Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 45

these grants ended up staying in school. "Think of going through college as driving a car, and the destination of the car is graduation," Becker told the Hechinger Report last year. "If you start drifting off the road, we want to straighten you out and keep you driving forward." UTEP News Service; Courtesy of Harvey Mudd College; Courtesy of Arizona State University MARIA KLAWE Harvey Mudd College No college administrator is working harder than Klawe to bridge the gender gap in tech. When she took over the small California school in 2006, one in ten computer science majors there were women. By last year's incoming class, that ratio was up to four in ten. To achieve this unprecedented increase, Klawe overhauled the way the school recruited and kept female students. Girls who are accepted are steered toward computer science as either a major or a minor. While all CS students need to take an introductory class, it's meant to welcome rather than weed out those who are interested. "I'd be surprised if twenty of our eighty-five graduates last year had any experience with computer science before college," Klawe told Bloomberg Business last year. This is in sharp contrast to the CS major stereotype of nerdy men who started coding before hitting puberty-an image that can dissuade even the most STEM-focused women at othMaria Klawe er schools, who might turn to a field like biology or chemistry because they think they're already way behind in CS. It helps that Klawe aggressively hired female faculty; six of the fifteen current computer science professors are women. She would be the first to say that her strategy contains no silver bullet. There's no magic trick involved in heavily recruiting female students, making them feel welcome in computer science, and hiring women to teach them. It certainly helps to be a small private school like Harvey Mudd, which has the resources to do these things. But that doesn't stop it from being replicable at plenty of other colleges across the country. DIANA NATALICIO University of Texas at El Paso Natalicio has served longer than any other president on this list, taking over UTEP in 1988. Her reign has seen a dramatic transformation of the school, growing research funding from $6 million to $84 million a year, making impacts in fields like tobacco and drug addiction, traumatic brain injuries, vaccines, and obesity prevention, while creating better student outcomes and changing the makeup of the school to better reflect its largely Hispanic bor- der community. (The student body is now nearly 80 percent Hispanic, including more than 1,000 Mexican students who cross over the border to attend. That's up from 55 percent when Natalicio took over.) To illustrate just how massive this turnaround was, UTEP went from 151st in the Washington Monthly's 2006 college rankings to tenth this year. The key, Natalicio says, is not just attracting students from the surrounding community, it's keeping them. That means keeping tuition low, keeping classes available in case students miss a semester, and creating jobs on campus so students don't need to work inflexible jobs outside the university. "When a student is enrolled, they bring their talent, their hard work, their commitment to succeed," she told the Washington Monthly. "And we should take care of just about everything else." While NaDiana Natalicio talicio's overhaul is proof that colleges don't need to choose between keeping tuition down and funding research, or between raising standards and catering to a traditionally underserved community, rising tuition and state higher ed funding cuts have left her less than optimistic about the state of higher education. "I think that we've converted what used to be viewed as a public good into a private benefit," Natalicio says. "We've said as a society that this is something that you benefit from, so you ought to pay for it. And if you can't pay for it, you can't have it. I think that's a huge mistake." MICHAEL CROW Arizona State University Crow may be the best-known president on this list, thanks to his school's agreement with Starbucks, which provides online courses to the coffee chain's employees paid for by Starbucks and Arizona State. But while that move made headlines, Crow's actual impact has been much larger. Since taking over in 2002, he grew the university to more than 80,000 students while raising graduation rates and enrolling way more students from below the poverty line. Getting more people into the Michael Crow workforce with bachelor's degrees is a boon for the country as a whole, and few colleges are able (or willing) to do it by dramatically increasing their undergraduate capacity. While Arizona State placed ninetieth on the Washington Monthly's 2006 college rankWashington Monthly 45

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015