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Reason 55 is a podcast hosted by law enforcement veteran, Stephen B. Walker, each episode of Reason 55 will bring together diverse and determined people doing incredible work that helps to affect our world for the better. Reason 55 gives a mic to voices from invisible operations that touch lives every day and features discussions that provide listeners with different perspectives and prescriptions to be an Evolution of Hope.

David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole when he was 17. In many states—including Pennsylvania, where Gonzalez was sentenced—there are few, if any, college opportunities for people with such lengthy sentences. 

Still, Gonzalez eventually fought his way into Villanova University’s privately funded college program at Graterford Prison, the maximum security facility where he was incarcerated. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in education and marketing.

While incarcerated, Gonzalez developed a decades-long friendship with journalist Maria Hinojosa. The two would later work together to document his time in prison and subsequent release, in 2017 after a Supreme Court decision that ruled automatic life sentences without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, in an eponymous podcast, Suave, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

Now, Gonzalez is a support coach with I Am More, a reentry program for formerly incarcerated students at Philadelphia Community College. He also co-hosts Death by Incarceration, which will be featuring episodes this fall focused on the various ways people in prison get an education. 

In August, journalist Rahsaan “New York” Thomas called Gonzalez from a phone booth on the ground tier of San Quentin’s North Block. Thomas, who was sentenced to 55-years-to-life in California, is the inside host of the Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle. 

Like Gonzalez, Thomas was able to earn a degree behind bars. As he wrote for Open Campus, it was one of the factors cited in the commutation he received from California Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this year. At the end of September, Thomas got word that he is suitable for parole following Newsom’s clemency and he expects to go home sometime in early 2023.  

Thomas and Gonzalez talk about fighting the system and the role of education in prison when you think you’re never getting out.

Read New York’s interview with Suave here. We co-published the story with Slate.

To listen to the entire conversation between Thomas and Gonzalez, check out this episode of Death by Incarceration.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus, College Inside on Oct. 20, 2022.  Photo/Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez both graduated from college while serving a life sentence in prison. Illustration by Charlotte West/Open Campus. Photo of Thomas by Eddie Herena. Photo of San Quentin by Shutterstock.

Clearing a final hurdle

One of our College Inside contributors got big news: Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, the inside host of the Ear Hustle podcast out of San Quentin, got word that he is going home in about 5 months. He cleared the last big hurdle last week when the California parole board signed off on Governor Newsom’s clemency.

Even though Rahsaan finished his associate’s degree – one of the factors cited by Newsom’s office as a reason for granting clemency  – in 2020, he also just celebrated his graduation in June. (Rahsaan recently wrote about his winding journey to a college degree for The Marshall Project.)

Don’t miss Rahsaan’s story we published earlier this year on why education matters for people serving extreme sentences. He’s also helping to build a prison-to-journalism pipeline with his non-profit, Empowerment Avenue.

“For those of us serving long sentences, recidivism rates and jobs can’t measure the success of our college education,” Rahsaan writes. “My pursuit of a degree started in 2016, approximately 16 years into a 55-years-to-life sentence. I would have to live to be 85 years old to evaluate whether an associate’s degree will break the cycle of incarceration that’s circled my adulthood.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus on Sept. 9, 2022.  Photo/R.J. Lozada

In January 2022, after an arduous 18-month application and review process, Mount Tamalpais College was granted Initial Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges, making it the first accredited independent liberal arts college dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students.

Operating out of San Quentin State Prison — the oldest operating correctional facility in California, tucked away on a peninsula just outside of San Francisco — the staff at Mount Tamalpais has long been dedicated to ensuring that students on the inside receive a high-quality education at least comparable to what they might receive at a quality educational institution on the outside. 

Along with providing “an intellectually rigorous, inclusive Associate of Arts degree program and College Preparatory Program, free of charge, to people at San Quentin State Prison,” Mount Tamalpais also seeks to “expand access to quality higher education for incarcerated people, and

to foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought, and freedom of expression,” according to its website.

NationSwell Council member Jody Lewen, the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College, recently sat down with us to talk about advocating for academic quality and inclusivity and the process of building Mount Tamalpais’s programs into what they are today — a process, she said, that “really strained my atheism.”

