Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., is helping lead a new national effort aimed at recruiting 50,000 talented students from low- and moderate-income families to the nation's top 270 colleges.
Currently, 430,000 low-income students as measured by those who receive federal Pell grants attend the top schools, which have six-year graduation rates consistently above 70 percent.
Under the American Talent Initiative, that number would rise to 480,000 by 2025.
The initiative, to be announced Tuesday, includes a core group of 30 public and private colleges, including four Ivy League schools _ Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth _ and other heavy hitters, such as Duke and Stanford. Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., is part of the effort, as are several state flagship universities, including Ohio State and North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and smaller private colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar.
The colleges will work together at recruiting and graduating students and sharing information on efforts that work, said Daniel R. Porterfield, president of Franklin and Marshall, who was honored at the White House this year for his work on increasing college opportunity for students from low-income families.
The colleges will explore how best to provide financial aid to the students and help them succeed.
"It's really about strengthening the whole of college opportunity, building a much stronger bridge between high schools and the top-performing colleges," Porterfield said. "We need to provide a ladder for students to pursue the strongest opportunities."
High-achieving, lower-income students fare better at top colleges than at schools with lower graduation rates, he said. But each year, at least 12,500 lower-income high school seniors with SAT scores in the top 10 percent and a 3.5 GPA or higher do not enroll at such schools.
Many of the students lack guidance counseling and other resources that would direct them to such schools, he said. And some simply don't know about financial aid that would allow them to afford the colleges, he said.
Porterfield is among three college presidents who put the effort together. The others are Carol Quillen, president of Davidson College in North Carolina, and Michael Drake, president of Ohio State. Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton, and Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, also have joined the steering committee, Porterfield said.
Funding will include an initial grant of $1.7 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and will be coordinated by two nonprofit groups, the Aspen Institute's College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R, Porterfield said.
The effort builds on a program that Bloomberg Philanthropies helped to launch in 2014 called College Point, which provides low-income students with free guidance counseling.
Joan Mazzotti, executive director of Philadelphia Futures, a nonprofit that helps students into and through college, likes the effort. She said Futures students thrive at colleges like F&M and Lehigh.
"It's understanding what you need to do to help them graduate because the needs can be so significant," she said.
Elite colleges have long been criticized for not having enough students from less affluent backgrounds. A recent study by Brandeis University found that the University of Pennsylvania lacked socioeconomic diversity even though it offers a no-loan, all-grant financial aid policy and has tried to recruit talented lower-income students.
The 30 colleges in the American Talent Initiative were selected based on work they have done to reach out to promising low-income students, Porterfield said. He expects others will join after the first year.
