For some time, this had been a common perception among many Rhode Islanders regarding to the state's independent colleges and universities. But that's changing.

The state’s housing bubble had burst in 2006, leading to interest in developing less volatile economic sectors that would provide the stable high-end ...]]> "Your students come here for four years and leave."

For some time, this had been a common perception among many Rhode Islanders regarding to the state's independent colleges and universities. But that's changing.

The state’s housing bubble had burst in 2006, leading to interest in developing less volatile economic sectors that would provide the stable high-end services jobs. By 2008, Rhode Island, already a year into the recession that would soon be felt by the rest of the country, was in the early stages of refocusing its economic development efforts on transitioning to a knowledge-based economy. This move would require an educated workforce, largely deemed the responsibility of the state’s 11 public and private institutions of higher education. Collectively, these colleges and universities educated nearly 90,000 students, producing nearly 18,000 graduates annually. For a state with slightly over a million residents and low population growth, increasing the retention of these graduates had the potential to close the postsecondary educational attainment gap that Rhode Island faced in comparison to its neighboring states.

“It was becoming evident in 2008 discussions with elected officials and policy leaders, which led to the knowledge economy concept, that colleges and universities were beginning to be seen in a new light as economic engines,” says Dan Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island (AICU Rhode Island). “Traditionally tracked by employment, spending and impact data, economic development opportunities around newly minted graduates were a new lens to gauge higher education’s impact on job creation and economic growth. The Knowledge Retention Symposium and subsequent bRIdge initiative have been born out of this new way of thinking.”

In fall 2009, nearly 100 educators, students, alumni, business leaders, policy officials and entrepreneurs from across the state convened on the campus of Brown University for the Knowledge Retention Symposium, a forum to explore strategies to grow the state’s knowledge workforce. This diverse group of representatives, from bank executives to self-employed artists, recognized the potential impact that increasing graduate retention could have on the local economy. From the discussion, it became clear that data were needed to determine whether the “brain drain” issue being discussed was real or perceived. In addition, two research questions emerged: how do current students view Rhode Island, and what experiences are common among alumni who decide to stay local after graduation?

Building a bridge

In 2010, AICU Rhode Island launched bRIdge, a statewide initiative to answer these questions and implement a strategy to increase post-graduate opportunity in Rhode Island. Early partners included the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Innovation Providence Implementation Council, and the Rhode Island Foundation. AICU Rhode Island’s first action was to enlist the help of Collegia, a Boston-area consulting firm that had previously researched graduate retention in states such as Massachusetts, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Nearly 10,000 undergraduates and 2,500 alumni across all Rhode Island colleges and universities were surveyed, and focus group sessions were held at each institution. The study revealed that while students generally had a favorable view of the state, poor entry-level employment prospects were the overwhelming deterrent to retention. The study clearly demonstrated that students who had local internships and those that spent more time off-campus than their peers were significantly more likely to remain in Rhode Island after graduation. Of 2006 and 2007 graduates from the private colleges and universities, only 12% of those without local internship experiences stayed in Rhode Island after graduation. For those who had one to two internship experiences on their resumes, the retention rate jumped to 31%. Similarly, students who only ventured off campus a few times a month were half as likely to stay when compared to those who ventured off campus one to two times per week.

Fast forward to 2012. Rhode Island unemployment reached 11.8%, and the Providence metropolitan area was one of only two large U.S. regions still losing jobs. While some of Rhode Island’s labor issues are unique, the lack of opportunity for recent graduates is a problem nationally. As noted recently in USA Today, 54% of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed.

Aligning grads and startups

This summer, AICU Rhode Island launched two new programs that seek to both support job creation and align graduates with available employment opportunities. In June, the organization enlisted the support of local founders of early-stage startups to host the inaugural Newport Startup Session on the campus of Salve Regina University. Students spent nine days working in an experiential learning environment to develop a core entrepreneurial skill set. Through the program, participants gained an accessible mentor network and connections to students at nearby institutions who share their interest in innovation in higher education.

"It is extremely important for institutions of higher learning to continually identify the skill sets demanded in today's ever-evolving workforce and to prepare students with the tools to meet those demands," says Jane Gerety, president of Salve Regina University. "It is equally important that we foster networking relationships to bridge academia and the business community. We are proud to host The Newport Startup Session, which accomplishes all of these important objectives."

The program concluded with a half-day conference that brought together members of academia and the local entrepreneurial community for a discussion about supporting entrepreneurship on the campuses of Rhode Island's colleges and universities.

