QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization, figured out how to
convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can
attend a top college. College admissions officers attribute the organization’s
success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly
complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so
many low-income families. QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message:
If you get in, you can go.
The growth of QuestBridge has broader lessons for higher
education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor
teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic
ladder is so hard in the United States today. But QuestBridge’s efforts are
innovative enough to deserve their own attention. Yet the broader lessons of
QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also
how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.
The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are
now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships
that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this
money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and
where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving,
low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t
graduate from any college.
They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school
juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To
win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which
could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on
social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to
tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated,
longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and
which you can afford).
QuestBridge has its roots in summer programs they started as
Stanford students in the 1980s and 1990s. Eventually, the McCulloughs realized
the growing applicant pool to their summer program consisted of exactly the
students whom top colleges said they wanted to recruit. So the couple began
approaching admissions officers with plans for a new program the colleges would
help pay for. QuestBridge uses traditional databases, like those with SAT
scores, as well as networks of high school teachers and others to recruit
students. It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long
application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.
Crucially, the program promises a scholarship not just for
one year but for four. The winners of the scholarships go through a matching
process. They attend their first choice among any of the 35 participating
colleges that admit them. Hundreds of scholarship finalists who don’t win are
admitted separately to the colleges, through a more typical admissions process,
often with nearly full scholarships. The students form a support network for
one another.
As much as QuestBridge has grown, it of course remains tiny
relative to the population of college-ready, low-income teenagers. Only a small
slice of them will attend colleges with the resources to offer full
scholarships. That’s why the larger lessons of QuestBridge are so important.
What are they?
One, the complexity of the financial-aid process is scaring students away from
college. The Obama administration has taken steps to simplify it, but
a full revamping would require help from Congress. Two, large amounts of
well-meaning scholarship money is fairly ineffectual. It helps many students
who would graduate from college regardless, rather than those with the skills
to graduate who are at risk of not doing so. Three, not every problem
created by inequality is fiendishly difficult to solve.
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