Marcus Sanders, 18, who grew up in Chicago and graduated from the Chicago Military Academy, is a big-city kid not easily intimidated by things that go bump in the night.
But he admitted he was more than a little spooked by an incident that occurred during a recruitment visit to Denison University in rural Granville, Ohio. It was just after midnight and he was walking alone across campus when he heard footsteps behind him.
Or rather, hoofsteps. “I turned around and–oh my God–it’s a deer. I froze. I’d seen deer before, but I’d never been that close to one before,” he recalled with a laugh. “I don’t want to say I thought he was going to eat me or anything, but he had very big antlers.”
Close encounters with local fauna are just one of the many unanticipated interactions that can make life challenging for minority students from urban backgrounds attending predominantly white private colleges in small-town America. More pressing problems include subtle racism, isolation, a vague vibe that they are viewed as charity cases admitted by virtue of their skin color, and complete bafflement over the affluent, suburban, middle-class culture that prevails at most of these campuses.
Fortunately, Sanders could call upon his posse. As one of 72 Chicago-area high school seniors selected for a Posse Foundation scholarship, Sanders will be attending Denison next fall with nine other Posse Scholars who have spent months working together to make sure they are ready to cope with any challenge that comes their way.
The Posse Foundation is an innovative scheme brought to fruition almost 20 years ago by Deborah Bial, an education specialist who was troubled by the high failure rate of promising minority students recruited by top-tier universities.
One such student explained to her that he would have stayed in school if he’d had his “posse” with him–using the popular urban expression for his network of neighborhood buddies. That’s when Bial hit on the idea of recruiting a cross-section of kids from urban public high schools, bonding them into cohesive groups of 10 or 12, and sending them off, en masse, to some of the nation’s best universities.
The program, which started off as a shoestring operation in New York, has expanded into a well-financed and highly praised organization with offices in six cities, including Chicago, and an annual budget of $8 million. To date, some 2,200 Posse Foundation scholars have gone off to 28 universities with $220 million worth of full-tuition scholarships in their pockets. Last year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Bial one of its “genius” grants for her work as an education innovator.
But the most significant measure of Bial’s success is the 90 percent graduation rate of Posse Foundation scholars-far higher than the national rate of about 50 percent for all freshman entering four-year institutions.
“Historically, a lot of programs that aim to help these students are looking at what’s wrong with them-they are poor kids, they are at-risk kids, they are kids from urban high schools. We take a different approach. We’re looking at what’s right with them. We are a strength-based program,” Bial explains.
She also stresses that Posse is a not minority program or an affirmative action program, but rather a diversity program that enables small liberal arts colleges “to represent the true demographics of the U.S.”
The organization takes a non-traditional approach to recruitment, scouring inner-city high schools for youngsters who show leadership qualities and group interactive skills that would not necessarily be reflected in their grade-point average or SAT scores.
“In the first round (of the selection process), we don’t even look at grades or transcripts,” says Chastity Lord, the program director of Posse Chicago.
Once the candidates have been identified, they are placed in group situations where their interpersonal skills can be evaluated by Posse staff members. A rigorous winnowing process follows.
“We put them into dynamic settings-large groups, small groups-and observe them as they interact with their peers. We are looking for noncognitive traits that we think can predict success: leadership skills, the ability to resolve conflict. It’s the same thing you would be looking for if you were hiring someone in the corporate world,” Bial says.
At the end of the process, college admissions offices are presented with a group of 20 or so candidates from which a posse of 10 or 12 is chosen.
The participating colleges love it.
“It affords us the opportunity to recruit from areas we would not normally recruit from, and to see students we would not normally see,” says Lisa Scott, director of equity and diversity at Denison.
Those sentiments would be echoed by the admissions office of almost any small Midwestern liberal arts college. Eager for diversity and multiculturalism, these top-quality institutions try hard to attract minority students, but because they are not big, urban or famous for their athletic teams, they often see their best prospects choose schools that are.
Denison, which has 2,100 students and yearly tuition and fees of $41,580, has been participating in the Posse Foundation program for eight years. This fall it will be accepting two posses, one from Chicago and another from Boston.
“It took a little bit of time to get our rhythm, but this has been a highly successful program for us,” says Scott.
At each year’s graduation, Denison awards six seniors a Presidential Medal, the school’s highest academic honor. This year, two of the six were Posse scholars, Scott says.
For bright kids from inner-city backgrounds, getting into a quality college is the easy part; staying in is much harder. The culture shock can be overwhelming.
“It’s not rocket science,” says Bial of her approach to the problem. “If you can find a way to fit into a community, you are more likely to stay. And if you do have a problem, you won’t turn around and go home if you have your posse with you.”
When Sanders, the Denison recruit, discovered he was being stalked by a deer, he reached for his mobile phone and called a member of his posse for advice. The advice was to keeping walking. What is significant is that Sanders’ first instinct-to turn to his posse-is pretty much what he has been prepped to do over the last several months.
Once a candidate has been selected as a Posse scholar, the training and preparation begin in earnest. Starting in December or January, the posses meet once a week after school to hone their academic, leadership and team skills.
“We want our students to be not just social leaders, but academic leaders. We want them to sit in the front; to raise their hands; to know their professors and to be part of the debate,” says Bial.
The intensive workshops continue through the summer. This is where the critical bonds of trust are forged.
“Oh, we’ve had some rough spots, had some arguments, but overall this is a real strong group,” says Daphne Martin, 17, a graduate of Hyde Park Academy and a member of the posse that will soon be heading to Denison.
“Most of us lived in the big city all our lives, never in a small town, so acclimating to this new environment will be a challenge,” she says. “Having the posse, we know we’ll be there for each other.”
Aderonke Adedokun, 17 and a graduate of Lincoln Park High School, is certainly a product of the big city-in her case, Chicago and Lagos, Nigeria. She is what college admissions officers call a “non-traditional student.”
Her father, who ran a small business in Lagos, immigrated to Chicago in the mid-1990s and now drives a cab. Four years ago, he brought Adedokun and her older sister to the U.S. so that they could go to school here. His wife remained in Nigeria.
Adedokun was considering the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when she was nominated for a Posse scholarship. It changed her outlook.
“I decided I wanted to experience something different. I wanted to experience people from different social backgrounds,” she says.
The smaller size of classes at Denison and a faculty that promises to be closely engaged with the students also appealed to her.
“I think it might be a little harder (at Denison), but with the posse I think it will be OK,” she says.
In addition to Denison, this year’s crop of Posse Chicago’s 72 scholarship winners will be heading to Carleton College in Minnesota, DePauw University in Indiana, Oberlin College in Ohio and Pomona College in California, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sanders, Martin and Adedokun were good students in high school. All were destined for college, but for financial reasons each of them says they would have been limited to choosing from among low-tuition state universities. The Posse Foundation expanded the possibilities. Small, private liberal-arts colleges, once the preserve of the children of the well-to-do, were suddenly on their radar.
Now, with the eternal optimism of youth, they are ready to take on Denison and the world.
“I plan to surpass all expectations, even my own,” Martin says.
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thundley@tribune.com
