In 1959 Fidel Castro led 9,000 military guerrillas into Havana, Cuba, in an attempt to topple Fulgencio Batista’s regime. Individuals holding prominent positions in Batista’s government feared for their lives and fled. Although too young to have memories of her own about Cuba’s political turmoil, Ana Mari Cauce, Ph.D., president of the University of Washington, was there. Her father, Batista’s minister of education, was one of those government officials forced to flee.

It was like a scene out of the movie Godfather II, says Dr. Cauce. “He left straight from a New Year’s Eve party. He and my mother spent time in Argentina and Chile. They didn’t think the revolution would last very long. The idea was that they would go back fairly soon,” says Dr. Cauce. 

She and her brother remained safe with their aunt and grandmother in Cuba. When her parents realized they could never return to their native land, Dr. Cauce and her brother boarded a Pan Am airliner with their aunt, and they flew the 30 minutes from Cuba to Miami. There they were reunited with their mother and father.        

The family settled into a modest, two-bedroom home. Eventually, her grandmother and aunt came to live there as well. The only work her parents could find was in factories. “I had a happy childhood. I didn’t realize we were poor, so to speak, until we were filling out financial aid forms for college,” says Dr. Cauce.    

A Promise of Accessibility

 Dr. Cauce’s childhood in Miami would later inform her views on access to higher education. Throughout her career, she has advocated for students whose financial situations preclude them from attending college. As executive vice provost at Washington, she created a program making the university more accessible to low-income students. “It was inspired in part by my research with low-income Latino and African American youth and also by my own experience growing up,” says Dr. Cauce. 

It was important that low-income students viewed Washington as an accessible option. “If they had the talent and the drive to make it to college, income and the cost of college wasn’t going to be a factor,” says Dr. Cauce. 

The program she created was called the Husky Promise, and it’s still in existence today. Through the program, Pell-eligible students can attend Washington tuition-free. In many cases, the university even covers their housing costs. “Every year I write a letter to every principal of every public high school across the state reminding them to tell their students about the Husky Promise,” says Dr.Cauce.  

Though no fault of their own, low-income parents of high school students are often misinformed about accessibility to higher education. They’re discouraged by the growing number of newspaper and magazine articles about college graduates mired in debt, sometimes owing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Aspirations are then cut short,” says Dr. Cauce.     

Each school year about 9,000 low-income students at Washington are educated through the Husky Promise. Since its inception, over 41,000 students have availed themselves of the program. “(They’ve) completed their bachelor’s degrees without paying a penny in tuition,” says Dr. Cauce.

Understanding Her Students’ Burdens

It’s a misconception that students drop out of college because they are failing or are academically inadequate. Burdens outside the classroom take their toll. Family obligations, work, and lack of support become obstacles students can’t avoid. With a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale and having compiled reams of data from research she’s conducted on low-income youth of color and homeless youth, Dr. Cauce knows how to help students transition to college, perform well, and graduate.

Some students “freak out” when they earn a C for the first time. They want to pack it in, says Dr. Cauce. Throughout high school, they’ve earned nothing but As and Bs. When they see a C on their transcript, their world caves in. “That doesn’t mean that you should stop. You can persist. It’s not unusual for someone to have a rough time in their first quarter or two,” says Dr. Cauce.  

Dr. Cauce envisions a higher education system that assists and supports low-income and first-generation students who don’t have the knowledge to navigate higher ed.  

Reigniting Interest in Healthcare

Over the past two years, the pandemic has raised awareness of societal inequities of all types, says Dr. Cauce. Spending endless days at home, Americans consumed more news than ever and witnessed entire communities upended. They’ve seen people of color, especially African Americans, getting shot. “We were digesting it from our homes...Some communities have lost a lot more people to COVID. Some communities found it a lot easier to get vaccinated than others,” says Dr. Cauce.

However bleak, this situation has ignited interest in the health science fields, especially for low-income students. The University of Washington is the largest healthcare system in the state and it’s critical that it meets everyone’s healthcare needs and focuses on health equity. That requires, says Dr. Cauce, considering the social and environmental determinants of health that are important to the LatinX community. “Some of the things that put us at risk are environmental and social,” says Dr. Cauce. 

 When Dr. Cauce launched a population health initiative at Washington some years back, she had difficulty convincing stakeholders that community health was interconnected. “People tend to see health as an individual thing… The pandemic has made it clear that we need to worry about the health of entire communities because anyone’s health can very rapidly become everyone’s health,” says Dr. Cauce.

Throughout her career, Dr. Cauce has advocated for women and minorities in the STEM fields. Naturally, when people think of healthcare, their thoughts spring immediately to doctors. But there’s a range of healthcare careers students can pursue. Some people develop vaccines in labs. Others develop tools that allow patients to confer with their doctors without leaving their homes. “I don’t know how we would have gotten through this pandemic without things like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. These are good fields that lead to meaningful work, where you can make a good living and support your family. We want to make sure (that Washington) students know the range of work that’s available,” says Dr. Cauce. 

Making a living is important, of course, but that’s not all there is to a career. “When we ask women and students of color (we find) that they are going into higher education because they want to give back,” says Dr. Cauce. Higher education has to do a better job of selling this aspect of the STEM fields. 

Keeping Democracy Strong Through Critical Thinking 

As Dr. Cauce guides Washington into the future, she’s committed to ensuring that it remains affordable to all students, no matter their socio-economic background, and that it continues to offer excellent affordable educational programs at all levels of higher education. “We want to prepare the next generation as part of the highly educated workforce our state needs,” says Dr. Cauce. “It’s important for our state and our people to be economically competitive on a global scale.” 

One way citizens become economically competitive is to learn to think critically and be engaged. Both skills, says Dr, Cauce, will strengthen American democracy. “The last few years have made it clear that we can’t take our democracy for granted. Education is important for workforce development, but it’s also important in terms of engaged citizenship and democracy,” says Dr. Cauce.