so many years,” Crespo says. “I didn't even know how to start.”

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The conversations had been going on for years in Newark’s higher education, government and philanthropic circles: Companies moving their operations to Newark reported difficulty finding city residents with enough education to fill job openings. So in 2012, Newark’s master plan set an ambitious goal: By 2025, a quarter of the city’s adult residents would have a college degree. Depending on which data were included, that meant an increase in the college-attainment rate of between 6.7 and 12 percentage points, representing as many as 20,000 people. 

In response, Rutgers University-Newark launched the Newark City of Learning Collaborative (NCLC), a community coalition dedicated to helping the city achieve its college-completion goal. NCLC’s partner organizations, which represent business, government, higher education, philanthropy, community organizations and K-12 schooling, aim to reach all kinds of Newarkers—teenagers enrolled in the city’s public, private, charter and parochial schools; GED degree recipients contemplating their next steps; and adults like Crespo, whose college-going journeys detoured along the way. 

“It’s the clarion call,” says Ronald Chaluisán, the former director of the Newark Trust for Education, who chairs NCLC’s advisory board. “The role is bully pulpit, get people engaged, become partners and then hold them accountable.”

By the time of NCLC’s formal launch in January 2015, the national conversation about post-secondary options had expanded to encompass not just college degrees, whether two-year associate degrees or four-year bachelor’s degrees, but also job-focused certifications and training. “There are multiple pathways that a person could take in order to get what I'm going to call the living wage credential,” says NCLC executive director Robyn Brady Ince. “We want everyone to be positioned to exercise the fullness of this thing called opportunity.” 

Although numbers vary depending on statistical parameters and methodology, NCLC’s numerical goal may already have been reached, more than a year ahead of the 2025 deadline: U.S. Census Bureau data estimates for 2022 suggest that 24.9 percent of Newark residents over the age of 25 now hold an associate degree or higher, even before the calculation is broadened to include non-college postsecondary certifications. But even if the city has already met its 25-percent-by-2025 goal, Ince says there’s plenty more to do. “We see that as the baseline goal,” she says. “By no means is that a North Star goal.”  

The same 2022 census estimates show that Newark’s college-attainment numbers lag far behind the comparable figure of 50.2 percent for the whole state—while the city’s poverty rate of 24.4 percent far exceeds the state’s 9.7 percent figure. Economists say that efforts to increase the college-attainment numbers have never been more important: By 2031, more than two-thirds of American jobs will require some kind of postsecondary educational credential, a recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce concludes. 

“Postsecondary education or training has become the threshold requirement for access to the managerial and professional economy and the middle-class status and earnings that flow from those jobs during both good and bad economic times,” the Georgetown researchers write. “Postsecondary education is no longer just the preferred pathway to middle-class jobs—it is, increasingly, the only pathway.”

By early this year, Crespo had reached the same conclusion about her own life. “At the end of the day, when you want higher pay, they want the degree,” Crespo says. “I'm really in the field that I want to be in. I just need the credentials.” 

So one March night, she found herself at a public library branch in the Ironbound neighborhood, attending a financial aid workshop co-sponsored by NCLC.

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When Ince talks about NCLC’s work, she turns to gardening metaphors: Tilling soil. Planting seeds. Cultivating an ecosystem. NCLC doesn’t provide services directly; rather, it works behind the scenes as “a clearinghouse, a connector and a communicator,” Ince says, focused on “sharing knowledge to increase understanding, helping people identify mutually beneficial goals and providing the backbone support.” Although Newark is a relatively small city, its various constituencies can still operate in silos, Chaluisán says. “You have all of these competing interests,” he says. “It's really hard to say, ‘Let's act as one.’”

Operating out of Rutgers-Newark, with a five-person staff and a budget funded largely by the university and local philanthropies, NCLC helps its partner organizations come up with ideas and work together on implementation. NCLC has promoted dual-enrollment programs, which allow high school students to take college courses for credit. It has helped Newark public schools partner with colleges to design summer campus tours for rising eighth graders. It has facilitated efforts by New Jersey’s higher education aid agency to train school guidance counselors and community volunteers in the intricacies of state and federal aid programs. It has partnered with the Newark Public Library to run workshops on college applications and financial aid. And it has conducted social-science research on what Newark students and their parents know about paying for college.

From its early days, NCLC has focused especially on encouraging families to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the sometimes daunting online gateway to many public and private forms of tuition assistance—not only for college, but also for other types of postsecondary education and training. Research shows that low-income students who complete the FAFSA are far more likely to enroll in college than those who don’t, says Elisabeth Kim, assistant professor of education and leadership at California State University, Monterey Bay. 

In part, that’s because published tuition costs are often far higher than the amounts that students actually pay, says David Socolow, the executive director of the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (HESAA), which administers the state’s financial aid programs. “When folks fill out the FAFSA, that deterrent effect of the sticker price is combated,” Socolow says. “They find out how much they could receive, and they're often pleasantly surprised that college is more affordable than they thought it was.” 

