Amid rising tuition and inflationary pressures, a new college run by BC opens its doors to low-income students - The Boston Globe (2024)

Messina’s mission is to give students like Melo a traditional, liberal arts college experience, with the academic and social benefits that come with communal life and study. The school is opening at a time when rising tuition and inflationary pressures are turning the on-campus college experience into a luxury many students can’t afford, especially those who aren’t straight-A high school students who can win admission to the country’s most selective institutions and access the more generous financial aid those schools usually offer.

BC leaders say the Messina project is a return to the school’s 19th-century roots, when it was founded to educate the children of Irish Catholic immigrants who were often excluded from other colleges. It is also something of an experiment, testing a unique approach to educating disadvantaged students who often fall behind their more privileged college classmates due to financial hardships or lesser academic preparation at underperforming city high schools. Nearly a third of incoming Messina students are graduates of Boston Public Schools; many of the rest are from gateway cities such as Springfield or Brockton.

“We cannot afford to have so many students not develop their gifts and address the tough issues facing our society,” BC president William P. Leahy said when plans for the school were announced two years ago. “Education is the ladder to success.”

BC is spending $35 million to revamp the campus, which it took over in the spring of 2020 following a merger with Pine Manor. On a recent morning, the campus was buzzing with the sounds of power tools and construction vehicles as workers rushed to get ready for move-in day. “There’s guys that are working double shifts right now to finish,” said the Rev. Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.

Berrelleza, 41, is a sociologist from California who moved to Massachusetts to lead the school. The son of Mexican immigrants, he was a first-generation college student himself.

His parents, he said, instilled the value of education in their children. “But when I was going through college, they didn’t have a lot of cultural capital to explain how to do that,” he said. “I sort of had to pave a path.”

At Messina, Berrelleza is trying to make that path easier to navigate.

Students will start classes in July, instead of September, so they can complete two courses before the regular academic year begins. That will lighten their course loads.

Every student will be paired with a mentor from BC’s student body. The mentors are meant to be juniors or seniors with similar backgrounds.

Messina will provide laptops, and also health insurance and meal plans for anyone who can’t afford them.

As part of their financial aid packages, all students will have work-study jobs because, Berrelleza said, evidence shows that students with campus jobs do better academically. “It expands their networks and teaches them about scheduling,” he said.

Attendance will also be a priority. Professors will be encouraged to keep track of missed classes, so that “if we see a pattern, we can at least intervene,” Berrelleza said. (At the high school level, absenteeism has spiked since the pandemic.)

Messina’s target students have about a B average in high school, Berrelleza said. They’d be unlikely to get into BC or other highly selective schools that offer generous financial aid. Their options would be taking on significant debt to attend a less selective liberal arts college or going to public institutions like the University of Massachusetts Boston or Framingham State, he said.

“Those schools might not create the types of opportunities we’re trying to create here,” he said. “That holistic student formation.” In line with BC’s Jesuit, liberal arts education, he said, “We want our students to develop as whole people.”

Anthony Abraham Jack, a Boston University professor and the author of “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students,” said Messina has “the potential to open Boston College to a much wider, and much more diverse, group of students not only with respect to class, but race, age, and parental status.” He said support services and extra resources are critical for ensuring low-income students persist to graduation, especially those with family responsibilities.

“You have to support them from day one, and not after they struggle to belong,” he said. “This program has the ability to create an on-ramp for students who have been left by the wayside for far too long.”

Melo, the Roxbury teen, said he probably would have gone to trade school if not for a guidance counselor at Cristo Rey Boston High School who told him about Messina.

He’d been more focused on getting by than on getting good grades, he said, ever since his mother died when he was in eighth grade. (His father is not in the picture.) After he learned about Messina, he started focusing more on academics and lifted his GPA.

Now he hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree after finishing his two years at Messina. BC says that any Messina student who maintains a 3.4 GPA can automatically transfer to BC as a junior and complete a bachelor’s degree there. Melo said he is contemplating pursuing a graduate degree as well.

“The end goal is to become a therapist, or some type of social worker,” he said. “I went through a lot of mental distress after my mom passed away, so it’s kind of my way of thinking I can try to give back to others.”

There are a handful of other programs similar to Messina. Fairfield University in Connecticut and Loyola University in Chicago have two-year associate’s degree programs. But only a handful of their students live on campus.

By contrast, all Messina students will live in campus dorms. Berrelleza hopes they will feel a sense of ownership of the school. “Some of them talk about how this is a school that’s designed for me,” he said. “I think they also see the investment.” (The school now has a $100 million endowment after a $50 million contribution from BC’s endowment, a $25 million anonymous pledge, and investment returns.)

The campus needed an infusion of capital, Berrelleza said, because it had deteriorated as Pine Manor gradually ran out of money. In the years before the merger with BC, its enrollment had declined to just 335 students on a campus with dorm space for about 600. Its endowment was only $10 million. The school had a similar mission to Messina’s: It served first-generation, low-income students. Thomas O’Reilly, the final president of Pine Manor, said the merger with BC had kept the school’s spirit alive.

“Messina is the next iteration of Pine Manor,” he said in a recent interview.

One of Pine Manor’s legacies is the campus’s centerpiece building, a mansion once owned by an early 20th-century Boston banker and set atop a small hill surrounded by grass and trees. The building will house administrative offices, classrooms, and a study hall in what was once the ballroom. The walls are paneled in walnut. There’s a grandfather clock, a piano, and buttons once used to summon servants. The grounds, which are now Messina’s campus, encompass 50 acres.

Berrelleza said some friends had asked him if the setting would be wrong for Messina’s students “because it’s so different from the settings they’re coming from.”

Melo does not share that concern. “It’s really my vibe,” he said. “Rural and really quiet.”

Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com. Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.