Featuring interviews with network leaders, support staff, graduates, and current students, it was a first attempt to capture these schools鈥� campaigns to raise the bar in how they define success, as well as their focus on providing additional support for teens long after they have left campus.

Whereas many districts focus primarily on high school graduation rates, there is now a commitment among many charter leaders to look beyond that first diploma and to focus more attention on measures of college persistence and completion.

In other words, they began to more closely track what percentage of their student body .

Whitmire鈥檚 most widely cited chapter from the summer of 2017 examined new statistics that showed the number of charter school alumni who had gone on to complete college within the six-year time frame. While the national college graduation rate for low-income students of color is 9 percent, Whitmire documented that .

In terms of developing policies to track and support graduates, perhaps no network has been as rigorous as KIPP Public Charter Schools, which now follows new high school students from their first day of ninth grade through the end of their college careers. (In the case of KIPP middle schools, the tracking begins even earlier.)

In the year since we first launched the project (), we鈥檝e covered many other developments about charter networks graduating their first senior classes, and more charter alumni transitioning to college campuses. Three of our most-read recent headlines:

鈼徛�New Orleans: In the aftermath of Katrina-inspired school reforms, report shows New Orleans students are now more likely to attend 鈥� and graduate from 鈥� college (Read the full story)

鈼徛�New York City: As Success Academy graduates its first class of 16 college-bound seniors, don鈥檛 bet against it someday being thousands (Read the full story)

鈼徛�Texas: A superintendent celebrates as all 849 seniors are graduating 鈥� and 590 are the first in their families to enroll in college (Read the full essay)

To see Richard Whitmire鈥檚 complete yearlong research project, . (You can also get the latest statistics on college attendance and completion data delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for 蜜桃影视 Newsletter.)

In case you missed them, here were the eight most-read chapters from the first year of The Alumni:

1 Exclusive: Data Show Charter School Students Graduating From College at Three to Five Times National Average

At top schools that primarily serve low-income students, graduates are going on to complete college at three to five times the national average. .

2 KIPP NYC College Prep: Tracking Students Through College Like No One Else in America

No one tracks their high school graduates into and through college like KIPP. And just a day at KIPP NYC College Prep in the South Bronx explains how KIPP has made such rapid gains in its college success rate: In a college prep class for juniors, KIPP alumni from two different colleges came to tell the highs and low of college life. .

3 WATCH: Closing the Opportunity Gap for College 鈥� F&M College Prep

4听Green Dot Public Schools: Not Just About Getting Students Into College, But Getting Them Into the Right Ones 鈥� and Keeping Them There

The Los Angeles-based Green Dot Public Schools has always been unique. Unlike many CMOs, Green Dot initially launched as a high school; unlike many CMOs, Green Dot takes on tricky turnarounds like Locke High School in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood. In recent years, the network has been highly successful at getting all of its high-poverty graduates on a college track and admitted to college, and it now says it鈥檚 focusing on issues of college persistence and completion. .

5 Georgetown Scholarship Program: Getting First-Generation Students Acquainted to College Early On

Many universities have been slow to accommodate first-generation college attendees, unaware of the special supports some of these low-income and minority students need. But at Georgetown University, things are done a little differently. Richard Whitmire explores an inspiring initiative in the nation鈥檚 capital, where a special scholarship program is designed to guide first-generation college students through the intimidating waters of the prestigious university. Over the past 12 years, the program has grown to 650 students, providing advice, mentoring, and additional grants, usually for expenses that don鈥檛 fit into the primary scholarship 鈥� things like dental and eye care, emergency trips home for a funeral, and the return trip to Georgetown. .

6 IDEA Public Schools: 鈥楶roving the Impossible Is Possible in South Texas鈥� by Striving for Both Bigger and Better

Richard Whitmire traveled to the Rio Grande Valley, where IDEA鈥檚 charter schools sit along the U.S.-Mexican border in McAllen, Texas. In those schools, where many students cross the border every day to go to class, 35 percent of the alumni are graduating from college in spite of significant financial and cultural obstacles. .

7 Must-See: At Newark鈥檚 North Star Academy, 100% of the Graduating Class Is Going to College

8 Achievement First: Where Just Doing Better Than Its Peers Isn鈥檛 Enough, Network Sets Its Sights on Lofty 75% College Success Rate

Despite seeing its alumni graduate from college at a rate above average for its student demographics, Achievement First is still reaching higher: The network with schools in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island wants to hit a 75 percent college success rate in the long term. .

Follow the latest updates and read our new profiles and testimonials at .

Over the past decade, the growth of charter schools has inflicted enormous disruptions on traditional school districts. Superintendents have grown unhappy about losing students and unions have become angry about both student losses and the fact that most charters employ non-union teachers.

That stressful dynamic prompted across-the-country battles over charter schools. In school districts like Los Angeles Unified, where about half the enrollment losses can be traced to charter schools, that fight has become epic, with the teachers union and several board members blaming charters for pushing the district toward bankruptcy.

The disruption is real, but nowhere in these fights does the most important question surface of whether charter schools produce the student outcomes to merit the fight.

The ultimate way to address that is by measuring their bottom-line promise: to ensure that more low-income, minority students actually win bachelor鈥檚 degrees.

Overall, the big charter networks are seeing college success rates that are anywhere from . The most successful networks are all in the 50 percent range 鈥� half of their alumni earn bachelor鈥檚 degrees within six years. Nationally, .

Perhaps more interesting are some of the rapid improvements. projects that within a few years could rise as high as 80 percent, the rate for students coming from high-income families.

All this needs some perspective. For this project we focused on the big charter management organizations, mostly because these are the only schools with a large enough pool of alumni more than six years past high school graduation to measure college success.

But it is important to note that that does ignore all kinds of awful charters, mostly for-profit or digital schools, that should be shuttered immediately.

This project鈥檚 findings do not add up to an argument for expanding all charters. Rather, they are an argument for careful expansion of the top performers. Clearly, these college success rates justify their creation and growth.

More important, the findings are an argument for traditional school districts to form collaborations with charters on college success efforts, . Collaborations just on college success programs sidestep the thorny issues that arise in the K-12 grades when charters and districts compete for students. In this case, all the effort gets directed at alumni. Nobody loses students; nobody loses funding.

College success collaborations are a clear win-win for both sides.

What these charter networks are beginning to master 鈥� winning college degrees for low-income and minority students 鈥� has mostly eluded traditional educators. Just when educators think they have it figured out, .

Among traditional schools, there鈥檚 little in place to fix this. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will soon impose a graduation requirement that all students 鈥� a college acceptance letter, evidence of job, a trade apprenticeship, or military enlistment. But as this project makes clear, ensuring future success for low-income minority students requires far more, from rigorous pre-graduation coursework to post-graduation tracking.

Many people assume that college success for first-generation students is all about funding. It鈥檚 far more than that. In New York, it appears that Gov. Andrew Cuomo鈥檚 鈥渇ree college鈥� initiative will of solving this problem.

In many states, awareness of the challenge 鈥� the first step 鈥� seems minimal. As Achieve documented, many states report their college graduation data in a way that makes graduation inequities .

Every month, it seems, another report emerges that documents the college preparedness deficiencies found among these students. The latest, concludes that only 9 percent of low-income, minority students in the class of 2017 鈥� students whose parents did not go to college 鈥� are strongly ready for college.

Ominously, this string of failures has prompted a growing sense of defeatism that maybe college isn鈥檛 for everyone.

But now we know that these charter networks, the same networks that seemed to have about what it takes to boost academic performance, have figured out at least some ways to lead more low-income, first-generation students to earning four-year college degrees.

None of the objections raised by charter critics 鈥� selection bias, taking too few special education students, encouraging dropouts 鈥� can account for an effect size of that magnitude. In fact, this college success refutes many of the objections raised about charters, that they succeed only because they 鈥渃ream鈥� students (because parents must apply, presumably the more motivated parents) or push out bad students.

If that were the case, these networks would have posted lofty college success rates from the beginning. But they didn鈥檛. , which assumed that broad college success would flow naturally, had to dig deep and launch new programs when it realized that wasn鈥檛 happening.

As we document in The Alumni, the 鈥� that for funding reasons were tardy in devising college success programs 鈥� now post success rates half those found in East Coast charters that began this process a decade ago.

Regardless of college success figures, there wasn鈥檛 a single charter leader interviewed for this project who expressed satisfaction with current rates. Rather, they all laid out ambitious plans to continue boosting college success. But most fair-minded outsiders 鈥� those not actively engaged in the bitter charter-district-union battles 鈥� would likely conclude that the disruption appears to be paying off in student outcomes.

For a traditional school district or charter network that鈥檚 new to the college success endeavor, there are lessons learned from the wins that major charter networks have seen thus far. Some highlights:

is probably the most advanced of any network.

That鈥檚 not surprising, given that KIPP was the first to take on this goal and has the deepest philanthropy pockets to carry it off. It鈥檚 important to view KTC 鈥� probably too expensive for most networks 鈥� as a research project: What works that others should imitate?

New York鈥檚 was a highlight on my tour of eight charter networks across the country. The thoroughness, precision, and coordination between the high school college counselors and the KTC team was impressive. Most striking was the sticky tracking system overseen by the college counselors there. Never did they miss a single student financial or academic record 鈥� records that prove crucial in the intricate dance required to match students with the right college and the right financial aid project. It鈥檚 not cheap 鈥� $2,000 per student in the New York City area 鈥� but it hums.

Uncommon Schools has always seemed, at least to me, the most cerebral of the bunch.

You could see that in action Uncommon has college-tracking operations similar to KIPP鈥檚, but nothing that elaborate. Several years ago, Uncommon concluded that intensive college monitoring would be impractical as its alumni base expanded, and switched its emphasis to the K-12 operations, specifically grades 5 through 12.

Uncommon assessed its science curriculum, found it lacking, and made some unique adjustments, drawing on the 鈥渘eed鈥� of nearby universities to demonstrate local impact as a condition of receiving national research grants. What鈥檚 more local than some charter high schools in high-poverty neighborhoods?

While many would like to move away from referencing the SAT as a key to college success, Uncommon looked at the data and concluded that it needed to embrace the test. So it created multiple sessions designed to boost those scores. Most interesting, Uncommon settled on boosting much-scoffed-at grade-point averages (which critics argue is a subjective number contingent on the rigor of the courses taken) as a key to college success. The lessons learned in boosting high school GPAs, it turns out, are the same lessons for college success.

College selection as an art form is a big part of the college success programs at multiple networks.

I liked the sophistication I saw in Chicago at the . For any charter school, placing seniors with good GPAs and SAT scores is no problem. There are lots of universities looking for inner-city students like that, and they are willing to give them near-full rides to attend.

The trickier problem is planning the futures of the lesser academic stars, the students that in the past ended up in community colleges 鈥� where odds of winning a four-year degree are in the single digits 鈥� or a sprawling commuter university, where the odds are roughly 15 percent. For those students, Noble has a plan 鈥� pathways that boost the odds of earning a four-year degree to around 40 percent.

By far the most interesting strategy adopted by most networks is taking advantage of the many small, rural colleges 鈥� colleges with stellar academic reputations 鈥� that are hungry to diversify their freshmen classes. For these colleges, well-prepared urban students are a gold mine. And the charter networks return the love. Where else do they find colleges willing to offer full rides and graduation rates in the mid-90 percent range?

Yes, 鈥渟urvival training鈥� is needed to ensure their graduates can make it in a predominantly white institution, but the effort is worth it. And as these colleges build up their minority student populations, the need for survival training diminishes.

In many ways, low-budget college success programs ended up impressing me as much as the sophisticated programs.

At charter networks like and , the push to raise college success rates is both recent and designed with cost in mind. Staffing counselors and college-tracking teams is a huge financial undertaking, especially as the number of graduates grows.

In years past, those initiatives would have largely been unthinkable to traditional school districts that must answer to school boards that may prioritize school librarian salaries over paying for National Student Clearinghouse data to track graduates. Thus, the lessons learned from college success programs at charter networks such as Alliance and Green Dot could prove to be very helpful and approachable for traditional districts considering an alumni tracking program.

Especially encouraging are the software programs the charter networks are developing to reach students in ways they prefer to be reached.

These methods mostly involve social media to 鈥減rompt鈥� action on the many important crossroads of their endeavors 鈥� everything from financial aid deadlines to cutoffs for adding and dropping college courses. The charter networks appear eager to share, should they come across partners, either traditional districts or other charter networks, wanting to share.

Although the gains these charters are making in college success are important, the real paradigm shift, and it鈥檚 a big one, is this: The top charter networks, almost unnoticed, have set a new accountability bar. Judge us, they say, on the number of our alumni who go on to earn bachelor鈥檚 degrees.

In doing so, all those other accountability measures we鈥檝e heard about for years 鈥� test score boosts, high school graduation rates, AP exams taken, college admittances 鈥� got downgraded. Like it or not, college has become the new high school, almost regardless of the chosen professions.

That鈥檚 radical. It鈥檚 virtually unheard of that a traditional school district would seek that level of accountability 鈥� to be judged on its high school graduates鈥� college success 鈥� much less track its graduates beyond self-reported college admittances. are committing to this goal.

Maybe more traditional districts should start trying. These charters are eager to pass along their lessons learned. What KIPP or Uncommon or Achievement First or YES Prep is doing today is something any school district is capable of doing, should districts take on the college success challenge normally left to colleges 鈥� institutions that, with some notable exceptions, have failed us on these issues.

If these college graduation rates hold up, and improve, the civil rights implications become profound.

Charter schools, or at least the top networks, seem to be worth the disruption.

Potts, a Georgetown freshman, is straight out of Newark, N.J.: black, and a graduate of KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy. Kelly, a Georgetown senior, is straight out of Boston: white, and headed into a high-power accounting job with Credit Suisse.

