Feature

I was quite single-minded when I came to Grinnell. I intended to major in French and study abroad, which I did, although I chickened out from a full semester because I was married and didn’t want to be away from home that long. Instead, I did a summer program in Lyons, France, that included a homestay. 

Perhaps because of my own single-mindedness, it never occurred to me that someone would study abroad for reasons other than increasing their language skills. So I contacted students and alumni to learn why they chose their study abroad programs and what they got out of them. 

 

Jeanne Pinder ’75 has been steeped in journalism all her life. The Grinnell native honed her craft over the years with the Grinnell Herald-Register (which her grandfather bought and her family still owns), the Associated Press, the Des Moines Register, and The New York Times.

As a journalist and a student of the old Soviet Union, Pinder demonstrated an affinity for complex issues. As a Times editor, she dealt with heady topics like the fall of communism, the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and “a couple of Persian Gulf wars.” 

Pinder wrapped up a career in what could be called conventional journalism in 2009 when she volunteered for a buyout from the Times after two separate stints totaling 23 years. What she did after that could hardly be called retirement. Rather, she reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, took an even deeper dive into journalism, and dedicated herself to a question for which no one seemed to have any answers, namely, “What do things cost in health care?” 

Pinder’s business invention, aimed at demystifying the health care industry for the practical benefit of consumers, is an entirely different breed of journalistic cat. Called ClearHealthCosts (clearhealthcosts.com), it has become nationally recognized for its expertise in health care pricing. Its data-driven, consumer-savvy approach to web-based journalism has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. 

It would not exist had Pinder not answered a challenge to re-examine everything she knew about the information business.   

Remaking the model

Uncertain about what she wanted to do after leaving the Times, Pinder decided to join a class in entrepreneurial journalism taught by new-media guru Jeff Jarvis at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. 

“The theory of the class,” says Pinder, “was that if CUNY is a journalism school making little journalists, it is doing it for an industry where the revenue model is challenged, if not completely broken. We had a responsibility to think about that and do something about it.”

The charge, she says, was “how to make journalism that pays for itself.”

Denizens of a newsroom have been known to regard the subject of advertising revenue with varying degrees of contempt, but Pinder enjoyed a distinct advantage among journalists trying to imagine a new way of doing business. “I’d worked on the business side on the Herald-Register,” she says. “I’d sold advertising. I knew how important it is. I had more of a business background than a lot of journalists who had been only on the writing and editing side.”

During the run of the class, students had to come up with a business idea, design the model, refine it through a competitive analysis, and convince an expert panel of its efficacy. “At the end of the class, we had a Shark Tank-type pitch contest with a jury of New York City venture capitalists and Internet illuminati to judge us,” Pinder says. “I won 20,000 bucks.”

No sooner did Pinder invest her winnings into a startup devoted to pulling back the curtain on health care pricing than detractors began to surface. It was a sure sign that she was on to something.

“I had a constant chorus of people telling me it didn’t make any sense, it was stupid, it wasn’t doable,” Pinder says. “This was in 2011, so people were saying things like, ‘When the Affordable Care Act comes into effect everyone is going to be insured, so everything is only going to cost $20 and what you’re doing is completely irrelevant.’ Or, ‘Powerful forces will put you out of business because health cost transparency is in nobody’s interest,’ which is true, actually, but those powerful forces have failed to put us out of business so far.”

Undaunted by critics, Pinder forged ahead with funding by “angel” investors and with additional grants from the likes of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, the International Women’s Media Foundation (funded by the Ford Foundation), and the McCormick Foundation (via J-Lab at American University in Washington). “It wasn’t really enough to form the business and certainly not enough to dismantle the health care industrial complex, but enough to get a start,” she says. 

Secrets in plain sight

Pinder’s team of research journalists immediately began surveying cash or self-pay prices for a range of common — she calls them “shop-able” — medical procedures. “There are about 35 of them on the website,” Pinder says. “Not big complicated things, but things that are pretty much apples-to-apples — MRIs, cardio stress tests, Lasik, ultrasounds, an IUD, a vasectomy, a well-woman exam — fairly common things for which you would have discretion over where you wanted to go.”

Prices are plugged into a software tool called PriceCheck, also developed by Pinder’s team, that allows consumers to share, search, and compare what actual providers are charging for comparable medical services in specific locations. It allows consumers to shop for mammograms or teeth fillings with the same price intelligence they’re accustomed to having when buying cars, shoes, or any other consumer item. 

Another data set on the site (hospitals.clearhealthcosts.com) collects prices for bigger-ticket items —knee arthroscopy, childbirth, ear tube surgery — from various web sources. Because these prices are collected and categorized in a different way from other prices, the site displays it in a separate data set. 

Helping consumers access real prices is a service that, to date, has been provided by no one in the health care industry — unless you count a handful of companies that match up provider and patient and take a nontransparent cut of the transaction for providing this service. Citing her own commitment to being a careful consumer, Pinder says the inability of otherwise intelligent people to understand their own medical costs makes even less sense in a health care sector that accounts for nearly 20 percent of the U.S. economy.     

“We receive these medical bills and explanations of benefits that are completely incomprehensible,” Pinder says. “People have no idea what they mean, why they’re being charged these amounts, or what the insurance company is paying. Nobody seemed to know what anything costs. It’s like a secret hiding in plain sight. I thought, why can’t we understand this? It should be pretty straightforward, right? Well, ha!”

The power of agency

“Coming from The New York Times and coming at this problem as journalists, we take a very different approach from what the current incumbents in the health care marketplace have,” Pinder says. “We like finding stuff out and telling people about it. That’s not necessarily high on the agenda of people in the health care marketplace. They have other agendas. 

“We are giving people agency in the marketplace, and that’s a very powerful thing.” 

Just how powerful is revealed by the numbers on ClearHealthCosts’ website. Pinder and her team of journalists and tech experts, with the help of data supplied by web users, have uncovered disconcerting price disparities in comparable procedures across the board. For example, a vasectomy that costs $150 in Stamford, Conn., can cost as much as $17,000 in Oakland, Calif. An MRI costing more than $6,000 through one provider in San Francisco can be bought for $300 at another provider only a few miles away. Furthermore, nobody in the industry seems interested in advertising the difference. 

“There is massive confusion in the marketplace,” Pinder says. “We know it’s true that people who are insured are frequently being asked to pay more than people who are uninsured. It’s a whole new thing for many people because it used to be that having insurance gave you access to a lower price and no additional out-of-pocket. Well, guess what?”

We could guess that in many cases one might do better as a price-negotiating cash customer even if one has insurance, and, Pinder asserts, we would be correct. The actual prices, at least those that can be found out through real customers or that are supplied by willing providers, prove it. 

“Insurance companies don’t profit by price transparency,” Pinder says. “They profit by keeping all of this stuff a secret, because if you’re not sure what you’re going to have to pay, then you’re inclined to buy more insurance. 

“What we do here is completely separate from any insurance question, because insurance companies won’t tell us what they pay,” she says. “If you’re an insured person, they won’t even tell you. So we do the cash or self-pay price and the Medicare price because those things are fundamentally knowable.” 

Beyond that, members of the community share what they were charged, what insurance paid and what they paid, often sending in their bills and statements as proof. This is a compelling back-check on the cash prices, revealing the hidden secrets in the marketplace and helping community members make decisions. For example, Pinder explains, an insurer might pay $400 to Provider A for an MRI, but $2,400 to Provider B for the same MRI in the same metro area. 

Actionable information

As experienced users of health care are aware, charges for services depend largely on how services are coded. Most of the searchable prices on Pinder’s site are based on the five-digit Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System, or HCPCS. Medicare reimbursements are shown for the same procedures, because, Pinder says, “Medicare is kind of a yardstick; it’s the closest thing to a fixed or benchmark price in the marketplace.”

Medicare prices also vary according to geographic location. And while we might be temporarily distracted by the fact that Medicare pays $570 for an MRI in California but only $387 in Iowa, ClearHealthCosts is less about fixing everything that’s wrong with the health care machine and more about helping consumers deal directly with factual realities. 

“When we write our blog posts, we don’t just point at the problem, we also tell you what to do about it,” Pinder says. “We do data journalism, but we also tell you anecdotes, like what has happened to people, why are they getting charged, and what should you do about it to protect yourself.

“One of the things that we’ve learned is that people are really upset about this issue,” Pinder says. “They don’t want to read any more stories about partisan bickering in Washington. They don’t want to read news stories about Obamacare rates. They don’t want to read stories about insurance companies whining that they’ve been poorly treated. They want actionable information. They want to talk about it, and they want to make a difference. 

“Some people want us to think that it’s only uninsured people who care about this, but nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “Insured people really care about this, both high-deductible and not.”

Media partners and crowdsourcing

Pinder’s business aims at building a critical mass of pricing data specific to as many regions of the country as possible. Consistent with its entrepreneurial origins, it is a for-profit endeavor; so to seek viability on a national scale, Pinder ultimately hit on a strategy of partnering with big media organizations to do crowdsourcing on their sites. ClearHealthCosts now has its price-checking software tool placed on public radio and other media websites in markets like New York, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.  

