GUIDING PRINCIPLES
High-achieving, low-income students need support to ensure that they thrive in school and beyond. Based on more than a decade of experience, we understand what such students need in order to realize their academic potential.
Research shows:
- There is a profound and widening excellence gap through elementary and secondary school.
- High-achieving, low-income students are less likely to pursue rigorous coursework or to score highly on achievement tests.
- High-achieving, low-income students are less likely to apply to or enroll in highly competitive colleges and less likely to complete college than their low achieving, high-income peers.
- High-achieving, low-income students often exist in isolation.
As a result, high-achieving, low-income students need:
- to be academically challenged and inspired during school, after school, and in the summers.
- information about how to successfully navigate transitions to high school and college and prepare for, identify, and apply to competitive colleges.
- financial resources that enable them to develop their academic and artistic talents.
- a peer community that challenges, supports, and inspires them.
Therefore, we
- challenge and inspire by
- ensuring that our students have access to rigorous curricula in their school and college and engage in meaningful, high- quality educational experiences.
- ensuring, through grants, that high-achieving, low-income students throughout the country have access to meaningful, high-quality educational experiences.
- provide information by
- counseling and guiding our students about how to apply for, select, pay for, and navigate a college that is the best fit.
- supporting organizations and institutions through grants that advise students about how to apply for, select, and pay for a college that is the best fit.
- provide financial resources by
- providing among the most generous scholarships in the nation for students in high school, college, and graduate school.
- providing grants to organizations so that high-achieving, low-income students can participate in high-quality summer and arts programming.
- provide a peer community by
- connecting our students to one another through in-person events, mentoring opportunities, and online communities.