Wanted: Low-Income High Achievers

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation helps 4-year colleges recruit the brightest community-college students

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Text: Other programs supported by the Cooke Foundation

Article: Virginia Lawmakers Consider Bill to Encourage Students to Start at 2-Year Colleges

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Matthew J. Quinn and Joshua S. Wyner, of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, about its efforts to get high-achieving, low-income students into college.

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By KARIN FISCHER

Alamance Community College, in Graham, N.C., and the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, are only 20 miles apart. But sometimes it seems as if they are in separate universes.

Despite the two institutions' proximity, last fall only 19 Alamance students transferred to Chapel Hill — one of the nation's most selective public universities — out of an entering class of 4,576 at the community college.

Many Alamance students believe that a "stigma" surrounds community-college transfers at the university, says Perry Hardison, an instructor of religion and humanities at the two-year college, who advises students on transferring to four-year colleges. Other students at Alamance worry that they could not afford the university's $3,456 annual tuition for in-state students.

University of North Carolina officials realize that they have not done enough over the years to reach out to top students at Alamance and other community colleges. "We had a nagging feeling that community-college transfers were becoming an afterthought for us," says Stephen M. Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admissions at Chapel Hill.

In that, the university is not alone.

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, based in Lansdowne, Va., near Washington, helps bright but needy students go to college and graduate school. In its research, the foundation has found that top colleges often overlook community-college students. Just 8 percent of all entering students at the nation's most prestigious public universities, and fewer than 1 percent at elite private colleges, came from two-year institutions in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available. Of that number, an even smaller portion, perhaps as few as 1,000 out of the 11,000 community-college transfer students who enrolled at selective colleges in 2002, are from low-income households, the Cooke foundation has reported.

Last spring, to encourage elite institutions to take advantage of the community-college talent pool, the foundation awarded $6.8-million to eight colleges, both private and public, to develop or expand programs to improve their recruitment and retention of low-income students from community colleges. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the grant recipients, will work with community-college advisers like Mr. Hardison to identify academically able students and provide them with specialized counseling and programs to prepare them to transfer.

The participating institutions have pledged a total of $20-million of their own money, and have promised to enroll 1,100 needy students from community colleges over the next four years.

The community-college-transfer program is one part of a college-access strategy pursued by the seven-year-old foundation, named for the late owner of the National Football League's Washington Redskins, who left millions of dollars to establish the philanthropy in his will. The group offers scholarships and mentor services to promising high-school students, supports research on the educational attainment of low-income students, and recently announced that it would award grants of $1-million each to eight selective colleges to guide underserved high-school students through the college-admissions process, following a pilot program at the University of Virginia.

At a time of growing concern about the economic stratification of higher education, and the implications for the nation's future, the foundation is gaining national attention for its innovative and often unconventional approaches to closing the educational-achievement gap.

"They've really been pioneers," says Christina R. Milano, executive director of the National College Access Network, an association of scholarship and college-counseling programs. "They've tapped into the potential of often-overlooked young people."

Extending Opportunities

Unlike many other philanthropic organizations that work to erase the socioeconomic barriers to higher education, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation unapologetically focuses on the best and brightest students of modest means.

That was the intent of Jack Kent Cooke, self-made owner of the Redskins, the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Lakers, and the Chrysler Building. He died in 1997, leaving the bulk of his $800-million fortune to establish a foundation to "reward young men and women for unusual intelligence, application, deportment, and character."

None of the money, Mr. Cooke wrote, was to go to athletics scholarships. But except for a provision that some of the funds should be used for awards for graduate study, Mr. Cooke did not specify how the $600-million bequest was to be spent.

If the will painted the philanthropy's mission in broad brush strokes, it has been up to the seven-member Board of Directors, which includes Mr. Cooke's son John Kent Cooke, to fill in the details. In shaping the programmatic focus, says Howard B. Soloway, the board's chairman and a longtime friend and lawyer to Mr. Cooke, the foundation attempted to embody the "spirit" of the benefactor, who had been forced to drop out of high school to support his family during the Depression.

"He wanted others to have the opportunity he didn't have," says Mr. Soloway.

At first the foundation awarded scholarships, of up to $50,000 annually for six years, to high-achieving, needy students who were enrolled in graduate and professional programs. It also created a $1-million educational fund for families affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Gradually, however, the philanthropy has expanded its reach, establishing a program to groom a younger generation of students who might not otherwise have the benefit of a top-flight high school, expensive extracurricular activities, or one-on-one advising. The foundation's Young Scholars program, which graduated its first class last spring, identifies about 75 academic prospects in the eighth grade; pairs them with counselors who help them choose a high school and challenging course work; encourages them to explore their extramural passions; and directs them toward summer programs and supplemental study. The foundation spends an average of $15,000 a year on each of the students and goes on to provide most of them with financial aid in college.

