County joins effort to help low-income students go to college

March 28, 2008, CHAPEL HILL, NC— The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of 10 colleges and universities joining in a $10 million partnership to create advising programs to help low-income students enroll in college.

Alamance County will be one of the first four counties in North Carolina to participate in the program.

The network of programs created through the partnership, to be called the National College Advising Corps, will be headquartered at UNC-Chapel Hill.

UNC-Chapel Hill will receive $1 million over four years to create the Carolina College Advising Corps, which will place recent UNC-Chapel Hill graduates as college advisers in 18 partner high schools across the state. The advisers will help students plan their college searches, complete admissions and financial-aid applications and overcome obstacles that might discourage them from continuing their education.

UNC-Chapel Hill will contribute nearly $700,000 to the program, which aims to boost the number of low-income and first-generation-college students enrolling in two- and four-year colleges and universities.

The Carolina College Advising Corps is modeled on the successful College Guide Program at the University of Virginia, whose founding director, Dr. Nicole Hurd, will direct the national corps from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions. This national office, a partnership among the university, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and the National College Access Network, will support the programs in place at UNC-Chapel Hill, U.Va. and nine other colleges and universities. It will also encourage other schools to launch similar efforts.

Following the tradition of the Teach for America and AmeriCorps programs, the colleges and universities in the National College Advising Corps will recruit and train recent graduates to work full-time as advisers in their states for one to two years following graduation.

Beginning in August 2007, four recent UNC-Chapel Hill graduates will serve as advisers in eight schools in Alamance, Chatham, Durham and Guilford counties. When fully implemented in August 2008, a total of nine Carolina advisers will serve 18 high schools from Ahoskie to Charlotte, including 14 threatened with closure last year by a Wake County judge under the Leandro ruling.

Principals whose schools will be Carolina’s partners in the new program expressed enthusiasm with the initiative and its possibilities.

“We are extremely excited about the possibilities of the program as well as the opportunities it presents for the students in our school,” said Meg Sheehan, co-principal at Cummings High School. “We believe it will help our students plan ahead in pursuit of their dreams.”