Group Funds Low Income Students

Eight elite colleges and universities and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation will commit a combined $27 million to increase the transfer of low-income community college students to selective four-year institutions over the next four years, the foundation announced yesterday.

The Cooke Foundation—an education foundation dedicated to funding low-income students at elite colleges—gave a $6.78 million grant to three public and five private highly selective institutions.

The participating schools, which were selected from a pool of 48, are University of California-Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Michigan-Anne Arbor, Cornell, Bucknell, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst and the University of Southern California.

These schools in turn will commit a composite $20.5 million of their own money to the program.

The foundation said its ultimate goal is to have the success of the eight colleges act as a model for other selective schools to increase their enrollment of transfer students from community colleges.

“With broad dissemination of the success these schools have had, other colleges and universities will create similar programs that serve thousands more students in the future,” said Joshua Wyner, Vice President of Programs at the foundation.

The schools and the foundation see this program as necessary because only 10 percent of students at the most selective colleges come from the bottom half of the socio-economic scale, while 75 percent come from the top quarter, according to the foundation.

Additionally, the statement also noted that the 6.5 million students currently enrolled in community college students comprise about 45 percent of all students who receive college degrees.

“Selective schools are expensive, community colleges are not,” said Dr. Peter Mackey, the foundation’s director of public affairs. “If you are a superb low income student and you don’t get a scholarship right out of high school, what else are you going to do?”

Joshua Wyner, Vice President of Programs at the foundation, said these figures are proof that university admissions should look not only to high schools but also community colleges to recruit low-income students “to meet their income diversity objectives.”

The grants will be used to give increased attention to transfer students from community colleges, said Jane Brown, the Mt. Holyoke Vice President for Enrollment and College Relations.

“What the grant helps us do is identify talented students when they first come into Holyoke community college and then through special coursework and good academic advising, help them get prepared to apply to Mt. Holyoke,” Brown said. “They have to meet the same academic requirements for admissions as any other transfer student.”

Amherst College’s director of public affairs, Stacey Schmeidel, said that opening up the school to students of all backgrounds increases the quality of the student body.

“The goal is not just increasing socio-economic diversity, it’s about getting the best students regardless of what their background is,” Schmeidel said. “There are a lot of talented low and middle income students who right now don’t apply to places like Amherst and Harvard because they think they can’t afford these schools.”