“Our partners pay us to build and customize this tool for them,” Pinder says. “We do the survey and prepopulate the database with information so that their communities can share and search for things while they’re in their pajamas at 3 o’clock in the morning. We also consult with them on how to generate more traffic and how to write great stories out of this information.”

It’s a mutually beneficial proposition. For its role in the partnership, KQED in San Francisco won the Society for Professional Journalists prize for innovation in journalism. WHYY in Philadelphia won the Pennsylvania Public Service Award for broadcasters. While the middle part of the country isn’t nearly as well represented by media partners as coastal urban areas, in five years Pinder envisions more partnerships, more price transparency, and a bigger, broader version of ClearHealthCosts.  

“We don’t have a partnership, say, in Iowa right now,” Pinder says. “We would love to have one. I would say there are six or eight partnerships that are nearing fruition in other states. Non-media partnerships are really attractive, too, but our sweet spot is media. They get it. They understand what we’re doing. We’re not compromised by anybody. We don’t pull any punches. We can’t. We’re all about full-on transparency. Journalists really get that.”

Half-truths versus the internet

What consumers understand is that they will always need health care and that genuine advocates in the medical marketplace are few and far between. As long as buyers have choices in services and providers, the kind of journalism produced by Pinder’s organization can only gain relevance.

“The topic of money will be in every conversation about health care where there’s a discretionary element,” Pinder says. “It has to be, because there’s no way a system can continue like this, charging some people $6,000 for an MRI and some people $300. The Internet doesn’t like it when people lie and keep secrets. And the healthcare marketplace is full of half-truths and secrets about who gets paid what. 

“It’s really ripe for some completely crazy thing like somebody telling you that an MRI could be $500 or it could be $2,400. Do you want the $2,400 one? Do you want the $6,000 one? Then you should have that. But if you want the $500 one, then you should have that, too.” 

What about quality? Measuring it is difficult, owning it more so

Questions about quality are sure to arise when price discrepancies are significant. Jeanne Pinder tells why ClearHealthCosts is not in the business of quality assessment:

“We’re not medical professionals. We’re not doctors. The medical profession needs to do that, or somebody other than us,” Pinder says. “My partners and I were invited to a state radiology association to tell them about our project. So we went through our presentation and one guy said, ‘You didn’t say anything about quality,’ and we asked, ‘Well, what’s a good quality MRI?’ 

“There were about 25 radiologists in the room. One of them said, ‘It’s the machine. It has to be the best machine.’ Another guy said, ‘Well if it’s a great machine and it’s not maintained or calibrated, then it’s not a good MRI.’ Another person said, ‘It’s the technologist who arranges the body parts and takes the pictures, because if they’re no good, then the MRI’s no good.’ 

“Another person said, ‘No, it’s the radiologist who interprets it.’ So they’re having a big argument about it and finally one guy says, ‘The worst MRI is the one that doesn’t get taken because the patient believes that she can’t afford it.’ And they all shut up. 

“If somebody shows me a good quality metric, I will incorporate it in a heartbeat,” Pinder says. “But there aren’t any good quality metrics now. There are a lot of efforts to assess quality, from the federal government, from the states, from insurance companies, from hospital chains, from trade groups. There are a million different quality metric efforts, none of them very effective or consumer friendly. But it’s not on us to fix the entire health care marketplace. Somebody should have done that a long time ago.” 

If you were asked to name a major Haitian cultural hub, you’d be forgiven for not shouting “Waterloo!” But when Fredo Rivera ’06, who grew up in Miami, first came to Grinnell, what he found surprised him. “Oddly enough, my foundation with Caribbean art is rooted here,” he says. Iowa, it turns out, has one of the largest concentrations of Haitian art in the world. And after returning to Grinnell as an art history professor, Rivera is making sure his own students can take full advantage. 

A fortunate fluke

On a frosty winter morning in 2002, Rivera’s first-year roommate ran into their dorm room in Loose Hall, pelting him with a snowball. Far from being angry, Rivera was delighted — it was his first time seeing snow. “I ran outside to play in like half an inch of snow,” he laughs. “I don’t even know how he managed to get enough to make a snowball!”

Rivera’s decision to study at Grinnell “was a fluke,” he admits. Neither of his older siblings had left Miami for school. Originally Rivera was only looking at large universities on the East Coast, but then a little college in the Midwest described as “weird and dorky” caught his eye. That fall, he was off to Iowa.

Rivera arrived at Grinnell eager to explore his interests in art, history, sociology, and political science. He settled on an art history major with an Africana studies concentration and found himself increasingly drawn to Caribbean art. There was just one problem: none of the art history faculty at the time had any expertise in Caribbean art. They were all Europeanists, specializing in Western art. 

Luckily, Rivera still found ways to engage in his chosen subject. “I was very blessed to have faculty members willing to go out of their way to do independent guided readings,” he says. Jenny Anger, professor of art history, led Rivera in independent study and introduced him to David Campbell, Henry R. Luce Professor of Nations and the Global Environment, who has a large personal Caribbean art collection. 

Beyond campus, Rivera discovered that he had stumbled upon what might be one of the best locations to study Haitian art. The Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, Iowa, has the world’s largest public collection of Haitian art, and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, has another impressive collection — including many works by Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, a fellow Miami resident. 

“It’s quite peculiar that we have these collections in Iowa, and wonderful as well,” says Rivera. While it was his Puerto Rican roots that had initially drawn Rivera to Caribbean art, at Grinnell he became increasingly interested in Haitian art, delving into the relationship between Haitian and African American art in his senior thesis. 

His love of Caribbean art cemented and his curiosity about Haitian art piqued, Rivera returned to the East Coast after graduating from Grinnell to further his art history studies at Duke University. In 2010, while Rivera was spending a year in Miami as a research affiliate at the University of Miami School of Architecture, he paid Duval-Carrié a visit in his Miami studio. Rivera learned that Duval-Carrié, whose work so impressed him as an undergraduate, was collaborating with Duke’s Haiti Lab at the time. “I told him about my discovery of his work in Iowa, and by the end of the conversation we just very much intellectually clicked,” says Rivera. Duval-Carrié invited Rivera to begin work on a major exhibition project exploring the role of photography in Haiti, From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography at the NSU Art Museum–Ft. Lauderdale. Duval-Carrié and Rivera have been working together ever since.

There and back again

In 2016, Rivera found himself at a crossroads. His time as visiting assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University had come to an end, and he was weighing the pros and cons of remaining in academia. He loved teaching, and he loved his research, but he was also unsure if the academic landscape was right for a queer artist and scholar such as himself. “I was like: you know what? I don’t think academia is somewhere where I can thrive and just be myself. I think there’s so much pressure to perform in a certain way and to conform in a certain way,” he says.  

He was contemplating his options, considering working on some of his art projects independently, when he got a nudge from Anger, his senior thesis adviser at Grinnell. There was a position opening in the art history department, and she encouraged him to apply. Rivera decided to go for it. While he was still unsure how he felt about academia as a whole, he knew “Grinnell would be a perfect place to figure that out.” Of course, once he got the job, he was faced with a new problem: how to fit everything he wanted to accomplish at Grinnell into his new two-year position.

Rivera was intent on not only investing in the aspects of the department that he loved the most, but also expanding its offerings for students. He could give students what he hadn’t had — access to a Caribbeanist art historian on campus — as well as offering classes on architecture and urbanism. To this end, he had two priorities. First, he wanted to teach the exhibition seminar, a class that gives students hands-on experience curating an art exhibition for the Faulconer Gallery. Second, he wanted to give students the opportunity to work with Edouard Duval-Carrié.

Connections with collections

Rivera’s desire to teach the exhibition seminar came from personal experience. He had taken the class himself as a student at Grinnell. “I think it was a profound experience that followed me to this day,” he says. “I would say that it is not only a highlight of what we do in our department, it is also unique among our peer institutions. This is the reason we go to Grinnell — to have this very hands-on, intensive experience.”

“We were blessed to hire [Rivera] whose research and curatorial interests on the Caribbean complemented my passion for writing and talking about visual culture in Latin America and the Caribbean,” says Abdiel Lopez ’18, a sociology major who participated in the exhibition seminar.

As the first exhibition seminar student in Grinnell’s history to come back as a professor and teach the class, Rivera felt compelled to take the class further than ever before. He knew that he wanted to build the student exhibition around Haitian art; but to do this, he would have to introduce a new element to the course. While the exhibition seminar historically pulls on work from  Faulconer Gallery’s own collection, Rivera wanted his students to look outside the Faulconer offerings to build a full exhibition of Haitian art centered around Duval-Carrié’s pieces. So, Rivera’s seminar students were treated to yet another first for the class: course-embedded travel to museums in Miami and Iowa. 

To kick off the semester, the class visited five different institutions in Miami, got a behind-the-scenes look at an exhibition installation, and met with Duval-Carrié in his studio. Then, over fall break, the students spent three days traveling throughout Iowa. They were able to go into the vaults at Waterloo Center for the Arts to select works that they wanted to borrow for their exhibition. Rivera let the students have full control over which artworks they chose. “I think the teamwork really formed at that point, and that’s when they started meeting outside of the class of their own accord.”

“The opportunity to meet museum professionals gave us essential experience in approaching a project of this scale,” says Ellen Taylor ’18, an art history major. “It was especially interesting to observe the approaches of institutions, and how their different resources, needs, and goals affected the process of exhibition.”

