Photo C 2007 Daniel Sheehan, www.danielsheehan.com

The University of Washington in Seattle, a charter member of the CollegeKeys Compact™, offers an excellent example for other institutions seeking ways to remove barriers for low-income students. Even before the CollegeKeys Compact was launched by the College Board, UW had put into practice their commitment to helping underserved students through two robust programs, the Husky Promise® and the Dream Project.

The Husky Promise is a financial aid initiative, introduced for the 2007-08 academic year, which guarantees that full tuition and standard fees will be covered by grant or scholarship support for UW undergraduate students who are residents of the state of Washington, who come from low- and lower-middle-income families, and who qualify for Pell Grants or State Need Grants. These grants and scholarships never have to be repaid. The “promise” is to remove all financial barriers to completing a college education.

“We believe the inability to pay should not prevent any Washington student who academically belongs here from earning a degree,” said UW President Mark Emmert. “What makes the Husky Promise possible is a classic public-private partnership, whereby public tax dollars and private gifts to the university combine to make this sort of opportunity available to students who otherwise could not afford to go to college. These students will get a world-class education for free. It's a perfect partnership."

The Husky Promise serves nearly 5,700 students each year. About half of UW students on the school’s three campuses (Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma) receive some form of financial aid, and more than one-third of this year’s incoming freshmen will be the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree. Students who qualify for the Husky Promise can be assured that if tuition increases, the grants and scholarships they receive will increase as well. For more information on the Husky Promise, visit its Web site.

And if eliminating financial concerns weren’t enough, the students at UW decided to launch the Dream Project, an outreach program that pairs UW students with local high school students to help them navigate the often-daunting college admissions process — another potential barrier to college. Now working with its third cohort of high school students, the program engages more than 100 UW students to guide nearly 250 students from seven Seattle-area high schools in SAT® preparation, filling out applications, writing essays, applying for financial aid and identifying scholarships. The Dream Project also awards “Live the Dream” Scholarships each year to nine high school participants who will be attending the University of Washington in the fall.
                                                                                                                             
In addition to the assistance these high school students receive, the program is beneficial for UW students as well, teaching them about educational opportunity and social mobility and examining these ideas in the context of the University of Washington. Students from the Dream Project will offer a session about their outreach efforts at the Western Regional Forum in February. For more information about the Dream Project, visit its Web site.

VP Al Mijares

For many of us working in the College Board, the 10 million-dollar question is “How can we best prepare our secondary students for success in a postsecondary system?” San Diego (Calif.)
Unified School District, under the guidance of Superintendent Terry Grier, has introduced a
list of strategies designed to promote students’ postsecondary opportunities, and is making an effort to reach out to Spanish speaking parents
by providing literature and outreach bilingually.
I share a few of these strategies below:

• Offering a new small high school with a humanities focus — the Early Middle College High School at San Diego City College;
  
  
• Reducing class sizes by allocating enough teachers to limit class size to 20 students per teacher in ninth-grade English classes.
  
  
• Requiring the PSAT/NMSQT® for all ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders, which means everyone is considered for National Merit Scholarships;
  
  
• Equipping students with the skills to take and pass AP® and IB exams through grants from the Advanced Placement®/International Baccalaureate programs. A second round of grant funding has been awarded based on the district’s initial success with round-one schools.
  
  
• Celebrating AP students with a special dinner at the San Diego Museum of Man in
  Balboa Park, sponsored by the AP Incentive Grant program in partnership with
  local businesses;
  
  
• Offering a College Bound Symposium for students and their parents to learn about online applications, finding money for college through the Cal Grant program and scholarship searches, and writing effective résumé and scholarship essays.

The WRO’s higher education group has formed a Bay Area PowerFAIDS®  user group to support those financial aid professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area who use the College Board's financial aid packaging software. Senior Educational Manager John Flemming organized the
group, which meets monthly on members' campuses to share best practices and address some
of the financial issues they face in their work. We hope to start a similar user group in
Southern California.

The WRO held two major events at the University of Denver this fall. The first was a financial aid services update workshop, which allowed many new and returning participants to learn about the 2009-10 service enhancements planned for the CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE®, Noncustodial PROFILE, Institutional Methodology and Institutional Documentation Service. Attendees were also briefed on important initiatives like the release of the Rethinking Student Aid study group report, “Fulfilling the Commitment: Recommendations for Reforming Federal Student Aid.” The second was a college-readiness event — done in cooperation with our Office of Government Relations as well as local and national experts — which was an informational workshop for Colorado public school districts. The workshop addressed the state’s goals of increasing the number of students going to college while closing the achievement gap, with discussions focusing on expanding access to academic rigor in schools and connecting students to college success and opportunity.

At this year’s Forum, held in Houston in early November, 266 new members were elected to the College Board, bringing the total number of members to 5,653. Fifty-seven of these newly elected member institutions are from the Western Region.

Click here to see events and workshops in the Western Region.