Potts and Kelly were paired up for an 鈥渁chieve chat鈥� 鈥� one of the university鈥檚 many services offered out of its Georgetown Scholarship Program, which is designed to guide first-generation college students like Potts through the intimidating waters of a prestigious university like Georgetown.

Between 2003 and 2013, the number of students at Georgetown who received federal Pell Grants aimed at low-income students, like Potts, doubled. The GSP, as it鈥檚 known, is Georgetown鈥檚 answer for making sure those students earn degrees.

Soon into the chat it became clear that Potts and Kelly weren鈥檛 such an odd couple. Kelly may appear preppy, but he grew up in a blue-collar family outside Boston, where his father worked as an elevator repairman. The two were paired together because they share similar majors, and soon Kelly was offering up nugget after nugget about which classes to take which year, how to pursue a double major without exhausting yourself, and pretty much everything an underclassman needs to know.

For a student like Potts, this was pure gold, and you could tell by her intent listening that she saw it that way.

THE NATIONAL COLLEGE PERSPECTIVE

In , most of the focus is on charter school networks that are beginning to send hundreds of minority students from low-income families to colleges, many of them prestigious universities like Georgetown. What do these students, who are often the first in their families to attend college, find?

For the most part, they find a higher education system unprepared for the new reality, where during the past decade the percentage of students using federal financial aid, Pell Grants, , said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

A quarter of the students have children, and 70 percent work while in college 鈥� a quarter of those work full time and carry a full course load.

And yet, the federal graduation rate only reports on the success of students who started college as full-time students and never transferred to another institution. A wonderful snippet from the 1960s, but not exactly the real world today.

It should come as no surprise that universities are slow to accommodate this new reality, which means many first-generation college-goers end up fading away before earning degrees.

To be fair, there are plenty of good actors, like Georgetown, but also plenty of bad ones 鈥� universities where few first-generation students like Potts emerge with a college degree within six years. According to U.S. Department of Education data, 鈥� a dilemma that costs taxpayers $30 billion a year.

When looking at the gap in graduation rates between black and white students, The Education Trust, which gathers data on this issue, discovered that the University of North Carolina at Greensboro the two groups. In fact, when compared to similar institutions, the black student graduation rate at Greensboro is 18.6 percentage points higher.

Now contrast that with Youngstown State University, where fewer than 1 in 10 black first-time, full-time students completes a bachelor鈥檚 degree within six years of enrolling. White students there graduate at nearly five times that rate.

As I made the rounds of the charter networks, it seemed like every network faced a dilemma with at least one university, usually a commuter university that draws their students with the promise of low tuition and the opportunity to study part time while holding down a job. Problem is, of course, only about 20 percent of those students 鈥� sometimes less 鈥� end up earning a degree.

In Chicago, for example, college counselors at The Noble Network of Charter Schools , where only 15 percent of Noble-like students earn bachelor鈥檚 degrees within six years.

Nationally, The Hechinger Report dug into Department of Education data to uncover which universities had the biggest gaps between graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients and the rest of the graduates. : At the University of Maine at Augusta, 57 percent of the students get Pell Grants, but only 9 percent of those earn degrees. At Franklin University in Ohio, the comparable figures are 47 percent and 11 percent.

On the other side of the ledger, among public universities, 58 percent of the students at California State University, Stanislaus, get Pell Grants, and 53 percent graduate within six years. At the City University of New York鈥檚 Bernard M. Baruch College, 45 percent are on Pell Grants, and 69 percent graduate.

In my interviews with college counselors at the charter networks, two clear favored paths emerged: Any top-ranked college or university is likely to have graduation rates in the 90 percent range, regardless of the student鈥檚 background. In short, if you are deemed qualified to study there, the university will find you the supports you need, just as Georgetown is doing.

Surprising, however, was another winning path: Small colleges eager to diversify are often the best places to send students, regardless of their rural location. It may sound incongruous, but the colleges that for years educated the white middle class are the most eager to diversify 鈥� and succeed.

FRANKLIN & MARSHALL

Especially for KIPP, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., gets mentioned a lot. There, President Daniel Porterfield engineered a dramatic shift in who wins spots in the freshman class. The biggest change, and one that many college presidents avoid, is shifting from so-called merit-based financial aid to need-based aid.

Many colleges fear that any shift away from merit aid would jeopardize their average SAT scores, thereby lowering their all-important college comparison rankings. Porterfield feels differently.

鈥淢oney spent on price-discounting, on merit aid, wasn鈥檛 leading to attracting strong students,鈥� Porterfield told 蜜桃影视 earlier this year. 鈥淕ood students, yes, but not near as economically diverse and inclusive as we could be, and as a result, the talent pool wasn鈥檛 as deep as it could be. The shift to need-based aid was a good thing.鈥�

Since 2008, Franklin & Marshall has more than tripled its percentage of Pell Grant students. Those students made up 5 percent of the class of 2012, but accounted for 20 percent of the past three freshman classes.

鈥淲hen the future of the country demographically is clearly moving toward more and more kids from underrepresented communities and when there鈥檚 greater interdependence in our country than ever before, the future of the country relies on breaking down barriers, rather than creating walled gardens,鈥� Porterfield said.

F&M鈥檚 special partnerships with both KIPP and the generate many of the candidates, but other charter schools profiled in this project also seek out the college for their candidates.

Another key generator is a three-week summer college prep program for low-income students entering their senior year of high school. The students live at the college, take seminar-like courses and meet in small groups with staff and faculty. That gives these students 鈥渃ollege knowledge,鈥� Porterfield said. It also gives the students, many of whom grew up in cities like Newark, a sense that they can survive in a rural location far from their urban homes.

鈥淵ou meet these kids and you realize this country has an amazing future as long as we can actually invest in the youth and bring them together and get over stereotypes that lead us to write people off because they鈥檙e from certain backgrounds,鈥� Porterfield said.

STAYING AT GEORGETOWN

The Georgetown Scholarship Program, which over the past 12 years has grown from just 50 students to 650, advises and mentors students but also offers additional grants, usually for expenses that don鈥檛 fit into the primary scholarship: things like dental and eye care, emergency trips home for a funeral, and the return trip to Georgetown.

Assistant Director Corey Stewart, known for his 鈥淐ookies with Corey鈥� chat sessions, tries to create a community space where students can drop in for free coffee or tea, hang out in the lounge, and perhaps take part in one of the many events, anything from dinners to sessions on how to build your own website.

鈥淚t鈥檚 cool,鈥� Potts said. 鈥淚 think I did it three times this semester. You just go in there and talk, and we talk about everything.鈥�

And the program offers 鈥渁chieve chats鈥� with student mentors like Zachary Kelly, who this past school year was one of eight mentors in the program.

Potts is one of about 35 KIPP students on the campus who are part of the program, which gives her instant community. One fear commonly shared soon after arriving on campus: What if we weren鈥檛 really smart enough to come here?

Like many first-generation students, especially minorities, Potts was hesitant to reach out for help. That would only ramp up the insecurities about whether she truly belongs here. 鈥淚t鈥檚 this big-name school and I came from little Newark, New Jersey.鈥�

But after a self-described 鈥渂umpy鈥� first semester as a business major, Potts settled down and feels comfortable with her classes, thanks in part to good counseling.

鈥淚 had six classes, and that was too much for me to handle, so I had to withdraw from a course,鈥� she said. 鈥淚鈥檓 doing so much better now. I鈥檓 learning to balance things better.鈥�

The graduation rate within six years for GSP students is 96.4 percent 鈥� several percentage points above the overall graduation rate. And that鈥檚 why college counselors at charter networks strive to get their students accepted at prestigious universities like Georgetown: Once in, they stay in and earn degrees.

Also recently, 28-year-old medical student Stanley Aladi was on rounds when he came across a young woman who insisted that her fractured rib resulted from a fall. Skeptical, he applied an interviewing technique he picked up at an Accelerator coaching session.

What Hand and Aladi have in common is the , which does for a few KIPP college graduates what white and Asian middle-class parents are more likely to be able to do for their children: help them find mentors or internships, coach them, teach them networking skills, and flesh out their network and connect them directly to potential employers.

But for KIPPsters 鈥� mostly black and Hispanic kids growing up in low-income and often single-parent households 鈥� this is often something foreign. They need the extra help 鈥� often even after they earn college degrees.

That should not be surprising. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute released documenting post-college pay gaps: College-educated black males, for example, earn 25 percent less than their white peers.

What鈥檚 interesting about the program is that it arises from the alumni interviewing that informs . One example: In 2013, KIPP hired a firm to survey KIPP alumni who had entered college. The interview team collected data from 14 students who had either graduated from or left college and 103 students who were still in college. The final product: a total of 218 stories from KIPP alumni, which led to the development of .

But KIPP also learned from those alumni interviews that the disadvantages of growing up in poverty never truly fade. If, for example, during college, a KIPP graduate never landed crucial job internships, either because they lacked connections or couldn鈥檛 afford to take an unpaid internship, that put them at a disadvantage after graduation.

Thus the creation of the Accelerator program. At a mere 14 fellows, Accelerator isn鈥檛 intended as a fix-all. Rather, it鈥檚 a laboratory experiment: Select a small pool of successful graduates and infuse them with the extra help that tends to come easier to upper-middle-income white and Asian graduates.

After a year, KIPP will measure what worked and what didn鈥檛, and apply that to the next group of KIPP Accelerator fellows.

Over time, KIPP might learn what, exactly, it takes to make their graduates as successful as their middle-class peers. This is hardly the only program KIPP runs to improve long-term outcomes for its graduates, but it鈥檚 definitely the most innovative.

IT ALL STARTED WITH 鈥楽UMMER MELT鈥�

There鈥檚 a reason KIPP and other top charter groups are constantly building out that extra help with programs like the Accelerator fellowship. In the early years of charter schools, the schools only tracked their kids into college. The ultimate bragging point: 100 percent acceptance.

But then, around seven years ago, the charter groups discovered how little that acceptance rate actually meant. In 2011, KIPP leaders were dismayed to learn that only 31 percent of their graduates emerged with college degrees within six years. True, , but it was far below what KIPP leaders expected.

The problem began with 鈥渟ummer melt鈥� 鈥� students who won acceptances but never showed up for freshman classes. And there was another melt between freshman and sophomore years.

Interviews with their students pointed to the obvious: The need to work, the need to take care of parents or siblings, the lack of money for the small essentials of college, everything from books to meals, were leading to the melt.

But not until early 2017 did KIPP learn just how challenging those early college years were for their students. A sent to about 10,000 former students netted 2,969 responses from KIPPsters in college. The results:

• 43 percent said they had missed meals so they could have money for books, fees, and other expenses. Most alarming: 57 percent worried that food would run out before more money for food arrived.
• 41 percent of students who qualified for federal work-study programs had been unable to find positions.
• More than two-thirds of those who worked during the summer were unable to find jobs or internships that aligned with their career aspirations.

In theory, the responsibility for ensuring that all students who enroll in college end up with degrees should rest with the colleges and the students. Why should this college success burden fall to KIPP, especially when many of these students went no further with them than eighth grade? (KIPP high schools are relatively new.)

The reason KIPP assumed a share of that college success responsibility lies in the third 鈥渂elief鈥� in KIPP鈥檚 three-belief operating philosophy.

鈥淚f you think about the work we鈥檙e doing, one of the big beliefs is we can have a transformative impact on the lives of children,鈥� KIPP President Richard Barth said. 鈥淭hen, we want to have a disruptive impact on the educational ecosystem in communities across the country. But there鈥檚 a third belief, which is, our alums are going to be change agents of the future.鈥�

That third belief will be KIPP鈥檚 most important legacy, Barth said. But that legacy loses its pull if less than half make it through college and many struggle even after earning degrees.

But there鈥檚 more than legacy at stake here. To Barth, these are his kids, and his kids are skipping meals to survive. Getting involved was a no-brainer for him.

鈥淔orty percent of our kids skip meals. Skip meals! So that鈥檚 a relevant insight,鈥� Barth said. 鈥淔or people who are real believers in the work we do, that鈥檚 a wake-up call. Like, are you serious? Let鈥檚 figure out how to solve that.鈥�

To Barth and other top charter entrepreneurs, there are multiple problems to be solved to fix the lower-than-expected college success rate. KIPP started on those solutions several years ago, radically adjusting its K-12 curriculum to make its students self-motivated learners, .

Then there are the college persistence programs, providing mentors to keep tabs on students. KIPP鈥檚 college counseling has been considerably ramped up, with students in KIPP鈥檚 College Match program now steered into colleges and universities most likely to help them graduate. Only a few years ago, only 1 in 10 KIPP graduates enrolled in colleges that are the best match for them; today, that figure is 1 in 4.

And perhaps the biggest innovation of all: adding KIPP high schools. A student graduating from a KIPP high school is significantly more likely to graduate from college.

The impact from all these changes: That 31 percent graduation rate at the six-year mark now stands at 38 percent. And given that KIPP starts its measurements at ninth grade, to catch any dropouts, that rate is probably far higher.

That鈥檚 a dramatic improvement. But is it enough to justify the traumatic disruption to the traditional public education system that charter schools have caused? Has it all been worth it?

THE ACCELERATOR FELLOWS

For Hand and Aladi, the 鈥渨orth鈥� question is easy to answer: Absolutely. Not only did KIPP get them into great high schools and colleges, but the KIPP Accelerator program is now boosting their post-college careers.

Thanks in part to her coaching provided by KIPP (every interview question was anticipated in their playacting), Hand now has a five-year Ph.D. program in art history completely paid for.

Thanks to fresh interviewing ideas gleaned from the Accelerator fellows鈥� first get-together in Chicago, Aladi, a fourth-year medical student at Howard University College of Medicine, drew the truth from the young woman he was treating: She had been beaten by a boyfriend 鈥� and it wasn鈥檛 the first time.

