A Chicago-based family foundation is giving 20 colleges across the country half a billion dollars to enroll more low-income and undocumented students.
The Schuler Education Foundation is asking the schools, including Tufts University, to match the $500 million being donated over a 10-year period to boost access to selective liberal arts colleges and universities. The funding will support low-income students eligible for federal Pell grants and those who are undocumented, including ones with DACA status.
President Tony Monaco of Tufts, which will receive $25 million, told GBH News the university’s donors would match that gift to invest in these “smart, capable, and ambitious students.”
“Too often the undocumented and DACA students are described in terms of the costs they are to the United States,” Monaco said. “But I think we’d rather change that dialogue to show the benefits.”
The other colleges include Bates in Maine, Union in New York, Kenyon in Ohio and Carleton in Minnesota. The $50 million going to Bates is one of the largest gifts for student scholarships ever made to a college in Maine — the whitest and oldest state in the nation.
“It is a game-changer for Bates,” President Clayton Spencer said. “This allows us to increase by 50% our number of low-income and undocumented students. It will allow us to attract talented and ambitious students who bring a wide range of perspectives and life experiences to their education, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college.”
Jason Patenaude, executive director of the Schuler Education Foundation, said in a statement that the organization was looking “for institutions that we felt were leaders in educating and supporting students who are Pell-eligible or undocumented.”
“It didn’t make a lot of sense to dramatically increase the number of students if we didn’t think the institutions could support them successfully to graduation,” he said.
