Scholar Spotlight
A prolific writer of poetry and song, Nate is a dynamic speaker and isn't shy about performing in front of an audience.
Scholars Around the World
Two JKCF Scholars organize a 15-day study tour to Bolivia to explore the country’s political economy, peoples and rural development
Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Awards $1-Million Grants to 10 Colleges to Increase Access
The chronicle of Higher education
By SARA LIPKA
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation plans to announce today that it will award $1-million grants to 10 colleges to help high-achieving, low-income students pursue higher education.The grants are for institutions around the country to replicate the College Guide Program, which began at the University of Virginia a year and a half ago with a grant from the same foundation. Virginia's program places its recent graduates in high schools with low college-going rates around the state to help students get through the college-application process. It also offers counseling to community-college students who may want to transfer to four-year institutions (The Chronicle, January 26).
"This innovative approach has succeeded in Virginia with notable increases in applications to colleges in the high schools where the guides work," Joshua S. Wyner, the foundation's vice president of programs, said in a written statement. "Now low-income students nationwide will get access to much-needed guidance from mentors fresh out of college who can really inspire them."
The new grants will go to Brown University; Franklin & Marshall College, which will collaborate with Dickinson College, and Millersville University and Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania; Loyola College in Maryland; Pennsylvania State University; Tufts University, in conjunction with the Massachusetts Campus Compact, a coalition of college presidents in the state; the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa; the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Missouri at Columbia; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the University of Utah.
The foundation invited 169 institutions to apply for the grants and picked the 10 winners from 56 applications.
The University of North Carolina and the National College Access Network, an association of scholarship and college-counseling programs, will establish the National College Advising Corps Office, in Chapel Hill, to coordinate the 11 institutional programs and to encourage other colleges to start similar projects. Nicole F. Hurd, who started the College Guide Program at Virginia, will direct the North Carolina office.
The $1-million grants will support the individual programs for four years, according to the foundation. The institutions will raise funds to continue the programs after that period.