Here鈥檚 the idea behind the fellowship program: Find top graduates and then find ways to boost their trajectory.

鈥淔or that 25-year-old who wants to be the top oil and gas lawyer in Texas or the 25-year-old who wants to build an entire software organization, or the 25-year-old who wants to do something in arts, can interventions or programs or activities that we offer at the junction in life prove catalytic?鈥� Barth explained.

To run the program, KIPP contracted with , a firm that specializes in fast-tracking minorities with great potential. Both by phone and in person, the fellows receive executive coaching, targeted professional development 鈥� in skills like proposal-pitching 鈥� and connections to mentors, donors, and influencers.

In short, KIPP turned its fellows over to coaches who know how to steer young talent into C-suite jobs jobs: CEO, CFO, etc.

In the group鈥檚 first session in Chicago, attended by all the fellows, executive coach Patricia Hayling Price said she was struck by the difference between these fellows and young people she has coached who come from wealthy families. The latter, she said, tend to view the cup as pretty full.

鈥淭hey feel they don鈥檛 need that much more to be amazing,鈥� she said. The KIPP fellows, by contrast, saw just the opposite. 鈥淓ven though, to their credit, they had already accomplished herculean things, given their backgrounds, they were still looking at the cup as half empty. They were saying: 鈥楩ill me, fill me, what else is there?鈥� It was very inspiring.鈥�

As the leaders of KIPP, a pre-K鈥�12 public charter school network educating nearly 90,000 students from underserved communities in 20 states and supporting 12,000 alumni in college, we鈥檝e seen firsthand the power and potential of children across the country since our founding in 1994. We鈥檝e also witnessed just how many challenges confront young people, particularly those from underserved communities, as they pursue their passions and their futures. In the process, we have learned a great deal from staying in touch with our students and supporting them along their life journeys. This is why we are so committed to talking publicly about college completion and career preparation.

While there is much public debate around the merits of a college education, we do believe that in America today, young people with college degrees have better odds at leading choice-filled lives. The research is clear: College grads have better earning power, civic engagement, and access to health care than those without a bachelor鈥檚 degree. Researchers have also found that the impact of a college degree on adult income levels is higher for students from underserved communities than for their more affluent peers.

Therefore, it is more helpful to families, educators, and civic, business, and political leaders to know how schools and school systems are performing on post-secondary outcomes for all their kids as the 鈥渇inal score鈥� than on any grade-level test, which is more akin to the 鈥渉alftime score.鈥� And while college might not be right for all students, the skills necessary to succeed in college certainly are beneficial for all students. The role of K-12 school systems should be to prepare all their children to have the freedom to choose their post-secondary path. Critical thinking skills, social intelligence, grit, and more 鈥� these are the strengths that our students rely on in school, in the workplace, and throughout their adult lives, and these are the strengths for which colleges and employers alike are searching.

Right now, there is a college completion gap in the U.S. based primarily on income. According to researchers, about 9 percent of students from families in America鈥檚 lowest income quartile earn a college degree, while students from families in the top income quartile earn college degrees at 5 to 6 times that rate. And the gap has been growing. Many students from low-income families don鈥檛 receive a high-quality college-prep education or college counseling; in the worst-case scenario, they enroll in college, accrue debt, encounter roadblocks, and drop out before earning a degree.

To help as many of our students as possible achieve their dreams, we stay in touch with our students well after they leave KIPP, whether that is after middle school to attend a non-KIPP high school or after they graduate from a KIPP high school and move on to other paths. We track how our students in college are faring in college, and what factors help them flourish on campus. We also want to know about those who don鈥檛 go on to college, and how we can better empower them in pursuing choice-filled lives.

KIPP calculates our college completion rate based on the KIPP students who start high school, not just those who graduate. We track our students鈥� college progress and outcomes for every student who completes eighth grade at a KIPP middle school. For students who join KIPP in high school, we track their long-term outcomes starting at the end of freshman year. This earlier starting point provides a more complete measure of our performance. This is the bar we believe all schools and school systems should set for themselves and report to the public.

Based on our formula, KIPP鈥檚 current national college completion rate for our alumni is 38 percent. This is above the national average for all students (36 percent), and approximately four times the national average for students from low-income families (about 9 percent).

Although we are proud of these results, we have room to grow. Our immediate goal is for 50 percent or more of our alumni to complete bachelor鈥檚 degrees in six years 鈥� looking at our oldest cohorts of alumni, we know we can get there, and for those who don鈥檛 go to college, we want them to be well positioned to pursue jobs that are both personally and financially rewarding.

We recognize that it is not easy for school systems to track students鈥� post-secondary progress and outcomes as we propose, and that doing so will require a meaningful investment of time and resources. We think that investment is not only worthwhile but crucial. And collaboration among schools can help lighten the load for everyone. The KIPP Through College program has made our most-used and most-requested tools available in the Beyond KIPP Resource Library, and we are eager to learn from other schools about what can make this approach work effectively.

There are clear steps K-12 educators can take to increase meaningful career opportunities for young people. We need to find better ways to keep more students with us in school, by helping each child find their passion, purpose, and plan. We need to make sure our juniors and seniors are applying to the right mix of colleges, and that they are equipped to make smart financial decisions. We also need to identify strong alternatives for those who don鈥檛 go on to college directly from high school.

And K-12 schools can鈥檛 do it alone; institutions of higher education need to play a role. KIPP has created partnerships with 90 colleges and universities to help more students persist to college graduation day. Many of these universities are leading the way in transforming higher education to better serve first-generation college goers, including offering programs to help students thrive on campus, increasing financial aid, and facilitating peer groups for mutual support. We need to ensure these ideas are replicated across more colleges and universities.

A college-preparatory education can make a life-changing difference for students from underserved communities. But if we as educators are to set more students on the trajectory toward choice-filled lives, we must be honest about how well we are doing toward this goal. Holding ourselves accountable by measuring post-secondary outcomes for students who start high school 鈥� not just those who finish 鈥� is a big step in the right direction.

In an early-summer session for fresh Green Dot Public Schools graduates at 脕nimo Leadership Charter High School Los Angeles, a college counselor asked for a show of hands: 鈥淗ow many of you are going to out-of-state colleges?鈥�

Not a single hand went up.

There were a handful of students going to the University of California, Los Angeles, but most were headed to less selective California State University campuses, where they will probably work part time 鈥� and are less likely to walk away with a degree. A fair number were headed to local community colleges, where the odds of eventually earning a bachelor鈥檚 degree hover in : Nearly three-quarters of those pursuing two-year degrees fail to earn those degrees or transfer to four-year institutions within six years.

That show of hands, or lack of hands, is one of several clues that explain why Green Dot is highly successful at getting all of its high-poverty graduates on a college track and admitted into college 鈥� but struggles to ensure they earn degrees.

According to National Student Clearinghouse data shared by the network, only 16 percent of Green Dot graduates earn bachelor鈥檚 degrees within six years. Green Dot says the figure is low because of Clearinghouse鈥檚 low rate of matching their records with college records. Roughly translated, that means the Clearinghouse couldn鈥檛 find their alumni.

For the class of 2004, for example, the match rate was only 55 percent, according to Green Dot. For comparison: At Texas-based , which educates similar kinds of students, the match rate is about 94 percent. Students at Chicago鈥檚 match at a rate of about 90 percent.

If Green Dot based its success rate only on the students successfully tracked, the success rates rises to 34 percent, according to the network鈥檚 internal calculations.

Green Dot is still investigating the cause for the low match rates. One suspect: A high percentage of its students may be claiming privacy exceptions 鈥� 鈥淔ERPA blocks鈥� (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) , making it impossible for the Clearinghouse to track them.

That was on display in Los Angeles during my visit as counselors remarked on the number of students clicking 鈥測es鈥� on the box enabling the privacy block as they worked online to update their college portal.

Who wants to share their higher education records 鈥� especially in a time when the federal government is ratcheting up its pursuit of undocumented immigrants? Green Dot, by state law, does not keep records on the immigration status of its students and their parents. But based on my interviews with students at 脕nimo Leadership and 脕nimo Inglewood Charter High School, the number of undocumented, especially parents, appears to be high.

There are multiple reasons for placing Green Dot in a separate category when evaluating college success rates, at least for now. One reason is that Green Dot takes chances that few charter networks do. In the 2008鈥�09 school year, Green Dot took over the famously dysfunctional Locke High School in L.A.鈥檚 Watts neighborhood. The school, where perhaps 5 percent or less went on to earn college degrees, was built after the . (That estimate comes from the principal when Green Dot took over, Green Dot founder Steve Barr said.)

Absorbing Locke nearly doubled Green Dot鈥檚 enrollment. Some of the Locke students barely had contact with Green Dot before they graduated 鈥� a significant factor in the network鈥檚 college success rate.

Overall, Green Dot serves a student population that is about a quarter black and three-quarters Latino. Its student body is also composed of those with backgrounds that tend to be among the most challenged: 91 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 25 percent are English language learners, and 12 percent have special needs.

But those demographics don鈥檛 seem any more challenging than the students who enroll in , where the college success rate is considerably higher. Nor can taking over Locke explain all of Green Dot鈥檚 modest college success rate.

At 脕nimo Leadership, a school so close to LAX that outdoor conversations are difficult when planes are landing (which is pretty much all the time), the college success rate is only 18 percent. Calculated with a denominator of students 鈥渇ound鈥� by Clearinghouse, the success rate rises to 25 percent.

Green Dot is not claiming it has a high college success rate. The network started its alumni tracking-and-support efforts only about two years ago, said Janneth Johnson, head of counseling and college persistence. And the effort is just getting up to speed.

So far, Green Dot鈥檚 college success efforts appear modest compared to other charter networks that are part of this project, especially the college guidance staffing. College counselor Reyna Casanova, who works at Green Dot鈥檚 脕nimo Inglewood school, is one of only two counselors at a school with more than 600 students in grades 9鈥�12. And her duties include far more than college counseling.

鈥淲e do it all 鈥� the scheduling, the college component, the mental health component, the social and personal,鈥� Casanova said.

That鈥檚 a sharp contrast to my visit to KIPP NYC College Prep, where both college counseling teams and KIPP Through College teams appeared capable of flooding the zone.

Green Dot says it can鈥檛 be compared to the East Coast charters, which have far higher per-student spending. It鈥檚 true that California has relatively low student reimbursement rates 鈥� almost half of what some charters in New York City receive, depending on where they are located. But the per-student reimbursement here is almost exactly the same as the reimbursement in Texas, where IDEA鈥檚 college success rate is higher. The elaborate KIPP Through College program operates off independent fundraising.

What the Green Dot high schools have are 鈥渁lumni champions,鈥� in which teachers are paid stipends to take on a caseload of graduated seniors and act as a resource for alumni who struggle with academic, social, or financial issues in college.

Before that program, graduating seniors essentially disappeared every June, Casanova said.

鈥淚鈥檇 bump into a graduate at the mall and say, 鈥楬ey, aren鈥檛 you supposed to be at UC Santa Cruz?鈥� and she would answer: 鈥楿m, I鈥檓 not going there anymore,鈥� 鈥� Casanova said.

But the alumni champion, one per campus, carries a caseload of only 25 students, which leaves the rest of the graduating class mostly untracked. At some universities, such as UCLA, Green Dot hires alumni as 鈥渦niversity mentors鈥� to assist incoming students.

Part of the difference between Green Dot and other charter networks, Johnson said, is that Green Dot embeds its college counseling into regular classroom instruction, with teachers becoming college advisers. But the challenge at Green Dot appears to be less about counseling students on getting accepted into a college than getting them into the right colleges, and then keeping them there until they earn degrees.

IDENTIFYING THE LEAK

There are multiple leaks: shaky financial aid, family pressure to work and stay in Los Angeles, students unready for college academic work, and students making ill-fated choices about where to go to college.

鈥淎 lot of times I鈥檝e had kids that get into great schools outside California,鈥� Casanova said. 鈥淔or example, this year I had a girl get into Mount Holyoke College. Great financial package. But her parents refused to let her go, even though it was the best fit for her.鈥�

This phenomenon, also experienced by counselors at all-Latino charters like IDEA, is unfathomable to upper-income white and Asian parents. Who doesn鈥檛 accept an invitation to go to the best college possible? But it鈥檚 very real in neighborhoods such as Lenox and Inglewood, home to the students coming to this college-prep session.

At schools like Mount Holyoke, more than 90 percent of first-generation students end up winning diplomas. Instead, Casanova said, the student ended up locally, at California State University L.A., a university where just 19 percent of the freshmen end up with diplomas after six years.

More worrisome is the high proportion of Green Dot alumni headed to local community colleges (Green Dot puts that number at about a third), where for these students, the odds of eventually winning a four-year degree are in the single-digit range.

鈥淪ome kids get into four-year colleges but choose to go to community college because it鈥檚 cheaper, or they can work and help their families,鈥� Casanova said.

Other students, Casanova said, rationalize their way into making poor college decisions. 鈥淭hey might say, 鈥業 didn鈥檛 get into UCLA, my dream school, so I鈥檓 just going to go to El Camino [College, a nearby community college] and then transfer to UCLA.鈥� 鈥�

Except that transfer rarely happens.

A few years ago, Casanova was more tolerant of decisions like that. 鈥淚 felt like I had to respect their decisions,鈥� she said. But that attitude has changed.

鈥淣ow I feel like I have to advocate, which means telling them the harsh truth, that they鈥檙e going to be at El Camino for four, five, or six years, just like the other kids,鈥� Casanova said.

Compared to a traditional high school, especially in the many high-poverty neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Green Dot does an admirable job tracking its graduates once they are in college. But when compared to the charter networks reporting college success rates in the 50 percent range, Green Dot has ground to make up.

