After more than a quarter century building the support systems that help first-generation and underserved students succeed, David Shein has retired from Bard College to carry that work into a wider field as an independent educational consultant.
After more than 25 years at Bard College, David Shein retired to launch an independent educational consulting practice. The title he carried out the door, Vice President for Student Success and Network Integration and William Lensing Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, was the last in a long sequence, but the work underneath it never really changed. For a quarter of a century, Shein’s job was to find the places where students fall through the cracks and to build something there. He remains committed to making the full college experience accessible to students who might otherwise remain on the margins.
A Career Built on Absence
Shein’s career was built on a foundation of absence. He was a first-generation college student before the term entered common usage. There was no older sibling who had navigated financial aid forms, no parent who understood the unwritten rules of campus life, no family dinner-table conversation about which major might lead where. He describes the experience of navigating college without a roadmap as integral to his formation as a student and foundational to his professional practice.
That experience is far more common than the public conversation about elite higher education usually admits, and far more consequential. First-generation students now make up roughly 54 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, about 8.2 million people. Yet they graduate at a rate of just 24 percent, compared with 59 percent for peers who have at least one parent with a college degree, according to data compiled by FirstGen Forward (NASPA). The gap persists even among students who arrive academically prepared and financially secure, which tells you the obstacle is rarely academic ability. It is, more often, the absence of a map. Shein spent his career drawing those maps for other people.
The Philosophy of Access
David attended public high school, in the suburbs north of New York City, He was active on his high school’s policy debate team and in its theater club and he worked, constantly and from an early age. At 11 or 12 he talked his older brother into splitting a newspaper route with him; once he had his working papers, he struck out on his own. Between the ages of 14 and 20 he worked at a department store, a day camp, a cemetery, a pet store, and several libraries, plus any number of back yards in the summer and driveways in the winter.
He attended SUNY Oswego, where he majored in philosophy and political science, earning departmental awards in both fields and graduating magna cum laude- the first person in his family to go to, alone finish, college. Upon graduation, he went to graduate school- first in Ohio and then in New York City. This meant working to make ends meet and he leapt at the offer of a full-time administrative position at Lehman Colleges His work there as Coordinator of the Core Curriculum and director of the tutoring center, put him alongside the classroom rather than strictly inside it. Those roles, administrative but proximate to teaching, sparked the questions that would occupy him for the next two and a half decades: how do students actually learn, and what gets in the way of their success?
Building an Infrastructure of Belonging
David arrived at Bard College in 1999 with a specific charge: create a writing and tutoring center, and serve as the college’s first-ever disability support provider. He stayed for over 25 years, cycling through a long list of administrative appointments while teaching in the First-Year Seminar and Philosophy programs along the way. The titles changed; the mission didn’t.
What he built tended to outlast any one role. The Learning Commons (first the Academic Services Center, later the Academic Resources Center) became a physical and intellectual space where students could get tutoring, writing support, and academic-skills coaching without stigma. Disability Support Services turned what had been an informal process into a coordinated system with a single point of accountability. The Center for Student Life & Advising, which he co-founded, integrated academic advising with broader student support, built on the recognition that a student struggling in a class might also be struggling with a family crisis, and that students were not served well by treating those as separate problems.
He also helped secure accreditation for more than a dozen credit- and degree-granting programs, developed Bard’s supplemental academic advising program, and helped build and launch the college’s online Global Degree. As his work extended across Bard’s international and domestic networks, including its dual-degree partnerships and the Open Society University Network (now the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century), so did the constituency he was trying to serve.
He describes the core of all of it as a commitment to making the full college experience accessible, to empowering students to participate meaningfully in what can often feel like an alien environment, and to helping them connect with their education in ways that matter beyond their time on campus.
Advising, and the Fulbright Pipeline
The clearest measure of that advising work may be where his students ended up. Shein advised many hundreds of undergraduates over his career, many of whom went on to win competitive postgraduate awards, including Fulbright scholarships. Bard has been named a top producer of Fulbright U.S. students by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Chronicle of Higher Education in multiple recent years- a distinction Shein repeatedly helped celebrate on the college’s behalf. In 2019, he was himself awarded a Fulbright for his work in international education.
Who Deserves a Humanities Education
Shein also has been involved with the Clemente Course in the Humanities, helping launch courses in Poughkeepsie in 1999 and in Kingston in 2012. The Clemente Course delivers a free, college-level introduction to the humanities (philosophy, literature, U.S. history, art history, and critical writing) in under-resourced communities, to adults who would not otherwise have access to it. It is not a mere gesture:the program awards six transferable college credits for roughly 110 hours of instruction across five disciplines, removes the usual barriers by providing books, transportation, and childcare at no cost, and has enrolled more than 10,000 adult students across some 30 sites. In 2014, President Obama awarded the program the National Humanities Medal.
It operates on the premise that intellectual life should not be the exclusive domain of those who can afford it or who arrived at adulthood with the right preparation. Classes meet in libraries and community centers, places chosen for their accessibility and civic character. Students range widely in age and background; some have never attended college, others started and stopped. What they share is a desire to engage with ideas: to read Plato or Tocqueville or Frederick Douglass, and to argue about what makes a good life or a just society.
The Shape of a Career in Retrospect
When Poughkeepsie Day School closed abruptly in 2020, Bard offered the private school’s rising seniors a way to complete their final year through the college… The program drew on Bard’s early-college model, and families were told to contact David. It was the kind of improvisational response to crisis that ran through his entire administrative career: identify the need, build the structure, open the door.