Over the course of the semester, Rivera also assigned the students readings on Haitian art and museology, and they debated the cultural politics of displaying the art respectfully. Some of these readings were the very same papers he had read in his exhibition seminar — bringing them back and assigning them as coursework in his own class after having to find them himself as a student was “very surreal,” he reflects. 

“I am 100 percent sure that we would not have received this wealth of knowledge in a typical art history seminar,” says Lopez, “mainly because we were able to not only talk to professionals who’ve been in the business for a while, but also because we designed this exhibition from beginning to end while reading about Haiti along the way.”

Rivera found himself blown away by the passion and dedication his students applied to their work. “I think the thing that most impressed me is I came into the classroom proposing doing an exhibition on Haitian art with an idea of what the exhibition would be, but as the students engaged with the course material, they took the exhibition to a place that I never thought was possible. I see this as the students’ exhibition — I merely provided connections with collections and a broad idea.” 

Rivera’s students also identified and contacted guest speakers (including a vodou priest), helped design the catalog, and assisted in installing the exhibition. Giving the students such a sense of ownership of their work seems to have paid off — several of Rivera’s students have now expressed an interest in furthering their studies as curators themselves. “This particular exhibition seminar on Haiti has completely altered my professional track,” says Lopez. 

Iowa: hybridity embedded in green

Rivera’s influence on student opportunities has not been limited to the art history department. Inspired by their “Haiti: History Embedded in Amber” art project at Duke’s Haiti Lab, Rivera invited Duval-Carrié to Grinnell to teach a short course as a visiting artist last fall. The course became a collaborative endeavor that stretched across departments, producing a piece of art to be installed in the new Humanities and Social Science Complex on campus this fall. 

The installation is made up of 35 green-tinted epoxy resin blocks set into a metal grid and lit from behind. Poured in a series of six liquid layers, the resin blocks encase archival images depicting historic scenes from Haiti to Grinnell, focusing on histories of freedom and abolition. Each layer also contains three-dimensional objects such as keys, plastic figures, beads, and sequins to highlight or complement the images and their meanings. The green tint of the blocks is indicative of Iowa cornfields and represents the intertwined agricultural history of Haiti and the United States. Presented together, the resin blocks represent a “collage of histories,” says Duval-Carrié. Two of the students enrolled in the short course are creating a website that will accompany the installation with narratives explaining the visuals of each block. 

Duval-Carrié tried to maximize the creative freedom of contributors while also encouraging them to think deeply about historical and cultural themes. “I gave them the theme and the color and the format,” Duval-Carrié explains, “but the rest is theirs.” While just five students enrolled in the short course, anyone who took an interest — or even who, as I discovered, happened to be in the room at resin-pouring time — was enthusiastically encouraged to join in. 

Most of the students and faculty members who contributed to Duval-Carrié’s art project were not art majors themselves, instead drawn to this unique opportunity to tell a visual story. Doug Hess ’91, assistant professor of political science, brought his first-year tutorial class on the Haitian Revolution to create blocks. Timothy Dobe, associate professor of religious studies, came with a student activist group to contribute; and Sarah Purcell ’92, L.F. Parker Professor of History, recruited students from her own department. A student in Rivera’s exhibition seminar, inspired by Duval-Carrié’s work, also joined in to help with many of the blocks. While participants were new to the medium, all were enthusiastic about this fresh way to explore themes usually confined to the more traditional linear structures of essays and research papers. 

The final product is a hybrid exploration of Iowa, the United States, and Haiti amassed by a group of disparate people. Given a new medium and free reign, Grinnellians produced a collage of layered histories as vibrant, disparate, unique, thoughtful, and bold as the individuals who created it. While Rivera once had to go out of his way to find resources to study Caribbean art at Grinnell, now he has come back to give his own students direct, hands-on experience — balancing intellectual rigor with creative freedom.

As Rivera and I wrap up our conversation, he sips the last of his piña colada. He has a Liberal Arts in Prison class on architecture to prepare for and more readings to assign his art history students before he leaves for the weekend to perform in the Wigwood drag festival in Miami. Attending Grinnell may have been a fluke, but it gave Rivera access to the resources he needed to be his own kind of student. Now, he’s returned to be his own kind of professor — connecting students to the subject he loves without feeling that he has to lose a part of himself in the process. He, in turn, is helping students to find their own unique expression. 

Erin Whalen’s pursuit of educational equity drives the high energy and enthusiasm he brings to his work each day as assistant principal at RISE High, a project-based charter high school in Los Angeles.  Whalen ’12 realized that as a black, Hispanic, indigenous male, his educational experience was a rarity; and he became passionate about creating experiences for other youth in marginalized communities. 

Whalen attended a progressive pre-K–9 school in his native LA before graduating from Santa Monica’s New Roads High School. A Posse Scholar at Grinnell, he graduated with a degree in anthropology and joined Teach for America to teach middle school English in Miami before returning home to teach in a charter school in Los Angeles. 

These experiences, plus off-campus study in Cape Town, South Africa, confirmed Whalen’s stated desire to work for those who seek educational equity and justice.  

RISE, which stands for Revolutionary Individual Student Experience, was designed to meet the needs of students who have experienced housing instability or foster care, or for students who have found that the traditional school model simply didn’t meet their needs. Students come to RISE through referrals from social service agencies and community partnerships. 

“These are kids who often miss school to go to court or to meet with their social worker. RISE High meets students where they are, bringing educational equity and justice to them, with resources available on site,” Whalen explains.

RISE High has two sites, one in south-central Los Angeles located with social service agency A Place Called Home, which is, Whalen says, “aligned in mindset and ability to engage with students. Small environments are important to kids who have been through trauma and need to feel safe.”  

Last year’s pilot served 30 students, and this year there are48 students at the south-central LA location (which has capacity for 120) and 43 at the Hawthorne, Calif., location (with capacity for 50).  Both locations use in-person learning and online learning platforms to allow students to engage in real-world projects and gain credit for their life experiences.

“Given the hardships many of our students face with transiency and instability, we often find their credits are not an adequate marker of their preparedness for college or the workforce. There are no grades at RISE. We focus not on their seat time, but on chapters through life by building portfolios of their work from jobs, internships, and employable skill sets so they can thrive independently,” Whalen says. 

Funding for RISE High, part of the DaVinci Schools Partnership charter schools network, was provided by a $10 million grant from the XQ Institute, funded by the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Whalen and Kari Croft, who is now principal at RISE High, became aware of the XQ Institute while associated with Teach for America. They talked to students in the foster care system and those experiencing housing instability about what school environment they needed to best support them and together with teachers, administrators, and industry partners, wrote the grant and charter petition to secure the $10 million grant that provides startup funding for RISE High, which could eventually serve 500 students. 

“The XQ grant was an intense competition and receiving the award was a huge dream. We based the proposal on what the students told us they needed to be successful. The XQ grant provides a launch point to respond to those needs,” Whalen says.

Rising year-round  

Classes started Aug. 17 at the year-round school — year-round, Whalen says, because “these students need stability and services year-round, not just eight months of the year. 

“Our biggest challenge is tracking down our students’ transcripts and records. The larger educational system hasn’t done a good job of tracking and crediting transient youth. Many have the skills but are consistently put in the same classes year after year because they don’t meet the required ‘seat time.’ At RISE, we focus on mastery as a marker of success, not seat time.”

At the same time, the biggest reward, he says, is seeing the students from last year’s pilot return and rally around each other and help new students. “The more students take over, the better. The environment I’m trying to create is having productive conversations in the classroom about issues on campus and around the world. That’s what I saw modeled at Grinnell, and I want our students to have those experiences.”

There is no typical day at RISE High, given the students’ many background challenges. With flexible scheduling, students are offered a wide variety of electives, from IndepenDance taught by Whalen to life skills and social awareness taught by a student. Students are also part of an advisory family where they process challenges and build social and emotional competencies.

Grinnell principles at RISE

What resonates with the Grinnellian most at RISE High is that “students create the culture and curriculum; students are the voice for other students; that’s self-gov,” he recalls of his own campus experience. At Grinnell, Whalen helped start IndepenDance, a hip-hop dance group, and was a member of the Student Organization for Latinos/Latinas (SOL), monitor at the Black Cultural Center, and Posse liaison and summer intern.

“My strongest experience at Grinnell was the First-Year Tutorial. Here was a kid from LA trying to assimilate to Grinnell, and to have the one-on-one tutorial environment was exceptional. We became consistent friends similar to a Posse. 

“I came to Grinnell as a biology major and had also thought about law school for social justice issues. Then I fell in love with anthropology. Working with Professor of Anthropology Katya Gibel Mevorach was outstanding. Through cultural anthropology, we studied how we ignore equity; and it allowed me to look at different perspectives that I now use to create an engaging environment for RISE students,” Whalen says. As assistant principal, he is responsible for curriculum development and student culture.

Whalen himself plans a return to the classroom to begin work on an eventual doctoral program in educational leadership, “to continue to fight for educational equity at the district or national level.”   

Proof is in the students

The proof of concept for RISE High will be in the students’ successes, says Erin Whalen ’12.

