Bostonia: The Alumni Magazine of Boston University

When Shaylithia Copeland was a freshman at Carver High School in inner-city Atlanta, only a third of the seniors graduated, fights were common, and student pregnancy was, too. Faculty morale was at rock bottom, and SAT scores were the lowest in all of Georgia. Not exactly the type of school lighting up the radar screens of the nation’s top colleges and universities.

Circumstances that might have doomed other students — that doom students in urban high schools across the country every day — had little impact on Copeland. The eighteen-year-old’s resilient, expansive personality had been forged years earlier. “I come from your typical drug-infested, high-pregnancy, shootings-every-night type of neighborhood,” says Copeland, who hails from Summerhill in Police Zone Three, considered Atlanta’s worst crime district. “I’ve lost a lot of people to murder. That’s what helped me say, ‘I’m not going to stay here.’ That’s always been my motivation: to get up and out, and make an impact.”

Despite the odds, Copeland, who graduated with a 3.6 GPA, is now a freshman at Boston University, the first in her family to attend college. She is one of twelve Atlanta-bred first-year students — nine African-Americans, two Hispanics, and one Caucasian — who have been guided to BU by the Posse Foundation, a national nonprofit scholarship program that recruits and trains groups of talented and motivated urban students — usually from public schools — for life on university campuses. The program aims to help a traditionally underrepresented group of students succeed in college, and in so doing, to nurture a new generation of urban leaders. And from the perspective of BU and the thirty-one other colleges and universities that have joined the program, Posse does something essential: it brings highly qualified students of color to campus, helping these institutions become more representative of America’s increasingly diverse demographics.

“To me, it’s obvious,” says Jeffrey Allen, a School of Management assistant professor of information systems and the mentor to BU’s inaugural class of Posse scholars. “If you’re around BU and you don’t see that there is a problem in terms of minority students here, particularly black students, I’d have to say you’re walking around with blinders on.”

Copeland (COM’12) was schooled by the streets she and her single mother spent their lives on, nestled southeast of downtown between Turner Field and Zoo Atlanta and hemmed in by two interstates. Although the 1996 Olympics helped usher in a period of revitalization, the years prior were colored by “the usual clichés,” Copeland says: condemned housing, vacant lots, drugs, gunfire. By the early 1990s, the population had shrunk from a one-time high of 20,000 residents to 3,500, nearly all of them poor and African-American.

“Growing up the way I did helped make me a determined young lady,” Copeland says. “I can never say, ‘I can’t do it.’ My mom says, ‘Well, my momma kicked me out when I was pregnant with you, so I know you can do it.’”

Copeland, whose head is wrapped in thin braids, speaks with a soft Georgia drawl that belies her vivaciousness. She was president of both the Student Government Association and the Future Business Leaders of America at Carver, and in the afternoons, she volunteered as a sexual health peer educator at Grady Memorial Hospital. She says she plans to take her BU degree into the music industry, recognizing how vital a link music is to young people in her community.

At BU, Copeland jumped in feet first, striding up and down Comm Ave like she owned the place. She delivered meals to Boston AIDS patients as part of the First-Year Student Outreach Project, a community service week for incoming freshmen, which the entire posse took part in. On day one of classes, Copeland led a group of lost freshmen to their classroom in Mugar Memorial Library.

Although she is the only African-American in her Women, Society, and Culture class, Copeland says she hardly feels alone. “I love my classmates,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to communicate across cultures than I thought. I thought people would have preconceived notions about African-Americans in general, and African-Americans from the South, and that it would be hard to talk to people because there would be stigmas attached to who I am. But it’s not like that. There’s a Peruvian girl, a Jewish girl in my class. A lot of my classmates are minorities. I’m just a piece of the puzzle. Each of us has a story to tell.”

Posse works by connecting select groups of students in urban centers around the country with participating universities, which in turn provide full-tuition scholarships to those students they admit. To date, Posse has placed 2,200 students in thirty-two colleges and universities. (Posse is also creating an online database for partner schools to mine the thousands of candidates nominated by teachers, guidance counselors, or community leaders but not selected for scholarships.)

Minorities make up one-third of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and their numbers are increasing. The self-identified Hispanic population, for example, accounted for almost half of a 2.9 million–person boom in the United States between 2005 and 2006. If projections are correct, whites will no longer be in the majority nationwide by 2042.

And yet many college campuses, particularly private colleges, don’t reflect that diversity. According to Boston University enrollment statistics, African-Americans make up approximately 4 percent of this year’s freshman class, with Hispanic students representing 9.3 percent. Nationwide, undergraduate enrollment rates at private and public four-year institutions for those two groups are higher — 13.2 percent and 11.9 percent respectively, according the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“One of the issues we all face is that, sadly, the proportions of African-American and Hispanic students going to four-year institutions is much lower than for Caucasians and Asian-Americans,” says Laurie Pohl, BU vice president for enrollment and student affairs. “The pool is small, and we are all competing for the same students. Posse helps us identify students who might fly below the radar screen in our usual recruitment efforts. And the program is a proven winner. These students succeed. They graduate from college at greater than 90 percent. They become leaders on campus.”

In addition to efforts like Posse, the University employs two full-time minority recruitment specialists and has developed relationships with community-based organizations in urban areas. Pohl’s team also recently created an Admissions Student Diversity Board, a group of student volunteers who help with outreach. She says that over the past five years, the number of African-American and Hispanic students applying to BU has risen faster than the increase in total applications. “We had a great year this year,” she says, “enrolling 133 African-American students, versus 101 last year, and 309 Hispanic students, versus 299.”

Posse founder and president Deborah Bial says her program is looking to do more than simply get minority students into college. “Posse is working to create a brand-new kind of network of professional leaders unlike anything this country has ever seen,” says Bial, who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” last year for her work with Posse. “It won’t be a good-old-boys network. It won’t be a network from the Greek system. It will be a network of powerful young people who were selected initially because of their leadership potential and who will be out there as lawyers and doctors and politicians, and who will better represent the demographics of this nation.”

Before ever setting foot on Comm Ave, the Posse students immersed themselves in college prep. They met weekly for eight months, most of the time in a corner room in Atlanta’s Centennial Tower, overlooking Centennial Olympic Park, CNN headquarters, and tourists tilting on Segways or bouncing along in horse-drawn carriages.

The training covers the kinds of issues that have tripped up other highly talented students who enter college from low-performing urban high schools, such as time management, effective writing, and cross-cultural communication. While the academics are helpful, the group bonding is at the core of the progam’s philosophy and success. Bial first understood the importance of those ties twenty years ago, after a conversation with a college dropout from the inner city: he said he never would have quit school if he had “had his posse with him.”

After one training session, which focused on conflict resolution, the students gathered on couches outside their workshop room, the froth of chatter punctuated by zingers and jokes. The chemistry was there; the bonds had clearly cemented. Schyler Cain (COM’12), then a senior at Parkview High School and the only white student in the group, says she didn’t give the role of a posse much thought at first. “But now that I have one,” she says, “the idea of going without them totally freaks me out.”

Looking back on the training, Reuben Buchanan (CFA’12), of Riverdale, Georgia, says that one of the things Posse did for him and his fellow scholars was to make them comfortable talking to people with different backgrounds and few common interests. “Gradually, we’ve started to branch off and make other friends,” he says, “but we’ve kept our Posse bonds and actually expanded the network. I’ve seen this happen — that our new friends, in turn, become friends of the whole posse.”