Regardless, Green Dot鈥檚 modest college success rate appears to easily exceed that of Los Angeles Unified School District and other local districts where Green Dot students would have ended up had they not gotten a low number via the charter school lottery.

YARITZA GONZALEZ

One of the alumni who attended an early-summer session as an alumni mentor was Yaritza Gonzalez, born and raised in California. She first lived in Oxnard, where both her parents picked strawberries, and then moved to Inglewood, where her parents now work as restaurant servers.

Gonzalez and her parents signed up for the Green Dot lottery, and all showed up for the draw. Yaritza鈥檚 name was the third called out. That was a great relief for her parents, because the schools she had attended through middle school worried them. 鈥淚 almost cried, because it meant so much to my parents.鈥�

If Gonzalez had not won a seat at Green Dot, she would have attended Morningside High School, part of Inglewood Unified School District, only a block from her home in Inglewood. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, she realizes how lucky she was, and why her parents were so happy. Many of her girlfriends from middle school got pregnant and dropped out. Several of the boys she knew are dead, victims of gang violence.

Gonzalez comes from a close-knit family that emphasizes education, so she assumes she would have survived Morningside and most likely ended up at one of the nearby California State University campuses, universities with modest college success rates.

Instead, she graduated as a Green Dot salutatorian and won a full scholarship to Dartmouth College, from which she has graduated. On this day, she offered advice to just-graduated Green Dot seniors.

It was fascinating to watch her interactions with the students. The clich茅 鈥減in dropped鈥� applies: These soon-to-be college freshmen hung on every soft-spoken word. Her advice: Reach out for help. Don鈥檛 be afraid to ask for extensions, for personal help from professors, for more financial aid.

鈥淚f you are honest about your experience,鈥� she said, referring to growing up in Inglewood, 鈥渢hen people are more willing to help you.鈥�

Later, Gonzalez said that out-of-state colleges often offered better chances of graduating, but there are challenges. At Dartmouth she entered a world where nearly all the students were wealthy and white 鈥� many the sons and daughters of Dartmouth alumni.

鈥淚t鈥檚 intimidating at first,鈥� she said. 鈥淓veryone else seems to know what they are doing.鈥�

She described the stunned silence among her privileged Dartmouth classmates in get-to-know-you sessions as she described her upbringing. They weren鈥檛 being mean, they just had no way of relating. Better to say nothing than something inappropriate.

The pull of family obligations also leads to diploma-earning challenges.

鈥淔amily issues really stick with you when you are far away,鈥� Gonzalez said, especially for those who are, like her, the oldest child in the family. 鈥淵ou feel this need to come back and solve the problems.鈥�

The biggest challenge is avoiding falling into insularity, she said, failing to build community, failing to ask for help.

鈥淢any [first-generation] students are intimidated to ask a professor for help or an extension,鈥� Gonzalez said. 鈥淲e feel like we鈥檙e being judged, that it would show we鈥檙e not prepared, that we can鈥檛 handle the rigor.鈥�

LEARNING FROM GREEN DOT

Although Green Dot may not be 鈥渒illing it鈥� like and , where success rates are as much as five times the general like-student population, its college success rate, even if it鈥檚 only roughly double that of LAUSD (estimate only 鈥� LAUSD doesn鈥檛 have official college success data), has to be viewed as a modest success.

One way of looking at Green Dot is to view it in the same light as , also based in Los Angeles. In each case, the push to improve college graduation rates is recent, affordable, and doable 鈥� programs that traditional school districts and charters lacking deep pockets could emulate.

Green Dot鈥檚 college persistence campaign is new, and the network seems candid about the need to improve.

鈥淲e are not afraid of the data,鈥� Johnson said.

Nobody tracks their alumni into and through college like KIPP.

And that was strikingly clear the day I spent at聽, a school that鈥檚 about half Hispanic, half black 鈥� and nearly all low-income.

Just a day at the school in New York City鈥檚 South Bronx explains how KIPP has made such rapid gains in its college success rate: In a college prep class for juniors, KIPP alumni from two different colleges came to tell the highs and lows of college life. A college prep session for seniors had several聽 counselors conducting role-playing sessions designed to guide the soon-to-be college students around danger areas. (Your friend steals a six-pack and jumps into a car with you to head to an off-campus party: What do you do?)

But, the day is far from over.

The school has a dozen counselors to track the New York alumni into and through college. I sat down with two KTC counselors, Becky Hamilton and Catherine Marciano, to learn how they use Salesforce software to track their students. Each student has a file loaded with every KIPP academic record since eighth grade: Grades for every semester, scores for every SAT taken, every college transcript (which students turn over in exchange for a book stipend), every tiny detail about financial aid 鈥� and every deadline for pretty much anything that needs an update. Every conversation with a student gets written up as a 鈥渃ontact note,鈥� and is passed to a KTC supervisor for further scrutinizing the very same day.

How It鈥檚 Working

The bottom line: 46 percent of the graduates at this New York school will earn bachelor鈥檚 degrees within six years,聽 from families that make up the bottom fourth of earners. (Nationally,聽38 percent of KIPP students achieve that success rate.)

Also striking about the diploma earning rate: KIPP insists on starting the 鈥渃lock鈥� on college graduation rates at the end of eighth grade (beginning of ninth grade for students new to the KIPP network), thus picking up any dropouts. So what鈥檚 the KIPP success rate that would match other charter networks that start their head counts in 12th grade? Impossible to say 鈥� but significantly higher.

The KTC program here is not cheap. KIPP spends roughly $2,000 per student per year on the program that will follow them into college, a figure that includes not just the seniors at the high school here, but the KIPP middle school alumni who went to a non-KIPP high school. In the coming years, as the KIPP alumni population grows, the plan is to reduce that to $1,600 per student.

A Declaration聽of War

Tessa Kratz, director of college and career counseling at the high school, holds a pivotal role, akin to the lesser-known catcher on a World Series baseball team who directs the team to victory. She鈥檚 the one who makes sure students make it to the perfect-match college, which then the KTC counselors track them through.

In trying to boost college degree-earning, the counselors at KIPP NYC College Prep embrace two maxims. First, students should always 鈥渙vermatch鈥� colleges, meaning go to a college that鈥檚 a reach for them, mostly because better colleges take better care of students from places like the South Bronx. Second, whenever possible, students should try to win a spot in the Educational Opportunity Program (called聽 at private universities).

Middle-class parents have never heard of EOP, mostly because students have to come from high-poverty neighborhoods like the South Bronx to get admitted. Once admitted, however, their odds of winning a degree soar, thanks to the counseling, tutoring, financial aid (near-full ride), and multiple other supports.

But here鈥檚 the best part about EOP for students from schools like College Prep, the part that melds the two maxims here: EOP helps students with that college stretch that lands them in a more prestigious university from which they are more likely to graduate.

A not-entirely-hypothetical example: Let鈥檚 say Columbia University has a freshman admittance floor for regular admission of a 4.0 GPA and 1400 SAT. For HEOP students, a 3.6 GPA and 1250 SAT might get them in the door.

鈥淭hey would never get admitted through regular admissions, but they can get admitted through HEOP,鈥� Kratz said.

But the spots are both coveted and limited: Kratz said SUNY New Paltz had an estimated 4,000 applications for 40 spots, which makes her job even more challenging to land those limited spots for her KIPPsters.

Each university has its own, tightly held EOP cutoff linked to a first-come, first-served award system. Plus, every year the state funding shifts, so everything is a moving target. Knowing the timing and GPA/SAT cutoffs for each public and private university 鈥� and the moving target aid numbers 鈥� takes a computerized campaign strategy that would make the Pentagon war planners proud.

鈥淚f 50 to 60 percent of our kids are eligible financially for this program, then we鈥檙e going to do everything we can to get those 50 to 60 percent of our kids into one of them,鈥� Kratz said.

This is a true declaration of war 鈥� but it means everything. Kratz says the graduation rate boost for EOP kids is hard to calculate, because it varies by college. But everyone agrees: It鈥檚 big.

鈥淭his is what my senior year team spends an inordinate amount of time on 鈥� the paperwork for opportunity scholarships,鈥� Kratz said. 鈥淵ou have to document everything.鈥�

Kratz鈥檚 campaign starts in a student鈥檚 junior year, when parents coming to report card night in late April, after taxes are due, are asked to bring in their tax forms. Those tax returns are the key to winning any financial aid, including opportunity status. None of this is easy. Most of the tax returns that show up that night are unsigned, so back they go for signatures. But eventually, Kratz鈥檚 team gets signed tax returns for every student 鈥� forms that get scanned into their system.

More work continues over the following months, and when the right day arrives for the right university for just the right students with just the right GPA and just the right SAT score, that EOP application gets submitted. First come, first served.

That鈥檚 just a tiny piece of what KIPP does. Compare that to a traditional public high school in New York where there鈥檚 perhaps one guidance counselor (not college adviser, just a basic guidance counselor) for every 300 kids or more. There isn鈥檛 a chance that that counselor is going to track what Kratz鈥檚 team tracks. And that is one of many reasons KIPP鈥檚 college graduation rates are standouts compared to their peers.

Shooting聽for the聽Stars

KIPP started out as a network of middle schools. Years later, it became clear that to catch these kids up to their peers from middle-class families they needed to expand to both elementary and high school. KIPPsters who graduate from a KIPP high school, compared to those who leave a KIPP middle school to attend other schools, are about 10 percent more likely to enter college.

KIPP NYC College Prep is wrapped into the KIPP Through College philosophy. It鈥檚 a big package, probably explaining why 46 percent of KIPP students here earn college degrees 10 years after completing eighth grade.

Still, at KIPP College Prep, where all the KIPP students will graduate from a KIPP high school, the team shoots for far higher than 46 percent. The expectation here: 75 percent will graduate from college 鈥� a rate nearly as high as the graduation rate for children of upper-income parents.

And based on the rapid gains in college graduation rates KIPP has posted in recent years, it seems entirely possible that they鈥檒l make it.

Watching the elaborate wraparound services here raises a question that KIPP asks itself: Does KIPP coddle its kids? In past years, when KIPP faced the fact that its students were not sticking with college at the hoped-for rate, the answer came back as a 鈥測es.鈥� Thus the famous KIPP pursuit of 鈥済rit,鈥� infusing students with the self-advocacy skills considered necessary to survive in large college lecture classrooms where no KIPP-like teachers are hovering to shower students with the nudges needed to persevere.

Can the same criticism be applied to KIPP Through College? That exact question was raised during my visit by a junior listening to two KIPP alumni, Ashley Gutierrez from Brooklyn College and Sarina Vazquez from Hunter College, visiting a college prep class.

鈥淒oes KIPP hold your hand too much, and does that hurt you in college?鈥� a male student asked.

Both alumni seemed surprised by the question, especially Gutierrez, who originally enrolled in SUNY Brockport in upstate New York and ran into severe academic problems 鈥� some of which she attributed to being so far away from her family in a rural environment where the social life revolved around having a car. Not only did she transfer out, but she also downsized her career goal from becoming an anesthesiologist to becoming a nurse.

This is what happens when you mess up, Gutierrez told the juniors, who appeared to hang on to every word of what became a confessional. KIPP Through College is what kept her college dreams alive, she told them. Her new goal: become a nurse anesthetist.

And all the college advice passed along in high school wasn鈥檛 just hand-holding, Vazquez told the juniors.

鈥淜IPP is just letting you know what the real world is like,鈥� she said.

Both alumni showered the juniors with advice: Get to know at least one professor. Avoid social isolation by forcing yourself to make new friends. Watch your GPA, or you can lose financial aid. Prepare yourself for long lab hours in science classes and lots of homework. Join a club.

Gutierrez advised them to take their current junior-year classes seriously. The more math and science absorbed in high school, the easier those college science classes will be.

鈥淚t鈥檚 OK to have fun in college, but school comes first,鈥� she said.

The alumni passed along one piece of advice that would be rare to come from middle-class college students: Expect to feel extra pressure as a role model for being the first family member to attend college, and also a role model for the KIPPsters still in high school.

鈥淚t can get overwhelming, but you have to realize you are inspiration for those who come behind you,鈥� Gutierrez said.

A similar message was raised repeatedly in the college prep class for seniors earlier in the day. When upper-middle-class students get in trouble, they can often count on parents to dig deeper into the family savings and land them at another college.

For the students leaving KIPP College Prep to enter college, there is no backup system. If you screw up and lose your financial aid package, there鈥檚 little even the elaborate support network that is KIPP Through College can do to bail you out.

鈥淲e鈥檝e got your back, but we鈥檙e not heroes. If you get kicked out, it鈥檚 going to be very hard to get you back in,鈥� one KTC counselor told the roomful of seniors, ticking off the list of loans and scholarships that keep their students afloat in college. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have the luxury of just moving you to another college.鈥�

That chilling message punctuated the need to absorb the play-acting lessons of the day: how not to give in to peer pressure; what plagiarism is and isn鈥檛; don鈥檛 assume if you are at another campus that the rules of your college don鈥檛 apply; know that when you sign a several-hundred-page student handbook, you will be held to what鈥檚 in it.

Also: Know the precise meaning of 鈥渘o means no鈥� sex guidelines: 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 matter what stage you鈥檙e in. As soon as someone says no, you have to put your clothes back on,鈥� the counselors said.

And yet another lesson probably not told to upper-middle-class students: Get to know your advisers and understand that going to them to report problems is not 鈥渟nitching.鈥� Snitching has its roots in the criminal world, with one criminal vowing never to turn in another, one KTC counselor explained.

鈥淪nitching is something between criminals,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou guys are not criminals.鈥�

At the end of my day there, it was exhausting just to watch the process. But put it all together, and you understand KIPP鈥檚 fast-rising college success rates. A lot went into that national effort: more KIPP high schools, more KTC supports, wiser college matching, more college advising for high school juniors and seniors 鈥� pretty much more of everything.