“Given that we seek to serve students whom the traditional system has not served well, we often receive students who are older. We often find that regardless of their mastery of essential skills, their credits are not an adequate marker of their preparedness for college or the work force. We don’t actually use the terminology of grade levels in our community. We speak about a student’s progression through high school in terms of chapters through life. Chapter 1 being furthest from graduation with particular attention on foundational skills and Chapter 3 being closest to graduation with focus on college pathways or work preparedness.”

These students say Erin and RISE High are already making a difference in their lives. (No last names are used since the students are minors.)

 “Erin has assisted my transition to high school by providing me with the materials and opportunities I need to become the man I wish to be and by pushing me to the platform I need to satisfy my ambitions. He is very dedicated to all those around him and is always finding new ways to provide success to his peers and himself,” says Hiram, whose ambition is to become “the next black leader.”

Aracely, who attended RISE last year and is now a junior, says RISE “offers me a voice to speak my mind with no judgment from my peers. 

“Ever since I met Erin, he’s been nothing but supportive of me. Erin helps my problems inside and outside of school, giving me emotional stability and supporting my interest beyond high school in psychology.”   

The defendant said it was self-defense. The prosecution called it murder. And former homicide detective-turned-private investigator (PI) Todd Troutner ’89 got the phone call, asking him to figure out what really happened. 

“My client was just arrested. You need to come up to the jail and take pictures to document any evidence that he was in a fight,” explained the criminal defense attorney. “Look for bruising and scratches.”

It was May 2012, and the case was Troutner’s first murder investigation as a PI. He’d worked dozens of violent crimes as a cop in Prince William County, Va., so he was thrilled to be back in the game. Troutner got in his car, drove to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility and began what turned into a seven-month quest to determine if the defendant, a 51-year-old Army veteran and security guard, had murdered his 23-year-old son. 

In his five years as a private investigator, admits Troutner, “It’s my favorite case, but it was a horrible situation.” Hired by the defense to see if the man’s claim of self-defense was true, he started with a jailhouse interview of the father and then watched the initial videotaped interview by the police. Finally, he went to the crime scene — an opportunity not every jurisdiction grants to private investigators. 

In this case, it was critical that Troutner examine the apartment where the shooting took place. He walked around and reinvestigated as if he were both evidence technician and cop, taking photos and measurements. “As I’m going through, I already knew the story so I had to make sure it made sense,” he says. He spotted a phone that was ripped out of the wall, for example, that matched the report. The prosecution’s theory was that the son was standing by a door at one end of a hallway when Dad deliberately took aim and shot him. Blood by that particular door and nearby carpet and tile supported that theory. 

But Troutner noticed blood farther down the hall, closer to where dad was standing when he pulled the trigger, which wasn’t mentioned in the blood pattern analyst’s report. That blood supported the defense’s claim that the son was shot when he charged at his father after threatening to kill him, a theory that police and prosecutors had dismissed. In fact, said defense attorney Steve Kupferberg, the father had been beaten and choked and grabbed his gun “as a last resort.” In the end, the verdict was not guilty. 

Kupferberg, who specializes in criminal defense and frequently works with Troutner, had been impressed with Troutner’s skills on a previous case, back when he was a cop. “I told Todd that if he ever got done with the police department he should speak to me about being our investigator. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the best in the business in the [Washington, D.C.] metropolitan area.” 

 

A one-man show

People often think of the private investigator as the guy who follows cheating spouses; and there’s a segment of the industry that’s very good at that and works in teams, with cameras, recording devices, and other equipment. Troutner, however, operates alone and refers cases like that to other investigators. His main area is criminal defense work, from homicide and kidnappings to shootings and assaults, and civil cases, such as car crashes and work-site accidents. 

Troutner likes to say he reinvestigates cases, searching for witnesses or evidence that might have been missed, video footage that wasn’t looked at, and statements in police and other reports that, in his experience as a former homicide investigator, don’t add up. 

 “I tell people I’m a fact investigator,” says the soft-spoken Troutner. “I work for the defense attorney but I’m not taking sides. When I investigate I look at all the facts, not just the ones that support our case. You need to give the attorney all of the information so they can make good choices for the client.” 

The investigative process usually starts with a phone call from an attorney. Troutner gathers all the discovery the defense has — transcripts, photos, reports, recordings, affidavits — and comes up with his own plan for investigating the case. He often creates a to-do list for attorneys: Issue subpoenas for particular documents, send out a preservation letter to a store to keep a security video, get cell phone records, interview particular people.  

In other cases, he’ll mainly focus on paperwork. “I have a murder case right now with well over 2,000 pages of police reports, forensics, and transcripts,” says Troutner, who is licensed to work in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. “You have to be able to digest documents and pick out what’s important and what’s missing, and you need to present the findings of your investigation in a written report to a client — usually an attorney — in a way that makes sense.” He’ll see what questions weren’t asked and who was or wasn’t talked to; he’ll corroborate statements and follow up alibis that weren’t pursued. “I know what an investigation is supposed to look like and include; and if police and other official reports don’t have certain things, or they cut corners or made leaps of faith, or got tunnel vision and focused on just one guy, I look into it.” 

There are good private investigators who haven’t been cops, he says, “but it’s a huge advantage when you’ve been one. You can read case files and see if it’s a good investigation.”

The best defense: A good PI

To Troutner, a private investigator is an essential part of an effective defense, yet “it’s a minute percentage of defendants that get one, so there are people going to trial without the best defense.” Many clients can’t afford a PI, or the court won’t appoint one, even if it’s an option. In some jurisdictions, he says, the prosecution isn’t required to hand the case file over to the defense — yet another critical reason for a good PI.  

Sometimes, however, Troutner finds that witnesses aren’t wavering, or they corroborate official reports. In that case, the attorney may go back to his client with the findings and say, “We can take this to trial but you’re going to lose.” At other times, Troutner’s work has persuaded prosecutors to drop charges.

“I really appreciate talented investigators, and Todd brings together a remarkable series of skills,” says Fairfax, Va., trial lawyer Peter Everett. “He’s really smart and a strategic thinker. He comes back and says, ‘What about this angle, or that theory?’ It’s so far beyond what most people do that it really stands out.” Plus, says Everett, Troutner is good at establishing a rapport. “You often get people who say they don’t want to talk. He connects with witnesses, and that’s really important.” 

The investigative approach he uses in civil cases is similar; a typical case is a car crash where Troutner is working for the injured party’s attorney. If the client says she suffered traumatic brain injury, Troutner asks witnesses how the injured party was acting; was she conscious, coherent, were there any obvious injuries? “You try to jog the witnesses’ memory,” he says. In other cases, he’ll look for traffic cameras or drive the route with a GoPro camera on the hood of his car to determine if a driver had an obstructed or clear view at an accident site. And he’ll review the accident report to see if something doesn’t make sense. “Some attorneys don’t realize that in addition to a report, it’s also important to get records of 911 calls from witnesses. I just had a case where I had to remind an attorney to get those.”  

Becoming Detective Troutner

Private investigator is Troutner’s third career (so far), though it follows in a logical chain. The self-described Navy brat was born in Guam, grew up in Rockville, Md., and attended high schools in Hawaii and Washington, D.C. With both parents originally from Marshalltown, Iowa, the family spent nearly every summer in Iowa. “On one of those summer trips I toured Grinnell, and I liked the feel of the campus and said, ‘I’ll go there.’”

After graduating with a political science degree, he moved to Washington, D.C. (at the time his dad was a police officer on a nearby naval base), to consider law school and work in politics. He ended up as a lobbyist for several large law firms, covering issues from transportation to international trade and software, and meeting with congressional staff and bureaucrats. “I was having a lot of fun in D.C., but after a while it started to be like Groundhog Day — the same legislation and the same hearings every two years. After doing that four or five times, I decided I couldn’t do it again and again.” 

No longer interested in law school, he decided it was time for something different. “I think my dad set a really amazing example of living a life of service, first with his [27-year] career in the military and then transitioning to police work — and demonstrating that money should not be the determining factor when deciding on what sort of job you’re going to take,” Troutner says. He knew there would be exciting aspects of police work, “but that’s not why I took a $15,000 pay cut while my wife was pregnant with our first child,” he explains. “I wanted to help and protect people. And my ultimate goal was to be a homicide detective, where I would be challenged to solve the most serious cases.”

From April 1999 to April 2011, Troutner was a member of the Prince William County Police Department. “I loved it,” he says. Troutner spent six years in patrol, then went into major crimes (property and white-collar crimes) for six months. After that he was assigned to the Violent Crimes Unit (VCU); and for four years he worked on robberies, rapes, murders, and other death investigations. 

“A lot of people don’t want to go to VCU because you’re on call and it’s disruptive to your personal life,” he says, but Troutner thrived. “I enjoyed it on a bunch of levels, especially the investigation part. You get to a scene and you have to figure out what happened. You talk to officers who are there first, you ask for witnesses, you canvass the area; you’re pretty much in charge because oftentimes it’s at night, so you’re relied on to take care of the scene. You could catch guys who were hurting people. You could come into someone’s life who was having the worst experience possible and be a steadying presence.” He spent time studying case law and the latest legal decisions, because “part of your responsibility isn’t just catching the bad guy, but doing it in a legally correct way so you don’t get the case tossed out.” 

