When Noah VanVooren was born with Down syndrome 18 years ago, doctors had a grim forecast for him—and one that didn’t include higher education. But nearly two decades later, VanVooren is defying the odds as he prepares to assume the role of a very happy freshman this fall at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin.
In the most heartwarming video you’ll watch all day, the high school senior opens his college acceptance letter in front of his family at his Little Chute, Wisc. home. His reaction? Pure joy. At one point he gets so excited he takes off his sweater and flexes his muscles in front of the camera.
Noah will be attending the college’s Cutting Edge Program, which is designed for students with intellectual developmental disabilities.
[ph]
The young man’s already had quite the banner year. You might remember a story from October when Noah, Little Chute’s varsity football team’s waterboy, got to suit up and score a touchdown for his school. The much-loved student was met with cheers from the crowd, and no one was more proud than his parents.
“He was born 18 years ago and the doctors told us that he would never be able to walk, talk, or do anything,” Noah’s father, Todd, says in the video below. “And then to see him 18 years to do this is amazing.” We couldn’t agree more.
[ph]
MORE: This Grandmother Is Helping People with Down Syndrome Gain Confidence
Tag: college
Soccer, Not Just a Pastime — but a Path to Citizenship
A year after arriving in New York City from Italy in 2009, the soft-spoken Reindorf Kyei, 18, was still struggling. He struggled with schoolwork, and he struggled at home. His mother was unemployed and his father was never home, working out of state to support the entire family and to maintain their legal residency status.
When Kyei was 7, his family had moved from their native Ghana to Italy in pursuit of economic opportunity, and then resettled again when his father landed a job in the United States. Torn between the three cultures, and speaking only broken English, Kyei and his family labored to fit into their new home.
Then, in March 2010, on a soccer field in the South Bronx, everything changed for Kyei. At the urging of his mother, he had sought out the youth coach of South Bronx United, a nonprofit soccer club based in one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods. Kyei started playing competitively with the club, and his teammates nicknamed him “Balo” — after Ghanian-Italian striker Mario Balotelli — a sentiment that carried special weight. Playing with South Bronx United not only provided an outlet for Kyei’s passion for the sport, but it also became the key to his dream: legal residency in the U.S.
MORE: Tired of Waiting for Immigration Reform, One Man Is Giving Undocumented Students a Shot at the American Dream
South Bronx United uses soccer as a way to engage with underprivileged kids, while providing them with tutoring, college prep and mentorship. Unlike other youth-mentoring programs that sometimes have a hard time keeping kids from dropping out, South Bronx United has a built-in draw. “They are always going to stay for the soccer,” says Andrew So, executive director of the club, which boasts a 99 percent retention rate.
The club has about 600 participants, who play on seven competitive teams and a recreational league. Staying true to the diversity of its South Bronx environment, the club is mostly made up of kids from immigrant families, and more than half were born outside the U.S. “That’s exactly the reason this program is so powerful. We have the added benefit here in the South Bronx because so many of our kids come from that [sports] culture and have that huge passion for soccer,” says So, a former high school teacher.
After joining the club in 2010, Kyei learned that his father had decided not to stay in the U.S. If he left, his children would be obligated to leave as well. However, Kyei, a sturdy central defender whose grades were improving through participation in the club’s tutoring and summer-school programs, had his heart set on something higher — a college scholarship. But that would require proper paperwork.
Through South Bronx United, pro bono attorneys helped him declare special immigrant juvenile status, which allows children to obtain green cards without mandatory parental approval. “At the beginning they tried to work with my dad, but he kept switching his mind about whether he wanted to stay [in America],” Kyei says. “Eventually, I just had to prove in a court that one of my parents, my dad, had abandoned me.”
ALSO: Meet the Undocumented Immigrants Who Created an App to Press for Immigration Reform
By the time his senior year came around, Kyei had a green card. He was also on the radar of a number of local colleges. During a game organized by South Bronx United, he caught the eye of Bloomfield College, a Division II college in New Jersey. After the school reviewed Kyei’s grades, which had drastically improved over the previous two years, it offered him a scholarship.
“We have a lot of immigrant youth who bring enormous challenges [around] language skills and things like that,” So says. “So we have kids who are very talented, but have not done well enough on SATs to qualify for a scholarship yet. That’s another reason educational components are so important for us.”
