Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Also Seeks to Aid Low-Income Students Gain Access to College

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has mounted a similar effort to the new Gates Foundation program to help low-income students pursue higher education. The foundation will award grants of $1 million to 10 colleges and universities. The colleges will in turn fund positions for recent graduates to act as mentors in high schools that have low rates of students going on to college. The mentors will help high-achieving students at these schools to navigate the college admissions process. Counselors will also be provided to community colleges to assist students at these two-year institutions who want to transfer to a four-year college or university.

The 10 higher education institutions that will receive the grants are Brown University, Loyola College in Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Tufts University, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Utah, and Franklin and Marshall College. In administering its $1 million grant, Franklin and Marshall will collaborate with Dickinson College, Millersville University, and Shippensburg University.

The 10 winners of the grant money were selected from 56 institutions that applied.

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