Foundations Look Beyond Admissions to Keep Colleges Diverse

Nationwide a small but growing number of foundations are working to help ensure that needy

and minority students not only enter college, but also exit with a degree in hand.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, just over one in four college students who come from families with annual incomes of $25,000 or less will attain a bachelor’s degree within six years. But that figure jumps to nearly 60 percent for those students whose families earn annual incomes of $70,000 or more.

Several nonprofit groups, such as the Posse Foundation, in New York, now believe that the key to raising college-graduation rates among low-income students and others who face disadvantages is to provide support throughout the college experience.

“Think of all the hurdles and stumbling blocks that kids go through to get into the door of college,” says Caroline Altman Smith, a program officer at the Lumina Foundation for Education, in Indianapolis. “If we just did a better job of supporting those students who made it that far, we would double the number of college graduates in this country.”

Among the examples:

• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $1.5-million over two years and the Lumina Foundation $2.4-million over the same period to “Access to Success,” a new national effort to cut in half by 2015 the gaps in both college attendance and graduation rates that divide low-income and minority students from other young Americans.

  Participants in the ambitious program include 19 college systems in 16 states and Puerto Rico that collectively serve about one-third of the low-income and minority students who attend four-year public colleges and universities in the United States. The effort is being led by the Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads, both in Washington.

• The Gates Foundation has also allocated $10-million to the D.C. College Access Program, which serves all 14,000 public-high-school students in Washington’s school system, as well as four charter schools, to expand its work and provide more scholarship aid. The group monitors and counsels nearly 5,300 students who have gone on to attend some 500 institutions around the country.

  “We believe everyone’s college material, unless they give us a reason not to,” says Argelia Rodriguez, the organization’s president. “Given the dysfunctional school system we’ve had in the past, we don’t believe you can really judge kids when they don’t have books or heat, so for us to cherry-pick would be unfair.”

• The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, in Lansdowne, Va., has pledged $3-million this year alone to continue its Young Scholars Program, which works with roughly 250 “high potential” students from across the nation whose average family income hovers around $25,000. The foundation begins working with the students in eighth grade, and will select approximately 75 new scholars next year. After the students are admitted to college, the foundation continues to make its educational advisers available to them, particularly during the critical freshman year.
• The Goldman Sachs Foundation, in New York, has committed $2.6-million since 2000 to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, in San Francisco, including support of the fund’s “scholar chapters” on 26 campuses nationwide. The chapters provide resources to help Hispanic scholarship recipients succeed academically, hone skills they will need in their professional lives, and serve as mentors to younger students.

Income Differences

Disadvantaged students — even those considered “high achieving” — often falter once they get to college. Compared with students from affluent families, low-income students are less likely to have parents who attended college, to come from schools that offered rigorous curricula, and to have had access to community groups that ran high-quality extracurricular programs.

Joshua Wyner, executive vice president of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, recently wrote a report on these issues in conjunction with Civic Enterprises, in Washington. The key finding: Although large numbers of high-achieving lower-income students are enrolling in college, they are far less likely (59 percent) to graduate than their higher-income peers (77 percent). The report defined as “high potential” those students who scored in the top 25th percentile on national standardized tests.

The study also found that students attending highly selective colleges fared better, in part because such colleges tend to be smaller and offer more-personalized instruction than large campuses.

“The professor is much more likely to be available,” says Mr. Wyner, “and you’re going to be in a class with 20 students rather than 300 students. I’ve been in those huge lecture halls, and they’re intimidating.”

Similarly, while tactics to be used in the new Access to Success program supported by the Gates and Lumina foundations will vary from system to system, it advocates efforts to overhaul remedial courses and huge introductory courses with large enrollments.

The Access to Success program also emphasizes that colleges and universities need to maximize the amount of financial aid they offer. Disadvantaged students not fortunate enough to land a coveted full-tuition scholarship at a four-year college often struggle financially and incur significant student debt. Furthermore, Mr. Wyner and others say that the “buying power” of federal grants awarded to needy students has gone down, as tuition costs have continued to spiral upward.

To help ameliorate the situation, in January the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, made a $3-million grant to the Institute for College Access and Success, in Berkeley, Calif., for its Project on Student Debt, which works on public-policy solutions that can help reduce the burden of college-loan debt for American students and their families. All too often, say Pew officials, the threat of crippling debt can cause students to drop out of college or dissuade them from attending at all.

Beyond ‘Brightest’

While the Jack Kent Cooke and other foundations focus on the best and brightest, other groups serve broader numbers of students.

The Lumina Foundation, for instance, stresses efforts to provide all students with the opportunity to graduate from college. This year the foundation allocated $23-million, out of a $50-million grant-making pot, for what it calls “attainment” — as opposed to “access” — programs. And it plans to shift a greater percentage of dollars to college-achievement programs in the future, says Ms. Altman Smith, and to urge other grant makers to follow suit.

“Our grantees frequently express frustration when we challenge them to go out and raise matching dollars,” she says. “They come back and say, ‘You’re the only show in town,’ that other foundations aren’t focusing on this issue.”

One problem that Lumina is tackling is helping to make sure their college and university grantees provide the specialized counseling, academic guidance, and “social acclimation” programs many disadvantaged students need.

In addition, Ms. Altman Smith says that her foundation encourages colleges to collect and use hard data, rather than anecdotal evidence, “to get a real picture of what the student experience looks like on their campus. What classes have incredibly high failure rates? What groups of students are having the most trouble, and where are they having that trouble?”

“A lot more could be done by colleges to accommodate and serve these students, who often lead very complex lives,” adds Ms. Altman Smith, “and it really requires some creative and dedicated outreach on the part of colleges to reach out to them and not give them ‘the right to fail,’ really being interventionist. They should feel a great sense of accountability.”

And while the Posse Foundation has been a Lumina grantee and Ms. Altman Smith applauds its approach, she says that she worries about the many teenagers who aren’t selected to participate in the program. (This year 7,000 students competed for 350 slots nationwide.)

“We’ve been in conversations with community-based and other groups that nominated kids for Posse but who didn’t make that final cut, and some organizations are really making a concerted effort to fill that gap. There are other services that could certainly help that student along their path, rather than risk having them just fade into the background.”