UNC-CH grads to guide high schoolers

CHAPEL HILL -- Recent UNC-Chapel Hill graduates will become college advisers to low-income students at 18 high schools across the state as part of a program announced Wednesday.

The aim of the National College Advising Corps is to stimulate interest in higher education among low-income students who are often baffled by the process of getting into college. The young UNC-CH alumni will help shepherd students through searching for colleges and applying for admission and financial aid.

It is part of a $10 million partnership between the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and 10 colleges and universities across the country. UNC-CH will receive $1 million over four years for its Carolina College Advising Corps. The university will contribute $700,000 to the effort. In addition, the national network, which is modeled on a program at the University of Virginia, will be based at UNC-CH.

The effort follows in the tradition of Teach for America and AmeriCorps. Recent graduates will train to work as advisers in high schools for one to two years after graduation. They'll earn about $27,000 a year, and they will supplement the work of guidance counselors who are often overwhelmed.

Steve Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admissions at UNC-CH, said graduates would be trained as guides -- not guidance counselors -- to help low-income students whose parents may not have the experience to navigate the bureaucracy of applying to college.

"We believe there are talented kids out there that, for one reason or another, don't know what they need to do to make the leap from high school to college," Farmer said. "We think this is going to be a way for us to make a difference for schools and students."

Beginning in August, four UNC-CH graduates will work in eight schools in Alamance, Chatham, Durham and Guilford counties. Area high schools include Southern and Hillside in Durham, and Chatham Central and Jordan-Matthews in Chatham County.

When fully under way next year, nine UNC-CH advisers will serve 18 underserved high schools across North Carolina.

Farmer said he hoped the national network eventually would expand the effort to more schools. "You could probably pick 50 more in North Carolina," he said.

Other universities in the partnership are Brown University in Rhode Island, Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, Loyola College in Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Tufts University in Massachusetts, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Utah.