Read our full interview with Jody below:

NationSwell: Tell us a little bit about how you ended up working in prison education.

Jody Lewen, founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College: I grew up in Manhattan and went to Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, for undergrad, and then a short time later moved to Berlin and ended up doing my Master’s in comparative literature and philosophy. I came to California in 1994 to do my doctorate at Berkeley, but while I was about halfway through working on my dissertation, I very coincidentally learned about this college program at San Quentin that was run entirely by volunteers and became very interested.

I knew nothing about prison, it was not a field I had read about or studied. I had done a lot of political work and read a lot of history and literature as an undergrad and was very aware, in a mostly abstract sense, of suffering in the world, but I really hadn’t found a way to integrate my political interests with my academic career path. But I thought the program sounded really interesting, so I ended up going into San Quentin in the spring of 1999 and teaching a public speaking class and really loving it.

NS: What were some of the early challenges or surprises you faced in doing this work?

Mount Tamalpais College’s Jody Lewen: It was a lot of my own demons about education — there were so many very humbling ironies. I had never interacted with adults who were as talented and intelligent whose basic skills in reading and writing were as poor, and it made me realize that I had a lot of ignorant assumptions about the correlation between basic skills and intellect.

When I got that first batch of papers back, I didn’t even know how to grade them, because there were so many problems. So I eventually went back and had a conversation with the students where I said look, guys, I’m realizing there’s all this stuff you haven’t been taught about college writing and I’m not sure how to handle this but I don’t really feel comfortable letting this stuff slide.

They just overwhelmingly were like, ‘Please don’t patronize us, people have been underestimating us our entire lives.’ They didn’t want to be in a prison college program; they wanted to be in college, and they wanted to learn what they really needed to know to be successful in the outside academic and professional worlds. 

NationSwell: How did you go from working as a volunteer at San Quentin to becoming the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais?

Lewen: I had gotten very interested in the recruitment and training of faculty because very early on I had become aware that they were not acquiring the basic skills they were going to need to be successful in a rigorous academic environment. It became a question of, should the standards we’re holding our students to on the inside be the same ones we’re holding our students to on the outside? And if not, why not?

I’m the most unreligious person to walk the face of the earth, and yet a series of things began happening that really strained my atheism. It was like an intervention: We started to realize that the problem was not just that they were so underprepared academically; the problem was us, it was that we didn’t have the resources or the time to build a program that really met their needs.

And then the fellow who was running the program left, and the whole thing collapsed on me like a house. I began to tear out walls and floors and ceilings; our courses weren’t in compliance with the minimum number of contact hours, so I extended the semester from 10 weeks to 13 weeks, increased the class meetings to twice a week from once a week, and began to recruit teachers who knew how to teach developmental writing and math. And we basically overhauled the whole pre-college writing and math program.

NationSwell: What are some of the things you think about in trying to recruit new educators to meet these challenges?

Lewen: To be frank, most people assume that prison is a scary place to be, understandably. We’ve all been taught to imagine incarcerated people as ugly, predatory, not very bright. So getting people to overcome their physical fear of prison is huge. It helps a lot, as the program has grown, we have so many current and former faculty members who can’t stop talking about what it’s like to teach there, and they’re really our recruitment army. 

And then the other thing I’ve noticed is that the universe of people who are interested in prisons and serving the incarcerated are often relatively politically similar to each other. The Bay Area is obviously quite progressive, so cultivating intellectual diversity among the faculty can be quite challenging. I take really seriously the fact that our students are really diverse in every way —

not just racially or ethnically but also culturally, ideologically, politically, they’re from all corners of the universe. So diversity is also an important value in our recruitment processes.

NationSwell: What can interested members do to help support the work that you do, or prison education more broadly?

Lewen: For the fall semester our instructors are mostly lined up already, but in general we’re always looking for volunteers. For the credit classes the lead instructor has to have at least a master’s degree in the field, but for the developmental education classes and also any tutoring roles, the requirements are a little bit more flexible. [Anyone interested in volunteering can get in touch through Mount Tamailpais’s website here.]