A higher degree helps down the line as well. Immigrant athletes who are in the U.S. on a visa need to be employable to keep it. A college degree helps with that. Meanwhile, players without the proper documents — many of whom may study in college through programs like Golden Door Scholars — may one day be eligible for amnesty, particularly if Congress passes new legislation similar to the DREAM Act (a bill that proposed giving legal status to illegal immigrants but was defeated in the Senate in 2010), which would grant residency to undocumented immigrants with a higher education.
DON’T MISS: Meet the People Hoping to Change the Face of Immigration in America
Kyei wouldn’t be headed to college without South Bronx United, he says. He is almost certain that he would be back in Italy or Ghana by now were it not for the club’s help. The same is true for other students in the club, such as Innocent, 21, and his 15-year-old brother, Paul, who came to the U.S. from Nigeria in 2008. (The club asked for the boys’ surname to be withheld in order to safeguard their efforts to gain residency.) They are working with the club in hopes of finally getting their green cards.
“We didn’t ever have Mommy and Daddy around,” says Innocent, whose parents returned to Nigeria in 2008, leaving him and his brother in the care of an uncle in New York. “[South Bronx United is] the reason I’m where I am, and there was no way we were ever going to get our cards without them.”
Innocent is now a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Paul is a winger for the club’s competitive travel team, and also aspires to receive a college scholarship one day.
“I don’t know where he would be without this,” Innocent says of his brother. “Nowhere, really. And the one thing he truly loves to do is play soccer.”
MORE: Paperwork Stood Between Immigrants and Their Dream, So This Group Stepped In
Life After the Military: Helping Veterans With Their Second Act
In June 2012, just a bit over a year since a back injury forced him into retirement from the United States Army, former Staff Sergeant David Carrell found himself in an air-conditioned Yale University seminar room with eight other veterans, discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” under the guidance of Professor Norma Thompson, director of undergraduate studies in the humanities department. It was a long way from the inside of a tank in Iraq.
Carrell, who had served in the Army for 12 years, was among the first veterans to participate in the Warrior-Scholar Project, an intensive summer program that aims to help soldiers transition from the battlefield to the college quad. During the project’s pilot week of 16-hour days on campus, the vets, who hailed from every service branch, attended academic seminars, untangled essay arguments with personal tutors, and participated in mealtime presentations on topics like emotional intelligence and campus leadership.
Carrell, then 30, was taking classes at Central Texas College, near Fort Hood, working toward an associate’s degree. During his four deployments to Iraq, Carrell had served as a tank commander, but back at home he acknowledged that his biggest fear was being outperformed in the classroom by 18-year-old freshmen.
MORE: When Veterans Leave the Service, This College Helps Them Process Their Experiences
The Warrior-Scholar Project seeks to address such challenges in part by helping veterans recognize and harness the qualities they already possess — leadership, dedication and motivation, among others — to succeed as scholars and citizens. Veterans receive substantial financial benefits toward college, including the GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program, but the U.S. military doesn’t have any college planning or counseling services built into its discharge operations. A program like the Warrior-Scholar Project not only encourages veterans to pursue a four-year academic experience, but it also tries to help them do well. There are currently no definitive statistics on veteran graduation rates, but one Department of Education estimate suggests that as few as 10 percent of veterans who entered college in the 2003-04 school year got their bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 31 percent of nonveteran students. When student-veterans receive support from academic institutions, however, they tend to earn higher GPAs and are less likely to drop out than their traditional student peers.
Today, having obtained his associate’s degree from Central Texas, Carrell is a freshman at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he plans to earn his bachelor’s degree. He is taking a writing-intensive course load, participates in a public speaking forum, and is considering pursuing a career in clinic psychology. He may even run for local political office. “By the end of the Warrior-Scholar Project, I felt like I could take on the world,” he says, with a laugh.
This is exactly the sort of bridge that the Warrior-Scholar Project hopes to build between the military and academia. “Our goal is not only that the veterans are going to go to respected universities, and complete university, but that they’re going to become leaders on campus and represent the veteran voice on campus,” says Jesse Reising, a second-year law student at Harvard University who dreamed up the program during his senior year at Yale.
