Oscar Wang (center) with graduates of College Together.
BARRA: Thanks for chatting with us, Oscar! To set the stage for our readers, Barra funded College Together in June 2018. College Together helps often-overlooked students earn degrees without amassing debt. Southern New Hampshire University provides curriculum and professors, and College Together curates a daily support community for students in Philadelphia. Tell us the origin story of this idea. How did it come about?
OSCAR: It’s been a 10+ year journey for me personally. I started out with a mentoring program in high schools here in Philly, and then realized that even though our students were more confident going to college, they were still taking on too much debt at schools that weren’t supporting them. Graduation rates were not changing. I thought, what if we take digital college curriculum and fuse it with a job placement program? And what if we actually help students figure out how to start working while also coaching them through this digital competency-based curriculum? We needed to figure out a way to evolve college.
BARRA: Our Catalyst Fund supports early-stage, untested approaches that could result in durable and transformative change, particularly in under-resourced communities. You launched College Together in 2018. How has the experiment been going? What have you learned since launch?
OSCAR: It took us a little while to get our first cohort up and running. There was just so much trial and error, which I know the Catalyst Fund is built for, but I think the right intentions were always there. I learned so much about the need for iteration. If I could change one thing going back to our first year, it would have been launching a cohort faster. We got advice that our first 10 students needed to be perfect. And to be frank, even though we took a lot of time to make sure that had a higher probability of happening, our first 10 students were not perfect by any measure. I think that’s something nonprofits can get caught up in — valuing function over results and learnings.
BARRA: What are your aspirational goals for College Together? What does it look like 1, 3 or 5 years down the road?
OSCAR: Success by 2030 would be that we’re a top three college destination in the city for youth. We’re still the most expensive state in the country to go to college in if you’re low income. We have a lot of colleges in Philadelphia, but not enough Philadelphians who are being served well by them when it comes to low debt and high support. College Together is helping to build an ecosystem of partners who are thinking about college differently, thinking about workforce development differently, and building a way to tackle barriers together.
BARRA: Finally, looking to the future, what are you most excited about for your organization?
OSCAR: Folks are pretty down on higher ed right now. It’s too expensive. It’s unsustainable. There’s a real opportunity for College Together and all of our models to become less of a secret and more accepted in the mainstream. You don’t need to just go to college in this one way that everyone’s been doing for years. There are multiple pathways. One of our beliefs that I hold personally and that we hold at College Together is that everybody belongs on their own path.
Get to Know Oscar
Guilty pleasure: Watching Gordon Ramsay marathons on YouTube.
Childhood ambition: I had a lot of childhood fears of what I would not be good at. I’m not tall enough to be an NBA player or good enough at math to work in business. But if you look past all the fears, I had a very early inkling that I wanted to be in education.
Music that lifts your spirits: Noah and the Whale. They have a lot of great songs about redemption and tomorrow being better and overcoming challenges, so they’re my current recommendation.
Favorite place in the Philly region: I have to go with my alma mater, Haverford. There is something very serene about a campus where there are three times as many trees as students. Haverford’s nature trail is a really great kept secret. As someone who got very involved in the city, it’s always nice to go back to a very serene, squirrel-filled campus.