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Lafayette is featured extensively in an article in today’s The New York Times on the Posse Foundation, an organization that recruits and trains student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams called “posses.” The teams enroll at top-tier colleges and universities nationwide to pursue their academics and help promote cross-cultural communication.
Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, was the principal speaker at Lafayette’s 171st Commencement Saturday, May 20, when members of Lafayette’s first posse received their diplomas. View the video of Bial’s Commencement address.
At Lafayette Bial passionately promoted equity in higher education, challenging top U.S. colleges and universities to “model equity and to educate student bodies that look more like our country’s changing demographics. . . . If [they] do not aggressively take on this challenge, they will be directly contributing to the ossification of our society — where we create a system that excludes groups who will one day — soon — represent the largest part of this nation.”
Excerpts from the Times article, “In Search of Standouts Who May Not Stand Out Enough,” follow (the complete article is available here; access is free but a login may be required):
In the fall, [Mosi] London, who is 17 and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, will attend Lafayette College in Pennsylvania on a full scholarship. He was identified by the nonprofit Posse Foundation, whose executives looked beyond standardized test scores to select him and 304 other students nationwide as likely to excel at a selective college — but also as likely to be overlooked by admissions officials. Mr. London is not a star athlete or musician and does not have stellar SAT scores; he is simply a New York City student with good grades, pride and potential.
”We are expected to be leaders,” Mr. London said.
Last fall, Mr. London was one of 6,300 students in five cities who competed for a Posse scholarship. The students who were picked received full scholarships to one of 23 colleges and universities working with the foundation; other participating institutions are Pomona College, Bryn Mawr College and Brandeis University.
For the participating colleges and universities, the Posse program offers a way to bring in students — especially minority students — to diversity their campuses. While Posse Foundation executives said the program did not search exclusively for minority students, it does recruit from urban schools, which tend to have far more nonwhite students.
“We’re looking for standout kids, kids who exhibit leadership,” said Deborah Bial, president and founder of the 17-year-old foundation, which is based in Manhattan and is financed through private donations.She said a narrow focus on standardized test scores missed students who show in other ways that they, too, have potential. “We’re looking at them through a nontraditional lens,” she said.
The selected students, having bypassed the typical admissions process, form a so-called posse of about 10 (or in Mr. London’s case, 12), who will go off to the same college in the fall. Until then, they meet weekly as a group with Posse trainers to prepare. The idea is that having bonded before college, they will support each other once they get there.
The students do well. More than 90 percent of Posse students graduate within five years, compared with about 60 percent at private four-year institutions nationally. More than half earn a grade point average above 3.0, according to a 2003 independent study of the program. The success of the program, which costs the foundation about $5,000 a year per student (not including tuition, which is covered by the college), suggests that its true strength is finding young people who are capable of thriving at selective institutions, but who might not be identified by admissions offices.
“They have a lot to teach us,” Daniel H. Weiss, the president of Lafayette, said, referring to the Posse Foundation. The conventional admissions process, he said, “misses entirely too much.”. . .
Steffi Romano, 18, is a first-year Posse student at Lafayette, whose pretty campus is perched on a hill overlooking Easton, Pa.
Last year, Ms. Romano was valedictorian at Health Careers and Sciences High School in Upper Manhattan and was thinking about applying to Columbia and New York University. But her SAT scores were low for those schools, and lower than the average score of an entering Lafayette student, which was 1279 out of a possible 1600, according to the institution. Regardless, in her first semester at Lafayette, she made the dean’s list.
“People didn’t know what Posse was,” recalled Rasheim Donaldson, 21, a senior at Lafayette [and a member of the first Posse group to arrive on campus four years ago.] .”We were under a microscope.”
Mr. Donaldson recalled that in those early days, the members of his group were extremely close, creating what he described as a haven for each other. He recalled a debate over affirmative action in a class in which he was the only black student, during his freshman year.
“I was very fervent in my position,” he said; he argued that policies to address racial inequality were necessary. He added that he had honed his arguments during Posse training sessions.
Now Mr. Donaldson, who is tall, articulate and constantly in motion, heads the black student organization, is a resident adviser in a dormitory and coordinates a program that works with children in Easton.
Mr. Donaldson and his classmates are thinking about what they will do after graduation. One plans a bicycle ride across the country to meet a variety of nonprofit groups; another will start work at Lehman Brothers. Mr. Donaldson is considering law school, although he would have to attend without his posse.
Through an alliance with the Posse Foundation, Lafayette has enrolled 45 New York City high school students in the last four years. In addition to New York, where Posse is headquartered, there are sites in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
This fall, Lafayette’s incoming class of 2010 will include a posse from Washington, D.C., in addition to one from New York, just the fifth college or university to have posses from more than one city.
Lafayette’s participation in the Posse program with New York students is supported by the Judith C. White Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Jeffrey Kovner ’66, which has established a $250,000 endowment to promote and enhance diversity at Lafayette. The foundation also is giving $10,000 in each of the next three years to fund a leadership retreat weekend for Posse students. The contributions are a challenge grant for which Lafayette is raising additional donations to reach at least $1.2 million.