However, the immense amount of overtime required to work violent crimes (the equivalent of three to four months a year) was leading to burnout, and Troutner returned to patrol, which after years of homicide investigations wasn’t that satisfying. “When you’re young every call is exciting, but at that point, I didn’t care about arresting people for weed anymore. It seemed like a total waste of time,” he admits. “It was the same types of calls all the time — domestics, car crashes. I was basically driving around 10 hours a night looking for drunks.” 

It was time to move on. He took a few months to think and decided he most liked the investigative aspects of being with the police. He put the word out and was hired by several law firms that had been impressed with his work as a cop; as time went on, Troutner’s PI business, Broadside Investigative Group, blossomed. 

Today, out of his Fairfax office, a white board charts the one to two dozen cases at a time that he works on. When phone calls come in, Troutner glances at the board to remind himself which case the call is connected to and what information he needs. In his mild Virginia accent, he’ll explain that he’s a former homicide detective, now a private investigator, looking into a case. 

Being a private investigator is incredibly rewarding, says Troutner. “The thought of an innocent person going to prison is horrifying to me, which is why I believe so passionately that the accused be provided the resources to present the best defense possible. I’ve learned that it’s much more satisfying keeping people out of jail than putting them in.” 

When the recession hit in 2008, Rishi Misra ’01 parted ways with Deloitte, a large corporate consulting firm that had employed him for almost five years. This was a gamble not only because he had to find employment, but because the India native also had to restart the green card application process from scratch. If he couldn’t find a company that could sponsor his green card application, he’d have to leave the United States and possibly never return. Time was running out. 

In 2009 he landed a job with a startup in San Francisco that hired a small immigration law firm to help. Eight months later Misra had a number in the green card line, but by then the line wasn’t moving.

“It’s important to understand why that happens,” Misra says. “It’s because, in the year 1990, which is when the high-skilled immigration system was last updated, there weren’t that many Indian and Chinese nationals walking around with graduate degrees and five years of U.S. work experience. [In] 2013 or 2017, they’re all over the place. So, the lines for that category, and those countries in particular, are going to be incredibly long. Which is why someone who had come from Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh at the same time I did, or applied the same time I did, would have been done well before I was done.”

Having to start the green card process over again made him think even more about how the U.S. immigration system could be improved. “Initially I thought there shouldn’t be per-country limits in the employment-based system,” he says, “because I felt like I was being judged based on where I was born.”

He sent a PowerPoint proposal to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) office in California, and her staff invited him to come and present it. “I said, ‘Here’s the issue. I’ve been in the country for over 14 years and in this process for [5-plus years]. It doesn’t seem like this line’s going anywhere. Why am I being judged on my country of birth and not my contributions?’”

Feinstein’s staff told him that if you remove per-country limits, people from less populous countries won’t get a chance in the employment-based system because India and China would dominate the whole quota. Misra thought that was fair.

“One of the things I value about the United States is diversity of national origin,” he says. “I think that’s important for this country to keep, for its long-term competitiveness, for attractiveness to other countries, or other immigrants, really.”

So he wondered what else could be done to fix the employment-based immigration system. “The answer to me was quite fundamental. Why not just raise the bar so that these lines don’t get that long?” 

Intent on sharing his views about how to fix the system, in 2013 Misra started attending meetings held by FWD.us, a political advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman — the Who’s Who of tech — to modernize the immigration system and keep the United States competitive.

They invited him to speak on panels and meet with members of Congress. Misra was also invited twice to meet with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. “They sought my opinion on what could be done to streamline the high-skilled system,” Misra says, “and also what could be done to attract foreign entrepreneurs to build companies and create jobs here in the United States.”

Meanwhile Misra was still stuck in the green card line. So in 2016, he decided to apply for the “alien of extraordinary ability” category, an EB1 visa. 

This is the fastest line and has tougher criteria to qualify. Some of the 10 criteria are reserved for artists, entertainers, and athletes. Misra applied for five criteria, including making original contributions of major significance to his field. 

“I think that’s a great thing because it doesn’t measure me on contributions to any single company but measures me on contributions to my field, which in a sense are my contributions to the United States,” he says. “I had to have people that I didn’t even know vouch for the fact that the work I had done, in building a company and creating jobs, among other accomplishments, were of major significance. It had to be completely objective and unbiased,” he says. He had to meet three of the 10 criteria to qualify and thinks he got four. 

In October 2016, Misra was granted a green card and looks forward to becoming a U.S. citizen by 2021. 

Challenges of the H-1B visa 

Unlike the EB1 visa that Rishi Misra qualified for based on his individual accomplishments, the H-1B is employer-based. Companies in the United States apply for these visas on behalf of workers they want to hire because they have specialized knowledge, typically in science, engineering, or information technology, and a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. 

Misra worked on an H-1B visa for 12 years because his first employer didn’t follow the green card application process as well as it might have. They parted ways and he had to find another employer who could start the process over. 

Misra says, “The high-skilled visa is pretty controversial. One of the issues with that visa is the quota is limited to 65,000, and then another 20,000 for people with U.S. graduate degrees. Most of that quota is taken up by a handful of companies, and when you look at who those companies are, all those companies have outsourcing as a significant business component and revenue source.

“So when I looked at that, I was like, ‘Why are we giving most of the visas to companies that are taking jobs overseas? And these entrepreneurs, who could potentially create jobs in the United States, why are we depriving them of visas?’ I think that part of the system needs to be reformed as well.”

Focus on Biomedical Engineering 

Rishi Misra ’01 was very good at physics in high school, so when his high school physics teacher told him to apply to Grinnell, he did. He was also interested in engineering, so he pursued a 3-2 program in biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, transferring after his third year at Grinnell. He earned his B.A. in physics from Grinnell, a B.S. in biomedical engineering at Washington, and then an M.B.A there too. 

One reason Misra wanted to stay in the United States was to do something innovative in biomedical engineering, which he couldn’t do back home in India. Bangalore has since become India’s version of Silicon Valley, but when Misra was looking for work in 2003, it wasn’t yet.

Misra has worked for a handful of companies, always seeking new opportunities to challenge himself. He’s passionate about preventive medicine. For the past four years, he worked on “this pretty innovative product that takes data from a patient's medical record, plugs it into a very sophisticated mathematical model, and predicts their risk of chronic conditions — like heart attack, stroke, diabetes, things like that — and helps doctors work with those patients to reduce that risk.”

In June he took a new job with a startup funded by Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures arm and the American College of Cardiology. He says they’re “doing very cool things with data, measured by a noninvasive device that’s just kept under someone’s bed. It takes data from a patient’s heart to again try and predict when something bad is going to happen and prevent that from happening. Because when a patient has that first event, their life changes, and we want to make sure that first event’s avoided.”

 

Developing a magazine is not accomplished overnight. Or even in a year — especially in the midst of many other projects, like news releases and student recruiting brochures and an existing alumni newspaper. Nine years before The Grinnell Magazine debuted in the winter of 1967–68, Ruth VanBuren Prescott proposed that the College publish a magazine.

Prescott, an Iowa native and Cornell College alumna, came to Grinnell in 1944 after several years as a newspaper reporter and editor in Bangor, Maine. At Grinnell she served as editor of the Alumni Scarlet & Black (AS&B), a four-to-eight-page newspaper published for alumni six times a year. It was one of her many responsibilities in the College’s information services office.

In 1958 Prescott proposed to Grinnell’s Alumni Association Board of Directors (precursor to today’s Alumni Council) that the College stop publishing its newspaper and start publishing a magazine. It’s not clear if Prescott made the proposal on her own initiative or if she was asked to by someone else, such as then-President Howard Bowen. 

During her presentation to the alumni board, Prescott showed several magazines published by colleges similar in size to Grinnell to demonstrate the “attractiveness of the cover design, the quality of content and readability, and the eye appeal of this format.” About half the alumni board members liked the idea. The other half thought the newspaper was fine. “No formal action was taken,” according to the board minutes.

A few years later, in 1962, Prescott presented a paper, “For Alumni: Magazine or Newspaper — Which or Both?”, at a conference of college and university communications professionals. “A newspaper has seemed right to Grinnell since 1940, when it was started as a replacement for a rather sorry magazine-type periodical,” she told the audience. She thought it was “better to have a good newspaper than a poor magazine.” 

Magazines that “are the badly conceived, badly edited, badly printed results of the we-must-have-a-magazine-because-it’s-the-thing-to-do trend” especially irked her. She disdained “intellectual content” that was inappropriate for the institution and the alumni audience at the expense of material better suited to the “primary editorial purpose.” And fancy typography and design? “The editor had better be sure that his design serves a functional purpose for his readers, that it is not merely distractive instead of attractive,” she said. 

“One of these days,” Prescott mused, “I suspect we will start a magazine — and drop the newspaper. But when we do, I hope we will be sure of these basics: a frequency of at least six issues a year; enough pages in each issue to make the book worth picking up; smart, simple design; an editor of extraordinary competence and few other responsibilities; and, of course, enough money to do a proper job. Above all, it should be Grinnell’s, not an imitation of anybody or anything, and certainly not an attempt to compete with the Atlantic Monthly or the Saturday Evening Post or Life. We would hope to continue doing what we try to do with our newspaper, to give our alumni what we uniquely can give — information, interpretation, communication, even rapport — the true reflection of their college.”