“We want to give back to the community by sparking passion for, and interest in, entrepreneurship among students, while they are still in school and can help achieve great change,” adds program mentor Kyle Judah, CEO of RecoVend, a startup developing a collaborative purchasing platform for institutions of higher education. The company relocated from Boston to Providence in order to participate in Betaspring, a 12-week startup accelerator program that enables teams with a strong start on a high-growth venture to rapidly transform into fundable, scalable companies. Since then, RecoVend has been working with AICU Rhode Island member institutions to explore opportunities for collaboration and contract workflow management.

To create better visibility for local employment opportunities, AICU Rhode Island has partnered with the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority and Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce to develop an online job board with the goal of placing more college students in nearby internships. The new resource will present college students in Rhode Island with unique opportunities to work with startups, small businesses and nonprofits that may otherwise be easily overshadowed by larger employers that recruit on campus.

The emphasis on internships is not solely for the purpose of local retention. According to the 2010 Student Survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 42% of seniors who had internship experience and applied for a job received at least one job offer, compared with only 31% of seniors without internship experience. Ensuring that students graduate with applied work experience on their resumes is now critical for institutions whose graduates seek to enter the workforce.

Whether they are entrepreneurs participating in programs like Newport Startup Session, or interns working for local businesses, colleges and universities should celebrate the economic contributions of students in their host communities. From the conversation that began in 2009 at the Knowledge Retention Symposium, to the data-driven strategy being implemented today, colleges and universities in Rhode Island are committed to working in partnership with the community to develop the educated workforce needed to reinvent the local economy.

Adam Leonard is bRIdge program manager at the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island.

Most recently, Jane Sanders announced she will step down as president of Burlington College, effective in mid-October, after seven years at the helm.

In mid-September, Ruth J. Simmons announced she will step down as president of Brown University at the end of ...]]> Three distinguished leaders announced their decisions to leave New England college presidencies ...

Most recently, Jane Sanders announced she will step down as president of Burlington College, effective in mid-October, after seven years at the helm.

In mid-September, Ruth J. Simmons announced she will step down as president of Brown University at the end of this academic year. She became the first black president of an Ivy League institution when Brown appointed her in 2001, after serving as president of Smith College since 1995.

Theodora J. Kalikow, president of the University of Maine at Farmington since 1994, announced she will retire June 30.

Daniel Mark Fogel announced he would step down as president of the University of Vermont, effective June 30, 2012, after 10 years at the helm of Vermont's land-grant university. In a letter to the UVM community, Fogel cited successful UVM initiatives such as the creation of the Honors College, a six-credit diversity requirement and ...]]>

Daniel Mark Fogel announced he would step down as president of the University of Vermont, effective June 30, 2012, after 10 years at the helm of Vermont's land-grant university. In a letter to the UVM community, Fogel cited successful UVM initiatives such as the creation of the Honors College, a six-credit diversity requirement and the UVM Transportation Research Center.

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Brown University announced that former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, an advocate for mental health care and neuroscience research, accepted a two-year appointment as a visiting fellow at the Brown Institute for Brain Science through the 2012-13 academic year.

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Edwin “Ned” Thomas, chair of MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named dean of Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, effective July 1.

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Related Posts: Among Comings & Goings: Another NE Land Grant Taps a Scientist as Prez; Comings & Goings: They Would Rather be in Philadelphia?; Holy Moly: McFarland to Step Down as Prez of Holy Cross

In the U.S., postsecondary education has long driven individual social mobility and collective economic prosperity. Nonetheless, the nation’s labor force includes 54 million adults who lack a college degree; of those, nearly 34 million have no college experience at all. In the 21st century, these numbers cannot sustain us.

Returning to learning: Adults’ success ...]]>

In the U.S., postsecondary education has long driven individual social mobility and collective economic prosperity. Nonetheless, the nation’s labor force includes 54 million adults who lack a college degree; of those, nearly 34 million have no college experience at all. In the 21^st century, these numbers cannot sustain us.