We’re  always looking to connect with individual and institutional funders who are excited about the idea of providing high quality educational opportunities to currently incarcerated people. Unlike traditional colleges, we charge no tuition and receive no state or federal funding. This is fantastic for preserving our autonomy and our capacity to innovate, but it’s also real work to raise $5 million a year. People can always reach out to us, or directly support our work at mttamcollege.org/donate. 

There are also other nonprofit organizations that support reentry and other ancillary fields that can always use volunteers.A number of excellent organizations in the Bay Area have been founded by our alumni, either while they were still inside or once they got out. Some of those organizations are:

• Bonafide (bonafidelife.org), an amazing reentry organization that works with people from the moment they’re released and then stays with them throughout their lifetime helping them adjust and thrive. 
• The San Quentin News, the prison newspaper that’s in a period of tremendous growth right now.
• Mend Collaborative, a restorative justice organization that was recently co-founded by an alumnus of ours.
• Veterans Healing Veterans, founded by a former student, which supports currently or formerly incarcerated veterans.
• Ear Hustle, a podcast that was co-founded by a former MTC faculty member.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in NationSwell, August 29, 2022.

Jody Lewen, Ph.D., first entered San Quentin prison in 1999 as a volunteer instructor in an educational outreach program to inmates. As a graduate student in the rhetoric department at U.C. Berkeley, Lewen was teaching classes on campus and working on her dissertation. “I started teaching at San Quentin out of interest and excitement at the idea of being able to deliver quality education to people who didn’t necessarily have it, but it was something to do on the side,” Lewen recalls. “My plan was to finish my dissertation and go into the conventional job market. Then I fell in love with the program and got very engaged.”

When the program coordinator announced he was leaving, and no one stepped up to keep it going, Lewen decided to take over. “I saw how little anybody cared what happened to people in prison,” she says. “That’s a precarious situation for any group of humans.”

Lewen wondered what the program could become if there was enough manpower and resources to support it, and decided to found the nonprofit Prison University Project to raise funds for expansion. As an increasing number of inmates enrolled in classes, the Prison University Project became the infrastructure for a robust academic program offering a general education associate of arts degree and intensive college preparatory courses. In the past two decades, nearly 4,000 students have participated.

“We’re letting people who have been marginalized, degraded and left for dead know that somebody does care about them,” Lewen says. “I derive so much satisfaction from feeling useful. Seeing the good we can do just by showing up and taking the time to give our students a high-quality education – that’s fuel for me.”   

Mount Tamalpais College, a program for inmates at San Quentin State Prison, has been granted accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

The designation came from the association’s Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a 19-member board that reviews whether schools meet educational standards.

“Because our processes are based on thorough and recognized best practices, our determination that an institution is in fact providing a quality educational experience for its students is respected by multiple stakeholders,” the commission website says.

Mount Tamalpais College — formerly known as the Prison University Project and Patten University — has provided free education to San Quentin inmates for 25 years. Its offerings include an associate’s degree program and a college preparatory program.

Jody Lewen, president of the college, said accreditation means the school is “independent and autonomous” and that students are not defined as prisoners.

“It advances the goal of helping the general public understand that people in prison are fully human,” she said.

“We are also committed to providing support to other practitioners in the field of higher education in prison, and to sharing knowledge to advance the cause of equity and excellence in higher education nationally,” Lewen said. “Some schools are interested in becoming involved in operating programs inside correctional facilities because they want to serve incarcerated people, because they want to make sure they have access to education.”

Lewen said the college helps students prepare to transfer to other colleges.

““We have many students who are now on California State and UC campuses pursuing bachelor’s degrees and even master’s degrees as well,” Lewen said. “We are really interested in creating that pipeline to further degrees.”

Amy Jamgochian, the chief academic officer, said, ”Becoming accredited as a junior college located solely inside a prison feels like an important turning point in a society that seldom sees education as a human right or incarcerated people as humans.”

Jamgochian said the staff is developing a computer lab and strengthening science, technology, engineering and math offerings.

Ronald Bloomfield, the prison warden, said the college’s accreditation “represents years of dedicated service in helping an underserved segment of our society.”

