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Friday, December 21, 2007
Got Yo’ Posse?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A well-established — not to mention unusual — education foundation has come to Atlanta to find promising high school seniors other college recruiters typically overlook.
The Posse Foundation, which began in New York in 1989 and now operates in five other cities, seeks out kids who may not have the highest GPAs or SAT scores, but who have oodles of potential. Posse staffers match the teenagers with some of the country’s best colleges and universities, which are looking to diversify their traditional applicant pools.
Last week, I attended the awards ceremony for Atlanta’s first 24 Posse scholars (chosen from nearly 500 applicants), who will go to either Boston University or The College of Wooster next year on full, four-year tuition scholarships.
To say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house would be an understatement. One single mother compared the scholarship to winning the Lottery. Another parent, a widower, choked up as he talked about what it meant for his son.
“I told his mother that I would do everything to make sure he was a success,” he said. “Posse came along and made it so easy.”
Not only do the lucky teens get a nearly free college education (and any extra financial aid needed), they’ll also have personal mentors and career counselors to work with them during the next four years.
Posse gets its name from a simple concept that founder Deborah Bial developed years ago after she saw too many bright, inner-city students drop out of college. At the time, she was working in a youth leadership program in New York city. One day, one of her students confided that he wouldn’t have left school if he had had his “posse” with him.
Bial thought: Wouldn’t it be great to send groups of these kids to school together so they had more support and a better chance of graduating? Nineteen years later, she claims a 90 percent graduation rate for her scholars — compared to fewer than 50 percent for Georgia’s college freshmen.
Certainly, it’s hard to argue with statistics like that. But there actually are some critics of the program. Both Rice and Lehigh universities previously were partner schools, according to an Education Week article from March 22, 2000, that I read. But they later pulled out, saying the kids weren’t prepared academically.
Boston University’s vice president for enrollment and student affairs assured me that she was confident the kids could do the work — even if she had made allowances for less-than-stellar SAT scores.
Only time will tell, of course, how many of them succeed.
UPDATE: I just got an e-mail from a local gentleman who said he first learned of Posse through Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he was a trustee. This is what he had to say about the program:
“The other side of the Posse story is what happens when these kids get to campus. The eight months of training that they go through leaves them as well prepared for college life as any entering freshman and really better prepared than the majority. So far, 100 percent of our Posse Scholars have graduated in four years. While there, these kids start things and become leaders of established campus activities. The annual Posse Plus retreat has become a significant event in the intellectual life of the campus. All this from kids Lafayette never would have reached without Posse.”
