Investments in Education:

Communities, regions and states take initiative to boost college enrollment

by Tom Gaston

Have other programs been successful?

The scholarship component of School Counts at Cumberland County College is relatively new, so there aren’t many results to report. According to the college, 146 students were eligible for the scholarships in 2005 and about half of them now attend Cumberland County College.

A small number of locally-funded tuition programs have operated elsewhere But as in Cumberland County, most are relatively new and without enough hard data for evaluation.

Although they developed independently, with little knowledge of each other, the programs hailed as most promising are remarkably similar. Among their common characteristics:

Strong community involvement
Early (6th or 7th grade) recruitment of students
Parental involvement and support
Focus on “mid-range” students who heretofore were unlikely to attend college
Significant support, engagement and cooperation from both public schools and cooperating institutions of higher education.
Funding “last dollar” scholarships that pay remaining costs after all other available support has been applied.

Here’s a look at some of them.

Kalamazoo, Mich.

Kalamazoo achieved nationwide publicity when a group of anonymous donors pledged to pay tuition for their public school graduates. The Kalamazoo Promise Program is just now paying its first semester’s tuition for students at some 15 to 20 state-supported institutions.
The program covers up to four years’ tuition and mandatory fees based on the number of years that students have attended Kalamazoo Public Schools. Of last year’s 500 graduates, about 80 percent qualified.

Bob Jorth, executive administrator for the Kalamazoo Promise Program, anticipates that about 70 percent of the Promise students will attend either Western Michigan University (located in Kalamazoo) or Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

Students who also qualify for federal Pell grants for low-income families get an even better deal.

“Western Michigan officials found that about 98 percent of their Kalamazoo students in the past got federal aid,” Jorth said. “They did some calculations and found that, by reallocating aid dollars, they could give free room and board to students receiving this scholarship. So this year’s students are required to apply for federal aid, but they get free room and board as well as their tuition.”

One of the citizens who are funding Kalamazoo Promise is the superintendent of schools. Other than that, Jorth said, “We don’t know who they are. . . . During discussions over three to five years they were looking at ways to improve public schools and somehow the idea of scholarships for all public school graduates came up as an option. So the group found resources within itself...

“The wonderful thing about them being anonymous is that it forces the community to step forward and take ownership,” Jorth said, “and that is a huge, huge plus.”

Once the money became available, a group of community leaders got together to coordinate the project. They formed four subgroups, each with an assigned responsibility:

Support of public schools
Regional educational support
Intergovernmental and political relationships
Economic development

These groups started yet smaller groups to handle media, marketing and other defined tasks within the overall mission.

Jackson, Macon and Swain Counties, N.C.

In the heart of Appalachia, in sparsely populated communities troubled by recent industrial losses and supported mostly by mom and pop businesses that cater to tourists, the New Century Scholars Program of Southwestern Community College has thrived.

Started in 1995 in Jackson County, the program expanded into nearby Macon and Swain counties the next year.

New Century Scholars identifies students for the program at the end of sixth grade and a “contract” to meet the program’s requirements is signed annually between the families, school system and college.

The program targets the middle 60 percent of students who may not be expected to go to college and invests $500 per student per year toward college costs. The money then makes up the difference between tuition and whatever other grants or scholarships they receive.
Connie Haire, vice president of Southwestern’s Macon campus and institutional development, headed New Century Scholars from the beginning.

Haire saw it as more than a response to financial need. “There were other risk factors in these kids’ lives,” she said. “But when we started talking about high-risk kids, we found that public school folks had a different definition of high risk than we did.” They meant children with severe emotional or developmental problems, she said.

“We meant a kid who had … potential barriers that might keep him or her from going to college. It could be a child from a single-parent family, could be one with academic difficulties or social and cultural difficulties. He may have trouble getting along with peers – or maybe just a family where nobody had gone to college – those kinds of things.”

Like Madisonville’s Rhoads, Haire stressed the importance of changing family attitudes towards college. In addition to helping with academics and social skills, she said, “Johnny’s family situation may be (one where) nobody even thinks about going to college. . . . College is just not a part of the family culture. . . .‘College is too expensive. It’s so far removed from us that we just don’t talk about that possibility.’

“We felt it was important, as early as the seventh grade, to let them know college is possible. We were setting out to change a culture, and to a fairly large degree we have. We’ve had some successes. We had a number who didn’t make it. We had a number who didn’t come to the community college but went straight to a four-year institution, which is a success in my book.”

Like others working with these programs, Haire laments the schools’ lack of follow-up tracking to provide reliable statistics on scholars “alumni.” She is convinced, though, that an important key to the program’s success is the fact that each school system assigned a coordinator whose job it was to track scholars in school, intervene when necessary to keep them on course, and plan activities to help them develop social skills and self esteem.

After a few years in operation, the scholars program received a “best practices” award from the Appalachian Regional Commission. And in 2002, Southwestern Community College received a $338,000 grant from the commission to replicate the program in other Appalachian counties in North Carolina, Haire said. “We were able to start six new programs. Some started off with a bang and are doing fabulous things and some started off with five or six students and are struggling.”

Other community colleges in North Carolina also offer locally funded scholarships, but the Public Life Advocate was unable to find any others that worked so closely with the public schools or that were deemed so successful by outside entities.

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