SPONSORED: Montclair State—An Engine of Opportunity for First-Generation Students

In comparison to its glitzy neighbor in Princeton, New Jersey’s Montclair State University cuts a relatively low profile. But its impact on the region is just as profound. Montclair is New Jersey’s second largest public university, with 21,000 students—the majority of whom are racial minorities and half of whom are the first in their families to go to college. 

Montclair is also among the top-ranked colleges in Washington Monthly’s 2025 College Guide and Rankings as a “Best Bang for the Buck” institution in the Northeast. In this sponsored episode, senior editor Anne Kim speaks with Montclair’s president, Jonathan Koppell, about the unique features of his school. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, iTunes and YouTube.

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Anne Kim: Tell us a little bit more about Montclair State University. I know that you’re located just outside New York City, and the photos and videos I’ve seen show a gorgeous campus with white buildings and red roofs, but can you give us a little bit more about the geography and the history of the school?

Jonathan Koppell: People see the pictures of our campus and say, “You must be in Southern California!” or something like that, because we’ve got this Spanish mission-style architecture. But as you noted, we’re actually in northern New Jersey, about 10 miles due west of midtown Manhattan. We may be as well known to people as we should be, but we’re the second largest university in New Jersey.

We’re proud of the fact that we are ranked by Washington Monthly as a top-ranked university in New Jersey, owing to our status as an engine of economic social mobility. About half of our students are on track to be the first in their family to graduate from college. We are a majority minority institution—a majority of our students are from underrepresented groups.

And our outcomes vastly exceed what one might project based on the demographics of our students. But what really is important thing is that we are a better institution because of this profile with outstanding outcomes from an academic point of view. 

And that’s what I’m particularly proud about. There’s this unstated notion that if you’re accessible, you must be making compromises. We’re not making compromises. We are highly accessible, but also a high achieving university. 

We’re very much committed to public service, both in terms of the university’s community engagement and at the same time encouraging public service in our students.

Montclair is a little bit of a hidden treasure, but we’re trying to change that. It’s a school that I think more people need to know about because it shows what higher education can and should be.

In some ways, we are producing more significant outcomes in terms of the contribution to the dynamism  of the economy and the delivery on the promise of the American dream that if you work hard and apply yourself, you can be put in a position to change the fortunes, not only for yourself, but for your family and your community.

The majority of our students are working; they’re balancing family and jobs. About a third of our students live on campus. The majority do not. 

Anne Kim: One of the reasons that Montclair is among the top ranked schools in the Washington Monthly’s College Guide is as a “Best Bang for the Buck” institution in the Northeast is affordability. I want to drill down a little bit on this question because that is probably one of the biggest concerns that a lot of students and parents have. According to the numbers that we have for you, the net price of attending Montclair is about $11,300, which is below the national average net price. So can you talk a little bit more about what Montclair does to offer an affordable education? And in particular, I saw on your website two really interesting programs, the Red Hawk Advantage Award and the Garden State Guarantee. 

Jonathan Koppell: First of all, I think it is important to say that while we’re proud of those numbers, they are, I think in many cases, still a lift for a lot of families to figure out. And so I don’t want to ever seem glib and say like, well, it’s no big deal. It is a big deal and it’s a stretch for a lot of our families. 

And of course the numbers you gave are averages. Some people are in a different spot. Some people pay nothing because of the nature of financial aid.

I think that we do a good job of keeping costs down. We’re proud that we have the fewest number of employees per degree in the state of New Jersey, and we try to be efficient, being mindful of our students and their families at every step of the way. 

But it’s also the case that the degree has to have value in order for that equation to work. I think a lot of times people say that the way to make college more affordable is just to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. We don’t do that. We try to ensure that the programs are of high quality and that the preparation for our students is such that they enter the job market in a position to do well and to thrive. Giving somebody an inexpensive degree is not necessarily giving them a valuable degree.

I’m a little bit reluctant to lean too far into the income argument because a lot of our students are not trying to optimize their income. If you’re coming here to be a teacher or a nurse or a social worker or a counselor or any number of professions, it’s not because you think you’re going to be a millionaire. It’s because you want to be in a place to do good in the world, to have a satisfying career, and to take care of your family. 

What do we do to try and help make it affordable? You mentioned the Garden State Guarantee. The Garden State Guarantee is a state program  which ensures that people at certain income levels can attend  at no cost. 

But we wanted to complement that with our own program, the Red Hawk Advantage, which extend that support higher up the income ladder. One of the concerns I have about the way we do financial aid is that folks in the middle economically are squeezed because they don’t have access to state financial aid and they don’t have access to Pell, but they’re not wealthy enough where they can easily just write a check. And so we’ve tried to extend our provision of financial aid from our university resources beyond the levels of the Garden State Guarantee or Pell because we do recognize how difficult it is to make college affordable. 

Anne Kim: I want to talk a little bit more about what kinds of experiences students get to prepare themselves for the workforce. I understand what you’re saying about that’s not the only reason students should come to college. And I think that there has been a very transactional characterization of the college-student relationship with a huge amount of emphasis on ROI to the detriment of the college experience. That being said, it does seem, based on your website, that students are having incredible work-based learning experiences. The College Tour video featured on your website talks about students interning on Wall Street and working on Broadway. You have the best college radio station in the country. These seem like incredible experiences that will set people up well.

Jonathan Koppell: I want to be clear that I think most students do have in mind that college is going to set them up for a professional, for professional success. I just don’t think that everybody judges professional success by the size of their paycheck.