Returning to learning: Adults’ success in college is key to America’s future; Lumina Foundation for Education; 2007

This is a growing problem faces higher education and our nation. Retention and graduation rates are deplorable, particularly for disadvantaged students. Far too many who enter the gates of higher education leave before earning a postsecondary degree. And for those who do earn their credential, there is a growing and fair concern over quality of learning—students’ ability to perform in the workforce, to solve problems, to think critically and to communicate effectively across different media and contexts. The reasons are many: pedagogy focused in learning from textbooks and lectures more than doing and designing, a disconnect between real-world needs and industrial-era academies, financial constraints for students and for institutions, and a market guided by rankings based on prestige and not student performance post-graduation. Students setting their own paths and purposes for learning are not often enough a central part of the higher education equation.

In a society that reaches for silver-bullet solutions, higher education is not immune from widespread attempts to raise graduation rates through scaling one-size-fits-all models at lower and lower costs. Yet we at Big Picture Learning believe any true, long-term solution that will produce more graduates with high-quality degrees must be one-learner-at-a-time and competency-based, and not applied in broad brushstrokes to produce quick results. The same terms we use, such as “student-centered” and “performance-based,” are often employed in circumstances we feel are merely tweaking around the edges one reform at a time. In contrast, we have spent the past two years piloting a model that is drastically different: College Unbound.

College Unbound brings to higher education the Big Picture Learning philosophy, which has grown over 15 years to a network of more than 70 U.S. schools and almost 60 schools internationally. With initial funding from Lumina Foundation for Education, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, Staples Foundation for Learning and individual donors, College Unbound launched its first program, College Unbound @ Roger Williams University, in fall 2009, accepting a cohort of students that will graduate in May 2012. Southern New Hampshire University will welcome its first group of College Unbound @ SNHU students in fall 2011. The word “unbound” in our title does not mean that our students do not attend college—in fact, all are thriving on their path to a degree. Instead, we hope with this name to sum up our work in “unbundling” traditional notions of higher education and creating a new paradigm for 21^st-century college.

College Unbound’s design: student retention with high quality of learning

Traditional curricula are typically text-to-life: students first encounter facts and skills from books, lectures and other academic resources, and are usually only later—if ever—asked to apply this learning in the way that those actually working in the field do on a daily basis. Not only does such a model of learning miss the opportunity to motivate and engage students in real-world work, but it is also no wonder that 63% of employers surveyed by the American Association of Schools and Universities said that too many recent college graduates enter the workforce without the necessary tools for success.

As a key both to student retention and quality of learning, we see College Unbound as a “life-to-text” model, a design that puts students in the driver’s seat of their educational journey. Students begin their studies focused not on which course they need to take, but instead on questions and ideas that are important to them. They then ground these purposes for learning within the actual problems and questions facing their community and career or interest. The internship projects that our College Unbound students spend two days building and executing with a professional advisor are just as, if not more, important than the learning students do off-site. The other three days a week are spent broadening and deepening their theoretical knowledge to support of their projects and their individualized plans for developing all required competencies for graduation.

Our communities of College Unbound learners excel because this program offers:

• real-world skill and knowledge acquisition as students tackle workplace and community problems with professional advisors;

• integrated seminars where students engage in interdisciplinary studies to gain the required broad as well as field-based skills and knowledge;

• individual learning plans that start with each student’s needs, interests, and modes of inquiry; and

• all remedial and enrichment education embedded into students’ learning planning and interest-based projects.

Throughout these program features, students’ work is highly collaborative as a means of building a professional and academic network and providing the necessary support they need. They meet on a weekly basis with faculty, professional advisors, mentors, writing coaches, tutors and their peers. The experience of working carefully and closely with faculty mentors on significant projects is profound and deeply rewarding, increasing student engagement and motivation and ensuring that their degrees will be grounded in real-world practice.

College Unbound’s student-centered evaluation and assessment designs

Evaluation and assessment are critical components of ensuring College Unbound’s effectiveness and student growth. All assessments are used to offer real-time feedback and lead to any necessary programmatic and student-level adjustments. To that end, students have an active voice in their own—and the program’s—growth and progress. For example, students participate in board meetings, funding meetings and evaluations of program components. In addition to program evaluation done by an outside program documenter, students are a central part of assessing College Unbound’s success through surveys, student interviews, student evaluations and documentation of student work.

Central to our program’s effectiveness are clear measures of student learning. Therefore, we also use a variety of formative and summative assessments to gauge student thinking and application of the skills demarcated in our detailed learning goals. Students are assessed in four categories of learning:

• Broad Knowledge—Making Interdisciplinary Connections;
• Critical Methods of Inquiry, Personal Growth and Development;
• Demonstrated Valued Added; and
• Applied Knowledge and Skills/Civic Engagement.

