Corps Aims To Help Low-Income Students Get To College

Career College Central summary:

A White House meeting of higher education leaders yesterday spotlighted a plethora of efforts to draw more students from low-income families into college, one of President Obama’s top priorities. Among them is a program called the College Advising Corps.
Based in North Carolina, the corps is a national program that resembles Teach for America. It draws recent college graduates into the educational system, training them to advise high school students and paying them modest stipends for two years to work in communities with significant economic needs. Colleges and foundations support the initiative. The corps aims to supplement what high school counselors do. Often those counselors have huge caseloads and are unable to give individual students enough attention.
Yesterday, the corps announced a $10 million gift from the John M. Belk Endowment to expand its work in rural North Carolina, as well as commitments from several colleges elsewhere to expand the number of graduates in the program. The corps has 375 advisers in Virginia and 14 other states. Plans call for the corps to have more than 500 advisers in the coming year.

Click through for full article content.