Reising had planned to serve in the Marines after college, but a devastating tackle in the final quarter of his final game as a linebacker for the Yale football team left his right arm paralyzed. “I was searching for a way to serve those who would be serving in the military in my place,” he says.
ALSO: Writing Helps Veterans Go From Victims to Victors
When Reising’s friend and the program co-founder, Nick Rugoff, introduced him to Chris Howell, a nine-year veteran of the Australian Army and a student at Yale, an idea jelled.
It was Howell’s younger brother, David, who had spurred his transition from the Army to university. Once Chris had set his sights on college, David, who was attending the University of Sydney at the time, sent him study advice and books packaged with brotherly tough love. Reising, Rugoff and Howell adapted the curriculum that David created and made it work for any U.S. military veteran hoping to embark on a college career. “There are so many challenges for veterans — academic, social, cultural, emotional challenges — in the transition from the military to college,” says Reising. “We launched the Warrior-Scholar Project with the idea that we were going to formalize the things that Chris did in order to successfully transition.”
The program, which has been expanded to two weeks, emphasizes reading and writing fundamentals, critical thinking and study techniques. Chris Howell, the executive director of the project, likens it to boot camp for its intensity — with five-page papers instead of push-ups. “When I rolled in there, I thought the professors were going to take it easy on us — but no, they were relentless!” says Jean Pierre Gordillo, a former Army convoy driver who attended the Warrior-Scholar Project in the summer of 2013.
The program also seeks to create an environment in which veterans feel understood, respected and empowered. Both Gordillo and Carrell emphasize the importance of the presence and perspective of fellow veterans like Howell, who have already made the transition to university and succeeded. In what Howell refers to as a “degreening seminar,” he and other veteran volunteers offer practical tips to help new students adapt to college life. You can’t swear in a seminar, for example. You can’t tell the same jokes you told in the military either. And you have to remember that you’ll be interacting mostly with 18-to-22-year-olds who, in all likelihood, have never witnessed combat and don’t know how to ask you about what you’ve seen.
DON’T MISS: Elite Colleges Need More Veterans. This Group Is Making It Happen
Before he arrived on campus for the program, Gordillo says he was most intimidated by the potential divide between the civilian student volunteers and the veterans. But built into the intensive academic work of the program was the occasional break — an afternoon on the beach, a backyard barbecue, a night on the porch of a Yale fraternity — that allowed his group to swap stories and ideas with current Yale students. “I left feeling I could share something of my military story, rather than being judged for it — and that that story gives me a unique perspective,” he says. Gordillo, who aspires to a career in U.S. foreign affairs, is now finishing his bachelor’s degree at Miami Dade College and recently submitted applications to master’s programs at eight selective universities.
Since 2012, every veteran who has completed the Warrior-Scholar Project and started college has stayed in college. Twenty-four Warrior-Scholars from the 2013 class are also currently in school or have plans to be enrolled by the fall of 2014. Last December, three more program graduates were accepted to Wesleyan University with financial help from the New York-based nonprofit Posse Foundation’s Veterans Program, which also provides Carrell with a scholarship to Vassar.
The Warrior-Scholar Project is now looking to scale up — but carefully. Its founders want to reach as many veterans as possible, while maintaining the support networks and one-on-one attention that have made the program so transformational. “There’s a saying in the special forces,” Howell says. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
MORE: How This Navy SEAL Uses His War Wounds to Help Other Soliders
With that in mind, this summer the Warrior-Scholar Project team will work with veteran students at Harvard and the University of Michigan to run two additional weeklong pilot programs on those campuses. With every university that hosts the project, more veterans will be able to experience its empowering effect, says Jeffrey Brenzel, former dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, who teaches philosophy seminars to Warrior-Scholar participants.
“Their sense of themselves changed over the course of the [program],” says Brenzel of the veterans he taught at Yale. “They could see themselves as active participants in their own education.”
This week, Carrell is in the midst of midterm exams, but he’s keeping his head high above water, thanks to Chris Howell’s late-night motivational phone calls and Dave Howell’s reminders that writing is a process, not an event. “Having the knowledge from the Warrior-Scholar Project is like having a reserve parachute,” he says.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Jesse Reising, founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has become a NationSwell Council member.
