Between 2002 and 2005, the National Center for College Costs conducted a pilot project with six Indiana high schools across the state, thanks to funding from the Lumina Foundation for Education, with the goal of finding an efficient way to have an impact on the postsecondary pursuits of students at high schools with disproportionate numbers of low-income, potentially first-generation college students.
Schools were chosen based in large part on their demographic profile, and careful consideration was given to selecting schools that offered diversity in terms of geography, size and student make-up so that the protocol could be tested in different environments. We developed a series of workshops which was implemented each of the three years of the project involving sophomores (1 day), juniors (2 days) and seniors (3 days). The workshops addressed a variety of college preparatory issues and included many of the workshops listed in the Our Programs section of this website.
At those high schools where 1) the National Center for College Costs was able to implement the full range of workshops and 2) the school staff actively engaged in and collaborated with National Center for College Costs staff on the workshops, the increases in the quality of high school course selections, Academic Honors Diploma rates (Indiana’s most rigorous high school diploma at the time), SAT scores and changes in college enrollment patterns were substantial.
An extensive data collection and analysis component was included in the grant project from the very beginning. To learn more about what we discovered in this important pilot project, select from the options below: