Campus Connection

[caption id="attachment_4186" align="alignright" width="400" caption="The Upward Bound Summer Session, a six-week component, is like practice college. Students live on the UW-L campus, take high school classes in math, science, language arts and world languages. "][/caption] Larry Xiong didn’t know if he wanted to go to college when he was a freshman in high school. Today the Holmen High School junior is debating whether he’ll major in psychology or sociology once he gets there. “Upward Bound helped me set college goals,” he explains. Upward Bound, a TRIO program funded by the U.S. Department of Education, helps prepare high school students for the path toward a bachelor’s degree. The program is hosted at UW-L — one of 964 program sites across the United States serving students whose parents did not obtain a four-year college degree and/or are from low-income families. “So many of these students have the intelligence to do it, but they don’t have the background knowledge to be successful on a college campus,” explains Paul Krause, acting director for Upward Bound at UW-L. [caption id="attachment_4189" align="alignright" width="400" caption="UB classes help students get a head start on the coming academic year and reinforce valuable study, time management and test-taking skills. "][/caption] Tutors help UB students with homework during the school year. In the summer, students take classes in preparation for the next year of high school. Students learn how to apply for financial aid, how college academic advising works, do career exploration and work on time management. “Neither of my parents went to college, so I didn’t know where to start,” explains Miranda Alicea, a UB graduate who will start college at UW-Eau Claire this fall. But, after more than three years in the program, she has had a lot of practice for college. The summer session, a six-week component, which UB students are taking now was the most helpful, she says. She not only learned math and language arts, but also slept in the residence halls at night and learned other college-living skills. [caption id="attachment_4192" align="alignright" width="400" caption="In a science classroom on campus, students learn about gravity."][/caption] “Upward Bound really helped with learning how to put yourself out there to make new friends,” she notes. The local UB program is funded to serve 85 students during academic year and 40 during the summer. Typically 20-25 local program students graduate from UB each year at the end of their high school career and more than 90 percent go on to college, says Krause. Mai Khoua Vang was in UB for more than three years and will be a UW-L freshman this fall. “I’m kind of scared, but I know my way around campus — that’s the good part,” Vang says. “I think I know where to go to get help when I need it.” [caption id="attachment_4203" align="alignright" width="400" caption="The program is hosted at UW-L — one of 964 program sites across the United States."][/caption] UB also takes students on college visits. That’s how Xiong met college students who had interests similar to his in psychology and sociology — and he learned that’s what he’d really like to study. “I knew I was interested in how the human mind worked, but I didn’t know what that was called,” he says. “It helped me realize what I wanted to do.”

The benefit of Upward Bound:

A national study showed that Upward Bound graduates are four times more likely to earn an undergraduate degree than students of similar backgrounds who did not participate in UB. Of the local program’s 2006 graduating class, 62 percent graduated from a post secondary institution five years after graduating from high school. Click here to see more class photos.