Spring Break
Adjusting to college isn't so hard when you have your posse with you
Tom Hundley - Chicago TribuneIssue date: 8/7/08 Section: News
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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.
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