Nonprofit Group Prepares Students to Handle Demands of Life on Campus

Winning a full-tuition scholarship to Grinnell College was just the first of several challenges

Lester Alemán would face during his college career. For starters, before Mr. Alemán left his hometown of Los Angeles four years ago for the remote campus of Grinnell, in Iowa, he had never traveled farther east than Las Vegas.

The college had a van waiting for his group at the Des Moines airport, and he says the ride to Grinnell’s campus was slightly unnerving. “It took about an hour,” says Mr. Alemán, “but it seemed like longer because there was nothing to see outside, just cornstalks.”

He came to Grinnell as part of a contingent of 10 students from Los Angeles handpicked by the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit group in New York that has shown that students from inner-city public high schools can thrive at selective colleges and universities.

The group’s work is rooted in the belief that a small, multicultural cadre of carefully chosen and prepared students can support each other, furthering their own academic and personal ambitions while providing an oft-needed dose of diversity at the mainly small, liberal-arts colleges it works with. The institutions reciprocate by providing the students with four-year, full-tuition scholarships, as well as additional financial aid on a case-by-case basis.

And while Posse is not an affirmative-action program, its approach accomplishes many of the same goals, as the students chosen reflect the demographics of their home cities.

Mr. Alemán, whose parents were born in Nicaragua, says he remembers vividly his initial feelings of isolation, particularly as part of the first Posse contingent to attend Grinnell.

“But we had each other, that reminder of home,” he says. And every semester he had at least one class with a fellow Posse scholar; they would proofread each other’s papers, study together, and organize study groups with other classmates.

He says the value of his posse hit him when he met other students from urban environments who didn’t have a similar support system.

“There were plenty of other kids on that boat,” says Mr. Alemán, “but we had such an advantage that enabled us to jump out of our comfort zone relatively quickly.”

Beyond ‘Comfort Zones’

Posse scholars seem to have an uncanny ability not only to “jump out of their comfort zones,” but also to become standout students, no doubt due to the innate qualities of leadership and motivation that the Posse Foundation emphasizes in selecting scholarship recipients. The organization estimates that 70 percent of Posse students either form new organizations or become the presidents of existing ones.

At Vanderbilt University alone, activities that Posse scholars have started include a gospel choir, an organization for Hispanic students, an academic minor in African-American studies, and a support group for rape survivors.

At Grinnell, Mr. Alemán says that two members of his posse played on the football team, one became an All-Star volleyball player, and others joined environmental, anti-sweatshop, and other student groups. Mr. Alemán’s own extracurricular activities included a stint on the student senate and serving as the first undergraduate director of the Stonewall Resource Center, which provides resources for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students and runs educational programs and activities on campus. Along the way, he found time to study in London and complete an internship with the Los Angeles school district’s Educational Equity Compliance Division.

Now 22, he is a trainer at Posse’s Los Angeles chapter, helping prepare and follow up with students who will be attending Grinnell and the University at Wisconsin at Madison.

Posse students also excel as scholars, with 90 percent graduating from the 28 colleges and universities the group currently works with, a figure that is far higher than the national average of 50 percent and quite remarkable for disadvantaged students attending elite institutions.

Despite such successes, Deborah Bial, the organization’s president, readily admits that life on campus is not always idyllic for Posse scholars. “Like every other college student, there are dramas — you break up with your girlfriend, you struggle with a class, anything that you can imagine happens, believe me.”

And arriving at colleges where their peers may focus on Greek life and have expensive cars and lavish allowances can be disconcerting, as can the reality of being a minority on what may seem like a monochrome campus.

“Posse students, just like people all over the United States, especially from underrepresented groups, encounter biases and stereotypes,” says Ms. Bial, “and that’s just part of what happens in life. But I think Posse scholars come equipped with training in how to deal with that and how to talk about it in a constructive way, and move forward.”

At Denison University, for example, Romero Huffstead recently created a “unity handshake” that originated among members of his posse, but has since been adopted by hundreds of his classmates and faculty members as a sign of both greeting and respect.

Involved Students

Dan Weiss, president of Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., says that Posse scholars are student leaders on his campus, which has recruited groups from the New York chapter for five years and has also begun recruiting students from Posse’s Washington chapter.

Says Mr. Weiss: “Everywhere you look on our campus, at the kinds of activities where I’m meeting students or attending events, more often than not Posse students are involved. So they have a disproportionate contribution to the quality of the environment here, and that’s probably true at all the colleges and universities where they attend.”

And although the students bond during the eight-month precollegiate sessions they participate in before arriving on campus, Mr. Weiss is quick to add a caveat: “The great subtlety of Posse is that by creating that kind of a community, they have the comfort and the confidence to reach out beyond it. And that’s not intuitive; you’d think, OK, these people are going to hang out with each other all the time. But they don’t lean on each other as a clique. They lean on each other as a foundation and then they go out and do all kinds of things.”

“Each new posse that comes to campus,” says Mr. Weiss, “they’re not just 10 more kids who are going to do well. They’re 10 kids who are going to light the place up.”