”The students of Mt. Tam experience an amazing high-quality education,” Bloomfield said. “Graduates leave the college with knowledge and skills essential to becoming productive citizens.”

Corey McNeil, a graduate now on staff at the college, said its accreditation makes him feel like the school is “growing and evolving along with me.” 

”This is our own college now, all of the people who built this together,” McNeil said. “Now we can say that this is ours.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Marin Independent Journal on March 30, 2022.

An AGB member institution just made history. 

When Mount Tamalpais College (MTC) received notice of its initial accreditation in January 2022, it very likely became the first accredited liberal arts college based inside a correctional facility and designed solely for incarcerated students.  

As an AGB consultant to the college, I see how students change their lives forever with MTC’s mission to provide “an intellectually rigorous, inclusive Associate of Arts degree program and College Preparatory program, free of charge, to people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison….” The college aims to “foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought, and freedom of expression.” 

Signifying how well the college delivers on its liberal arts mission, former President Barack Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal to the Prison University Project in 2016. 

The College Program at San Quentin State Prison was founded in 1996 as an extension site of Patten College (later Patten University). In 2003, the Prison University Project (PUP) was created to provide material and financial support to that program. After a series of significant changes at Patten, the leadership of PUP began to explore forging a new institutional partnership or becoming an independent institution. In 2018, they decided on the latter, and MTC came into being. 

The founding of MTC comes at a time of significant change in the field of higher education in prison. When the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994 prohibited incarcerated people from receiving Pell grants, the number of prison higher education programs across the United States dropped from over 300 to fewer than 10. Only in the past several years have efforts at the state and federal level to reinstate support seen a resurgence of the field. In summer 2021, Congress voted to restore Pell eligibility for incarcerated people (effective 2023) as part of the stimulus package.   

While Pell funds make it more financially feasible for other institutions to serve incarcerated students, MTC leaders note the lack of binding quality standards or accountability systems to protect incarcerated students from substandard, or even exploitative, practices. Responsible academic institutions and their governing boards will be attentive to such concerns. MTC has demonstrated that maintaining high standards in a liberal arts education in prison is not only possible, but a moral imperative. It also presents a unique opportunity to advance the cause of equity while fostering a healthy civil society.  

Patten’s sponsorship had allowed the program to develop without its own governing board or independent accreditation. After its first review, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) recommended that before applying for initial accreditation, the college should formalize decision-making roles and ensure that all constituents had opportunities to participate. The program-oriented board of directors needed to become a fiduciary governing board, and the college needed to establish shared governance. That’s when MTC turned to AGB for assistance. 

In late 2020, I began working remotely with MTC due to the pandemic. We started with five two-hour seminars over the course of four months, covering board roles and responsibilities, trusteeship, board-president relationships, and board operations. Each session had a syllabus with recommended readings and other AGB resources that remain in the board’s online folder for future reference. I also met with the executive team to help them understand how they can support the board’s transition.  

Starting with their existing bylaws and policies, I drafted revisions and wrote new material for the Governance Committee to develop further and recommend to the board for adoption. The documents remain works in progress, slowed primarily by the demands of the pandemic. Now I sit in on board and committee meetings and advise the president and board chair. I provide just-in-time information about best practices, suggest adaptations if best practices don’t fit MTC, and offer feedback on their efforts to implement their new learnings.  

Our discussions frequently run into unique dilemmas. Why should we change from being directors to trustees—what’s the difference? How do you achieve faculty governance when the faculty consists of over 300 part-time, unpaid volunteers with varying availability from one semester to another? Is it appropriate for a faculty volunteer to serve on the board of trustees? (Several already do.) Is it appropriate to have alumni on the board? (Emphatically, the answer is yes.) The president is a founder of the organization and the core sustaining element of its success. Given the board’s new governing responsibilities, do the president and the board need to reconstruct their relationship? 

Working through questions like these brings me a fresh perspective on the work we all do. We know in our heads that we change lives and society for the better. We can imagine in our hearts what MTC means to its students, alumni, and their families and communities. Though every story is different, is higher education’s impact less true for any student anywhere? Are we doing enough to build support? 