Visit any of the big charter networks in the spring and you might catch a raucous 鈥渟igning day,鈥� where seniors brandishing college banners proudly and loudly shout out to an arena full of friends, family, teachers and classmates: 鈥淚鈥檓 going to ___ college!鈥�

That all started in Houston, Texas, in 2000. On a chilly October night that year, YES Prep founder Chris Barbic and his college counselor and neighbor, Donald Kamentz, stopped by Ernie鈥檚 on Banks, a bar in the Montrose neighborhood started by a Chicago guy who loved Cubs star Ernie Banks 鈥� so he decided to open a joint on Banks Street.

Barbic and Kamentz were sipping Shiner Bocks, munching on Tombstone pizzas (it was the only food the now-shuttered bar served) and watching ESPN鈥檚 SportsCenter, which was broadcasting college signing day for the nation鈥檚 top student athletes. Lots of drama, lots of shouting, lots of happy families.

鈥淲hy shouldn鈥檛 our families experience the same acclaim?鈥� they reasoned. Most are the first in their families to go to college, many of them headed to name-brand universities. This needs celebration.

鈥淥ur kids were going to declare their own colleges and nobody was going to make a big deal of it,鈥� Kamentz said. 鈥淲hat if we made a big deal of it?鈥�

Thus was born the senior signing day, in June 2001, with the first 17 graduating seniors of YES Prep and their families, who were cheered on by about 300 younger YES Preppers and the staff. They all fit into a small theater at an adjoining community center. It was a hit, and each year it grew and was replicated by other charter networks.

These days, YES, which now has 17 schools educating 12,600 students, holds its , where the Houston Rockets play.

But that鈥檚 just the beginning of the college success strategies invented at YES Prep.

Today, most charter networks build college partnerships, in which the colleges recruit their students, give them full financial rides 鈥� or close to it 鈥� and promise to recruit their students in small 鈥渃lusters鈥� so they won鈥檛 be isolated. In short, they promise to go the extra mile to ensure they graduate.

That, too, started in Houston in 2006 with YES Prep via partnerships called . The origins were conversations with an admissions representative from Iowa鈥檚 Grinnell College who knew Kamentz from Teach for America.

鈥淲e love your kids, and we know from the program that recruiting students in clusters works,鈥� the representative said. 鈥淲hy not draw up a recruitment deal that helps both YES and Grinnell?鈥�

That first year, Grinnell was the only IMPACT partner. The program has since grown to about 35 partners today. YES Prep may not be the biggest charter network in the country, but when it comes to pioneering college success, it鈥檚 the clear leader.

IMPACT TODAY

Those college success rituals were on full display on an early August day this year 鈥� several weeks before Hurricane Harvey tore through Houston 鈥� during an IMPACT gathering, where college representatives set up interview tables and conducted small group sessions. A sample of the colleges represented: George Washington University, Grinnell College, Hamilton College, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and Kenyon College.

These are colleges willing to meet the full financial needs of YES Prep students and admit students in 鈥渃lusters鈥� to help reduce student isolation. On this day, the IMPACT college representatives had one pitch for the YES Prep seniors: 鈥淎pply to our school!鈥�

One more interesting thing about this IMPACT gathering: Parents are invited, and they participate fully. Pushing up college graduation rates often requires getting parents to agree to send their sons and daughters out of state, and among these mostly Latino families that鈥檚 not always an accepted practice.

IMPACT launched before most charter networks even started focusing on college success. At that point, their long-term goal was limited to college admittance. Barbic and Kamentz recognized that the real push had to be college completion and saw an opportunity: Colleges wanted to diversify, and charters like YES Prep could offer them the well-prepared students they were looking for. In exchange, the colleges would agree to meeting their financial needs and supporting them once on campus.

鈥淥ur job was to pump out kids prepared and ready to roll,鈥� said Barbic.

The students invited to this day鈥檚 IMPACT session represent YES Prep鈥檚 top 25 percent. Most have grade point averages of at least 3.4, good SAT scores, and an impressive record taking Advanced Placement courses in their junior year, and are continuing to take AP classes now in their senior year.

Colleges fight for these students. They are academically prepared and represent the nation鈥檚 diverse future: 85 percent Latino and 13 percent black. About 85 percent come from low-income families.

YES Prep鈥檚 early start in focusing on college completion probably explains its high college graduation success rate: 46.7 percent earn four-year degrees at the six-year mark. While that falls well short of what high-income families experience (80 percent), it鈥檚 a remarkable rate given its student population. from families in the lowest-earning quartile earn degrees.

One reason for that 46.7 percent figure is the very high success rate for the students entering IMPACT colleges. Among these top YES Prep students, 84 percent have graduated from or are still enrolled in their original IMPACT college.

And YES Prep college counselors deal with challenges that college counselors at a typical suburban high school can鈥檛 even imagine: Laura Villafranca, the counselor from YES Prep鈥檚 Gulfton campus, estimates that a third of her students are Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries, and more than half of their parents are undocumented. That demographic representation is unlikely to describe a suburban traditional public school.

Here鈥檚 what that means when pursuing college success. For starters, a lot of your graduates won鈥檛 even consider out-of-state colleges, even though many of those colleges have great college completion rates. First, because DACA students in Texas can get in-state tuition. These YES Prep students can鈥檛 get loans to go to out-of-state colleges, so just take that entire option off the table.

Second, undocumented parents don鈥檛 want to their children go to college anywhere other than local. Even going beyond Houston is considered dicey.

鈥淭he parents are afraid,鈥� Villafranca said 鈥� afraid of the risk of deportation if they leave their communities. Why send your children to a college where you will never be able to drop them off for their freshman year, and are not likely to attend their graduation?

Yet another issue that most college counselors might not tend to deal with, and one that might strike outsiders as odd: The counselors at YES Prep say they have to work hard to convince their students that they are 鈥渕inorities鈥� who may feel isolated on distant college campuses:

鈥淚鈥檒l say, 鈥榊ou鈥檙e a minority,鈥� Villafranca said. 鈥淎nd they will say, 鈥楴o, I鈥檓 not.鈥� They will look left, and right, and they look at the hallways and everyone there speaks Spanish. They look at me and say they don鈥檛 know what I鈥檓 talking about. So I tell them when they step foot on this [new college] campus and look around, they may be the only student of color or one of a handful of Latinos. Everyone is going to look at you 鈥� What鈥檚 your response going to be when an entire class turns and looks at you and says, 鈥楾ell us about the Hispanic experience?鈥欌��

Veteran counselor Peter Olympia said YES Prep pours all its resources into academics. Many of their students arrive at YES schools in sixth grade reading at the second- or third-grade level. YES probably does a better job bolstering academics than it does preparing its students for the dramatic social challenges they will face in college, he said.

The best antidote there, Villafranca said, is bringing in alumni who have gone to colleges known as PWI 鈥� Predominately White Institutions. Those are the voices that current high schoolers will listen to.

Even the simplest things, like explaining the expenses of a plane ticket to their new institution, or buying clothes to attend a college in cold-weather climates like Massachusetts, New York, or Vermont, can take a lot of explaining and effort.

鈥淭his is very much a sit-down conversation,鈥� Villafranca said. 鈥淚鈥檒l tell them, 鈥榊ou鈥檙e going to the University of Rochester. You have no idea how cold it is. You need to buy a winter coat.鈥� And they will look at me and say, 鈥楤ut I have a sweatshirt; I鈥檒l just layer.鈥欌��

Yet another challenge: Nowhere in Houston can you buy a winter coat suitable to survive at New York鈥檚 University of Rochester.

And even if the students think they can come up with round-trip airfare, Villafranca has to warn them about the expenses of making multiple trips during the school year.

鈥淭he conversation we have with the family is they should try to identify a friend on campus because they probably won鈥檛 be coming home for Thanksgiving, or they won鈥檛 be coming home for spring break,鈥� she said.

All the counselors in the IMPACT group session agreed that hidden fees 鈥� charges not covered by students鈥� nearly full-ride scholarships 鈥� were among their biggest challenges. The biggest ones are housing deposits that they thought were waived but are actually deferred and being required to pay for campus health insurance if they aren鈥檛 covered by parents. That health insurance bill can run from $1,500 to $3,000 a year.

Another surprise cost: having to pay to attend college orientation. That can run $300 to $500. And some colleges schedule orientations in June or July, which means having to come up with airfare for a separate trip.

In general, expenses that run $3,000 to $5,000 over the offered scholarship are considered no-gos, by both the parents and the college advisers.

STUDENTS TELL THEIR STORIES

Destinie York, 17, entered YES Prep in seventh grade, a move that her mother engineered.

鈥淪he didn鈥檛 want me to go to a high school where people would fight me,鈥� York said. 鈥淪he wanted me at a school where people cared about me.鈥�

Destinie鈥檚 mother, who graduated from college, works as a bookkeeper at a Walgreen鈥檚; her father works in vending.

In her junior year, York took AP English and AP physics.

鈥淧hysics was really hard. I cried almost every night,鈥� she said. In her junior year, she is taking three AP classes, including calculus.

With a GPA of 3.5 and good SAT scores, York is hoping to land a spot at Rice University, which was one of the universities represented during the IMPACT gathering.

鈥淚f Rice gave me a scholarship I would go.鈥�

鈥︹赌︹赌︹赌�

Axel Palapa, 17, aspires to graduate from Columbia University in New York City with an engineering degree. His mother and a sibling live in Mexico. He lives in Houston with his aunt, uncle, and two cousins.

Palapa came to YES five years ago, transferring from another charter school that he thought was less academically demanding.

In his junior year, he took three AP classes 鈥� French, physics, and English literature 鈥� all while working 30 hours a week as a cashier at Taco Bell.

In his current senior year he is taking another three AP courses, including calculus. His GPA: 3.98.

Palapa has never been to New York City; the closest he came was taking a summer course at Cornell University in upstate New York for budding minority engineers. Cornell, he said, was too rural. He鈥檚 convinced that he鈥檚 a natural New Yorker.

鈥淚 want an urban setting,鈥� he said. 鈥淣ew York City is where I see myself in the future.鈥�

鈥︹赌︹赌︹赌︹��.

Elysia Garza, 17, has been at YES Prep since sixth grade. Entering the YES admissions lottery was her idea.

鈥淢y father didn鈥檛 want me to go to YES,鈥� Garza said. 鈥淗e thought I was going to be stripped of my childhood and have no fun at all.鈥�

Garza has no regrets about her decision, citing a college visit trip she was able to make to Washington, D.C., where she visited George Washington University and Catholic University, as well as Goucher College and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Without YES鈥檚 support, that trip would not have happened, she said, and without the IMPACT program, Garza feels she would have stood no chance of getting a full financial ride from any of those institutions.

Her first choice: George Washington University, where she wants to study international affairs.

鈥淚 loved the political climate there, and everyone was welcoming,鈥� Garza said. 鈥淚 also liked how fast-paced it was.鈥�

A representative from George Washington University was on campus that day. To go there, Garza would need a full scholarship.

鈥淚 come from a very low-income family,鈥� she said.

This is one chapter in an ongoing multimedia series by Richard Whitmire called The Alumni, which focuses on the efforts being made by America鈥檚 top charter networks in guiding alumni to 鈥� and through 鈥� college. Read all our school profiles here, and be sure to visit to see other essays, videos, graphics, and profiles of the educators and students leading a college success revolution: .

With 15 high schools in its network now, Alliance has grown from just eight schools five years ago. In total so far, there are 8,712 high school graduates of Alliance schools.

That rapid rate was calculated to meet a demand from parents who wanted high schools in which, compared to the traditional L.A. schools, students were far more likely to earn high school diplomas and enter college. When Alliance opened its first high school in 2004, only 49 percent of students in traditional LAUSD schools graduated from high school.

Photo: 蜜桃影视

Alliance is posting those gains now, but that comes five years after the charter network realized it had a problem: Far too few of its alumni were actually earning college degrees. At that point, Alliance put together a team to track its students after graduation.

But compared to the charter networks with higher college success rates, Alliance was late to the charter school game. That, plus being challenged by its rapid growth, probably explains why Alliance has a low proportion of alumni who graduate college within six years: 25 percent.

That鈥檚 better than the 9 percent of students from low-income families who earn college degrees within six years, but well below other charter networks, where half of their graduates earn college degrees within six years.

All three California charter networks profiled in The Alumni, Alliance, Aspire, and Green Dot, ended up at the bottom of the college success rankings. The reasons for that appear to lie in the state鈥檚 erratic funding over the past decade, first slicing per-student K-12 funding to the bone, followed by severe cuts to the state university system.

At a time when charter networks elsewhere in the country were expanding their college success programs, the California charters were struggling just to stay afloat. And when their students entered the beleaguered state university system, they struggled to win seats in classes mandatory to stay on track for graduation. Middle-class students could afford to wait it out; not these students. Many gave up and took jobs.

So the relevant question is how the college success rate at Alliance compares to Los Angeles Unified. Hard to say, since LAUSD, like nearly all traditional districts, doesn鈥檛 track its students that far. But we do know how many LAUSD graduates enter four-year colleges: 24 percent, compared to 49 percent of Alliance graduates.

Another factor to consider: LAUSD includes far more upper-income parents coming from schools in neighborhoods . of the district students are considered disadvantaged, compared to 97 percent of Alliance students. And the racial mix is different as well, with far more white and Asian students in district schools. At Alliance, those students make up just 2 percent of the student population.

Alliance may rank near the bottom of the major charter networks in terms of degree-earning rates, but it still significantly outperforms L.A.鈥檚 traditional district.

A published this May identified 鈥渟potlight鈥� schools where black and Hispanic students fare far better than the city鈥檚 district at large. Several Alliance charters ended up on that list. Alliance estimates that its students score 82 percent higher in math and 48 percent higher in English, compared to students at neighboring traditional public schools.

