Jessica Turral has lived in Baltimore since she was seven. She?s from what she calls “the county” ? a way to distinguish herself from friends who have lived in the city all their lives. That, she says, along with her country accent ? she?s originally from a farm in Florida ? and an affinity for knowledge made her different once she got to high school.
“A lot of people didn?t think you could be smart and popular at the same time,” she said.
Turral?s high school alma mater is Baltimore City College, one of the city?s leading public high schools and the source of some of its brightest young minds.
Even there, she says, the stigma of academic success as “nerdy” pervaded the culture.
“A lot of people didn?t want to challenge themselves,” she said, out of fear that they too would be “ignored by the rest of the school.”
Though Turral says she was able to balance having a social life with finishing three to four hours of homework a night from advanced classes, she admits that “for some people, it was hard.”
But maybe it was that ability to thrive both within and beyond the classroom that made Turral what she is now, a psychology major and aspiring lawyer at Johns Hopkins University, just down the street from her former high school.
Turral is one of 39 students admitted in the last two years under a new program at Hopkins called the Baltimore Scholars Program.
The program gives any graduate of a Baltimore City public high school admitted to Hopkins a full-tuition scholarship.
William Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services at Hopkins, said the university established the program as a way to satisfy two of its most pressing needs: a better relationship with Baltimore City and a more diverse student body.
But the program ? conceived of at first as a way to integrate Hopkins into a community with stark demographic and socioeconomic differences ? represents something much bigger:
An evolving role for universities as advocates of higher learning locally, not just globally.
As Baltimore?s public school system languishes under the weight of administrative failures and bureaucratic turmoil, programs such as the one at Hopkins highlight the potential for private ingenuity to succeed where public initiatives fail.
And as the country?s elite urban colleges strive to attract more economically, culturally and ethnically diverse applicants, the incentive to look for talent locally has become greater.
Matthew Crenson, the program?s academic advisor, said schools such as Harvard, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania and Towson University have launched similar programs.
He says the idea is to keep “a core of able, educated people committed to the city.”
And, in only two years, the program has been a massive success.
According to Conley, Hopkins used to enroll an average of three to five students a year from Baltimore, out of an average class size of more than 1,000.
However, since the establishment of the Baltimore Scholars Program that number has improved sevenfold ? from three in 2002 to 21 in 2005.
And the best part is that the program is neither need-based nor race-based and doesn?t employ a less rigorous test for acceptance than regular admission.
It just provides a powerful incentive for Baltimore?s most gifted students to stay in a city that needs them.
The next step: broadening the program from one that simply attracts the city?s brightest minds to one that has a genuine impact on the educational futures of the rest of the city?s public school students.
“One of the key things to all of this,” Conley explained, “is that we?re not just trying to prime the pump, we?re trying to widen the channel.”
Starting this year, Hopkins will widen its marketing efforts to include all of the city?s high schools and even some of its middle schools, in an effort to give students something better to shoot for.
Hopefully, more of them will end up like Turral.
When I asked her if she had given any thought to what she wants to do after college, she didn?t have to think twice.
“I?ve already decided,” she said, “I?m going to stay in Baltimore.”
Sal Gentile will be a junior at Johns Hopkins University next year. He is managing editor of the student newspaper, The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, and can be reached at [email protected].