Every governing board I’ve worked with impresses me; every institution is uniquely inspiring. By definition, each one devotes time and resources to governing better. There is always more to learn. It helps to have a coach.  

Ellen-Earle Chaffee is a senior fellow and senior consultant at AGB.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in AGB on February 16, 2022.

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Students walk to and from classes with books in hand. Some stand around the yard, discussing philosophical concepts from their latest assigned readings. The scene looks similar to that found on any campus quad—except the students are gathered in a prison yard, and the college is located in San Quentin State Prison.

Mount Tamalpais College is the outgrowth of a nearly 25-year-old college program serving students in California’s oldest prison. It was formally accredited as a two-year college last month by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges and became the only accredited, independent liberal arts college in the country that operates its main campus out of a prison, according to college leaders. Mount Tamalpais offers a general education associate degree program and a college preparatory program that teaches students writing and math skills. The faculty members are entirely volunteers, many of them from local colleges and universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.

The college serves about 300 students at a time, which is a small portion of the 3,049 inmates housed at San Quentin. Enrollment is capped at around 300 because of limited classroom space. At least 3,731 students have taken courses through the program over the years.

Jody Lewen began volunteering as a graduate student at the program in 1999 and is now the college’s president. She said the idea of becoming an independently operated and accredited institution started out as a pipe dream. The program was formerly known as the Prison University Project and began as an extension of Patten University, a private Christian institution in Oakland, which became an online, for-profit university.

Lewen wanted the college to stand on its own, without its success contingent on a partner institution.

“I had fantasized about that for a long time,” she said. “I just thought it would be really extraordinary to be independent, but it never seemed like there would be any way we could pull it off financially. Just the logistics and the infrastructure required seemed so daunting at the time.”

She still worries about finances—Mount Tamalpais is funded by private philanthropy, so classes, textbooks and supplies are provided to students for free—but she got her wish for the program to strike out on its own and provide a level of quality that matched colleges outside the prison.

“Making the decision to become accredited meant that we would be held to the same standards as main campuses typically are, as schools as a whole are,” she said. “We were going to have to answer to all these questions about access to technology, library resources, data collection and analysis, all of the substance of accountability … It just ended up being incredibly productive for us.”

She emphasized that the accreditation will ensure the long-term stability and quality of the program and also will send a larger message.

“What we hope is that our coming into being as a college that happens to be located in the prison has the effect of drawing the attention of the higher education community to those students and causing them specifically to recognize incarcerated students as a part of the higher education community,” she said.

The accreditation comes at a time when lawmakers and higher education leaders are increasingly focused on expanding college opportunities for incarcerated students after Congress in 2020 overturned a 26-year ban that denied incarcerated students access to the Pell Grant, the federal financial aid program for low-income students.

Second-Chance Pell, a pilot program established in 2015, originally allowed 67 select institutions to offer prison education programs with the support of the Pell Grant. The pilot is expected to expand to up to 200 colleges and universities in the 2022–23 award year. The federal funds will be widely available to incarcerated students starting next year.

Incarcerated people tend to have lower levels of education compared to the general population. A 2018 report by the Prison Policy Initiative found that a quarter of formerly incarcerated people never graduated high school. This population is almost twice as likely to lack a high school degree compared to American adults at large. Meanwhile, more than half don’t hold credentials beyond a high school diploma or GED.

Research shows prison college programs have wide-ranging benefits for incarcerated students. Incarcerated people who participate in college programs have a 43 percent lower recidivism rate than their peers, according to research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Only 14 percent of incarcerated people who earn an associate degree and 5.6 percent who earn a bachelor’s degree return to prison.

Shannon Swain, superintendent at the Office of Correctional Education for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said these programs also increase morale among the incarcerated.

“I can’t overemphasize the positive effect that all college programming has on the institutions,” she said. “It’s just really amazing, because all of the sudden, you have incarcerated folks that are more mature, they’re focused on their own recovery, they’re focused on their future, and it influences the people around them.”

The news of Mount Tamalpais’s new status has been widely celebrated by San Quentin staff.

