Eight Highly Selective Colleges Plan to Enroll 1,100 Low-Income Community College Transfer Students Over the Next Four Years

The latest Department of Education figures show that there are 859,000 black students enrolled at two-year community colleges. They make up nearly 45 percent of all black students enrolled in higher education.

Eight high-ranking colleges and universities recently announced that they have teamed up with the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in an effort to increase the number of low-income students currently at community colleges who can transfer to selective four-year institutions. The participating institutions are Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern California.

The foundation will award grants totaling $6,780,000 to the eight colleges and universities to help them establish programs to recruit low-income community college students. The eight schools will in turn commit $20.5 million in financial aid to students who transfer from community colleges.

Over the next four years, the goal of the program is to admit 1,100 low-income transfer students from community colleges at these eight institutions.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.