Going to college is one thing. Graduating from it is another. Of the Boston Public Schools alumni who started college in 2000, just 35 percent had earned degrees by 2007, according to a Boston Private Industry Council study. But Bottom Line, a nonprofit with offices in Jamaica Plain and Worcester, thinks it has found a way to improve those numbers — albeit an expensive way. Founded in 1997, the organization counsels public school students through the application and financial aid process, and then sticks with them through the college experience. Its students have a 74 percent six-year graduation rate, nearly twice the city’s average.
Bottom Line students must live in Boston or Worcester, have an adjusted gross family income of no more than $40,000 and — a criterion Johnson considers critical — have a minimum GPA of 2.5. Once those tests are met, it’s “first come, first served” for the tuition-free support program that begins during a student’s junior year in high school. Bottom Line’s counselors help students identify good college possibilities, apply and secure funding, and then adjust to college. The program now has 600 students who are in college, and 475 in high school.
I spoke with Greg Johnson, Bottom Line’s executive director, about his model, the students it serves best, and the challenge of expanding it further.
How do you account for a graduation rate that’s twice the city’s average?
We do all their homework. [laughs] No, there are a lot of things to it. We’re all about trying to figure out which is the right school for the kids who come to us. If you can get them to the right place, you’ll have an easier time getting them to finish. And we mentor them along the way. We’ve found that when kids don’t finish, it’s usually an academic problem. Kids are not ready for college when they come out of the Boston Public Schools. They’re not ready academically, or with the study skills, and they’re not as independent as they need to be. The second reason they don’t finish is a lot of financial things go wrong. They go to a school that’s too expensive, or they’re not getting their I’s dotted and T’s crossed on time in their loan forms. And we’re dealing with a population that doesn’t really have a safety net. If I made a stupid decision in college, my parents probably would have bailed me out. But these kids usually don’t have parents who can do that. And then the last reason kids don’t finish is the emotional challenge. In some cases, they’re a minority on a campus of all white people — intangibles that some students deal with well, and other kids don’t. We try to manage all those problems and be involved. We call financial aid offices. We play a really active parental role.
Why isn’t your approach more widespread?
Well, for one, people are just starting to realize that the problem isn’t just about access. The federal money is all tied into college access, not college success, so they’re not doing what we’re doing. Once a kid gets accepted, they sort of wash their hands and say, well, you’re in. And parents aren’t filling the support role for our students in the way they do in a suburban or middle-class household. Plus, it is expensive. We’ve got staff going to college campuses and visiting kids. So it’s not cheap to do it right.
How are you funded?
We’re all donor-funded. We don’t get any federal, state, or city money. Donations are about one third foundation, one third corporate, and one third individuals. Our individual base is really growing, but the corporate side is what makes us a lot different from other organizations our size. We’ve generated a lot of enthusiasm because we have a pipeline now of 600 kids, and we run a career fair, and we’ve got this diverse, educated group of kids from Boston that are coming back to work here in the summer. We’ve had a lot of success with places like Stop and Shop’s management program. We have staff right now meeting with folks at State Street. You name the industry; I think they’re trying to figure out how to integrate kids from Boston.
How do students find you?
We have relationships with some community organizations, and we’ll send some people out to do information sessions. Most of all they come through word-of-mouth. We don’t really do any marketing campaign. We have a wait list of 150 kids. We’ve oversubscribed, and have been since the day we started. We do have an attrition rate of a little less than 10 percent, so if spots open up, we fill in from the wait list. Our best feeder is kids telling their friends in schools.
Now, any time an educational organization boasts success rates twice the average, there’s talk of both cherry-picking and self-selecting. If a kid finds their way to you, couldn’t that be a sign that they’re already on the path to success?
Yes, that’s a legitimate point. We now have a threshold of a 2.5 GPA, but we didn’t until about three years ago. The reality is, what we’re good at doing is getting kid into and through a four-year college. And if you have less than a 2.5 GPA, you’re not getting into a four-year college. There may be reasons, but they’re not ready for a college curriculum. We’re not big fans of the second- or third-tier private schools that will accept kids under 2.5, because our kids can’t afford it and we’re not big fans of private loans. So, over the past decade, we’ve sort of looked at who we can serve well. We don’t serve many kids from the [Boston Latin School] since they have support. So in that scenario, the top students in the system, we’re not serving. We try to avoid kids that have support elsewhere. We do require students to come to us for support. If students can’t come to us and get their applications together, they’re a bad risk for college. College, to me, has to define some sort of rigor. The investment has to be made in kids willing to help themselves.
What kind of time commitment does your program ask of students?
They meet on as-needed basis. For the average kid, it’s probably 18 hours of service during the senior year. Then, in the summer after senior year, we do some training for college, on stuff like what a syllabus is.
What’s the reaction been like from the public schools, especially the guidance counselors whose territory you overlap?
In some cases, there are some territorial issues, [such as] a guidance counselor that does things a certain way. Sometimes, we have students finishing up applications by December 31, and guidance counselors aren’t ready to send transcripts out until January, and they get frustrated with us. I understand that. They’ve got other things to do beyond college applications. That’s what one of the reasons we exist. We provide a different level of service. They have 350 kids; our counselors have 50 each. But we are seen, in some ways, as taking more of the attractive work of the guidance counselor, and that’s when feelings can get hurt.
Do you want to serve more kids than you now are?
We plan, first of all, to grow in Boston from 400 to 500 high school seniors. The other piece of our growth is into more urban locations. Worcester’s been a great trial for us and it’s worked really well. [This is Bottom Line’s first school year serving Worcester students.] We’re hoping to grow from 75 to 125 students there. The next logical question is, should there be offices in other cities? We’d intended to open a third in 2010, but that’s on the back burner. Having staff in other cities benefits the kids going off to college. If we had staff in Springfield, they’d be only 20 minutes from our students at UMass/Amherst.