From our news partners at The Seattle Times: College Bound, a state program that helps pay college costs for low-income students, sent more students to four-year colleges than anyone expected. By Katherine Long.
Ken Lambert via The Seattle Times "Charles Armstead, a member of the College Bound program, takes part in a U.S.-government class at Seattle Central Community College." |
The evidence is anecdotal, but the personal stories are powerful: A new state program that pays higher-education costs for low-income students is encouraging more of them to finish high school and enter college.
In its first year of paying for college, the program, called College Bound, did much better than expected.
In fact, so many low-income students were admitted to four-year schools through the program that it will soon be out of money, using up in one year the $12 million lawmakers set aside for it in 2007 — a sum that was supposed to last two years.
Now, 118,000 low-income students across the state who signed up for College Bound are eligible to receive scholarship money in the next five years, and the Legislature must find millions of dollars this biennium to keep the program going.
Though money remains tight this session, legislators don't foresee a problem funding the program for the next two years, given the results it is producing. But it's hard to know whether that attitude might change if College Bound grows exponentially, as it seems poised to do, by the end of the decade.
"I think we've got a real winner," said Bob Craves, the co-founder, chair and CEO of the nonprofit College Success Foundation (CSF), which administers the program. When the Legislature created College Bound in 2007, "I couldn't believe they'd done something this terrific," said Craves, one of the founding officers of Costco.
The program made all the difference to Charles Armstead, who was flailing in his 10th-grade year at Cleveland High School until college-prep adviser Logan Reichert told him that if he could improve his grades, College Bound would pay for a lot of his schooling.
