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Lafayette was featured June 5 on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric in a segment highlighting the Posse Foundation and Lafayette’s Class of 2007 Posse Scholars.
Here is the transcript of a web-exclusive interview with Posse founder and president Deborah Bial on the CBS Evening News site.
Exploring The “Posse”-bilities
Posse Foundation founder and President Deborah Bial tells Wyatt Andrews what inspired her to create the program, and why she believes it has been so successful
Deborah Bial: Posse started because of one student who said he never would have dropped out of college had he had his posse with him. And we thought, what a great idea. Why not send a posse, or a team, of kids together to college, so they could back each other up?
You think about communication skills, leadership ability, ability to act well within a team: these are the qualities that we look for in 17-year-old kids, when they’re in high school. And when they’re selected out of thousands of their peers they are truly representing a unique element that a university admissions officer is looking for. So they’re catalysts of change, because they’re coming onto a campus with these leadership abilities and their changing their world: they’re sitting in the front of their classrooms, they’re promoting dialogue in their dormitories, they’re starting organizations, they’re becoming presidents of existing organizations. They’re very dynamic young people who’ve been trained to talk about issues that are often hard to talk about, issues like race, class, gender, sexuality, all of those things that can be taboo.
A unique aspect of Posse is the selection process, called the Dynamic Assessment Process. It’s the way we identify outstanding young people who may not show up on the radar screens of these top colleges and universities. And they might not show up because they might not have the best SAT score, they might not have gone to a highly ranked high school – they might have actually gone to a very under-resourced high school. So we look for an alternative set of criteria that we think can predict persistence and success as well as a test score.
I think that the focus on grades and test scores as the primary indicator for admitting students into an elite institution finds only a small number of students, and there are so many other young people out there who are smart, ambitious, and talented and can succeed at these elite universities and colleges if you just gave them the chance.
CBS News reporter Wyatt Andrews: And who don’t have the best grades?
DB: And who don’t have the test scores or grades, correct.
WA: Do you think that’s one of the most important things you’re proving?
DB: I think we’re proving that. I think we’re showing that young people who are excelling in their high schools, even if their high schools are poorly ranked, and who don’t have the best test scores – we’re showing that these young people can not only succeed but excel at these top colleges. We have a 90 percent persistence and graduation rate. That’s higher than the national average, much higher, and it equals or exceeds the average graduation rate at some of the top colleges in the United States.
WA: And not just for minorities, right?
DB: For everybody.