Beyond SATs, Finding Success in Numbers - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.
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The posse was key. “It’s so easy to get lost. I couldn’t imagine going to college without a group of people I already knew. I don’t think I would have made it.” They were all studying different things, she said. They didn’t do homework together, but they held each other accountable for doing it. “If you needed somebody to get you out of bed and get you to the library, Antoinette” — a Posse member — “would get you to the library.” The Posse members, she said, held each other up to the standard they had set: “how are you doing in class, how you behaved socially and whether you were supporting people you agreed to support.”
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Posse offers schools an efficient way to find the kind of students it chooses — they can ride on its selection process. After it chooses its winners, it releases the list of finalists who didn’t win. The 40 colleges that are Posse partners can then recruit from the list.
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With the stress of the SATs steadily climbing to an all time high, it is nice to hear about success stories from those who achieve lesser-than-exceptional scores. Posse sounds like a great program that offers many underprivileged students opportunities that they would not otherwise have had. Hopefully, colleges learn from this program in that SAT scores do not necessarily predict your success in college- or life for that matter.