For promising students from subpar or middling urban high schools, there are plenty of scholarships, grants and programs to gain access to elite colleges. But once they’ve matriculated, there’s not always a safety net in place: they might be unprepared for the mountains of work, or overwhelmed by the distance from home, or shocked by the money they see their peers spending (or the amount of alcohol they’re drinking). With no familiar faces around, drop-out rates for these students run high.
Deborah Bial was a New York City teacher in the late 1980s when a former student explained to her why he had walked away from his scholarship: “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.” A light bulb went off: why not send these nontraditional yet motivated students to school in supportive teams?
Thus was the Posse Foundation born. Since 1989, Bial’s organization has sent nearly 5,000 students to 48 top colleges, full tuition waived, in groups of about 10. Through regular meetings in the months leading up to move-in, leadership training, constant on-campus group support and many shoulders to lean on, they graduate at a rate of 90 percent. After four years of helping each other through, they are like ambitious, close-knit families.
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Getting into a posse is no easy feat, and unlike college admissions, there’s no simple SAT-plus-GPA calculation. Instead, Posse Foundation administrators monitor students in group interviews that test for problem solving and teamwork. The non-intellectual attributes they’re checking for resemble the characteristic that Angela Duckworth, one of 2013’s MacArthur Geniuses, calls “grit.” Bial herself was a MacArthur Genius in 2007, and had developed a similar test, the Bial Dale Adaptability Index, with a $1.9 million Mellon grant earlier in her career. Continue reading “A Gang You’ll Want Your Kid to Join”