This is the season of the great college migration.
Parents are packing up cars with clothes and books and posters — perhaps a blankie — and driving their precious offspring to college campuses across the country and beyond. One of my daughter’s friends is crossing the Canadian border to attend Magill University in Montreal. Most families are driving to nearby colleges in Virginia, Maryland or up the East Coast.
In reverse migration, I am driving west to Madison to haul my daughter and her stuff home from the University of Wisconsin.
Plenty of us will be on the road. Shamefully, few of the collegebound kids will come from D.C. public schools.
According to the D.C. College Success Foundation, only 9 percent of our ninth-graders earn college degrees. I asked the Office of the Superintendent of Education for the number of high schoolers who are heading to college. Alas, it doesn’t keep track.
The school system does keep track of students who drop out. My colleague Jonetta Rose Barras reported this week that 32 percent of high schoolers don’t graduate.
With that grim accounting, does it make sense to even expect kids from the nation’s capital to make it to college — and graduate? It’s not about money. Washington is brimming with scholarships and programs to help kids get into college.
“People think if low-income kids just had money, they would be successful in college,” says Herb Tillery, executive director of the D.C. College Success Foundation. “They need a lot more than money.”
Tillery was deputy mayor for operations under Tony Williams. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation approached him to run its nonprofit to get more D.C. kids in college. They put in about $116 million. He opened the College Success Foundation in December 2006. Its motto is “Double the Numbers.”
So far the money seems well spent.
Starting in March 2007, Tillery’s group selected 160 sophomores from six high schools east of the Anacostia River. It mentored them. It schooled them in four weeks of residential enrichment programs in the summer. It guaranteed them scholarships worth up to $50,000 for five years. And it didn’t shove them off and forget about them.
“A lot more kids are going to college,” Tillery says. “How many are graduating? You don’t become a contributing member of society until you graduate.”
So Tillery’s team stays in contact with the kids, helps them get books, makes sure they go to class. They sent 164 high school graduates into the great migration to colleges this season. They will attend one of 70 schools, from Bates and Syracuse to the Universities of Vermont, Arizona and Hawaii.
“We don’t build bench strength in this town,” Tillery says. “Sixty-two percent of the jobs require a post-secondary education. We need to nurture our homegrown talent.”
Tillery, a D.C. native and a graduate of Roosevelt High, is onto something.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected]