The Cooke foundation also gives scholarships to students like Anna R. DeGolier, who ace their community-college courses but would struggle on their own to pay the costs at a four-year institution. Ms. DeGolier, who is 23 and immigrated from Belarus in 2003, put herself through Normandale Community College, in Minnesota, by working as a waitress, a nanny, and an English tutor. A Cooke scholarship made it possible for her to afford the $45,000-a-year price tag at Cornell University, where she studies pathogenic microbiology.

"This country is such a country of great opportunity," she says, in an accent that is equal parts Eastern European and upper Midwestern. "I came here with nothing, and three years later, I am going to an Ivy League school for free."

Source of Talent

But Ms. DeGolier's opportunity is one that few other community-college students, even the most gifted, are likely to experience. In fact, over the past two decades, the number of students from either two-year or four-year institutions who transferred into the most selective private colleges has plummeted by more than 50 percent, according to a study commissioned by the Cooke foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, two other higher-education grant makers.

That steep drop is alarming to many higher-education leaders.

"If [selective] colleges are committed to locating the best talent, and they're not working with community colleges, then they're not fulfilling their mission," says Robert G. Templin Jr., president of Northern Virginia Community College, who is on a board that advises the Cooke foundation on its community-college programs.

Cooke officials hope that another aspect of the foundation's research, about the academic caliber of community-college students, can persuade elite institutions to take a second look. A growing number of students graduate from high school with strong grades and test scores but attend two-year colleges for financial and other reasons, says Joshua S. Wyner, vice president for programs at the foundation. What's more, community-college transfers who enroll at highly selective colleges earn bachelor's degrees at the same rate as students who enter directly from high school.

Partnership between community colleges and elite institutions makes sense for another reason as well, says Mr. Wyner. Community colleges enroll the majority of the nation's poorest students, while, in the past few years, selective colleges, alarmed by the lack of socioeconomic diversity on their campuses, have embarked on efforts to expand financial aid available to low-income students and to more actively recruit them. If top colleges are seeking bright students with financial need, he says, they should look to community-college campuses.

"We need to think of places where low-income kids are as lands of opportunity," says Mr. Wyner.

Some community-college educators say many of their counterparts at four-year institutions believe that students from two-year colleges are unlikely to succeed as transfers. Such skeptics see those students as "behind the academic eight ball," says Mr. Hardison, the transfer adviser at Alamance.

Cooke foundation officials say convincing some elite colleges of the potential of low-income community-college students is likely to be an uphill battle. Matthew J. Quinn, the foundation's executive director, says he still meets college presidents and trustees who argue that community-college students lack the academic chops to succeed in such a competitive environment, or who believe that a transfer student cannot get the same educational experience as one who attends a college for all four years.

The foundation has hired researchers at Brandeis University to review the transfer programs at the eight colleges taking part in the foundation's community-college program and to evaluate their success in enrolling and graduating low-income students. Mr. Quinn says he hopes the results will help persuade other elite institutions to expand access for community-college transfers.

Another test of the participating colleges' commitment to community-college transfers, he says, will come in three years, when the foundation's grants expire.

Next Steps

Meanwhile, higher-education observers wonder what is next for the Cooke foundation, and if it will continue to focus on the most gifted of low-income students.

Alison R. Bernstein, a vice president at the Ford Foundation, says there is room for Cooke to zero in on the "talented tenth" because other philanthropic organizations, including Ford, deal with broader college-access issues.

Mr. Soloway, chairman of the Cooke foundation's board, says it intends to keep concentrating on high-achieving, low-income students in order to stick to the founder's vision and to rectify what it sees as a relative lack of attention to this subgroup of students.

"We wanted to figure out where we could have the most impact," he says.

Forthcoming projects include the selection of eight top public and private institutions to expand and adapt a program, created by the University of Virginia, that places recent graduates as college counselors in high schools with low collegegoing rates. The grantees will each receive $1-million and will create a "national college-advising corps."

The Cooke foundation has also commissioned a detailed census of high-achieving, low-income students from elementary through graduate schools, to determine where the leaks are in the educational pipeline. It will look at how, and why, some students are lost at each stage of their education. The findings of that study are likely to inform the philanthropy's next generation of projects, says Mr. Wyner, the vice president.

Additionally, the foundation plans to conduct a "hard-nosed evaluation" of all of its programs. It spends 5 percent, or $30-million, of its endowment annually, in accordance with federal law, and had a 14.3-percent investment return in 2006. When the new programs are fully phased in, the foundation, will spend $32-million to $34-million per year.

"The question always becomes," says Mr. Soloway, "Is there something better that we can do?"