Following up on an earlier thread in the Postsecondary Completion group (Throwing Money at the Issue!), I found another model that tried to solve the college affordability puzzle and provides a lot of scaffolding to the participating students. This scaffolding come in the form of student success coaches, college success modules, and additional academic support. This particular program targets traditional high school students. It will be an interesting model to follow as more and more states are planning to emulate it including Tennessee and Oregon.
Excerpt:
The program is called Tulsa Achieves, and, so far, it's helped some 10,000 kids into college. Charles Davis is one of them. He says the program changed his life because when he graduated from high school, he was lost.
Davis is 20 and grew up in Owasso, Oklahoma (a Tulsa suburb). He says his high school grades were pretty good, but college was out of the question.
"I just knew it was going to cost more than I had," he says.
No scholarship offers came in. No recruiters beat down his door. His family couldn't cover the costs, and neither Davis nor his parents wanted to take out tons of loans to make up the difference. Still, he couldn't say no to a free education at Tulsa Community College, where Tom McKeon is president.
"We established Tulsa Achieves seven years ago," McKeon says, "because we no longer believed that a high school diploma was sufficient in terms of the jobs of the future."
In 2007, McKeon helped convince local business and political leaders to think of the program as an investment — not an expense. To qualify, students have to live in Tulsa County, graduate from high school with at least a C average and commit to at least two years of community service.
"I think we're seeing kids that never, ever dreamed that college was a possibility for them because parents didn't think it was within their realm," McKeon says. "So it wasn't even a topic of discussion."
The total cost for Tulsa Achieves is $3,400 per student per year and is mostly paid for with local property taxes. When asked if taxpayers are getting their money's worth, McKeon throws out these numbers: eight out of ten students who enter the program... finish it.
Complete Article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/06/11/320633113/college-for-free-tulsa-radical-idea
~ Priyanka Sharma