In my career, I’ve worked to support student success at three levels: first at the campus level, then at the student level, and now at the policy level.
Ten years ago I chose to attend Kenyon College for the tight-knit community, and as an undergraduate I sought to foster inclusive communities of peer support and uplifting fellowship. I served as an on-hall community advisor for first-year students over three years, as a co-chair of Take Back the Night, and as a founding member and president of a new Greek organization with a strong anti-hazing mission. Witnessing the incredible ways students can grow and achieve together inspired me to devote my career to higher education, and after graduating from Kenyon I earned my master’s in higher education policy and administration from Penn GSE.
For two and a half years I served as a staff member in the Office of Academic Resources at Haverford College, first through a part-time assistantship during grad school and then full-time as program coordinator. Working in the OAR provided a unique and exciting privilege: to directly educate students on the hard and soft skills that lead to growth and fulfillment in college. In one-on-one academic coaching, I helped students discover their strengths and navigate the hurdles of the college transition, particularly for those who were the first in their families to attend college. The experience confirmed for me that there are no smart students and un-smart students, only those who have been given a roadmap to success and those who have had to find their way without one.
Meanwhile, I was slowly developing my research chops. In Dr. Joni Finney’s class on higher education finance at Penn GSE, I got for the first time a vocabulary for the inequality in higher education that I had felt around me for four years. That winter, I took a risk and added on a second graduate assistantship to be Joni’s research assistant at the Institute for Research on Higher Education (IRHE). At IRHE, I helped lead a project examining the economic and fiscal factors that shape state governments’ role in creating affordable college opportunities. The lessons Joni taught me continue to drive my work, the most important of which is optimism and hope for the future even when facing the most uphill battles.
For me, policy research bridged naturally from my direct work with students. All too often, what a student needed was not a new study strategy or another stress management technique: it was to have the financial freedom to cut back on their job (or, more often, jobs) and focus their time and energy on school. Seeing that the greatest barriers to my students were systemic, I shifted my focus to system-level policy.
In January 2019, I joined The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank focused on reducing inequality. You can read more about the work I’ve been up to in the “Research Portfolio” page of this site.
In my life now as a policy analyst, there is no data or research that informs my work more than the diverse lived experiences of the students I supported as an educator. I always ask: “What would this policy proposal mean for them and the people they grew up with?” It has made me a proud progressive who looks forward to a society that sees every student as the future leader that they can be, if only the structural impediments wrought by history can be cleared from their path.
Peter Granville 