Until recently, Alliance schools operated like traditional high schools, which measure themselves only by the percent of students winning high school diplomas 鈥� perhaps supplemented by the percentage of their graduates committing to enroll in college, which is an unreliable measure. Many students just don鈥檛 show up for the first day of classes, or drop out after the freshman year.

The idea that high schools should track their students through college, and then calculate the number of their alumni earning degrees after six years, is both new and radical. The assumption has always been that it was the job of colleges to worry about how many of their students earn degrees.

In researching The Alumni, I came across very few traditional school districts that track their students through college, and those were .

Even today, Alliance鈥檚 alumni tracking efforts are modest, at least compared to the extensive programs devised by networks like KIPP, which employs teams with precise student caseloads, tracking them with software from Salesforce 鈥� an expensive endeavor.

At Alliance, only three people oversee the effort, and there are no caseloads. Rather, Alliance relies on improving its college selection process using a list of colleges more likely to guarantee success for its unique students, almost all of whom are low-income and minorities and then supporting them in college with a student mentor program known as AMP, .

The 135 mentors who take part in AMP 鈥� all of whom are Alliance alumni 鈥� receive modest stipends and keep track of five to eight recent Alliance graduates. That approach keeps costs down for Alliance, which sets a goal to prove it can do a better job educating low-income students without spending any more money than what traditional L.A. high schools receive.

The Alliance Marc and Eva Stern Math and Science School is an Alliance school located on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles. Both college counseling at the high school and the AMP program at the university were taking place in late April.

Seniors were scheduled for exit interviews, during which a high school counselor or 鈥渃ollege success鈥� team member sits down with a high school senior and reviews his or her college plans. This particular day also happened to be one week before seniors had to commit to college.

In each case, Linsley updated student files, reviewed where they had applied and where they had been accepted and rejected. He then analyzed the details of their commitments. Almost all the planning revolved around financials.

The first student to meet with Linsley that day was Karina Rodriguez. The shy 17-year-old鈥檚 mom stays at home while her dad sells fruit from a truck. On weekends, she helps sell fruit as well.

Rodriguez had been accepted at the University of California, Los Angeles, a highly prestigious and selective public university 鈥� an accomplishment that history and data would defy for a student of her background.

Rodriguez, who wanted to study environmental engineering, was also accepted to New York University, but she never considered moving to New York 鈥� the Big Apple is simply too far from family.

Alliance senior Karina Rodriguez.

Photo: Richard Whitmire

At UCLA, grants and scholarships were expected to cover all but $24,000 over four years, but that was still a scary figure for Rodriguez, who had no money saved for college.

Rodriguez appeared to prefer living at home and commuting to UCLA, which concerned Linsley, who was busy scanning the student鈥檚 online financial aid package from UCLA. The aid package, he concluded, would cover room and board. To top that, the commute could take up to two hours one-way.

鈥淚n the long run it鈥檚 going to be better for you to live in [university] housing, especially the first year, when you鈥檙e acclimating to academics,鈥� Linsley told Rodriguez. 鈥淧lus, you would have no social life.鈥�

Rodriguez looked worried, and while her heart appeared to be more comfortable living at home, she promised to change her application to apply for student housing.

On the same day, Kiara Ramirez was confidently wearing a Smith College sweatshirt and a big smile, and feeling good about her decision. The estimated cost of a Smith education is $72,000 and the financial offer covers $70,000 of that, she said. Her study interest: chemistry.

Simon Linsley, director of college success at Alliance, with senior Kiara Ramirez.

Photo: Richard Whitmire

As Linsley examined the aid package, he noticed there were no transportation allowances. His estimate: Going to Smith would cost Ramirez $20,000 over four years. For an Alliance student, that鈥檚 a lot.

He then pointed out that Ramirez hadn鈥檛 actually accepted Smith鈥檚 offer 鈥� and had only a week to do so, and he told her as much. Suddenly, her cheerful demeanor disappeared. She looked worried, which Linsley quickly sought to absolve.

To help Ramirez manage all her needed actions over the next week, Linsley built a to-do list in an email, which he sent to both Ramirez and her counselor.

The AMP mentee on the adjacent college campus, Cal State L.A., was sophomore Vanessa Najarro, a criminal justice major who one day would like to join the FBI. Adjusting to college life meant learning how to be more organized and how to seek out professors for help. When she was an Alliance high school student, the teachers were always available. The college social life was also an awkward adjustment.

鈥淚t can be nerve-racking to get out there and actually talk to strangers,鈥� Najarro said. 鈥淚n high school you see your friends every day.鈥�

On one day, she was being mentored by Alliance alum By鈥橰on Williams, who walked her through a checklist of questions supplied by Linsley鈥檚 program. Next year, Najarro wants to become a mentor.

Cal State L.A. freshman Vanessa Najarro, a graduate of Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, gets counseled by an upperclassman there, also an Alliance alumnus.

Photo: Richard Whitmire

鈥淚t鈥檚 really helpful. They teach you how to build r茅sum茅s, how to network. These are life skills that you don鈥檛 get in high school,鈥� Najarro said. 鈥淎MP mentors have also helped with financial aid questions. But it鈥檚 also about becoming a better person, building yourself up.鈥�

Najarro was accepted to the University of California, Merced, which is both a more prestigious university and a place from which she is more likely to earn a degree. But that seemed too far away.

鈥淚 really like L.A., and I felt like I would get homesick,鈥� she said.

Being at Cal State L.A. allows her to live at home and work 20 hours a week as a cashier, which is necessary to pay off college debts. But those same distractions explain why the Cal State L.A. graduation rates are so low: Only 19 percent of the students earn degrees within six years, in part because of the many work and family obligations and distractions.

Najarro agreed that there are more challenges, especially time management issues arising from being a full-time student and working 20 hours a week.

Part of her motivation came from being the first in her family to go to college. 鈥淚 have a good GPA,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 feel like I have to be a good role model for my brothers.鈥�

One AMP mentor, David Vaca, described the many pressures he hears from his mentees 鈥� pressures familiar to him, because he experienced the same, only without benefit of a student counselor. Feeling overwhelmed with classwork and worrying about failing are only two of the pressures. 鈥淚t鈥檚 also work. They feel pressured by their parents. I can speak for myself. I felt pressure to get a job because I was in college, everything was getting more expensive 鈥� food, books,鈥� Vaca said. 鈥淪o they have to take on that extra job, plus the four classes already and also the pressure to also get involved into some campus activities. They could probably lose track of one of those things, like their education.鈥�

Vaca knows he can鈥檛 solve all their problems, but just having someone to talk to makes a difference.

鈥淚 can hope that they won鈥檛 ever feel alone, because it definitely is a scary place out here,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou definitely feel alone a lot. Overwhelmed.鈥�

This is one chapter in an ongoing multimedia series by Richard Whitmire called The Alumni, which focuses on the efforts being made by America’s top charter networks in guiding alumni to — and through — college. Read all our school profiles here, and be sure to visit to see other essays, videos, graphics, and profiles of the educators and students leading a college success revolution: .

(Watch as part of 蜜桃影视’s project .)

That breadth and longevity make Noble a valuable research asset in looking at charter school college graduation rates. To date, 31 percent of its graduates have earned college degrees within six years (35 percent if the deadline is pushed beyond six years).

Considering that nearly 80 percent of the children raised in high-income families (the top 25 percent) earn college degrees within six years, that figure of 31 percent seems less than impressive. But Noble’s student body is 98 percent minority and 89 percent low-income — a group where, nationally, only 9 percent earn degrees within that time frame.

Noble’s rate is at least double that of Chicago Public Schools generally, and probably far more than double the comparable rate for similar low-income minority students within CPS.

The best comparison comes from out of the University of Chicago. Across CPS, the six-year college graduation rate for Hispanic students is 11 percent for males and 16 percent for females; black students graduate within six years at a rate of 6 percent for males and 11 percent for females. The current graduating class at Noble is 44 percent black and 54 percent Hispanic.

Ask Matt Niksch, Noble’s chief college officer, whether 31 percent is a “good” rate, and he answers, “I’m not comfortable with how well our alumni are doing. Most of our efforts now are focused on getting them into the best colleges possible. We’ve gotten better. Also,

Niksch may be right about that. In the past two years, the degree-earning rate for Noble students at the six-year mark jumped to 54 percent, which may point to an improved rate that will persist.

It’s May 4 on Noble Street College Prep, Noble’s flagship campus, and there are two sessions of a college seminar class. The program is key to guiding students into colleges where they will come away with degrees. Seniors file into the 11:04 a.m. class, pop open their laptops, and pull up their college websites — their portals to a new life.

May is a time when seniors already know where they’re headed in the fall for college, so it has the feel of a victory lap: All that’s left is mopping up the last details about financial aid packages, housing applications, work-study jobs … and fantasizing about their new, exotic lives as college students.

In one corner, Erin Greenfield, dean of college at Noble Street College Prep, sits with four girls headed off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their questions for Erin: Is it better to room with someone you know? Somebody brand-new? Am I going to get a refrigerator in my room? A microwave? Do we need to go grocery shopping?

Greenfield explains that no, there’s no need for shopping. All their meals will come via the college dining halls.

For Greenfield, these are fun questions. The hard part for her is done, especially with these four girls. Landing a spot at the University of Illinois’s main campus is huge: Nearly 80 percent of the Noble students who get accepted there earn degrees within six years.

This year, Noble will send about 270 students to the flagship campus. That success rate varies greatly by campus, however. At the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, for example, only about half of Noble’s alumni earn degrees within six years.

For Greenfield, improving the college success rate is all about landing students in the right spots. Her job is challenging in ways that a college counselor at a suburban high school or private school likely can’t even imagine: About a quarter of the parents at Noble Street College Prep are undocumented, and between 5 percent and 10 percent of the students are undocumented.

Undocumented parents are often reluctant to see their kids leave Chicago, . For starters, it most likely means they fear taking their children to college, or visiting them, or even attending their graduation. It also often means they will lose the one member of the family with a driver’s license, the one member of the family they count on for running errands. Thus the pull to keep their sons and daughters in Chicago.

For undocumented students, it means financial aid becomes extremely difficult. Yet another undertow that might keep them from leaving Chicago.

Thus the challenge for Greenfield, who usually wants to get her students out of Chicago, away from commuter colleges where college success is limited, and into colleges where financial aid covers nearly all expenses.

Greenfield knows what every college counselor I interviewed knows: The more selective the university, the more likely it is the student will earn a degree.

Ideally, all the students in this class would land in places such as Northwestern University, where 90 percent of the minority undergraduate students will earn degrees within six years. But that’s not realistic. The real challenge is finding the right spot for her students who have B or C-plus grade point averages.

Greenfield and her staff know precisely where she doesn’t want to see those students end up: places such as Northeastern Illinois University, where only end up with degrees, and Chicago State University, where only 20 percent of low-income minority students earn degrees within six years.

The attraction for students to places like Northeastern is clear: cost, convenience, a chance to live close to home, and the opportunity to both work and study. Many of those “advantages,” at least as seen by students, are exactly the factors why so few end up walking away with degrees.

Greenfield and her staff have worked hard to steer their students away from universities like Northeastern, and they are making progress. In prior years, 10 to 12 of their seniors ended up there; this year only four did.

“When we sit down with parents we’re very sure to mention this is the graduation rate [at Northeastern], and we show them alternatives,” Greenfield said.

Fortunately, Noble has alternatives: National Louis University and Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago, where the Noble counseling staff estimates the graduation rate will be at least 40 percent. Arrupe is a two-year college designed to guide first-generation college students into a successful path to earn a four-year degree.

For the higher-performing Noble students, Greenfield and her staff recommend smaller colleges, often in the Midwest — colleges eager to recruit well-prepared minority students who can diversify their campuses. Just a few: the College of Wooster and Oberlin College in Ohio, Carlton College in Minnesota, Albion College in Michigan, Holy Cross College in Indiana, and Gettysburg College and Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

“They want our students because ultimately they want to educate everybody, not just the rich,” Greenfield said. “I think colleges are looking to diversify for the world. They know the need for a diverse perspective in their classrooms, and our students can help provide that.”

These colleges come to charter networks such as Noble also because the students come with supports, Greenfield said. If Noble alumni struggle in college, the Noble staff in Chicago is available to help them. This is one of the ironies of The Alumni project: The colleges most successful with charter school graduates — largely low-income minorities — are those with a history of enrolling student bodies that are almost entirely white and middle-class. For the counseling staff at the charter schools, the big challenge is getting their students mentally prepared to survive, and thrive, on rural campuses where most of the students will look nothing like them and will share none of their growing-up experiences.

Often, the biggest resistance comes from parents, who don’t want to see their children leave for relatively obscure locations for four years of college.

One of Noble’s programs, , addresses that challenge directly. Noble students apply to do a summer college program, where before their junior year they spend up to three weeks on a college campus.

“It almost always goes well,” Greenfield said. “They have a good experience, they come back safe, they come back eager, and their parents have that initial touch of what it would feel like for a longer term.”

Yale is offering Rodas $63,000 in scholarships to offset a full college bill of about $66,000. The remaining $3,000 balance is up to Rodas to meet with work-study jobs on campus. Just to be safe, he’s planning to wait a semester before taking a job.

“Transitioning from an inner-city school like Noble will be a different experience compared to the kid who’s coming in from one of the top boarding schools in the country,” Rodas said. “I need to acclimate to the environment at Yale and make sure I’m on top of my academics.”

To Rodas, the transition from a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago to Yale looks intimidating.

“At Noble I’m used to performing really well and I’m at the top of my class, so it’s really scary because I know that’s not going to be the case at Yale,” he said.

Rodas plans to major in political science, with aspirations to become a lawyer, with a specialty in immigration law.