The outcomes we have adopted take into account all of the Essential Learning Outcomes published by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise, as well as additional outcomes based on our own research and experience. Our learning goals are in alignment with students’ ability to show competency in these rigorous goals and is a prerequisite to what we believe is a truly performance-based degree.

To monitor students’ competency development, they are evaluated using learning goal rubrics by their faculty and professional advisors through weekly meetings and varied assignments and projects. Student internship project work, seminar assignments, journals, reflective and critical writing, surveys and interviews all provide formative opportunities for those working closely with the students to provide feedback and assist students in documenting their growth.

In addition, students do weekly self-reflections and engage in self-evaluation to help them track their own progress. We seek to use portfolios and public exhibitions in innovative ways to do accurate summative assessments of what students have learned at each mid-semester and final point. Instead of exams, our students speak about, demonstrate, and are challenged on their work during public exhibitions in front of faculty, professional advisors, field experts, community members and peers. Portfolios and exhibitions allow students to document, share, and self-evaluate their work, creating a perfect opportunity for faculty and students to collaboratively assess their learning plan progress to revise them before the next semester’s work.

The College Unbound student experience

For example, Michael Reaves, a student at College Unbound @ Roger Williams University is interested in history, specifically the Civil Rights Movement, community and education. Through his internship at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, Michael explores his questions and purpose to gain the knowledge and skills required to be a community organizer, leader and educator. In his freshman year, Reaves underwent 30 hours of professional training to become a certified trainer of nonviolence. He led a high school partnership program where he and a team of trainers taught an eight-week non-violence workshop to more than 90 high school students. Each group of students was responsible for a community event and a culminating final day of celebration and sharing of project work.

Reaves also participated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s 50^th-anniversary conference, traveled to China and attends seminars, lectures, and salons offered throughout Providence and Rhode Island. He has listened to and spoken with leaders from the Civil Rights moment and experts in the field. This, year he is spearheading the development of a new community response team for the Institute. His seminars on leadership, grant writing and the social sciences support his project and intellectual growth. Along with a College Unbound student colleagues, Reaves is planning to create a summer community leadership program that brings at-risk students from Providence to Israel to work with and learn with their Israeli counterparts.

Alex Villagomez began his freshman year exploring his broad questions on sustainability through an internship at StackDesignBuild (Stack). Stack is a unique contractor focused on affordable green building, sustainable design, and innovative technologies. In his first year, Villagomez learned how to use RevIt and Sketch Up, how to hand draw sketches, and how to create 3D models. His  main project was to design six options for the interior of Stack's new office space. He met with Stack owners, ran project meetings, and gave a formal presentation of his drawings and models. Villagomez also assisted on three of Stack's other projects: the Box Office, Containers to Clinics, and Barmonde Residence. He spent the summer in Soweto, South Africa, where he learned about leadership/entrepreneurship, urban agriculture and green energy.

After his first year of work at Stack, his seminars, and his summer travel, Villagomez honed his questions around sustainability to focus on passive solar design. This year, he is serving as the project manager and designer for a sustainable tree house classroom project to be built at Driftwood Stables, a leadership camp in New Hampshire. His tree house will use passive solar design and may draw on small-scale green energy technologies including a solar panel system and rainwater catchment system. His work is undergirded by seminar learning, workshops and conferences focused on passive solar design, leadership, project management and grant writing. To maximize learning and application of the theories involved in this project, Villagomez is also taking a class on passive solar design at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Providence.

Finally, Ariel Wilburn began her journey at College Unbound with a focus on psychology and the stated purpose of working with children of domestic violence. Wilburn spent her first year interning at a shelter for women and children of domestic violence. Under the guidance of her professional advisor and the theories learned through her seminar work, she created a curriculum focused on social development of children ages three to six. Wilburn supported her work at the shelter by studying theories of child development—from Jean Piaget’s to Barbara Rogoff’s—by auditing a course at Brown University on social and culture context of learning and development, and by attending state-level child advocacy meetings with her mentor.

Over the summer, Wilburn brought her skills, knowledge, and interests to Salvador Brazil, where she continued working with underserved children. In her sophomore year, she has merged her passion of spoken-word poetry with her purpose of helping children and transitioned to the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. In this internship, she is creating and then leading a group of spoken-word poets—VENT, Voices Encouraging Nonviolent Thinking. This corps of poets will teach nonviolent principles to local school students. Like Reaves and Villagomez, Wilburn completed 30 hours of professional training. She has become a certified trainer of nonviolence.

