DeAngela Burns-Wallace

DeAngela Burns-Wallace was a black teen from the inner city who went to a predominantly white Catholic high school and had a love for languages and all things international.

It was her undergraduate years at Stanford University where that all came together, she said — where she learned to be “that black intellectual woman.”

“Stanford was the first place that I felt like I didn’t have to choose between my identities,” Burns-Wallace said. “Higher education can and should be that for every undergraduate when they walk in that space — ‘how do I learn who I am?'”

Now, Burns-Wallace, 42, is in her first year as vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas. Most recently she was assistant vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri, but before that her first career was as a U.S. foreign service officer on three continents.

At KU, as she puts it, she’s the “lead advocate” for undergraduate student success. As head of the undergraduate studies unit, she oversees academic programs designed to ensure KU’s roughly 25,000 undergraduate students stay in school, progress academically and, ultimately, graduate.

DeAngela Burns-Wallace

Research indicates that the most common reasons undergrads leave college are academic difficulty, financial barriers, a lack of sense of belonging, poor “academic fit” and personal external factors, Burns-Wallace said.

Her work aims to combat the ones tied to academics, in particular. As vice provost for undergraduate studies she oversees programs including KU’s Academic Achievement and Access Center, Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Center for Undergraduate Research, KU Writing Center, Office of First-Year Experience, Undergraduate Advising Center and University Career Center.

As opposed to just creating such programs and having them available, Burns-Wallace said, it’s important to be strategic, proactive and “intentional” about plugging students into them.

Goals include helping students pick “best-fit” majors through advising, ensuring they’re not taking just any 30 credit hours in a year but the right 30 credit hours for their majors, or helping make sure they get connected to a mentor and plug into academic opportunities such as undergraduate research.

A lot of people many rungs down from Burns-Wallace on the organizational chart — from residence hall staff to academic advisers — make important face-to-face connections with the students, she said.

“What we’re trying to put into place are things that are more coordinated,” she said. “It helps make this place that may feel like this (Burns-Wallace spreads her hands wide) feel like this (then shrinks them together) to the student.”

Personal connections and places to plug in helped ensure her own success in college, Burns-Wallace said.

A native of Kansas City, Mo., Burns-Wallace was a first-generation college student but grew up knowing she was college-bound.

Her grandparents did not graduate from high school, and her mother did not go to college, Burns-Wallace said. Her father went to Southern Illinois University but only for about a year. He had a football scholarship but got injured and dropped out because he couldn’t pay for school, then never completed his degree.

Her family, especially her father, told her that education was her future, she said. “If you build whatever your future is on education, no one can take that away from you.”

Burns-Wallace said she applied to schools all over the country and ultimately chose Stanford “sight-unseen,” other than a picture or two in the pre-internet printed college viewbook.

Her admissions essay talked about standing on the shoulders of the generations before her in her quest to pursue a college education, Burns-Wallace said. When she got her admission letter from Stanford, a handwritten note from the dean of admissions saying her grandparents would be proud sealed the deal over all the other schools, Burns-Wallace said.

At Stanford she got a bachelor’s degree with dual majors in international relations and African and African-American studies. She went on to get her master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Off-shooting from a U.S. Department of State fellowship she’d received as an undergrad, Burns-Wallace’s first career was with the U.S. Foreign Service. She was trained in Mandarin Chinese and French, and for about eight years she worked in both southern and northern China, South Africa and Washington, D.C.

Her next job was back at Stanford, where she worked in admissions and, at the same time, completed her doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania — an executive program that required flying across the country monthly for two years.

When Burns-Wallace moved into Strong Hall early this year, she’d been working about six years at Missouri but was no stranger to the KU campus.

In 2013-14, she spent a year as an American Council on Education Emerging Leaders Fellow placed at KU. She had an office in Strong Hall and was at KU daily, shadowing Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little.

Burns-Wallace said KU’s stated commitment to increasing student retention and graduation — a goal the chancellor has repeatedly cited, including for minority students in particular — is a big reason she wanted the job she has now.

It’s “humbling” to be in a position to help students, she said.

“I love this work. The power of higher education and how transformative it is for our young people is something that we should not take for granted,” Burns-Wallace said. “If we get this right, more and more and more of our students are going to thrive.”