ALSO: This Nonprofit Needs Your Help to Get Paralyzed Veterans Walking Again
One Small Tweak Made a World of Difference in This Computer Science Class
Something revolutionary happened last spring at the University of California Berkeley. For the first time ever, as far as digitized records indicate, more women than men enrolled in Professor Dan Garcia’s introductory computer science course, “Beauty and Joy of Computing.” Men have long outnumbered women in computer science majors, earning 81.8% of the bachelor’s degrees according to a 2010 National Science Foundation report, and are far more represented in careers in the field. So professors at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere have retooled their computer science classes, especially introductory ones, with the hopes of attracting more women to them.
Garcia told Kristen V. Brown of the San Francisco Chronicle that he conceived his computer science class for non majors as being more than “just programming,” and he made it “kind of right-brained as well.”
Sumer Mohammed took Garcia’s course without plans to major in computer science, and the class changed her mind. She’s now an electrical engineering and computer science major. In recent years Berkeley and Stanford have about doubled their computer science enrollment among women, who now comprise 21% of the students in this discipline at each school.
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D., and a Passion for Science?
The Next Frontier in Crowdfunding: DIY College Scholarships
Fed up with the lack of scholarship opportunities at your school? Well, now even scholarships can be DIY thanks to Cabell Maddux, a recent Wesleyan University graduate.
Maddux and his friends started a crowdfunding system called Scholarships Expanding Education to help students pay for college. SEE flips the traditional scholarship crowdfunding model around by inviting donors to start a scholarship in their own name. Then donors can recruit other people to donate to the fund. The donor can set GPA limits and majors so that the scholarship can be catered to what he or she would like to see. “We noticed the buzz around crowdfunding for students with a couple of sites that started up years ago, and these were sites where students were creating their own profile. As students ourselves, we thought it would be so hard for us to sell our stories to 100 strangers,” Maddux told Fast Company. “So we came up with this concept of flipping this on its head, with starting with someone who’s essentially the giver, so the student isn’t having to mobilize this crowd of donors.”
SEE debuted last month with encouraging results. A fund set up for Maddux’s grandfather’s birthday has raised $550 in the last week. And SEE has raised $8,000 in scholarships for Harvard, Fordham, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Averett University. Maddux and his team have applied for nonprofit status hoping to make scholarship donations tax deductible. The team aims to get things running smoothly before Maddux goes to medical school next year. “We want to build and provide another access point to financial aid,” Maddux told Fast Company. “We want to make this simple for the schools as well.”
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
Low-Income Students Can Aim High. This Group Can Help
Nobody in Jennifer Alquicira’s immediate family had ever attended university, and they had no money to spare. So even though the Omaha woman was an accomplished student, she was resigned to going to community college. But the intervention of College Possible helped Alquicira find an educational institution that matched her abilities and helped her figure out how to pay for it. With offices in the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Omaha, Neb. and Portland, Oreg., the Minnesota-based non-profit’s mission is to target talented low-income students to help them avoid “under-matching”—seeking higher education institutions that don’t measure up to their ability. College Possible contacted Alquicira when she was a sophomore in high school with an offer to help her prepare for tests, research colleges and complete her applications. Students can also visit the group’s offices, where AmeriCorps volunteers coach them for two hours, twice a week, on everything they need to know about preparing for college. With the help she received from College Possible, Alquicira is now a freshman at the University of Nebraska, and most of her costs are covered by scholarships and Pell Grants. “I felt like I could do this,” she told Kate Howard Perry of the Omaha World Herald. “I wanted to show how proud my family is of me and what I can do for them later in life.”
MORE: What Wounded Soldiers Need Most After Battle
Helping College Students Graduate Debt Free and on Time
Tré Robinson, 20, is the son of a single mom. A year and a half ago, he made his mother proud by graduating from Indiana’s state community college, Ivy Tech, with an associate’s degree in computer networking. He finished school debt-free and landed a full-time job working in IT. “I have a health plan, and I just took a 15-day cruise to the Caribbean for vacation,” Robinson says.
