Nicole Hurd
This year saw a number of high-profile efforts to open college doors to more students, and Nicole Hurd seemed to have a hand in all of them.
In January, Ms. Hurd spoke on a panel at a White House summit on the topic. When Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $10-million commitment to help high-achieving, low-income students, her organization, College Advising Corps, was on its list of partners. And her name appeared in one news article after another about college access.
Ms. Hurd, 44, recognizes that this is a special moment. Sometimes, she says, “everything lines up.”
The corps has established itself just as college access has been getting more attention. Ms. Hurd credits that change to the growing body of research showing that access is a serious dilemma and that there are solutions. Her group has also benefited from donors’ heightened interest in proven results, as it makes a point of documenting its successes.
Its mission is simple: Provide disadvantaged students with more of the sort of college advising that students at wealthier schools can take for granted. The group, with an annual budget of $27-million, places recent graduates of its 23 partner colleges into high-need high schools, where they work to create a college-going culture—doing things like making signs for teachers’ doors saying where they went to college and what they studied.
The Bloomberg program works a little differently, using alumni of the school-based program to counsel high-achieving, low-income high-school students throughout the country, with tools like text messages and document sharing.
Ms. Hurd wasn’t always focused on college access. The idea came to her in a parking lot in May 2004, when she was dean of undergraduate research and fellowships at the University of Virginia. Ms. Hurd was reflecting on a meeting she’d attended with local business leaders and staff from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which was interested in supporting college access.
She was struck by the statistics the foundation’s staff had shared about the heavy caseloads of high-school counselors—today the average counselor has more than 450 students.
Thinking of the top graduates from UVa who competed each year to work for Teach for America or join the Peace Corps, Ms. Hurd wondered, “Why can’t we keep them here to do college advising work?” Ms. Hurd’s boss liked the idea. So did the Cooke foundation, which provided $623,000 for a pilot program that placed 14 recent UVa grads in 2005.
Things took off from there. In 2006, the foundation provided $10-million to expand the program, surprising Ms. Hurd. She offered to quit her day job to run the program full time, surprising the foundation. For six years, the corps was “incubated” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before becoming a stand-alone nonprofit last year. And the group is having an impact: Seniors who met with an adviser were 23 percent more likely to apply to college than those who didn’t.
Ms. Hurd’s next goal? Ensuring that college access doesn’t just have its moment, but becomes “a permanent issue.”
—Beckie Supiano
