CASTING A WIDER NET

What We’re Learning: To help promising students get to college, you have to do more than just pay the bills.

If you go to high school in Washington, D.C., your chances of eventually earning a college degree are exceedingly low. More than half the students in D.C. who enroll in the ninth grade never graduate from high school. Of those who do graduate, about one-third don’t go to college. Of those who do go to college, more than two-thirds don’t finish within five years. Do the math, and here’s where you wind up: In many neighborhoods, just one out of 10 young people will ever earn a bachelor’s degree.

Obviously, the city’s schools are broken in many places. In 2006, a number of community organizations, government entities, and philanthropies came together to think systematically about how to fix them. They formed the Double the Numbers coalition with the goal of helping twice as many students in the nation’s capital earn bachelor’s degrees.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to doubling the numbers. The district needs wholesale changes, and it’s developing a strategy to make them. Last year, we helped fund one of the key components of a comprehensive plan: a college scholarship for low-income students called the D.C. Achievers Program. Helping students overcome the often overwhelming financial barriers to higher education isn’t the only thing that needs to get done, but it is essential.

The D.C. Achievers Program is modeled after a similar scholarship program we’ve been funding in Washington state since 2001, and it incorporates many of the lessons we’ve learned over the past six years.

For example, the Washington state program paired the scholarships with a controversial high school redesign effort. The D.C. Achievers Program prioritizes scholarships, so it won’t get bogged down in the occasionally messy politics of high school reform. The city’s high schools will still be reformed, but as a separate yet complementary effort.

At the same time, the D.C. Achievers Program is adopting the best practices of the Washington state program.

First, it doesn’t select students based on grades or test scores alone. It also emphasizes characteristics such as leadership potential, which, though harder to gauge, are an important complement to more traditional measures. Here’s why: All our high school work is based on the idea that many of the nation’s high schools aren’t giving students the challenging, relevant curriculum they need to fulfill their potential. By using non-standard criteria to select students for the Achievers program, we can reclaim some of the talented young people who otherwise would never even dream of attending college.

The second unique characteristic of the D.C. Achievers program—also adapted from the Washington state program—is its recognition of the fact that just paying the bills isn’t enough. The Achievers program augments financial aid with advising as students navigate the college application maze and mentoring as they adjust to campus life, oftentimes at colleges where the vast majority of students come from very different backgrounds.

This year, 175 students in D.C. were selected as Achievers. They’ll be heading off to college in the fall, early success stories in D.C.’s long-term effort to double the numbers.