By all accounts Prescott was a strong-willed, feisty woman (a retired Grinnell administrator who knew her well describes her as a “hard-ass”). She wanted Grinnell College to publish the best periodical it could afford. In 1966, she wrote a memo to then-President Glenn Leggett listing three things that a “first-class” magazine requires:

• Money for art, photography, and distribution costs, in addition to staff salaries
• Time for preliminary planning (“perhaps as much as a year”) and the “permanent equivalent of at least a half-time person”
• Editorial expertise 

About editorial expertise, Prescott continued, “The present AS&B editor and her colleagues do not feel qualified to assume full magazine responsibility without a sizable amount of additional technical training, nor is the present staff large enough to absorb the considerable extra work a magazine would entail.”

Why did an editor with 25-plus years of experience — not only in newspapers but other college publications as well — not feel qualified to edit a magazine? And what did she think when someone without professional editorial experience got the job? One can only surmise. Prescott was a whiskey drinker, so perhaps she knocked back a few after work and got on with things. 

Although she didn’t have the head job on the new magazine, Prescott’s role as managing editor was instrumental. She used her expertise in copyediting and print production in an era when pages were literally pasted up. 

The magazine’s inaugural editor, Dean of Men S. Eugene Thompson ’58 (deceased), bade adieu to Grinnell in 1968 after editing three issues. He left to take a similar position with Whitman College in Washington state. He wrote to Prescott, “I’m having a delightful time, though doing everything single-handedly, including design (liberally and unashamedly borrowing Quirk’s ideas), and learning fast.” He shared a copy of his new Whitman magazine. It looked remarkably like The Grinnell Magazine, from the typography to the spot color to the paper stock.

Prescott was livid. Grinnell had paid John Quirk — Grinnell’s freelance design consultant — several thousand dollars for his work. She wrote to Thompson, “I fear you have just made history in the field of alumni publishing. But not in a way of which you will have reason to be proud. I — as well as numerous others here and our designer and our printer away from here — am completely appalled at your unethical and unprofessional theft of the total design and format of The Grinnell Magazine for your first issue. … I can only suppose that you must have been ignorant of the nicety that this sort of thing is just not done, but it is still inexcusable on any basis.” 

One can imagine the profound embarrassment Thompson must have felt on receiving Prescott’s letter. He’d accepted the part-time role of magazine editor on top of his responsibilities as dean of men at Grinnell, likely a challenging job by itself in the late 1960s. Before that he’d been a high school teacher. The editing bug must have bitten Thompson, however, because he spent the rest of his career working in college communications.

Prescott worked with three other editors before retiring from her job as associate director of college relations. She helped hire her own replacement, Gayle Burdick, who recalls the job interview. 

“Ruth asked if I was married or single,” Burdick says. “I told her, ‘You know, Ruth, it’s none of your damn business. If you really need that information for me to work here, I don’t want to work here.’  That’s when Ruth knew I had a spine and could handle the job.” Burdick laughs. “She told me how to do the rest of the interviews.”  

They worked together for a short period before Prescott’s retirement in 1978. “She basically made it possible [for me] to do the job,” Burdick says. “She was a force.” 

If you’re like the majority of Americans, you’re probably not too thrilled with your 9-to-5 grind. (That may start with the fact that your 9-to-5 grind is actually closer to an 8-to-6 — or even 24/7 — grind.) 

According to a 2014 survey by the nonprofit research group Conference Board, a full 52.3 percent of us are unsatisfied with our jobs. 

And that dissatisfaction extends even to Grinnell alumni — smart and driven people who might otherwise seem to have every advantage in the workplace today.

So what’s going on, and how can we fix it? In this story, we talked to Grinnellians who are zeroing in on the problems of, and the solutions for, today’s working world. 

Open office or closed doors?

Office design can help or hinder our work. Paula Briggs Fracasso ’89 shares ways to understand your office space’s strengths and overcome its weaknesses.

The freewheeling atmosphere of Silicon Valley startups hasn’t just led to billion-dollar behemoths like Uber and Airbnb; it’s also influenced office design from coast to coast.

These days, office designers everywhere are taking their cues from fast-growing tech companies. You’re probably familiar with the look, and you might spend your weekdays in something just like it: Such offices favor wide-open spaces over individual offices with actual doors, polished concrete over industrial-strength carpet, and incandescent bulbs over headache-inducing fluorescent lighting.

Unfortunately, the covetable look doesn’t necessarily translate to productivity or employee satisfaction, says Fracasso, an executive coach. “I’ve worked with people at Fortune 500 companies who make well over six figures a year who admit that the only place they can have private conversations is in the parking lot,” she says.

Yet buttoned-up workplaces where every office has a door, and maybe even a lock, might not be much better. After all, such layouts likely speak volumes about the office’s interest in collaboration and camaraderie.

In the end, Fracasso says, great design focuses on how people in the company actually work best — and translates that into spaces that work. In general, that means a more thoughtful mix between public and private spaces. “It never makes sense to design an office based solely on what looks cool in a magazine,” she says. 

Take action: Stuck in one office-design extreme or the other? There are always workarounds. Fracasso offers two:

1. For open spaces, “library rules” for the first couple hours of the day can help people stay focused on deep work.
2. Remote offices can get a boost with “virtual social hours” that promote interaction even among faraway colleagues. “Office design has a huge impact on company culture,” she says. “The goal is to inject a little bit of humanity in these environments.”

When knowledge isn’t power

Our own terrible habits may be to blame for our bad attitude and poor performance at work, says Billy Strean ’86. What does it take to change them?

Speaker and performance coach Strean often works with high-level executives who are desperate to get an edge in their work — but all too often, he says, they’re looking in the wrong place. “People are willing to do so many sophisticated and expensive things to perform at a higher level, but they might not be doing the fundamental things that would help them: sleeping, eating well, drinking water, getting exercise,” he says. “They’re trying to build a house on a really shaky foundation.”

This might sound like old news. After all, most of us understand that we shouldn’t be binge-watching Orange Is the New Black until 2 a.m., and few of us feel great about the fast-food lunches we eat at our desks. Even Strean admits he’s guilty. “When I work in front of a 27-inch computer screen right before bed — I might as well be sitting in front of the sun. Should I really be surprised that I can’t go to sleep an hour later?” he jokes.

Your brain is sabotaging you: Intellectually understanding that we need more sleep and more exercise won’t make us change, and reading this article might not do much for you, either. 

One thing that might make you change a habit is an emotional gut punch. “Most people don’t analyze their way to change,” says Strean, echoing the ideas of Harvard professor and consultant John Kotter, who argues that when people see something that has them feel something, then they change.

In other words, reading one more fact-packed article about the benefits of sleep won’t lead you to a good night’s sleep that will help you on the job. But seeing how much better you feel and how much more effectively you work? That might cause you to see the potency of the issue — and lead you to set aside your late-night Netflix binges for good.

Is it time to toss the organizational chart?

Strict hierarchies may be dragging all of us down, says James Jennings ’87.

As one of the world’s first management consultants in the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor offered plenty of theories about how to make workers on the factory floor more efficient. One of his biggest ideas? Divide the work up so that managers do the thinking and planning while the workers perform the tasks.

In many cases, Taylor’s principles did lead to greater productivity and — perhaps more important to company owners — bigger profits. But as more companies adopted his approaches, including many firms that didn’t focus on manufacturing, their effectiveness dwindled. Even worse, the side effects were devastating, says Jennings, founder of @1, a company that helps individuals and companies build better systems to do better work. 

“People lost a sense of ownership in the work that they were doing when they were simply told what to do,” Jennings says. “The idea, in this economy, that there are a small number of people who know what the answer is and everyone else should just do what they say is obsolete.”

You’ve probably experienced a version of this in your worst jobs. You feel like you’re little more than a cog in a machine. In the end, it might not even be good for productivity, says Jennings. “The people who are assembling understand assembly better than the people who are watching it. There’s value to the experience of doing the work.” In other words, technicians in every field have plenty of insights that their managers would be wise to heed.

So what’s the best way forward? Jennings argues that giving workers at every level more agency and discretion in their work can make a big difference not only in worker happiness but also in the progress of an organization.

Such approaches have already been proven in some organizations. Online retailer Zappos, for instance, famously tossed the word-for-word scripts that are typically used in customer service calls so that that employees could use their creativity and empathy to solve callers’ problems. 

Jennings, too, saw benefits to this approach. Years ago, while working as a manager at Keurig, he called meetings with his entire team — from sales to accounts receivable to delivery — and found that some profitable but unpleasant clients were bringing everyone in the division down. “When people on the team started talking to one another, they realized that certain clients were horrible to everyone — demanding discounts from sales people and leaving customer service reps in tears,” he says.

Together, they came up with the solution to drop the most disagreeable clients, even if it meant lost revenue. “And it turned out when people didn’t dread those parts of their job, they did better,” he says. “We ended up improving customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and growth rate.”

The point, says Jennings, is that he wasn’t a hero. The collaboration his team did, and the authority they all had to make good decisions, drove the team to success in the way Jennings couldn’t have done on his own. “It’s important to build a culture that allows for more discretion in decision-making,” he says. “It’s time to start democratizing information and power.”

