An 11-year-old charity -- cited as one of the nation's "most effective K-16 outreach programs" -- is changing the lives of minorities across the United States by helping them earn college degrees, Education Week reports in its March 22 issue.
The New York City-based Posse Foundation helps build ethnic and economic diversity in some of America's more prestigious schools. The foundation does this by helping prepare minority students for college work, and then sends them to school in so-called "posses" of seven to 10 people.
The foundation's goal is to see people from traditionally underrepresented groups not only enroll in a good college or university, but to excel once there and graduate.
"We figured, why not send a group of teams of kids to college together with a support group?" Posse Foundation founder Debbie Bial told the newspaper.
The program is successful, Education Week reports. About 90 percent of all Posse participants have graduated, and the foundation has awarded more than $17 million in scholarships to send nearly 300 students to college.
The foundation selects student leaders from public schools in New York and Boston, then grants them full scholarships to one of the institutions that have partnered with the program: Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.; Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.; and Wheaton College in Norton, Mass.
Scholarships can be lost if the student does not maintain his or her grades.
More than 700 nominated students apply for 50 merit-based scholarships each year. Scholarship recipients tend to be students with mediocre grades and average standardized test scores. The idea is to give these students a chance, because most colleges would overlook them for admission.
The participating schools provide the scholarships and pay an annual $30,000 fee to the Posse Foundation for programming and overhead. The foundation also receives 70 percent of its money from individual and corporate donors. Past corporate sponsors have included AT&T; Corp., GE Capital, the Citigroup Foundation and Merrill Lynch, the newspaper reports.
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