Professors sometimes learn what’s going on in students’ lives when they volunteer it during a class discussion or in a piece of personal writing. But in plenty of other cases, students face problems that hinder their academic performance—and their professors have no idea.

That’s part of the reason that Oakton Community College encourages instructors to devote 15-minute meetings to getting to know each student in one of their courses during the first three weeks. The meetings are part of a broader effort called the Persistence Project that seeks to use the connections students form with their professors to keep more of them enrolled. 

In 2016, Jeffrey Moss started Parker Dewey, an organization that facilitates micro-internships as a way to ensure that every college student and recent graduate has equitable access to professional opportunities. 

Micro-internships are short-term, paid professional experiences that allow students from all backgrounds to explore career pathways, build professional relationships, and showcase their skills to prospective employers. They can prove especially valuable to students who don’t have a stellar academic pedigree, GPA, or family connections, and are therefore otherwise frequently filtered out in the traditional campus recruiting process.