Lessons learned

As these experiences show, our two years of experience with the College Unbound pilot are successfully developing learners who are consistently curious, wondering, pondering, uncertain, speculating, questioning, stuck and caught up. We believe such students are clearly more likely to stay in school through their graduation day and, because they are learning for their own purposes and interests, much more likely to develop the rigorous set of competencies required for a high-level college degree.

Although the current trajectory of higher education is toward scaling one-size-fits-all models at a lower cost, our 15 years of raising graduation rates in the Big Picture Learning network argues for sticking with the tried and true about how people learn. No matter our age, no matter our background, we all learn best when allowed to do so in a way we find meaningful and when supported toward high-level goals. College Unbound is a high-touch model without a doubt; as our program continues, we believe adding a greater high-tech component will allow for the efficiencies of scale a higher education does require—without losing the innovations we believe are making a significant difference for our students.

The accompanying videos were filmed and edited by students to demonstrate their work and the College Unbound Program. The videos include footage of second-year student Ariel Wilburn and Alex Villagomez’s work and the College Unbound learning community, and first-year student Mike McCarthy’s work on digital learning and educational design. Click the links below to view the videos ...

• About Big Picture Learning
• College Unbound's Learning Community
• Internship: Voices Encouraging Nonviolent Thinking
• Components of College Unbound

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Jamie E. Scurry is co-director of College Unbound. Ariel Wilburn and Alex Villagomez are sophomores in College Unbound. Mike McCarthy is a freshman.

Related Posts: The Big Picture College: A Model High School Program Graduates (pdf); Interview with Nick Donohue of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation

Ten of the 32 new Rhodes Scholars are from New England or studied in the region.

They are: Mark Jia and Nicholas DiBerardino, both of Princeton University; Laura Nelson of the University of Virginia; Zachary Frankel, Daniel Lage and Baltazar Zavala of Harvard; Alice Baumgartner and William Zeng of Yale; Gabrielle Emanuel of Dartmouth; and Jennifer ...]]>

Ten of the 32 new Rhodes Scholars are from New England or studied in the region.

They are: Mark Jia and Nicholas DiBerardino, both of Princeton University; Laura Nelson of the University of Virginia; Zachary Frankel, Daniel Lage and Baltazar Zavala of Harvard; Alice Baumgartner and William Zeng of Yale; Gabrielle Emanuel of Dartmouth; and Jennifer Lai of MIT.

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some ...]]>

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some New England campuses made honor roll with A- grades, including Amherst College, Brown University, College of the Atlantic, Middlebury College, Smith College, University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University, Williams College, Yale University and Harvard University.

Others followed close behind with B+ grades, including Clark University, Colby College, Dartmouth College, MIT, Northeastern University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

For more information, visit GreenReportCard.org.

Today’s fast-paced and Internet-driven society provides a lot of opportunities for innovation in the college financial aid world. As tuition costs continue to rise faster than average incomes, more students are turning to private lenders and other third-party organizations to finance their educations; the Harvard Educational Review estimates that there was a 76% increase in ...]]>

Today’s fast-paced and Internet-driven society provides a lot of opportunities for innovation in the college financial aid world. As tuition costs continue to rise faster than average incomes, more students are turning to private lenders and other third-party organizations to finance their educations; the Harvard Educational Review estimates that there was a 76% increase in the amount of debt that students attending public four-year colleges faced over time between 1992 and 2004.  While the power of online micro-giving has been harnessed to the benefit of entrepreneurs in developing countries (by Kiva, for example, and for K-12 classrooms throughout the country (Donors Choose, for example), American students struggle more than ever with high college costs and have no vehicle to access support from their personal network, community, or individuals nationwide.  Co-fund.org consists of an online platform that enables anyone to directly fund students’ unmet tuition need so they can attend and succeed at college.

The Gates Foundation estimates that between 2006 and 2016, nearly 4.5 million students will not pursue college degrees due to the costs of higher education.  High school counselors report not having enough financial aid, tuition costs being too high and an unwillingness to borrow as the top three reasons, respectively, why college-ready students do not enroll directly into four-year institutions, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy.  These burdens have led to the troubling finding that students from low-income families attend four-year institutions at about half the rate of equally qualified students from high-income families (U.S Education Department’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance). Also troubling is the fact that many low-income college students do not have other types of support needed to navigate the college and financial aid application process, and then to succeed during college itself.

