Tandy Caraway has been helping students excel academically and reach their educational goals, for over 20 years, by using student-focused strategies. She began her educational career by coordinating an after-school program at her high school alma mater. Since that time, she has tutored, instructed, and counseled hundreds of students, leaving them with a renewed sense of self-confidence and motivation. Tandy has experienced high rates of success with all types of students, although gifted and at-risk students are seemingly her specialty. Her peers describe her as an enthusiastic, motivated, and dedicated professional who demonstrates a sincere interest in her students as individuals. This passion and tenacity have earned her national and local accolades from organizations such as the White House, American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, Future Business Leaders of America, Miami Dade Public Schools, United Teachers of Dade, the Florida Senate. She has been featured by media outlets such as Forbes, OZY Media, the Dallas Examiner, Miami Herald, the Florida Channel, and Parent magazine.
As an avid believer in giving back to the community, Mrs. Caraway has helped launch multiple youth development organizations and coordinated youth educational programs for her church. She has also developed service-learning programs for students to continue giving back to the community while learning workforce readiness and life skills. Her latest business venture, CollegeMode Academy, helped hundreds of students secure over $20 million dollars in scholarships, grants, and fellowships. Her programs develop #FullRideScholars who are the next generation of changemakers. She often tells her students, “You have to make some decisions about who you want to be”, as she pushes them toward seeing themselves as the catalyst for change internally and within the world that surrounds them. This particular quote echoes her philosophy about education and life in general. Tandy works in education, in hopes of being part of the solution that causes a generation of youth to exceed the expectations set before them while overcoming the challenges of today. When she is not busy motivating and inspiring others, Tandy relishes spending time with family and friends, reading mysteries, and splashing around in pools and water parks.
How much did the college landscape change since you were working on your master’s degree?
There’s like two lifetimes of change that have happened since the time I started with my bachelor’s degree and then there’s a whole other shift that happened between the time I received my master’s and now. When we were going to college, if you were low-income, you could get a partial payment grant. You could even take out student loans for up to $5,000 or work a part-time job and you could pay your way through college. These kids are not in a situation where they can pay their way through a four-year university. When I look at students in this generation, they’ve just grown up so much differently and have seen so much more in their lifetime. I think college is a great place for them to explore their independence as an adult but also have the safety net of parents and bumper rails of the college there. For them to get that experience, it’s just not an option for them to work their way through it anymore. If they’re going to pay their way through, they’re going to have to go to community college and then a local four-year college and stay at home. The complexity of getting admitted to certain colleges has become a thing. A parent told me recently that their kid got physically sick from the stress of the beginning of this year. If they want to apply to specialized programs, like performing artists or athletes, they deal with a whole recruiting process which has gotten convoluted and stressful. It’s unreal, and students really do need support. They’re dealing with these complex systems where they need to have a computer open and somebody to either share the screen with or come over and say, “Those few things, here’s how you get past that.” Optional testing has become a thing of, ‘I don’t know if I should submit my test scores or not.’ It’s added another whole layer of confusion to the process.
When you were teaching full-time, did you have a lot of autonomy when it came to helping students find grants?
Even though things have changed over a lifetime, I don’t know if that aspect has changed very much, which is where a lot of the trouble comes in. I think the key difference is paper versus digital. When I was in school, there was this spinning rack, and they would make copies of scholarships and opportunities that came in and put them in the rack. It was your job to somehow make it by there during passing period or after school and go pick up the applications that were available. Counselors still get a lot of applications and opportunities that they must screen for because sometimes a scholarship will say we only want two applicants from your school. I understand why the scholarships might gatekeep for a selective opportunity, but I don’t think they understand the implications behind it. There’s a thing that’s been present since I was in school of “The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” and how appearances matter. That quiet kid who’s doing the work but doesn’t go to the counselor’s office could have a better resume, but they’re not top of mind when that opportunity comes through. The counselor doesn’t recommend them and just a host of other things happen. Schools are now paying for sites and uploading scholarship opportunities into systems like Naviance, which weren’t really around when I was teaching. As a matter of fact, the school district that I taught in Miami-Dade, just adopted a system two years ago called Scoir. There’s also a program called Remind, which is like group texting, where counselors post the scholarships. I remember asking a counselor to put me in the group text and was told “No, your son needs to get it for himself.” I have two problems with that. Number one, I had seniors at that school. They weren’t the highest performing seniors, but if they knew I was going to help them, they would have taken some initiative and would have done some things a little differently. Secondly, my son being a football player meant that everybody was pushing him toward athletics, but I wanted him to focus more on some of the academic opportunities.
What is the scholarship landscape like right now and are they primarily merit-based or need-based?