Life changed for his family after Donald Trump’s election.

“My parents are a lot more worried about going out and sometimes it makes me worried too,” Roberto said. “I worry about my dad going to work. I’m scared that if the cops pulled him over he would get sent back to Mexico. He’s the one supporting us now, with everything we need.”

The family relies on Roberto to do the chores that involve driving, which is one reason his parents preferred that he stay in Chicago for college. But Roberto wanted to leave Chicago, and he’s headed to the University of Dubuque in Iowa, about a three-hour drive away. He aspires to be a nurse.

Roberto chose Dubuque because that was one of the schools he visited on a field trip to see colleges, and because he felt the campus was welcoming.

One reason he wanted to leave the city was the crime in his neighborhood, especially gang activity.

“It worries me because my little brothers are always outside playing around,” he said. “I worry they could be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Roberto realizes he will be in a minority at the university, but that doesn’t bother him.

“I’m really outgoing and I make friends easily,” he said. “I’ve never been the victim of racist comments and stuff like that.”

Stephanie Sarabia was born and raised in Chicago and is headed to the University of Pennsylvania.

Her parents, who are from Mexico, own a business in Chicago, Tony’s Burrito Mex. Sarabia waitresses there on occasion. She ended up at Noble because her older sister is a Noble alumna.

At Penn, Sarabia plans to double major in English and international relations.

“They have the Penn in Washington program, and that’s one of my focuses, as a guide into the political world and foreign world,” Sarabia said. “I’ve been attracted to the United Nations, and followed what they have done.”

Despite her academic success at Noble, earning a 4.2 GPA, she remains worried about life at Penn.

“The fact that they are an Ivy League school, I know it’s going to be rigorous and I’m going to be challenged,” Sarabia said. “I think sometimes no matter how smart you are or how great your grades are, you still have that self-doubt: Can I actually do this? Will I be able to succeed?”

Those worries, Sarabia tells herself, are a way to keep her grounded.

“I’ll be telling myself: I can do this,” she said. “I got here for a reason.”

This is one chapter in an ongoing multimedia series by Richard Whitmire called The Alumni, which focuses on the efforts being made by America’s top charter networks in guiding alumni to — and through — college. Read all our school profiles here, and be sure to visit to see other essays, videos, graphics, and profiles of the educators and students leading a college success revolution: .

While that rate may be four times the national average and rising (48 percent of the class of 2008 earned degrees), it is below some of the East Coast charter networks.

But reaching the conclusion that IDEA experiences only middling success would be a mistake.

In truth, what’s happening at IDEA may be the most successful and revolutionary charter school experiment in the country. This month, the network is launching , a way to give those who “stopped out” of college (the polite term of art for dropping out) a path to complete a degree. And that’s just the latest example.

Understanding all this requires understanding the environment in which IDEA operates, which calls for visiting the Rio Grande Valley, surely one of the most unique regions of the U.S.

Stepping off a plane in McAllen, Texas, everything appears familiar enough, with the usual assortment of chain restaurants and hotels that pop up in small cities. But what visitors don’t see at first is how they are in a kind of no-man’s-land along the Rio Grande, where there’s a tidal movement of people moving across the border — in both directions.

Immigration officials don’t even attempt identity checks until Falfurrias, which is 75 miles to the north. And IDEA is smack dab in the middle of all of this. Its Riverview campus is called that because it overlooks the Rio Grande. Students who live in Mexico cross the bridges twice daily to attend IDEA schools, and no one bats an eye.

Whether those students were all born in the U.S., however, is hard to answer precisely.

Unlike charter networks in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, IDEA — being in remote McAllen — has a far harder time recruiting teachers by tapping into the network of fresh graduates from the nation’s top universities — a cornerstone for staffing charters in those cities. So instead of trying to compete in a field where IDEA is at a disadvantage, the network is turning to those whom it knows — and who know it — best: IDEA graduates.

At IDEA’s Donna school, a sixth of the staff are alumni, some of whom are not only alumni, but are also beneficiaries.

Even the university options for IDEA students in the valley are radically different. There are no nearby elites like Columbia University, Georgetown University, or the University of California, Los Angeles, to send their graduates. And the small, liberal arts colleges in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York that successfully absorb many graduates from East Coast charter networks — colleges with graduation rates in the 90 percent range — are also very far away.

While IDEA students apply to and win acceptance at high rates to many of the nation’s most selective colleges, only about 18 percent end up on that path. Instead, a full half of each graduating class ends up at the local University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where the graduation rate is a modest 40 percent, far below what students would experience at selective out-of-state colleges.

And there’s only one reason that happens: money. Any scholarship offer short of a completely full ride, including travel expenses, is both daunting and mostly unthinkable.

At UTRGV, the price is right, the students can live at home and hold down a job, and they can please their close-knit families by not leaving the Valley.

Given all that, IDEA’s college success rate of 35 percent seems far above middling.

Nowhere is the push to hire IDEA alumni more apparent than at IDEA Donna, where alumni make up a sixth of the staff.

One April afternoon in the pre-AP U.S. History class Ramiro Flores teaches, everyone is reviewing for an upcoming state test. On the wall next to Flores’s desk are three diplomas: The University of Texas Pan American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), an diploma earned at IDEA, and an IDEA diploma.

IDEA teacher Ramiro Flores’s IB and IDEA diplomas posted on his classroom wall.

Photo: Richard Whitmire

That’s a reminder to every 13-year-old in the class: I know what it’s like to be you, to grow up in families like yours, and to attend high school at IDEA.

But there’s more that makes Flores relatable to many of the students. He was brought to this country from Mexico as a child and now works in the U.S. under DACA.

The students work in small groups, with Flores moving from group to group to assist, occasionally switching to Spanish. The students know all about the diplomas on the wall and Flores’s DACA status.

“Mr. Flores says history is mostly told from the white person’s perspective,” Emily Garza said, referring to a recent lesson on the Mexican-American War. “He likes to add the Hispanic perspective.”

Flores was born in Mexico and raised in Miguel Alemán, a tiny town of about 100 residents 160 miles northwest of McAllen, on the other side of the Rio Grande. But his parents didn’t think much of the Mexican schools. Plus, they wanted him to learn English. So every day, he commuted across the border to attend a private school stateside.

Flores and most of his family moved to the U.S. when he was in the ninth grade, and in 2007, he enrolled in IDEA Donna, hoping to receive a more rigorous education.

Flores never thought much about his legal status, and like all IDEA students he was told constantly he would enroll in a four-year college. During his senior year, Flores won a full scholarship to Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind. A week before he was supposed to leave to start his freshman year there, he heard from a college representative that scholarships were not available to students like him.

“I was kind of defeated. I had bought into this system of meritocracy,” Flores said. “Charter schools preach that if you are smart and hard-working you can go away to college and come back to serve. It was really a huge moment of depression in my life.”

Flores enrolled in then-UT-Pan American, and after a year attempted to transfer to American University in Washington, D.C., only to run into the same dilemma. So he continued at Pan American, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees in political science and economics in three years, and with a 4.0 GPA.

After graduation, Flores joined Teach for America as a corps member and went to Houston for training. He then ended up back at his alma mater, IDEA Donna.

Being an IDEA alum makes a difference to the students’ parents, as well.

“I had parents last year who were doubting whether their daughter could succeed in the IB program, so I sat them here and had them look back at my diplomas,” Flores said. “I let them know that when I was in eighth grade I couldn’t speak English, so in fact, their daughter was far ahead from where I started.”

Employing alumni brings authenticity to the IDEA program, Flores said.

“More than that, it shows that it is possible to succeed. I’m not going to solve the immigration issue today, or tomorrow, or at any point. But I’m at least able to have a very candid conversation about it with students who need to talk about it.”

IDEA college counselor Abby De Ochoa was born in the U.S. and grew up in Donna. Her parents came to the U.S. from Monterrey, Mexico, 150 miles southwest of McAllen. Her father is a carpenter; her mother is a business clerk. While her parents lack formal educations, they were insistent that De Ochoa’s educational experience would be different, which led to enrolling her in an IDEA charter in the sixth grade.

At first, the go-to-college emphasis at IDEA worried her parents, especially the push to look at colleges beyond the valley.

“In our background, it is not common for children to leave the house before marriage, especially as a young woman living by myself more than two hours away from home,” De Ochoa said.

But De Ochoa, who did well in both academics and sports, insisted on leaving the valley for college. She ended up at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich., with an aspiration to study engineering.

IDEA alumna and college adviser Abby De Ochoa.

Photo: Richard Whitmire

“I wanted to experience independence,” she said. “I also wanted to live through four seasons. Here in the valley, we don’t have four seasons.”

De Ochoa was recruited to play softball at Kalamazoo, which allowed her to attend all-expenses-paid. As part of her senior project for college, she did an internship with IDEA’s development team — a relationship that persisted and resulted in a job offer after graduation. When she decided she wanted more contact with students, she shifted to a college counselor position.

The big challenges she faces are familiar. IDEA parents want their children to stay in the valley, both to be close to the family and to work and contribute to the family income. That cuts into college success rates. And even small discrepancies between what a college offers and what IDEA families can pay leads to huge problems.

“We have kids who have gotten into Ivy League schools, with a great financial package, but are missing a couple of thousand dollars,” De Ochoa said. “Parents do not want that debt. They said, ‘My kid is not taking a $4,000 loan to go out of state.’”

That attitude is shifting, but slowly.

“The first batch of [IDEA graduates are] coming back, so the parents are getting used to the idea of [their younger siblings] going away for college,” she said.

The next difficult conversation with the families is graduate school.

“At first parents were happy with a high school degree. Then it was a college degree. But now it’s like an undergraduate degree is not enough. Soon, they are going to need master’s degrees,” De Ochoa said. “So it’s having that conversation with the parents that is most difficult.”

And yet, despite those disadvantages, IDEA is probably the fastest-growing charter network in the country, with plans to expand from its current 30,000 students to 100,000 students by 2022. Its leaders think they’ve figured out something special, and therefore have an obligation to expand to meet parent demand.

Tripling in size over the next six years should not affect the college graduation rate, said Phillip Garza, IDEA’s chief college and diversity officer.

“One thing that’s made us very successful is we have gotten really finite in terms of what an IDEA school is. We’ve just been building the same school over and over and over again. Each grade level has about 115 students. Every principal manages a school body of about 800 students. We’re very clear on what the pre-K-through-fifth-grade school is, and the sixth-to-12th school,” he said. “We’re very clear on how you ramp up, how you staff up, the budget model, the curriculum, the approach to non-cognitive learning. We just hire a leader that can essentially execute. So this is not a place where, for example, a fourth-grade teacher can say, ‘I’m not sure what a fourth-grader needs to know.’ No. We know what a fourth-grader needs to know, and we know how to get them to do that.”

Again, it’s all part of the belief that IDEA is onto something really big, and needs to expand to meet the demand.

“We are proving the impossible is possible in South Texas,” IDEA co-founder JoAnn Gama said during the network’s college signing day.

IDEA’s college signing day, held in multiple galas at a local arena to accommodate the growing number of IDEA graduates, is a . Every IDEA student attends. Elementary school students in the nosebleed seats soak it up: “One day,” they are likely thinking, “that will be me on that stage, shouting out to a rocking, packed arena where I will go college.”

A few weeks later, Gama appeared at the annual New Schools Venture Fund gathering in San Francisco, possibly the most important convening of school reformers in the country. There, she was on a panel with KIPP CEO Richard Barth and Kriste Dragon, co-founder of Citizens of the World Charter Schools. The panel was a debate on “bigger, better, different,” with Barth arguing for better, Dragon for different, and Gama for bigger.

The instant feedback from the audience before the debate overwhelmingly favored Barth’s view. But as the session came to a close, when the audience voted again, it was Gama’s position that moved more of those in attendance.

“You can get better as you get bigger,” Gama said, citing academic improvements at IDEA amid rapid growth.

And that revolutionary attitude extends to college. IDEA wants 100 percent of students enrolling in four-year colleges, and most of them emerging with diplomas six years later. But that’s not all.

The real revolution, Garza said, comes from “democratizing” college — making it something available to all students, including some of the poorest students in the nation who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley or in poor neighborhoods in other areas of Texas, many of whom grew up speaking Spanish at home.

For that reason, Garza is at peace with so many students choosing the local option, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, even if that diminishes IDEA’s college graduation rate.

“We have to remember that if IDEA had not opened its doors, a lot of our students who are now committing to going to the local college would not have even applied, much less gotten in, much less committed to attending the local college,” Garza said. “[Traditional] public districts across the nation are not on a mission to democratize higher education. They do not have teams of college counselors who ensure that 100 percent of seniors get into college, to ensure that 100 percent of seniors apply for [federal student aid], to ensure that adults are having strong fit-and-match conversations with students.”

One way college gets democratized here is just unfolding: IDEA-U, a partnership with which is part of Southern New Hampshire University, a program that marries the needs of nontraditional students (the need to work, or raise a family) with the flexibility of online classes — but with a brick-and-mortar site where they can study uninterrupted and get mentored.

Not all students are born destined to get dropped off at leafy, pricey colleges and emerge four years later with a bachelor’s degree. This is for those students, a hybrid college. The first actual site for IDEA-U will be IDEA’s old headquarters.

“We’re onto something at IDEA, which is why we feel the imperative to grow,” Garza said.

And to IDEA, growing means ensuring college for all its alumni, even those who dropped out of college.

The first IDEA-U opens in August with 50 students, who will pay $5,500 a year for tuition and fees. For students who qualify for a full Pell Grant, they will pay nothing out of pocket. The center will be open during business hours, nights, and weekends.

Giving students an out-of-home place to study, away from laundry, children, and other distractions, is a big part of the strategy. At the center, students will meet regularly with advisers to keep them on track.

