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College Summit Poised for Growth in New York City

This month, thousands of New York area high school seniors will submit applications to the colleges and universities of their choice. As in prior years, only 47% of low-income students nationwide will enroll in college, far below the national average of 82% for the highest-income students. 

In just one year, College Summit’s two year pilot program in New York expanded from 110 seniors in two schools to 575 seniors in seven schools located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. These seniors engage in weekly college advisory classes, part of College Summit’s systemic college access solution. Over the summer, the schools sent 20% of their rising seniors to a College Summit workshop at Fairfield University in Connecticut. There, they received a head start on the college application process, as well as peer leadership training. In addition, teachers and guidance counselors from each school attended a College Summit Educator’s Institute for training in the college advisory curriculum.

Responding to the demand for its services, College Summit hired local staff in the summer of 2006 to expand its pilot program. Leading College Summit’s current efforts in New York is Executive Director Karin Goldmark. “The most important things for us to deliver in New York this year are increased college enrollment rates and a positive experience for our partner schools.”

That “positive experience” is something that New York’s program team is delivering on every day. During the first year of College Summit’s implementation for the senior classes at two high schools in Manhattan, 97% of the seniors submitted at least one college application.

The New York team is positioned to more than double the number of New York students served from 575 to 1,300 students during the 2007-08 school year. New York Program Director Freda Richmond attributes the organization’s growing popularity to the recent emergence of small high schools in New York. “Many schools are having their first graduating classes,” she says. “They want to put people in a program for transition to college. College Summit is a national proven model.”

An important component to the program’s success is the College Summit Summer Workshop, a four-day event hosted by a partner college, where ‘rising seniors’ complete their college applications and receive peer leadership training. “We are partnering with colleges within and outside the City; we’ve had interest from schools as far as four hours away,” says Goldmark. “High schools are excited about this because, in many cases, students will be traveling somewhere they’ve never been before.”

Goldmark likens her work to “building a plane while flying it.” She is quick to highlight the complementary skills of her colleagues. Goldmark’s knowledge of the New York City landscape and her K-12 education background match Richmond’s deep knowledge of College Summit through her work bringing the organization’s services to the students in Chicago. Christie Mitchell, High School Coordinator, brings her savvy in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, as well as her recent degree in social work, to the education field. “We’re learning a lot from each other and from the work,” says Goldmark.

The generous support and commitment of Time Warner and the Blue Ridge Foundation, an incubator for non-profit organizations serving low-income communities, made the pilot program possible. This year, College Summit also partnered with New Visions for Public Schools, an organization at the forefront of education reform in New York and nationally. This partnership allowed the pilot to expand its services to five additional schools within the New Visions network.