What to ask before you take that new job

The answers could determine how satisfied you’ll be in the new role.

Job interviews are a two-way street. Just as employers want to get a good sense of a candidate through good questions, candidates should be doing some tire-kicking of their own. Because companies are well-versed in putting their best foot forward as they describe the work, the perks, and the growth opportunities of a given position, candidates should be asking questions to uncover the deeper truths of an organization to see if it will truly be a good match.

Alison Hayes ’87, who has worked with James Jennings at @1 and has long been interested in what makes a company good for employees, suggests a few questions that can provide needed insight for a job candidate:

Q. How is great work recognized? 

A. A Starbucks gift card or a superficial “good job” from the boss? “Ask people to describe a time they did work they were really proud of and how that was recognized,” says Hayes. “‘It meant a lot to me when my boss …’ is a good sign.”

Q. What does feedback look like? 

A. It should go beyond annual reviews. “You don’t want someone who tells you once every 12 months if you get a thumbs up or thumbs down,” she says. “You want to know if you’re on the right track so you can proceed confidently or adjust in the moment — not six months after the fact.”

Q. How much time do employees spend using their best skills? 

A. Anyone who says 100 percent is lying — even the best jobs have crummy parts — but the ratio should be something you’re comfortable with. “If people say 80 percent of their work is administrative and they spend just 20 percent doing the work they’re excited about, that’s a red flag,” she says.

Q. Can employees safely challenge themselves? 

A. You’ll want to be confident not only that you’ll have a chance to take on projects that stretch your skills, but also that your boss and company will have your back even if your best efforts fail. “You want to know that if you push yourself hard and take risks, you won’t be cut loose if you occasionally fall down,” she says.

Why the “just a job” mindset can be devastating

Indifference about your work is likely to have consequences that spill into your off-hours.

Plenty of people are working for the weekend. Clocking in and clocking out is just a way to pay the bills, not part of a larger sense of identity. 

But could that “just a job” mentality have troubling consequences? Jim Asplund ’88, chief scientist of strengths development for Gallup, says that research done by his firm suggests that a job we don’t love could have a powerful effect on our stress levels and overall happiness. Here’s how:

Twenty-one percent of all Americans say they use their strengths to do what they do best for fewer than three hours per day. They are far more likely than those who use their strengths four or more hours per day to report that they are experiencing worry, stress, anger, sadness, and pain.

Asplund says, “We thrive when we’re doing things we’re inclined to do anyway. Even if we know we can do things that come a little less naturally to us, [this work is] less likely to energize us and allow us to do the kind of work that makes it feel like time is passing quickly.”

The more hours per day that adults believe they use their strengths, the more likely they are to report having ample energy, feeling well-rested, being happy, smiling or laughing a lot, learning something interesting, and being treated with respect. 

“Not only are you more productive when you’re working in your areas of strength,” Asplund says, “you’re happier, too.”

Make your current job your dream job

We may all fantasize about a dream job where we know we’d flourish, but the reality is that many of us are tied to the one we’ve got. Maybe we’ve got loans to pay off or nearby family who’d be devastated if we left. Maybe the job we’ve got is actually pretty good, once we consider the alternatives.

Even if you’re not planning to jump ship to a new job, there are steps you can take today to feel happier and more purposeful in your work, says Mark Henry ’05, global talent development manager for Aon Corp. “Employees should be able to find new challenges and experiences at work that make them feel fulfilled,” he says, “especially Grinnellians, who are curious about the world and like to think a little bit bigger about things.”

1. Start with a positive attitude. 

Incompetent bosses and lazy co-workers are infuriating, but griping about every last detail of your day-to-day tasks won’t endear you to the people who can help you most. “You can’t let your inner kindergartner come out,” says Henry. 

2. Find ways to eliminate the tasks that bog you down. 

Start with an accounting of your daily activities, tiny details included. If there are projects that you find particularly draining, think creatively about how you might get them off your plate. “You might find that there are ways to streamline certain processes, hand them off to people who like them or are more equipped to deal with them, or remove processes altogether,” says Henry. With the right positioning, you can show how replacing the tasks you loathe with ones you love will lead you to do better, more high-value work that will benefit your organization. 

3. Dig deep on your interests.

There are an almost infinite number of self-assessments that you can take, but you can start simply by paying attention: When do you find yourself so engaged that you lose track of time? If you feel those moments don’t exist for you in your current job, a co-worker or friend can help. “Ask people around you when they have observed you at your best, or when they see you truly light up,” says Henry. “They can often see things about you that you can’t see yourself.”

4. Connect your interests to the company’s or boss’s goals.

Does your list of strengths connect up with some larger company objective? Can you make the case that the things you want to pursue in greater depth will lead to higher profits, improved product quality, or faster response times? Such results will likely be music to your boss’s ears. “Move away from simply saying ‘I want this, I want that,’” says Henry. “Figure out a way to make your passion something that your company can’t afford to be without.”

5. Find your own vision. 

On a day-to-day level, it can feel like all you’re doing is sending out emails or creating PowerPoint slides, but if you can connect the daily work to something larger — whether it’s the mission of the organization or just making the lives of co-workers a little bit easier — it can lead to a sense of purpose. Just as a bricklayer who sees her work as building cathedrals instead of stacking bricks is more likely to be satisfied, finding your own purpose is likely to lead to greater work happiness. “Find your cathedral,” says Henry.

Until Grinnell College installed a hearing loop in Herrick Chapel, Linda Bryant, the College’s organist, used her smartphone to turn off her hearing aids before performing so that the overtones from the organ didn’t cause unpleasant sensations in her ears. 

“I then used the phone to turn them on when people were speaking, but I heard mumbling and only understood a word here or there. That meant I was always guessing when it was time for me to play at the end of a ceremony or worship service, and hoping I got it right,” she says. “When people were speaking at the pulpit or anywhere in front of me, I could not understand what they were saying. I thought it was the way things were.”

Thanks to the work of Juliette Sterkens and the College Accessibility Committee, things aren’t that way anymore. Sterkens, a Wisconsin audiologist and the Hearing Loss Association of America’s hearing loop advocate, visited campus in the fall of 2015. She delivered a lecture on hearing loop technology and advised on where hearing loops might be installed on campus.

A hearing loop is a wire, or an array of wires, that encircles a space and connects to the sound system. The loop transmits the sound electromagnetically to the telecoil (T-coil) in a person’s hearing aid or cochlear implant. If a hearing device does not contain a T-coil, there is an option to wear earbuds connected to a “loop listener” device. Portable loops also exist, allowing the benefits of a looped room within a few feet of the box.

Installation of hearing loops is complete in parts of the Charles Benson Bear ’39 Center for Recreation and Athletics, Burling Library, Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Robert N. Noyce ’49 Science Center, Harris Center cinema, and Herrick Chapel. Countertop hearing loops have been installed at the P-Card office, the entrance to the Marketplace, Pioneer Bookshop, conference operations, and the Bear Center information desk.  

The College also uses portable loops for Commencement and Faulconer Gallery talks and has small ones available for checking out from the Office of Accessibility and Disability Resources and the Center for Religion, Spirituality, and Social Justice.  

Sterkens notes that people who use hearing aids hear best when they are close to the source of the speech signal when there is minimal background sound, and when they are able to see the person speaking. When the conditions are less than ideal, the user’s ability to hear is compromised. More technologically advanced hearing aids do not improve these conditions, since all microphones inside the aids have a limited effective range. When a user turns up the volume on the hearing instruments, the background noise will become louder. Hearing loops deliver sound directly to the hearing aid without the deleterious effects of distance and background noise, and the user enjoys hearing speech with great clarity. 

With a hearing loop, Sterkens says that in effect, “The microphone on the lectern becomes the microphone for the hearing aid.” Other common types of hearing technology, FM and infrared, are essentially unusable for a person with hearing aids, since they require the wearing of earbuds. Because a hearing loop connects with the telecoil in a person’s hearing aid, cochlear implant, or “loop listener” (a box with earbuds that pick up the electromagnetic waves clearly), the delivered sounds are perfectly customized to a person’s specific hearing loss every time. 

As Bryant prepared to play at a ceremony in Herrick Chapel in the fall of 2016, she removed her hearing aids, replaced them with the earbuds, and activated the loop listener box to pick up the hearing loop. The results blew her away.

“For the first time, I understood President [Raynard S.] Kington. I understood everything. The difference was magnificent. It took the uncertainty out of the situation.” She was also relieved the organ kept her out of view. “I was sitting there with tears running down my face. It was just really exciting.”

Grinnell resident J.R. Paulson shares in the excitement. A physician of 35 years, Paulson is a hearing aid user himself and attended Sterkens’ lecture on campus. “I learned a number of things that I didn’t know as a physician and had never learned in medical school.”

He is able to determine a major difference in sound quality if a room is looped or if it is not. He encourages his patients to try it for themselves. “Whether it’s our schools, churches, or business venues, every place it’s happened, it’s been remarkable.”

Advocates on campus hope that hearing loops will be installed in more locations in the future.