Robinson is one of the success stories of the Associate Accelerated Program, known as ASAP, a radical new approach to higher education. The program puts low-income students on the path to a higher degree by enrolling them in an intensive, accelerated curriculum at Ivy Tech. ASAP students take double the normal course load and are expected to complete a two-year degree in half the time. ASAP pays the students a weekly $100 stipend, enough to cover phone, food and gas money; students also typically qualify for a combination of state and federal loans that allow them to graduate without debt. To enroll in ASAP, students must pledge to take it seriously — they agree not to work during the school week, so they can focus on their studies full time.
MORE: Teaching High School Kids How Not to Lose a Fortune
The program is aimed at low-income students because, according to Mike Smith, a philanthropist and member of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education who first conceived of the idea, “I believe that the way to break the cycle of poverty in America is through education. I also believe that for America to remain relevant and competitive, we need to have a better prepared workforce.”
Robinson earned his associate’s degree just a year out of high school, and the salary he’s earning now helps cover expenses at the Indianapolis home he shares with his mother, who works as a paralegal. (His father died when Tré was 4 years old.) “I feel like it gave me a great head start on people my age. I have a lot of friends who went to Purdue, and they are about $60,000 to $70,000 in debt,” Robinson says of ASAP, whose graduates are also eligible to transfer to a four-year college to pursue their bachelor’s degrees.
Since ASAP launched in 2010, funded by a $2.34 million grant from the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to higher education, it has graduated 139 students with associate’s degrees in liberal arts, business administration and computer networking. Of the 233 students who enrolled in the program in its first three years, 69 percent finished within a year, according to ASAP. Across the United States, in comparison, just 58 percent of students who start college at a two-year public institution complete any postsecondary degree within six years, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
MORE: Why Prisons of the Future Will Look More Like College Campuses
Carrie Warick, director of partnerships and policy at the National College Access Network, notes that over the next decade, 65 percent of all jobs in the U.S. will require a degree beyond a high school diploma, so programs that help students obtain those degrees are especially critical. While Ivy Tech’s highly structured, accelerated program is one promising model, there are other more accommodating programs that offer flexible class structures and provide child care on campus — such as those offered at the City University of New York — that also work well, says Warick.
Key to ASAP’s success, however, is the togetherness fostered by the program’s intensity. Because students take all their classes with other ASAP participants and are required to be on campus at least from 9 to 5 every weekday, they tend to develop close bonds as they work on group projects, study and hang out together. Faculty advisers meet regularly with students as well to help keep them on track. “We do whatever it takes to get them through. We put our arms around them for a year, and we love them up for a year,” says Jeff Jourdan, ASAP’s program chair at the Indianapolis campus, adding, “We aren’t just trying to churn out graduates and say, ‘See you later.’ We care about the success of these students.”
With a 40-plus-hour study week, ASAP participants need all the support they can get. “I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be,” says Carrington Murry, 19, who is currently enrolled in the liberal arts curriculum. “There’s a lot of all-nighters you have to pull,” he adds. But whereas in high school, he says he was earning B’s and C’s, he currently has a 3.6 GPA. When he first applied in high school to Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., he didn’t get accepted and thought he wouldn’t go to college at all. Now, after finishing ASAP, he expects to transfer to Ball State as a junior and earn his bachelor’s degree with a focus on film and television broadcasting. All told, it will take him three years to get his college degree, versus the standard four-year schedule.
MORE: Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
Ivy Tech plans to expand its accelerated program, thanks to a second, $2.23 million grant from Lumina that the college is matching with $3.1 million of its own. Over the next three years, the college will bring ASAP to 14 campuses across the state — up from the four it is on now — and offer it to any student, regardless of family income, who can handle its rigorous course load. The expansion will allow an estimated 1,010 more students to enroll by 2016. But how will the program sustain itself after that? Ivy Tech President Thomas Snyder says officials are evaluating ways to keep ASAP afloat without private grants.
The Lumina Foundation’s overall goal is to increase the proportion of Americans with degrees or professional certificates that will help them find jobs, from 38.7 percent today to 60 percent by 2025. In order to do so, “Indiana needs to produce 10,000 more high-quality degrees and certificates per year. My goal would be to have the Ivy Tech program produce between one-quarter and one-half of those,” says Mike Smith, who is also a trustee at the nonprofit.
He says he also hopes that the ASAP program will become a model across the country, allowing a whole generation of young people to fulfill their very own American dreams.
MORE: This Is How to Inspire Kindness in Academia