Today, unmet tuition need, or what is referred to as “the gap,” constitutes a high percentage of many students’ expenses. The average unmet need of students with incomes in the lowest quartile is roughly $3,265, according to the American Council on Education.  A study by McKinsey estimates that if the gap between low-income students and the rest were closed, the gross domestic product in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion (3% to 5%) higher.  The impending failure of our education system to maximize the inherent potential of our nation’s intellectual capital has economic implications that go far beyond the issues of social equity, and this must be addressed in innovative ways.

Scholarships seem numerous, but the applications, deadlines, and impersonal nature of most scholarships hinder their accessibility and effectiveness. Overall, both grants and loans are problematic; two-thirds of grant aid is given as merit-based aid, and research in the American Educational Research Journal indicates this aid does not equalize college participation rates over time or change the impact of income on enrollment patterns.  Moreover, individual donors are disenfranchised from directly supporting an individual college student unless they have the legal and financial resources to set up their own scholarship fund.  Students are also unable to systematically leverage their personal network, community, or individuals nationwide for support to help fund their college expenses.

Having seen these problems first-hand at my large public high school in North Central Florida, and with a mother who is a professor of education at the University of Florida, I had already wanted to make a difference and help improve college access for deserving students.  With that cause in mind, I first conceptualized of what would become CO-Fund while working at a startup in Silicon Valley last summer that also uses a person-to-person fundraising platform. This experience, in addition to internships at a venture capital fund, marketing for an orthopedic device company, and business development for an online job-matching service, had all given me significant experience in what it takes to build and garner support for a high-tech startup.

Following preliminary research and feedback on the idea that summer, I met with old classmates from my Entrepreneurship and Good Work class once back at Brown University in the fall that are also experienced and passionate about education and startups. I began to conduct extensive research and met with dozens of experts in relevant areas to refine the approach and build the team needed to launch and maintain CO-Fund. Our seven-student team and Board of Advisors was in place by the end of the fall, and Rhode Islanders Sponsoring Education (RISE) agreed to be our fiscal sponsor, enabling donors to make tax-deductible donations. In the early spring I also secured free legal services from Partridge Snow & Hahn, giving us the legal resources needed to sort through the tax implications of our work and to draw up the necessary contracts and terms.

Fast forward a couple of months and it is evident that our hard work has paid off: We have the website up, reputable partner organizations, our first students profiled and have raised more than $20,000, including winnings and recognition from several business plan competitions.  As you can see in the “About Us” section on our website, our team of students, advisors and directors had the determination and skills necessary to bring this initiative to fruition.  In the face of the myriad problems that aspiring college students face, CO-Fund has emerged to help deserving students make college more affordable by empowering donors to choose the recipient of their aid (100% of which goes to the students) while circumventing the complicated traditional scholarship process.

So how does CO-Fund help these students exactly?  The CO-Fund process is relatively simple.  Mentors from partner organizations recommend deserving, college-ready students that need aid to “close the gap” so that they can directly enroll into a four-year institution.  Selected students then make online profiles to introduce themselves and their financial challenges and academic, extracurricular and career interests.  Visitors to the site can view the profiles and easily donate as little as $1 to the Fellow(s) of choice.

CO-Fund Mentors are members of partnered organizations that work with students who plan to enroll in college, and are responsible for referring and mentoring qualified students to CO-Fund throughout the college application process. Once the student completes a profile, the new CO-Fund Fellow can raise up to $2,500 through CO-Fund to help fund their college tuition. Once this amount is met, or tuition comes due, CO-Fund coordinates with the student’s college financial aid department to disburse the donated funds directly into the student’s tuition account.

As a part of their Fellowship, students also pledge to “pay it forward” to other students and communities like their own by completing one of the pay-it-forward options,” examples of which include working for one of CO-Fund’s partner NGOs for a year after graduation or donating one-fifth of the amount they received through CO-Fund back to other Fellows.  In this way, CO-Fund prompts students to find creative solutions to fund their college tuition and improve their communities upon graduation, and donors in a sense are investing in a Fellow and their future actions.  Please read our FAQs for more details

CO-Fund expands the tools available to make college more accessible and affordable for low-income students. In the same way that the Internet democratizes access to information, it now has the potential to do the same for the giving and receiving of college scholarships.

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Cody Simmons, a student at Brown University, recently founded CO-Fund, America’s College Opportunity Fund, to improve college access for deserving, college-ready students.