Hearing loops provide easy listening that is dignified and free of fuss, and are not just for those with hearing loss. A study conducted at the University of Northern Illinois revealed students who did not have hearing loss enjoyed wearing the earbuds and loop box — which can be controlled using a smartphone — to achieve better comprehension in lectures.

Sterkens believes if all people realized how much better they could hear in a loop, everyone would use it. The technology has existed for more than 40 years but has yet to go mainstream in the United States. “I’m absolutely convinced that this is the way to go for people who are hard of hearing, and the stories that come out prove me right,” she says. “When Grinnell does this, they raise the bar for other colleges.”

As for Bryant, she’s looking forward to her next performance. “When you live with hearing loss, you don’t know what you’re missing,” she remarks. “You don’t know there’s something that can fix it, so you learn to live with it. In this case, it was fixable. I’m very grateful the College chose to fix it.”

U.S. News & World Report first published its list of “Best Colleges” in 1983. Today, a profusion of commercially published rankings enthrall and mystify consumers every fall. For high school students and their parents, rankings by venerable sources like U.S. News, Money, and Forbes ostensibly provide objective guidance about academic reputation, affordability, and other supposed measures of college quality and accessibility.

For the colleges themselves, rankings can be both a headache and a useful measuring stick. Some institutions have noisily boycotted the annual ritual of lobbying for positive peer assessments, which play a big part in reputation ratings. An infamous handful have been caught trying to game the system by cherry-picking data or just plain lying. 

The great majority — Grinnell included — take a more reasoned approach, because even though the data are sometimes questionable and the methodologies imperfect, the lists are not going away. “Like it or not, rankings matter,” says Randy Stiles, Grinnell’s associate vice president for analytic support and institutional research. 

How students perceive rankings

Stiles points to research by the Art and Science Group that says 72 percent of traditional students pay at least some attention to rankings. Seven out of 10 students report that they discuss rankings in person or on social media, mostly with parents and friends. 

What’s more, college test scores are predictive of students’ attitudes and behaviors with respect to rankings. The 2016 poll reveals that students with ACT test scores of 28 and higher are apt to care more about the prestige associated with higher rankings. But students whose scores are 21 and lower are likely to give rankings more weight in choosing a college. 

Incoming Grinnell students seem to bear out that research. While their average ACT score of 30 may indicate awareness of the status that a lofty ranking commands, it also appears to signal greater discernment with respect to the importance of rankings in relation to other factors. Stiles says annual surveys of first-year students show that rankings in national magazines show up about halfway down the list of their top 20 reasons for enrollment. 

“Year after year students report the main reason for coming to Grinnell is the College’s academic reputation,” Stiles says. “Number two on the list is financial aid, which is not surprising because there is very generous aid given here.” 

Rounding out the top five reasons are the size of the College, the ability of graduates to gain admission to top graduate programs, and graduates’ prospects for getting good jobs. 

Perception versus reality

It could be that student perceptions are formed at least in part from rankings, and Stiles emphasizes that Grinnell does exceptionally well in systems that give considerable weight to academic quality and reputation. The challenge for data analysts is to balance those perceptions with what rankings are really saying about college quality, given that each system calculates performance differently.

Stiles says Grinnell’s approach to making sense of the complexities of college quality is to use “multiple lenses” in comparing and benchmarking performance against similar institutions, or what are referred to as the “peer 16.” That includes a review and in-depth analysis of seven different systems plus Princeton Review every year. 

“Our philosophy is not to manage to these systems,” Stiles says, “but to be informed by them, to be able to answer questions about them, and educate anybody who has an interest in what rankings have to do with the whole world of higher education.”

Stiles’ team studies not only Grinnell’s rankings within each of those systems but also the rankings of those peer liberal arts colleges in the Midwest and on the East and West Coasts. A daunting task, it requires knowing how each system works and what makes some more meaningful than others. 

How rankings actually work

“What these ranking systems all do in one way or another,” Stiles says, “is put together some collection of schools — liberal arts colleges, research universities, publics, privates — and rank them all on one long list. Then there is some collection of measures that are given some collection of weights. All of that gets added up into an overall score, from which is produced an ordered list.”

What makes one set of rankings more influential than another depends to a large extent on commercial reach. “Readership matters a lot,” Stiles says. “Some of these things have a lot of readership, and people give greater credibility to them. Others, not so much.” 

Making sense of college rankings would be easier if all of the rankings systems produced similar results. In many cases they don’t, and Grinnell is a perfect case in point. Last year, Grinnell was No. 19 among national liberal arts colleges in U.S. News rankings. In the other systems that Stiles tracks, the College came in at No. 19 also on Washington Monthly, but at Nos. 73, 9, 156, 31, and 54 on other lists. 

 “U.S. News puts a big emphasis on reputation and resources,” Stiles explains. “Forbes claims to emphasize outcomes or ‘output over input.’ Kiplinger’s is about best value. Money, not surprisingly, is about affordability and the salaries of graduates. The New York Times Access Index emphasizes the percentage of Pell students and the economic diversity. College Factual is outcomes-focused. 

“These days, there is more and more talk about outcomes,” Stiles continues, “and when people say outcomes in these systems, they’re talking about graduation rates and salaries more than anything else.” That’s an important distinction, he says, because rankings that weigh earnings heavily can skew data unfavorably for graduate students whose higher incomes materialize on a longer timeline. 

Also, not all systems are equal in terms of their own development. Stiles says Forbes’ ranking of Grinnell since 2008 has fluctuated by “an incredible variation” of 80 points. “I can guarantee you Grinnell didn’t change that much between 2008 and 2012. But the system changed, as did the way people were using it and the way it was managed. So it’s important to remember that the systems themselves need time to mature and achieve stability.” 

Rankings that resonate

Among all of the annual rankings, U.S. News’ “Best Colleges” remains the source that students use most widely to compare academic quality among 1,800 U.S.-based schools. “People pay most attention to U.S. News,” Stiles says. “It gets a lot of readership.”

In the U.S. News system, the categories given the most weight are reputational assessments by counselors and peers (22.5 percent), graduation/retention rate (22.5 percent), and faculty resources (20 percent). Student selectivity rank is next (12.5 percent), followed by financial resources (10 percent), graduation rate performance (7.5 percent), and alumni giving rank (5 percent).

Stiles says the key take-away from the 2017 U.S. News rankings (released in 2016) is that Grinnell’s overall rank of 19th is stable. “In fact we’re improving lately in overall rank. We have a great academic reputation,” Stiles says. 

“We’ve also become much more selective,” he says. “Just a few years ago Grinnell was 38th among liberal arts colleges for selectivity. Now we’re ninth in that category.”

To illustrate the seven-year data lag that can occur in published rankings, Stiles points to a blip in attrition among the student group that came to Grinnell in the fall of 2012. “That cohort will have a negative impact in our graduation rate when U.S. News rankings are published in 2019,” Stiles says. “We know that’s going to happen, and we’re working hard on graduation/retention as part of the quality initiative that’s connected to the upcoming accreditation review.”

Still, all ranking systems do not use the same measures, and a large readership for U.S. News does not necessarily make it the last word in college quality. Stiles says one of the more discriminating ways to view rankings is in how a system resonates with a college’s core values. One that gives particular weight to criteria consistent with Grinnell’s values is Washington Monthly’s ranking of “Best Liberal Arts Colleges.” 

“Washington Monthly’s primary factors are social mobility, research, and service, each of which counts for one third,” Stiles says. “There are lots of details beneath those major categories, but the point is that different systems attribute different weights to measures that are relevant for what’s going on at a college.”

Breaking into the top 10

Everybody wants to be No. 1, or close to it. Human nature dictates that college graduates who encounter a list of best colleges will almost certainly want to know how their own alma mater stacks up. The question is, should Grinnell be content with being No. 19? What exactly would it take to be No. 15, or No. 12, or even third? Stiles explains:

“When you add everything up in the U.S. News system, schools will score numbers in their overall tally of about 70 to 100. The top 10 schools — and there is a lot of variation in the top 10 — go from a score of 100 down to about 87. Among the next 10, there’s a variation of only two points.” Grinnell’s overall score in last year’s U.S. News rankings was 85, tied with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

“If this were a road race, you would see the first 10 runners spread out,” Stiles says. “Right behind them would be another 10 in a clump, which is where Grinnell is. In the one-to-10 range it takes a big change to make a move, but even a small move in the overall score in the 10-20 range could move us six or seven places.” 

It’s about culture

While Stiles’ job is to analyze rankings from an institutional perspective, his insights are just as valuable for parents and prospective students who are staying up nights trying to decode the latest list of “best colleges.”

Stiles prefaces his advice with sociologist William Cameron’s famous quote, which he says is applicable to any consideration of college rankings: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” 

“Remember that the data lags,” Stiles says. “Also, cumulative earnings matter; rankings based on graduate salaries five years out do not tell the full story for a college like Grinnell that produces a lot of graduate-degree candidates. 

 “Look at a variety of rankings as a first filter in choosing a school,” Stiles says. “Culture and fit are so important that you’ve got to do a campus visit and check out several institutions to really know. The peer 16 are all fine colleges, and Grinnell is very highly regarded in that mix. You almost can’t go wrong with a liberal arts education at any one of these schools, but it is culture and context that really matter.”