There’s a group of colleges in that $250,000+ college tier that are almost strictly needs-based, which means when the parents do the FAFSA, they are asking that they absolutely contribute that. Scholarships can’t cover it, because the college is willing to give just so much, and they want the families to do their part. I had a student admitted to Johns Hopkins, which is a needs-based school, so they were awarded scholarships and grants. If you can get yourself in there, you’re pretty much guaranteed to only pay what is reasonable based on your income. If your family has the money and can really afford to pay what the government says, they should be able to pay the required amount. It’s an easy route to get the money you need. There’s a lot of first-generation opportunities out there and scholarship opportunities for people of color. But I like to tell people those are not the only ones.
Do you have any special shoutouts to give to any previous students?
Demari is one of those special cases like I just described but he wasn’t in the Ivy League School realm before he started working with me. He had great grades, but his test scores were not college-ready in one of the areas. He only had limited community service, so we had work to do. I see that students are not being intentional; families aren’t being intentional about what they’re doing with their kids. They have the kid in 10 activities because they hear advice from different people. I’ve had students go to school on a combination of those things. For example, I had a student last year who was an artist and was placed in the top 10% of artists nationwide. I have a student that’s a junior this year who received the same award as a junior. It’s about finding your kid’s thing and thinking about their high school experience. One of my coaches and mentors wrote a book called the “C Student’s Guide to Scholarships”. She had a C average, but she wrote solid essays and was a very good communicator. Even now she makes her money writing and doing speeches. That talent was uncovered in her scholarship process. What I find is that if you can work with your kids to find their thing, the money will follow. If you can zoom in and amplify that, they’re going to be better suited for their major. People are going to believe them more. Demari is a “math nerd,” so it wouldn’t make sense to put him in sports. He can’t write about it with passion, so nobody’s going to believe that about him. I had a student last year who came to me with a 2.9, who was into environmental topics. He was at environmental academy school and all those things, but he never talked about it. A lot of people didn’t even know he was that kid. We had to really work on him talking about himself that way as a Black male because he’s not the stereotypical Black male and everybody else expected him to be something else. He was also in the orchestra, so he defied a lot of stereotypes. And while he did that for himself, it was very hard for him to express that to the public because he was very aware that others were expecting something else from him. But he did well in the scholarship process as well.
Is it difficult to motivate teenagers about caring about their futures?
This goes back to my public school teaching days, because I would do service projects with my kids in math class even though they hated math. The kids that came into my room hated math because I was their second math teacher. For the last five years of my career, I was typically what they call the intensive math teacher. My kids were there because they had failed the state exam. They didn’t want to be in my class for the most part. They were getting two doses of the thing that they hated the most and the thing that they had failed at, and so this is a recipe for disaster. I had to find a way to overcome that. What I found was that they started focusing on others rather than themselves while doing service but applying the math while they did it. We built an outdoor classroom and redid the rec area for a foster home that some of the kids attended from the high school where I taught. We used math to do it. We used the semicircle, the Pythagorean theorem, the arc of a circle, and we learned about linear equations and slope to determine how to predict whether we were going to hit our money goal or not. We did a lot of geometry with spacing because we bought some exercise equipment and calculated where to put it. I use a similar process for my CollegeMode students.
Relevance is important in subjects like this?
Making learning relevant to the kid is important to motivate them and making it reachable. Students like them, I had to keep reminding them of who they were (not what their test scores said). Even though they don’t fully accept this because it’s probably not cool in their environment to be this person, I had to keep reminding them of what they were capable. I’m always trying to find out “who is this kid?” What do they like? What are they into, and why have they not been as successful as they could be? I keep following up on those things. For example, with the environmental student, I kept talking about the environment and what a difference he could make in the future and what a difference he had already made and kept reminding him of that. He had failed the state exam and I reminded him repeatedly when he was having trouble with the SAT and ACT, “You’ve done this before, you’ve overcome this hurdle, so you can do it again.” Monday nights when I do test prep with my kids, we talk about everything from tv shows to macaroni and cheese. I used to do a series of posts on Facebook the night after I would do test prep and share what we talked about that was tied into test prep that night. The group dynamic really helps them to see that there are other kids just like them who may be struggling through this, but we’re all going to get there together. We put the younger kids in the room with the older kids so they can watch their journey and they know that their success is also possible for them. So those are big motivational components that I include in my programming and the way I do things.
Are there any new projects or additions to current projects that you’re excited about?
We are looking forward to a couple things, but I think the biggest thing is we have built out a brand-new content platform. And we’re excited to be able to take that now and use it to help students in the community and use it to help students who come through my regular programming. We are looking at growing CollegeMode Academy beyond just parents signing their kids up. We’ve worked with the library in the past, but we didn’t have a content platform to say “Hey, here’s a place where your teen advisory board can log on and you can check in with them now plus have an online community for them.” That’s the biggest thing we’re looking forward to in 2022. We’re also continuing our newest tradition, Debt-Free College Week, and we’ll be doing that again in April. We’re excited to change things up a little bit, get more people involved in that and just show people that debt-free college is possible.
