Don Graham, the former CEO of the Washington Post Company, doesn’t think America can afford to wait for immigration reform before beginning to help the undocumented students who were brought here as kids. To that end, he’s announced a $25 million scholarship fund for such students, called TheDream.US, which will begin providing 1,000 full-ride scholarships a year to some of the estimated 240,000 college students brought to the U.S. as children who are still waiting for the passage of the DREAM Act to provide them with a more secure legal status.
These students, who aren’t at immediate risk because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, do not qualify for federal student aid or Pell grants. Eighteen states now offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, with more debating the issue currently, such as Arizona and North Carolina.
Republican and Democratic legislators alike have given public support to TheDream.Us, whose funders include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The fund has already given 38 scholarships to students in all majors but liberal arts, and TheDream.Us administrators are working with a group of colleges that the students can attend. Graham told Maggie Severns and Hadas Gold of Politico, “We’re focusing on places that are low enough in cost that we can send a lot of students there, because we have to raise every dollar for their tuition,” giving students “a bachelor’s degree from a good place that will give students a start.”
MORE: Meet the Undocumented Immigrants Who Created an App to Press for Immigration Reform
Tag: Higher Education
A Guidance Counselor Told Her Daughter Not to Bother Applying for College Scholarships. What She Did Next Will Inspire You
Pensal McCray wasn’t the kind of woman to back down. So when the guidance counselor at her daughter’s Denver high school told her the honor student wasn’t eligible for any scholarships, McCray refused to believe there was no one out there who wanted to help.
In 1983 she and her husband Christophe started the Ethnic College Counseling Center to serve as an alternative source for guidance for minority teenagers. Since then, the center has helped 3,000 youths attend college. The ECCC offers tutoring, mentoring, scholarship help, and tours of colleges. McCray, who died January 17 at age 71 while organizing a tour of historical black colleges, is being remembered as “a giant among giants,” civil rights attorney Anne Sulton told Joanne Davidson of the Denver Post.
McCray’s daughter not only went to college, but earned her Ph.D. in Urban Technological and Environmental Planning from the University of Michigan, served as Fulbright Scholar at the Glasgow Urban Lab in Scotland, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “Our mother lived a very full life,” she told Davidson. “And she died doing what she loved to do. You just can’t ask for anything better than that.”
MORE: When People Said Minorities Weren’t Interested in Science, This Guy Proved Them Wrong
Meet the ‘Million-Dollar Scholar’ Who Wants to Help Other Disadvantaged Kids Pay for College
A year after Chicago native Derrius Quarles’ father was murdered, social services took the five-year-old and his brother from his mother’s custody. He spent the next nine years in foster care and began a dangerous life of “crime and fast money” until one simple act of kindness turned everything around. After arriving late to a high school biology class one day, Quarles was confronted by his teacher, who took him aside and told him, “You have so much potential, and yet you choose to waste it.”
That display of encouragement was enough to inspire Quarles to dedicate himself to his studies and earn more than $1 million in academic scholarships and financial aid. He graduated from Morehouse College, determined to help other young people finance their education. So he wrote a book on the subject, “MillionDollarScholar: Winning the Scholarship Race,” and founded the business Million Dollar Scholar, offering downloads and an app that can help high school students discover scholarships they qualify for, free writing evaluation, resume templates, and online practice interviews.
In a video on his website, Quarles said, “I was going to use what happened in the past as a catalyst to really be able to change myself and use that as some type of inspiration to say that is not what I want for my family when I get older, that is not what I want for myself. I can be different.”
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
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
He Dropped Out of High School 30 Years Ago, But This Innovative Education Center Helped Him Earn a Diploma
Montaque Quentrel Koonce of Indianapolis dropped out of high school at age 16. Years later, when he was laid-off from his job on an assembly line, he struggled to find an affordable place to live. That’s when he turned to the Excel Center, a Goodwill-sponsored charter school that offers the city’s 150,000 dropouts a chance to earn a high school degree and college credit. Koonce told April Brown of the PBS NewsHour there were “two things [he’s] terrified of,” becoming homeless, and “having to do math. So I had to confront both of those fears at the same time.” Koonce overcame his fears, graduating with a high school degree more than thirty years after he dropped out.