“The accreditation of Mt. Tam as an independent college represents years of dedicated service in helping an underserved segment of our society,” Ronald Bloomfield, warden at San Quentin, said in a press release. “The students of Mt. Tam experience an amazing high-quality education. Graduates leave the college with knowledge and skills essential to becoming productive citizens. With an increased worldview comes increased possibilities and hope for a better future.”

Sam Robinson, public information officer at the prison, said one of the “hallmarks” of the prison is that students can leave with a free associate degree, and the program has led many people to request to transfer to San Quentin.

Corey McNeil, who graduated from the college in 2019, was among those students. He said he came to prison with a middle school education, and when he was first incarcerated, he decided to further his education to show his family he was on a “different trajectory.” He earned his GED at another prison before he requested to transfer to San Quentin to go to Mount Tamalpais because of its reputation for face-to-face learning with instructors and robust classroom discussions. McNeil earned his general education associate degree while simultaneously working as a clerk for the program for four years. He became the college’s alumni affairs assistant after his release last May.

McNeil recalls having lively discussions in the prison yard, ranging from the Reconstruction era in U.S. history to the pros and cons of utilitarianism, with his classmates, whom he now considers “lifelong friends.” He made regular calls to his mother and uncle to tell them about classes and update them on his academic progress.

“Now to see that MTC is growing and achieved accreditation, it feels like not only a celebration of the college’s accomplishments … as an institute of higher learning, but the accreditation also feels like an acknowledgment of all the hard work that the students themselves have done as well,” he said. “It’s like the college’s success is our success, our validation.”

Monique Ositelu, a higher education senior policy analyst at New America, a liberal Washington think tank where she conducts policy research related to prison education, said accreditation may also assuage concerns students have about the value of their degrees.

She noted that the number of higher ed programs in prisons dwindled after congressional lawmakers banned the use of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, and the remaining programs were typically privately funded by organizations or philanthropies. However, not all of these long-standing private programs were accredited, even though degrees from accredited institutions hold “a little bit more weight” with employers and four-year universities where students may hope to transfer, she said.

A student she interviewed at San Quentin once told her he worried future employers wouldn’t respect his degree.

“Will they see it as a degree or a prison degree?” he asked her.

Other students expressed “a lot of faith that this degree will outweigh that they served time in prison,” she said. “We owe it to them as educational providers to ensure that it does, and one of the ways to go and do that is through accreditation.”

She also pointed out that now that the Pell Grant will be widely available to incarcerated students starting in 2023, students can take developmental math and writing courses or earn associate degrees at Mount Tamalpais for free and save their Pell dollars to pursue a bachelor’s degree, which makes a four-year degree more affordable.

College-in-prison experts believe Mount Tamalpais would be a difficult model to replicate at other prisons. Swain, of the Office of Correctional Education, believes the college has flourished in part because of its location. San Quentin is located in Marin County, a short driving distance from many colleges and universities, unlike the majority of prisons, which are located in rural areas.

“Try to find a faculty member that’s qualified and interested in teaching statistics in a prison in Susanville [Calif.]—it’s not an easy thing to do,” Swain said.

She noted that San Quentin offers hundreds of educational and recreational programs, and the prison is such a popular place to volunteer in the surrounding community that it has more volunteers than incarcerated people. The prison is also at a Level II security status, which means most of the prison population can move around freely for most of the day, which she said makes it easier to provide programs.

Even if Mount Tamalpais remains an outlier as an independent, entirely in-prison college, Lewen still believes its accreditation can jump-start a broader discussion about ensuring prison higher ed programs offer value.

“One can do this work well without being an independent college, and there are some very strong in-prison higher ed programs that are extension sites,” she said. “My hope is not necessarily that lots of independent colleges in the field sprout up but that we are able to spur conversations about quality and what’s going on in those programs in a way that benefits the students.”

Ositelu also emphasized that quality prison education programs can have ripple effects on whole families and communities by building up incarcerated students’ confidence before they re-enter society, making it easier for them to secure jobs after release and motivating future generations to pursue higher education.

A degree “signals to the market that they can do the job,” she said. “They have the skill set to do it. They have the content knowledge to do it.” But a college education has “an impact greater than the degree. It has an impact on who they are, on their family, on their children.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed on February 8, 2022.

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