Twenty-four years ago this November, Shirley Collado was hanging out in a bustling activity room of an arts program for inner-city kids when a counselor pulled her aside. She showed the teenager a viewbook from Vanderbilt University, and asked, “What do you think about going away to college?”
The campus looked like an extravagant, distant land, a dot on the map so far from her Brooklyn home that Ms. Collado was certain she’d never experience it. “There’s no way I can go,” she replied. She couldn’t afford it, for starters, and her parents—a garment worker and a taxicab driver—were unlikely to let their only daughter leave the fold of their traditional Dominican family.
The counselor, a recent graduate of Brandeis University named Deborah Bial, had just set up a new organization aimed at getting more students like Shirley Collado on the campuses of elite colleges. The program would identify promising young students in New York City who might be overlooked in the traditional college-admissions process, help them get scholarships, and send them off in small groups to prestigious universities.
As she explained this to Ms. Collado, and later to the teenager’s parents, she stressed that several other students from similar circumstances would go to Vanderbilt, too. You won’t be alone, she assured them.
In August of 1990, Ms. Collado and her mother, along with four other students and their mothers, left New York on a Greyhound bus bound for Nashville. Twenty-six hours later, they arrived on the campus. A front-page article in the local newspaper heralded their arrival; it dubbed the five students an “educational experiment.”
More than two decades later, the experiment known as the Posse Foundation has offices in nine cities and an endowment of $36-million. Vanderbilt is still a partner, along with 47 other colleges and universities across the country. (St. Olaf College, the Universities of Rochester and Virginia, and Wesleyan University will welcome their first posses to campus next fall.) Colleges have paid more than a half-billion dollars in scholarship funds since the program’s inception, and nearly 5,000 students have been named Posse scholars. A few years ago, the foundation rolled out a special “posse” for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields; last year it created another just for veterans.
Participating institutions and observers say the Posse Foundation has played a major role in transforming conversations about diversity beyond issues of compliance and affirmative action, leading to a nuanced debate about inclusion, merit, and different kinds of diversity. Posse, they say, looked for students with “noncognitive” attributes like “grit” or “moxie” long before the words became fashionable underpinnings for some scholarship programs. And at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court has shown less tolerance for race-conscious admissions policies, Posse’s approach has offered colleges a way to bring diversity to a campus without using race.
Ms. Collado, who had arrived at Vanderbilt in 1990 with a combined verbal and math SAT score of 800, graduated from the university in 1994. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke—believed to be the first Posse scholar to earn a doctorate—and is now the dean of the college and an associate professor of psychology at Middlebury College.
“We knew we had to be successful,” she says of her posse. “That was, frankly, enormous pressure, but it allowed us to lean on each other in ways that most first-year students would never have imagined.”
The “posse” concept persuaded Ms. Collado’s parents to let her leave home for college. But it was also what enabled her to thrive once she got there. “There’s no way I would have gone to Vanderbilt, and no way I would have stayed at Vanderbilt, had it not been for the power of a cohort.”
The Posse Foundation takes its name from the words of a college dropout, who told Ms. Bial in the late 1980s, “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.” Its approach is straightforward: In concert with its member institutions, Posse identifies students with academic and leadership potential who might otherwise be overlooked by traditional admissions metrics, gives them several months of precollege training, sends them off in “posses” of 10 or 12 with other students from the same city, and gives them robust support once they’re on campus.
For its first decade, Posse drew its scholars only from high schools in New York. In 1999, Posse opened an office in Boston; the following year, another in Chicago; and over the next 12 years opened shop in Los Angeles, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, and Houston. It found colleges that were looking to diversify their classes and make their campuses more appealing to students of color. Ms. Bial, who is now the foundation’s president, tried to get the word out among nominators at high schools: She remembers days when she’d wait by the phone with a pen and yellow legal pad, hoping enough calls for nominations would come in. (This year, the foundation will select roughly 660 scholars from nearly 15,000 nominations.)
There were skeptics at first. Did Posse’s view of merit compromise key standards for admission? Were Posse students taking spots from other students? Were they prepared for the academic rigor of an elite college? A handful of colleges signed on, then withdrew “for internal reasons,” Ms. Bial says, such as a shift in institutional policy on merit aid. None left because of Posse students’ academic performance, she says.
Today, Posse officials point to a retention rate of 90 percent as proof that the approach works. “But I don’t think that was clear at the beginning,” says Judith Hunter, who recently retired as director of the writing lab at Grinnell College and served for years as a Posse mentor. In the beginning at Grinnell, she says, “There was a lot of ‘What are we doing?’ and worries about lowering standards.”
In response, Posse officials and supporters emphasize that it is not a program for at-risk youth, or one for minority students, but a leadership scholarship. Posse recruits solely in metropolitan areas, so by definition those pools are racially and ethnically diverse: In 2012, 40 percent of Posse scholars were African-American, 32 percent were Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent were Asian, and 7 percent were white.
“It’s a proven model,” says Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, president of Kalamazoo College, in Michigan, which graduated its first Posse last spring. In three of the five years that Kalamazoo has selected Posse scholars, she says, there have been a few students who didn’t make the Posse program’s final cut but were otherwise admitted. So those students arrived without the depth of support from peers and campus officials the Posse students receive. College, she says, has been more difficult for them. Some have dropped out.
Posse requires a substantial commitment from its partner colleges. Institutions pay for the scholarships, and depending on how many Posse scholars they admit, have put into place an array of support systems. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, a Posse partner since 2001, for instance, is the only Posse institution to recruit from four cities. With 180 or so Posse scholars on the campus, the university has its own Web site and office just for Posse.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June ruling on race-conscious admissions policies, colleges will very likely be searching for “race neutral” ways to maintain or bolster their diversity.
“The Posse approach becomes even more important now that the Supreme Court is becoming less tolerant of racial remedies,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation who researches and writes about socioeconomic class in education. “It can be a real model for universities moving forward.”
Ms. Bial hopes that by 2020, Posse will recruit students from 10 cities, have 100 university partners, and send 1,000 students to college each year. Next year, she says, the foundation will begin consulting with companies on how to adopt the posse approach in corporate settings.
Whether Posse accomplishes its goal of training young people to be catalysts for individual and community change, observers say, will be its greatest test. Most Posse alumni are still in their 20s, and building their careers. The majority work in education and nonprofit organizations, or in business and finance. Many are in graduate school.
David Opong-Wadee, a 2012 graduate of Grinnell and a Posse scholar from Washington, D.C., works for a congressman. Like Ms. Collado, he’s aware of the expectation to make good on his education.
“People didn’t invest in us because they thought we’d get our degrees and smile and say goodbye,” Mr. Opong-Wadee says. “There’s this sense of urgency and giving back and making sure we’re always remembering where we came from, and how we got to where we are now.”
Ms. Collado has brought Posse’s approach to her own work. Last spring, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $4.7-million grant to an organization she co-founded with an administrator at Williams College that seeks to increase diversity in the faculty ranks of elite colleges. The grant is allowing the group to start a new venture. That fledgling program, Creating Connections Consortium, or C3, places postdoctoral students in cohorts of four at three colleges—initially Connecticut College, Middlebury, and Williams—and encourages them to apply for faculty positions there.
Her inspiration, Ms. Collado says, was Posse.