Goodwill is mostly known for its thrift stores, whose sales fund job training and programs for a variety of needy people. But although Goodwill hadn’t previously been involved in education, representatives of the City of Indianapolis’ mayor’s office approached Goodwill of Central Indiana about starting a program to help the city’s dropouts who’d been severely affected by the recession. (In Indianapolis, the mayor’s office is able to sponsor state charter schools.)
Jim McClelland, CEO and President of Goodwill of Central Indiana, decided its education centers would offer dropouts the opportunity to earn high school degrees rather than G.E.D.s, because according to research, those with G.E.D.s fare little better in terms of job opportunities and money-earning potential than dropouts do. The Excel Center also offers college credit and classes that prepare students to earn technical certifications.
The Excel Center now enrolls 3,000 adults at nine different locations in Indiana, where the teachers hold them to high standards. Kandas Boozer, an algebra teacher for Excel, told Brown, “I expect them to always give 100 percent no matter what that looks like. Everybody is at a different level, so I just want to make sure they give me everything they have.” People like Koonce are getting a lot in return.
The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
Garrett Neiman knows first hand the difference an improved SAT score can make—he increased his own SAT from 2000 to a perfect 2400, and began a SAT tutoring business while he was in college at Stanford. But he soon saw that the students who needed his help the most were those least able to afford it, so with co-founder Jessica Perez, he started the non-profit CollegeSpring in 2008, two years before he graduated. CollegeSpring helps low-income high school students—whose scores tend to begin at about 300 points lower than other students—through diagnostic tests, mentoring, and classes.
As Neiman points out in a column for Forbes, a few points difference on the SAT can determine whether or not a low-income student is accepted into a four-year institution, where statistics show they are much more likely to graduate than if they attend a community college. While in college, low-income students are less likely to be able to place out of entry-level courses through their SAT scores, making earning enough credits to graduate more difficult for them. People who earn bachelor’s degrees make an average of $800,000 more in a lifetime than those with only high school diplomas. He gives the example of a young woman he tutored named Neda, whose family was low-income and didn’t realize SATs were required for many college applications. Neda learned how important SATs are, brought her scores up and went to UCLA, where she’s now applying to medical schools.
Elite Colleges Need More Veterans. This Group Is Making It Happen
Most veterans who enroll in university after serving their country end up at community colleges or state schools, unable to afford many of America’s elite institutions. But the Veterans Posse Initiative is working to change that by identifying vets who can excel at top-tier schools and helping them get there. Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, is the first college to participate, enrolling 11 veterans in its freshman class this school year, and Google recently awarded the program $1.2 million to expand. Part of the Posse plan is to admit veterans in groups of about 10, so they have fellow veterans for support. The vets are given scholarships through the Yellow Ribbon Foundation, the GI Bill, and other sources, as well as help with childcare and assistance with coordinating their appointments with the Veterans Affairs office so that they don’t miss classes. In exchange, the colleges receive a more diverse student body—it’s not every freshman composition class that includes a tank commander and a soldier who earned a Purple Heart. “You can almost feel the patriotism of America in welcoming back veterans, and Vassar is only emulating that with this program and opening its arms to veterans,” retired Brigadier General Chip Diehl told Caitlin Johnson of the Tampa Bay Times. The Veterans Posse Program aims to expand soon to at least 10 institutions.
MORE: How This Navy SEAL Uses His War Wounds to Help Other Soliders
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
What If We Could Nearly Double the Graduation Rate of Community College Students With One Simple Idea?
While 80% of community college students say their goal is to earn an associate’s degree in a two-year program, only a third go on to graduate with a certificate or degree within six years. While community colleges offer flexibility and accessibility, they often don’t have ways to give extensive support and guidance to the students who really need it. Which is one reason more community colleges may want to follow the example of the ASAP program at the community colleges of the City University of New York system. The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs initiative turns a community college education into a comprehensive, full-time commitment. The program helps pay tuition, loans books to students, places students in bi-weekly advising, provides extra tutoring, and both supports students and holds them accountable from remedial classes all the way through to their degree. Most importantly, the initiative teaches students to navigate an academic institution and how to plot a course to success, which the program is doing for itself — it’s already well on its way to its goal of a 50% graduation rate.