This article online at Edweek.com illustrates what a community can do if it puts it's students first. They have set up a program to send every student who is eligible to college. They have realized that the future of their town depends on it. They talk about how this program will bring people to their town and I think it will also bring business to town that will create jobs. They talk about the long term affect of having students come back and be productive members of the community.
There where a few questions I had that the article didn't answer. How are they going to pay for it? How are they going to get these students to move back after they complete college? They also talked about it providing around $2,500 per student per year and I wonder what the tuition for a public university in Connecticut is?
As we all know one of the biggest barriers to success for a college graduate is the heavy debt that comes with it. This is a great step forward in the fight against public debt. I hope they can be a model for the future and I know that they will have many bright minds moving to their town who normally would not be thinking about their children going to college because of the cost.
It looks like the Promise program will be funded mostly by Yale, with some administrative costs funded by a local community foundation. Interesting that a non-public university is providing the funding for public university tuitions. Odd. I support the idea of their eligibility criteria (a 3.0 grade point average in high school, 90 percent attendance rate, a record of good behavior and completion of 40 hours of community service) but can't help but think of the nightmare of trying to track all of that for all of their students individually.
ReplyDeleteMuch of the money for these types of programs is going to have to come from private sources. There just isn't enough money from the government. I think that something is on the horizon for tracking all student progress as well as linking that to teachers.
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