 We have one of the finest performing arts colleges in the country, bar none, and our students are on Broadway and they are in Hollywood and they’re on television and they’re fantastic dancers and musicians. Very few people in those professions, notwithstanding Taylor Swift, end up as billionaires or millionaires, but they have very fulfilling careers.

And they’re set up to be successful in part because we are really focused on giving students opportunities to learn with hands-on experiences while they’re still in school. So you mentioned our award-winning radio station, WMSC, but we have a variety of places like that radio station where students are learning while they’re doing. 

We just launched our School of Communications and Media as a standalone college of communications and media. And the record there of students finding employment afterwards is phenomenal. 

We are unique in hosting our own streaming platform, which no other university has. We have our own Red Hawk Sports Network where every Montclair State University sporting event is covered by a crew of students  producing high-level broadcasts of baseball, football, you name it. 

We’ve now emerged as an R2 research university.  Our research funding has gone up. That creates learning opportunities for our students and it puts them in a better position when they graduate. 

We’re going to continue to try and improve in this regard and in particular try to level the playing field. One of the issues when you have a population like ours is that it’s awfully difficult for a student who’s working, in many cases full time, to afford to be able to go to college and also take an unpaid internship. 

We’re trying to figure out how to not only create those learning opportunities, but have them be paid learning opportunities so that they’re accessible to the full range of our student population. 

Anne Kim: What is the university doing to make sure that students do, in fact, walk across the stage to collect their diplomas? I saw on your site that you have several programs that are actually geared toward that, especially because you have so many first-generation students coming through your doors. It seems like you have an early college program and a summer bridge program. Can you talk a little bit more about what these programs are as well as other supports that you might offer?

Jonathan Koppell: I appreciate you calling attention to that question because as you know, there’s a lot of critical attention around higher education these days. Part of it is this notion that college isn’t worth it and so on, but part of the frustration is that a lot of people go to college and never finish.

And they are right to be frustrated. I actually think you could make the argument that somebody who starts college and doesn’t finish is worse off than if they never started at all because now they’ve got some debt, they have a psychological burden of having failed. 

From my perspective, when a student arrives at our campus, it’s our moral obligation to see them walk across the stage. And we can’t just say, well, you need to try harder. We have to look in the mirror and say, “Well, what do we need to do differently in order to make sure those students succeed?” 

So our summer bridge program gives students the opportunity to engage and to learn how to be a college student in the summer before they start so that they’re not hitting the college campus cold. They get some training and experience in how to live at a college and how  take on coursework independently. For many students, this is a big transition. 

Part of it is just getting people comfortable with the language and the mechanics of college and just establishing that this is a place where they belong. And that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do with our students who maybe have nagging voices in the back of their head telling them, “I don’t know if I can do this” and so on. 

We try to be very intentional about creating that sense of belonging,  and we have wrapped a good portion of our student life programs under something we call the Office of Student Belonging because we think that’s a major hurdle that many students have to overcome. 

We try to also monitor very carefully how students are progressing on their journey so that if they are running into hurdles or even a little hiccup, we identify that early, we intervene and try and help them before it’s too late. 

Anne Kim: Let’s go back now to something you said early on in this conversation about how Montclair is not just a public university but a public serving university. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Jonathan Koppell: When people say public university, what they usually mean by that is you get some portion of your budget from the state, which we do. Unfortunately, as a percentage of the total budget, it goes down every year, but we’re very grateful for the people’s investment  in the university. 

But our publicness is more about our mission than our budget. And I consider our mission to serve the public interest. And certainly we do that in the ways that we already talked about by making education accessible to a population that’s representative of the whole state. But I believe universities can do much more. 

We have thousands of smart, energetic, passionate people. We have students who are eager to serve and to apply the things that they’re learning in the classroom. We have faculty who are doing cutting-edge research and are knowledgeable about many of the challenges that our society faces. And we have a staff that creates  centers and programs that have capacity to engage the world. And if you just torqued all of those things a little bit and pointed them outwards, you can have a massive impact in the community. 

Now you can’t waltz into the neighborhood and say, we have all the answers, we know what to do. You have to be humble  and be a good partner, which means listening to the community, asking them what they want, asking them how we can be  supportive, not big footing all over the place and saying, you know, we’re in charge. But if you build those partnerships, you can do phenomenal things. 

We’re very excited about, for example, our work in Paterson, which is an unappreciated or underappreciated city here in northern New Jersey, remarkable history. We’ve set up the One Square Mile program there, which is about trying to catalyze transformation in a distinct geography in a tough community. I think that by concentrating our effort there and dealing with things like public health, economic stability, financial literacy, quality of schools, and housing, we can have a big effect. We also have a unique partnership with the Montclair Department of Public Health, which is linked with our School of Public Health.

Our business students are out there doing all kinds of interesting things, working with small businesses, helping residents do their tax returns. Our science students are out there in the community, measuring water quality, looking for algae blooms and other disruptors to save drinking water. Our education programs are creating pipelines of teachers through  Red Hawks Rising, a signature program in Newark, which is having a huge effect on schools there. You can orient a university around the needs and aspirations of your community, and at the same time, each of those programs creates learning opportunities for our students.

We’re not the only university that’s doing this, but I think all universities should embrace this idea. And frankly, I think that the more higher education does that, the more positive the feeling will be about higher education generally. 

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