Brookline’s new Messina College is teaching first-generation college students

Messina’s mission is to provide students like Melo with a traditional, liberal arts college experience, with the academic and social benefits that come with living and learning together. The school opens at a time when rising tuition and inflationary pressures are turning the on-campus college experience into a luxury many students can’t afford, especially those who aren’t straight-A high school seniors who can win admission to the nation’s most elite institutions and gain admission the more generous financial aid these schools typically offer.

BC leaders say the Messina Project is a return to the school’s roots in the 19th century, when it was founded to educate the children of Irish Catholic immigrants who were often excluded from other colleges. It’s also an experiment of sorts, testing a unique approach to educating students from poor backgrounds who often fall behind their privileged college classmates because of financial hardships or poor academic preparation at struggling urban high schools. Nearly a third of Messina’s new students are graduates of Boston Public Schools; many of the rest come from gateway towns like Springfield and Brockton.

“We cannot afford to have so many students not develop their talents and engage with the difficult issues that face our society,” BC President William P. Leahy said when plans for the school were announced two years ago. “Education is the ladder to success.”

BC is spending $35 million to rebuild the campus it took over in the spring of 2020 after merging with Pine Manor. The campus was abuzz with the sounds of power tools and construction vehicles on a recent morning as workers rushed to prepare for move-in day. “There are people who are working double shifts right now to get this done,” said the Rev. Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.

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

His parents, he said, instilled in their children the value of education. “But when I went to college, they didn’t have a lot of cultural capital to explain how to do it,” he said. “I had to kind of chart a path.”

In Messina, Berrelleza aims to make it easier to navigate this path.

Students will begin classes in July instead of September so they can complete two courses before the regular academic year begins. This will reduce their course load.

Each student will be paired with a mentor from the BC student body. Mentors should be third or fourth year students with similar backgrounds.

Messina will provide laptops, as well as health insurance and meal plans for those who cannot afford them.

As part of their financial aid packages, all students will have a work-study job because, Berrelleza said, evidence shows that students who work on campus do better academically. “It broadens their networks and teaches them how to plan,” he said.

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

Berrelleza said Messina’s target students have B grade averages in high school. They are unlikely to get into BC or other highly selective schools that offer generous financial aid. Their options would be to take on significant debt to attend a less selective liberal arts school or go to a public institution such as the University of Massachusetts Boston or Framingham State, he said.

“These schools may not provide the kind of opportunities we’re trying to create here,” he said. “It’s a holistic education for students.” In keeping with B.C.’s Jesuit liberal arts education, he said, “We want our students to grow as whole people.”

Anthony Abraham Jack, a Boston University professor and author of “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students,” said Messina has “the potential to open Boston College to a much broader and much more diverse group of students, not just in terms of class but also race, age and parental status.” He said support services and additional resources are key to ensuring that students from low-income families persist through to graduation, especially those with family responsibilities.

“They need to be supported from day one, not after they’re struggling to belong,” he said. “This program has the ability to create an on-ramp for students who have been left behind for too long.”

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

By his own admission, since his mother died when he was in eighth grade, he had focused more on his studies than on getting good grades. (His father is not in the picture.) After learning about Messina, he began to focus more on his studies and raised his grade point average.

Now, he hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree after completing two years at Messina. BC says any Messina student who maintains a 3.4 GPA can automatically transfer to BC as a third-year student and complete his bachelor’s degree there. Melo said he is also considering pursuing postgraduate studies.

“The ultimate goal is to become a therapist or some kind of social worker,” he said. “I went through a lot of mental health issues after my mom died, so this is my way of thinking that I can try to give back to others.”

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

All Messina students, by contrast, will live in dorms. Berrelleza hopes they will feel a sense of ownership over the school. “Some of them say, ‘This is a school designed for me,’” he said. “I think they see an investment, too.” (The school now has a $100 million trust fund after a $50 million contribution from the BC trust fund, an anonymous $25 million pledge and investment returns.)

Berrelleza said the campus needed a capital injection because it had been in decline as Pine Manor gradually lost money. In the years before the merger with BC, enrollment had fallen to just 335 students on a campus with a dormitory for about 600. Its endowment was just $10 million. The school had a similar mission to Messina: serving low-income, first-generation college students. Thomas O’Reilly, Pine Manor’s last president, said the merger with BC kept the school’s spirit alive.

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

One of Pine Manor’s legacies is the campus’s central building, a mansion that once belonged to an early 20th-century Boston banker and sits atop a small hill surrounded by grass and trees. The building will house administrative offices, classrooms and a study hall in the former ballroom. The walls are paneled with walnut. There is a grandfather clock, a piano and buttons that were once used to call for service. The land that is now the Messina campus covers 50 acres.

Berrelleza said some friends asked him if the environment would be inappropriate for Messina’s students “because it’s very different from where they come from.”

Melo doesn’t share that worry. “It’s really my kind of vibe,” he said. “Country and really quiet.”

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Mike Damiano can be reached at [email protected]. Hilary Burns can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @Hilarysburns.