Eight highly selective colleges and universities - including Cornell University - are teaming up with a nonprofit foundation to invest $27 million to improve opportunities for community college students to attend four-year colleges.
With the aid of a $7 million grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the eight participating schools are providing $20 million of their own money to create programs to recruit some of the 6.5 million students who attend community colleges nationwide, according to a press release from the Cooke Foundation. Community college students make up 45 percent of college undergraduates in the country.
The Cooke Foundation sought proposals for such support programs from the nation's 127 most selective colleges and universities, said Pete Mackey, a spokesman for the Cooke foundation. Forty-eight institutions submitted proposals, and the eight selected were Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Southern California.
Mackey declined to name the other schools that submitted proposals and would not say if Brown applied.
The eight contributing schools are expected to enroll 1,100 new community college transfer students from low- to moderate-income backgrounds, provide another 2,100 community college students with information about four-year schools and instructional services and partner with 50 community colleges to build and improve transfer programs, according to a March 6 press release from the Cooke Foundation.
In selecting the grant recipients, the foundation's staff looked for schools that have already proven a commitment to providing support to low-income students and community college transfers. Staff members also tried to identify schools that would be able and willing to sustain the program after the grant money was exhausted. The foundation's grant is expected to last four years.
While many colleges and universities have recently focused on recruiting students from lower socioeconomic levels, these programs "typically focus recruitment and financial aid on high school graduates," Mackey said, noting in particular programs in place at Harvard and Yale universities.
Many, including Kurt Thiede, vice president for enrollment management and communications at Bucknell, believe community college students are discouraged from transferring to four-year institutions because of the lack of available financial aid.
"I believe community college students have (previously) had admissions access to Bucknell similar to that of other transfers. However, I don't believe they have had consistent access to financial aid, which would have made enrollment more possible to most of them," Thiede said.
Amherst has many programs that recruit disadvantaged high school graduates, but the college has not done much previously to reach out to community college students.
"For a lot of students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending community colleges, sometimes largely for financial reasons, there is a perception that transferring to a place like Amherst or Brown simply isn't an obtainable goal, academically or financially," said Darren Reaume, Amherst's coordinator of admissions outreach. "Because we haven't done much outreach to community colleges, I think we haven't been on the radar for students looking to transfer."
Amherst's proposed program has two goals: to increase and improve outreach and recruitment strategies and to ease the transition to campus for community college transfers.
While Amherst currently lacks a community college outreach program, at least one other school funded by the Cooke Foundation's grant is building upon already established connections to community colleges.
Prior to this recent partnership, Bucknell had already utilized transfer enrollments to "top off" its enrollment numbers. But financial aid for transfer students ebbed and flowed, not allowing Bucknell to enroll a consistent number of transfer students and low-income transfer students on an annual basis, Thiede said.
"Our partnership with the Community College of Philadelphia was called STEP (Student Transfer Enrichment Program)," Thiede added. "This was a summer program that provided a six-week academic experience for 20 to 30 CCP students on the Bucknell campus. In any given year, after the STEP experience, three to six students indicated an interest in enrolling at Bucknell the following year."
Bucknell has taken a hiatus from STEP for the past two summers to revise the program so the partner relationship could be offered to more community colleges. The proposal to partner with the Cooke Foundation "could not have come at a better time," Thiede said.
Bucknell's partnership with the Cooke Foundation includes five partner community colleges that will identify individual students for the program. Students in the program will be matched up with a faculty mentor and peer mentor from Bucknell. Trips to the Bucknell campus will be planned during the school year so the community college students can gain a better sense of the community into which they will enter. A summer program will be available to these students between their first and second years at the community college.
"We anticipate enrolling at least 15 students annually beginning in the fall of 2007," Thiede said. "Over the four-year period of the grant, the Cooke Foundation will commit $806,400 for operations. Bucknell will commit $416,300 for operations and at least $1,677,300 in new scholarship funds."