Indeed, every year, federal money allocated for financial aid--including the Pell Grant, the leading program for low-income students--goes unspent because students who might have qualified for the funding don’t fill out the FAFSA, says Matthew Odom, a spokesman for the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), an umbrella group for postsecondary access and attainment organizations. In 2022, unspent Pell Grant funds totaled $3.6 billion, Odom says—enough to cover aid for hundreds of thousands of students.

Filling out the FAFSA can also give students a new perspective on their futures, Kim says. Some Newark high school students “really are unsure, even when they get into the spring semester of their senior year, what their plans are going to be,” says Kim, who researched FAFSA issues in the city as a Rutgers-Newark postdoctoral associate and still works with NCLC. “They're not necessarily thinking about college, but then they have to fill out this form, and it's kind of saying to them, ‘Hey, maybe I could do that.’” 

Ironically, FAFSA completion rates tend to be higher in higher-income school districts, says Kim, even though better-off students presumably need less financial aid. “For families in higher-income districts, they're already accustomed to filling out this kind of paperwork,” Kim says. “They may have more support in their schools.”  

In 2021-22, the Newark public school district began requiring FAFSA completion as a condition of graduation, although students can opt out if they wish. As a result, Socolow says, the district’s FAFSA completion rate, which hovered around 50 percent as recently as 2015, has risen to almost 70 percent, roughly equal to the state average. “That is a tremendous achievement in eight years,” he says.

At some NCLC-sponsored workshops, participants get the help they need to complete the FAFSA in one sitting; other workshops, like the one Crespo attended in early 2023, offer information about applying for college and qualifying for private scholarships. For Crespo, the workshop was “empowering.”

“I was really overwhelmed with the whole process of going back to school,” Crespo says. “So just by going to the workshop, it was able to kind of bring my nerves down and say it's not that big of a deal.” 

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A numerical goal like NCLC’s 25-percent-by-2025 can serve a useful purpose, advocates say. Decades ago, when the first charter schools hung Ivy League banners over the doors of their kindergartens, “everybody thought they were insane,” says Chaluisán. “Well, it wasn't just that they put a label up. It was that it became a conversation. It became a conversation about college, and it became a conversation about bias, and it became a conversation about admission practices. It made a difference in how people were talking.”

But Chaluisán and others agree that choosing a numerical goal is only the beginning of a mobilization effort. “Setting a target can be helpful, particularly for the community partners that are working on this issue to allocate resources,” Kim says. “But I think along with that target, we need to make sure that we have the supports in place so that we're really ensuring that we're not placing all of the onus on the individual students.”

And even as NCLC seems close to achieving its goal, more remains to be learned about the newly enlarged pool of city residents with postsecondary credentials. “We see ourselves hitting the 25 percent, but where are the individuals coming from?” asks Jasmyne Beckford, a Prudential Financial manager who serves on the NCLC advisory board. “Are they people who have moved in? Are they people who have benefited directly from the work of NCLC?”

“Twenty-five percent by 2025 achievement tells me we have 75 percent more people” to reach, Ince says. “That’s all it tells me.”

Ince’s concern for the remaining 75 percent is well-founded, advocates and economists say. “College education has been shown to be a big predictor in whether or not an individual can advance their social and economic mobility,” says Odom of NCAN. “We really see a college education as the key to unlocking a more prosperous and successful future.”

Odom’s argument dovetails with the recent Georgetown report, which extrapolates from current trends to predict that by 2031, 72 percent of jobs nationwide—and 68 percent of those in New Jersey--will require some kind of postsecondary education or training. New Jersey ranks fifth-highest among the states for the proportion of its future jobs that are predicted to require not just any postsecondary education but a four-year bachelor’s degree—28 percent, or 1.1 million jobs.

“The economy will continue to create jobs for workers with a high school diploma or less,” the Georgetown report says. “But these jobs, in many cases, do not offer high enough earnings for the workers who hold them to adequately maintain a home and raise a family.”

That’s an important message for teenagers to hear before they decide on their path after high school, says Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and a co-author of the report. “Students have to know if you don't graduate on time, and if you don't get your certificate, your credential, you're going to have a harder time getting a job,” Smith says. “You're going to have a harder time at life.”

In October, state data showed that an average of 15 percent of Newark public school students in grades 3 to 9 had passed the spring 2023 state math test, while 29 percent had passed English language arts. In that context, NCLC’s efforts to encourage postsecondary attainment can look like too little, too late—or can serve as a spur to redouble efforts to help younger students succeed. Pre-kindergarten classes, elementary and secondary schooling, postsecondary attainment: All of it matters, Smith says.
“We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” she says, “and to employ what's necessary to make sure that we really prepare our students for the future.”

  When Kean University’s spring semester begins in a few weeks, Crespo plans to re-enroll in the sociology program she dropped out of 12 years ago, aiming to earn the bachelor’s degree she missed out on. And she’s already thinking ahead, to a master’s degree and a social work license. 

“I want to stay in the nonprofit field working as a social worker and just be licensed and be able to even become a director,” Crespo says. “I just want to be able to excel.”

Humanities Reporter Deborah Yaffe is a freelance writer based in Princeton Junction, N.J. She worked as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and California for 14 years and is the author of two books: “Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools” (2007) and “Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom” (2013).

This article is the third of CivicStory’s Humanities Reporter series, funded in part by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.