“While IDEA graduates complete college at rates three or four times the national average for low-income students,” said Garza, “there are still a number of students who struggle to persist due to unforeseen challenges.”

This is one chapter in an ongoing multimedia series by Richard Whitmire called The Alumni, which focuses on the efforts being made by America’s top charter networks in guiding alumni to — and through — college. Read all our school profiles here, and be sure to visit to see other essays, videos, graphics, and profiles of the educators and students leading a college success revolution: .

“I’m really passionate about neuroscience,” she tells the representative assertively, and with complete eye contact. “I’m obsessed with the brain and how it literally controls every part of our body. But I’m aware that there are 11 percent women of color in the [science, technology, engineering, and math] field. Do you have any resources specifically for the sciences departments that will help me as a black woman who is interested in science?”

Olaose is a student well prepared by Achievement First college counselors for the task of engaging with college admissions representatives. Her dream acceptances are Ivy League colleges UPenn, located in Philadelphia, and Brown University in Providence, R.I., so being prepared is pretty much required.

This April 20 event marked the first-ever joint college fair held at the building shared by Achievement First — Olaose’s school — and in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. There were 75 colleges represented, spread across tables in the huge room used both as a gym and cafeteria — a cafetorium.

What’s interesting about the gathering is its popularity among the colleges. The mostly top-ranked colleges present certainly aren’t looking for revenue; the low-income charter students at the high school, nearly all of whom would be the first in their families to graduate from college, would require almost full financial aid to attend those colleges.

Nor are the colleges looking for students “easy” to guide through graduation. These students require extra attention not just in academics but in adjusting to a completely foreign cultural ecosystem, and to being among the few students of color on their campus who grew up in some of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods.

In coming to charter schools such as Achievement First and Uncommon, the colleges know they’re getting the real deal. These are not minority students from the middle and upper-middle class who went to elite suburban high schools or private schools. These are the true faces of the future — the low-income minority students who now make up roughly half the nation’s K-12 student population.

And, best of all to these colleges, these charter schools have prepared their students to persist through the academic and social challenges that their campuses present. Thus the crowd of college recruiters.

There’s more at stake here than just a college fair. Playing out here is the ultimate accountability measure for charter schools. Can they justify the considerable disruption they have inflicted on traditional schools by guiding far more low-income minority students not just into college, but through college?

Here at Achievement First, one of the oldest “high-performing” charter networks, the answer appears an obvious “yes.” An estimated half of Achievement First students earn college degrees within six years — a rate three times () that of similar students in Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Since Achievement First shares this high school building with Uncommon Schools, there’s a fair amount of intermingling between the two staffs, which may explain why the two also share college success strategies, like a focus on grade point average.

To outsiders, GPA appears a squishy index. Critics argue that the averages depend on whether teachers are easy or hard graders, and a B in a rigorous class could matter more than an A in an easy class.

But what Achievement First and Uncommon have concluded is that the multitude of little skills that go into boosting GPA are the same skills needed for college success.

Here’s the evidence offered by Achievement First: Only 17 percent of its students with a GPA below 2.0 earn college degrees. Just a small boost to a 2.49 GPA vastly increases the college-degree-earning rate, to 62 percent. Achievement First students at the top, with a GPA between 3.5 and 4.0, earn college degrees at a rate of 92 percent.

Tracking students through college and stepping in when there’s trouble is another part of the formula. Nearly all students accept money, $150 per semester, which helps offset cost for books and supplies with the condition that students turn over transcripts and participate in a survey. The program offers clues about how to tweak Achievement First’s K-12 courses to better prepare students to survive academically.

“We hope to raise our college graduation rate to 60 percent in the next three to five years,” said Adam Kendis, director of college access and success at Achievement First. Long term, the goal is 75 percent — a rate that matches students from high-income families.

Kendis is confident with the short-term 60 percent goal because “all our schools are getting stronger,” he said. “Each year we see graduates with stronger academic skills and habits. We have continued to refine our core academic model, which is Advanced Placement for all.”

There’s another reason: Achievement First conducted an internal analysis of the colleges selected by its most recent graduating class. Based on each college’s historical graduation rates for underrepresented minorities, Achievement First expects more than 60 percent of its class of 2017 to graduate .

Achievement First is about to launch a two-year course, called AP Seminar/AP Research, “designed to give students an experience similar to what a college research paper is like.”

And, , Achievement First seeks out college partners, of which the network currently has 10. Institutions like Union College in New York, Colby College in Maine, and Lafayette College, Franklin & Marshall College, and Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania agree to offer greater access, summer visit programs, and coordinated support systems for the Achievement First alumni.

Key to those supports, especially on rural campuses that enroll nearly all white students, are outreach efforts to students battling “stereotype threat” that makes them reluctant to seek help. Asking for help, Kendis said, often makes those students feel like failures.

All this makes a huge difference in graduation rates. At Lafayette, which was Achievement First’s first college partner, 90 percent of Achievement First alumni earn bachelor’s degrees.

Summer visit programs are the key to sending Achievement First graduates to nearly all-white colleges, said Amy Christie, a senior director at Achievement First who works with Kendis, focusing on K-12 preparation. “They see what it’s like to be the only student of color in a class.”

Both parents and students sometimes balk at leaving for isolated, mostly white campuses, both Christie and Kendis said. But it is colleges like Lafayette, Colby, and Franklin & Marshall that turn in the highest graduation rates for Achievement First alumni. Other colleges where nearly 100 percent of Achievement First students earn degrees include Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Bowdoin College and Bates College in Maine.

Olaose came to the United States nearly five years ago. Her father had a friend whose daughter was enrolled in an Achievement First school, which led Olaose to do the same. Olaose’s 4.0 GPA gives her lots of college options. To her, the array of colleges assembled in the school’s cafetorium resembled a tasty smorgasbord.

She stopped by the Kenyon College table to hear from Darci Kern, who not only is black but grew up in a gritty urban school district in St. Louis, graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio, and then taught Spanish in an Uncommon charter school for two years.

Kenyon leaders wanted a presence at the college fair for the same reason the other 74 colleges sent representatives. “We’re looking for really talented students who haven’t been able to get their foot in the door,” Kern said.

While she had a “tough transition” from urban St. Louis to rural Kenyon, located in Gambier, Ohio, Kern said Kenyon has since become far more diverse. “Kenyon has a lot to offer urban students,” she said.

Olaose seemed interested, but her primary targets remained Penn and Brown — especially Brown.

“I’m looking for a really inclusive college that will help me explore my identity in ways that I want, because my identity is so complex — just merging my experience as a black woman in America and as a Nigerian immigrant in the United States,” Olaose said. “It’s really, really hard to do.”

This is one chapter in an ongoing multimedia series by Richard Whitmire called The Alumni, which focuses on the efforts being made by America’s top charter networks in guiding alumni to — and through — college. Read all our school profiles here, and be sure to visit to see other essays, videos, graphics, and profiles of the educators and students leading a college success revolution: .

North Star holds a special place in charter school history. Norman Atkins and Jamey Verrilli launched the first North Star school in 1997. Verrilli was already teaching in Newark and Atkins moved there from New York City, leaving his job at the helm of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that seeks to mitigate the effects of poverty in the city. Starting a school, Atkins concluded, meant getting closer to the source of turning around the poverty dilemma.

And where better to start than long-beleaguered Newark?

Over the years, their schools have probably drawn more visits from would-be charter entrepreneurs than any charter network in America. North Star’s iconic morning “community circle,” a spirited all-school gathering involving African drums, call-and-response, and academic exercises, has popped up in various forms in charter schools across the country.

As one of the most famous charters in America — a country where a bachelor’s degree is the commonly cited indicator of success — North Star has only recently been able to calculate how many of its high school graduates go on to earn four-year degrees. The 142 students in North Star’s senior classes of 2004 to 2010 were the first to reach the six-year, post-graduation mark — the standard window of time used to measure how many successfully earned four-year college degrees.

The finding: exactly half.

To upper-income parents — those in the nation’s top quartile of earners — that may sound unimpressive. After all, 79 percent of their children earn college degrees at the six-year mark.

But let’s put that number in context: Only 9 percent of low-income, minority kids . From that perspective, 50 percent earning degrees is impressive. Is it worth the disruption to traditional schools? Arguably yes, at least in my view.

But there’s more to this college graduation story.

Uncommon Schools, of which North Star is part, is one of the larger high-performing charter management organizations that is leading the pack. Uncommon Schools are also the ones I wrote about in . Where networks such as Uncommon, KIPP, and Achievement First are headed, others will follow.

Photo: Uncommon Schools

While North Star’s 50 percent success rate may seem notable, other data points need to be highlighted. Based on factors such as rising GPA and SAT scores, Uncommon predicts a rising college success rate. Of the 80 students in the class of 2013, for example, half graduated this past spring with a bachelor’s degree — four years after leaving high school — and 23 percent are still enrolled in a four-year college.

Here is where things get interesting.

There are currently seven Uncommon high schools, with three more planned within the next three years across the northeast region of the U.S. in which it operates. Assuming graduating classes of 200 per school, between 7,000 and 9,000 Uncommon students will be in college about eight years from now. And if their degree-earning rates rise dramatically from 50 percent, as the current on-track persistence rate indicates, this could be a game changer.

Uncommon is not the only high-performing charter network putting up these kinds of college graduation rates.

If the projected pattern continues, the civil rights and anti-poverty implications are significant. Even the many critics of charter schools will have a hard time identifying an anti-poverty program this effective.

And given Uncommon’s track record of effectively sharing its lessons learned with traditional school districts, the spillover potential for college success lessons learned is promising.

But can Uncommon keep pushing up its college persistence rate even as thousands more students enter college? Hard to predict, but the early signs are encouraging.

Photo: Uncommon Schools

“We learned that if you call them at 10 a.m. and if they’re still asleep, you’ve got a problem,” said Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, who oversees K-12 curriculum development for Uncommon. “You know, sleeping in is one of the biggest signs of depression in college. It’s not just an indicator of partying, but of not getting your work done, not getting to class. So that’s one of the tricks of the trade we’ve learned.”

Another trick of the trade Bambrick-Santoyo — and other charter leaders — cited is to reach students via the media they prefer. To the adults who head charter networks, email might be the preferred medium, but for most teenage college students, especially those coming from cities such as Newark, email is foreign. As any parent of a college student knows, text messages tend to be far more effective.

Also in those early days, Uncommon could usually find an “angel” on every campus — someone who could guide their students through the tough times. Bambrick-Santoyo tells the story of a Boston College angel who personally stuck with an Uncommon graduate for seven years, until the Uncommon alumna finally earned her BC degree.

It makes for an inspiring story, but arranging for “angels” on hundreds of campuses to act as shepherds for thousands of Uncommon graduates is not really feasible. Nor is it, Bambrick-Santoyo concluded, the best strategy.

It took Bambrick-Santoyo and others at Uncommon a few years to reach this conclusion, but once there, they shifted gears quickly and never looked back: What happens early on in grades 5–12 is far more likely to boost college graduation rates than any after-the-fact outreach initiative to monitor students in college.

As the author of multiple books about effective leadership, Bambrick-Santoyo can fairly be described as one of Uncommon’s intellectuals-in-residence. In a lively interview at North Star Academy, Bambrick-Santoyo laid out the reasons behind that shift to pre-emptive interventions from the previous post-college-enrollment angel guidance.

“If you had a million dollars to spend on boosting college graduation rates, would you spend it on expanding in-college supports or boosting the quality of grades 5–12?” Brambrick-Santoyo asked. And to him, the answer was clear: Spend it on grades 5–12.

It’s not that Uncommon doesn’t do in-college supports. At North Star Academy, two counselors work exclusively on tracking their graduates through college. At the network level, there’s one person who coordinates overall college persistence strategies.

But compared to, say, KIPP’s extensive network, Uncommon’s college support network is lean. That doesn’t mean Uncommon isn’t fixed on the same six-year college diploma goal. It’s just a different approach.

“A lot of the talk about college persistence is about how do we build the superhuman human support to get them to succeed,” Bambrick-Santoyo said. “But lost in that narrative is the question of where are we failing in the preparation we’re giving them prior to entering college? Our college persistence numbers are climbing, but I think it’s less about what we’re doing to support them in college than it is about what we’re doing in the K-12 arena.”

Photo: Uncommon Schools

There are multiple layers to how Uncommon approaches readying students for college success. The biggest players: boosting grade point averages, raising SAT scores, and ramping up the STEM curriculum.

One of the most intriguing pieces of the strategy: GPA. GPA, at least compared to ACT, SAT, or Advanced Placement scores, tends to be lightly regarded, as the overarching perception of GPA is that it depends on the varying degrees of rigor across schools and the cocktail of courses students select.

At North Star, GPA is taken very seriously. Uncommon leaders found a strikingly strong correlation between students’ high school GPAs and their likelihood to graduate from college: Students who graduate Uncommon high schools with at least a 3.0 GPA are four times as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree, Bambrick-Santoyo said.

And that finding “really supports the ‘grit’ work,” he added, noting that if students can be taught the habits and work ethic to earn an excellent GPA, that tenacity carries over into college success.

At North Star Academy, the task of boosting GPA — dubbed “Target 3.0,” now in its second year — fell on the shoulders of Michael Mann, the head of school who launched the project amid great uncertainty. “I didn’t know why GPAs were low, and I didn’t know how to fix it,” Mann said.

To learn how to boost GPAs, Mann organized what essentially amounts to a weekly group intervention by gathering every student with a GPA below 2.5.

Using what he learned from those students, Mann developed a tool that allowed students to analyze their grades, with Mann’s oversight, and then create an action plan for themselves to improve their grades. The plan included strategies for what Mann calls “self advocacy.” His advice: Go to the teachers in whose classes your grades are low and say exactly this: “I’m really concerned about my grades,” and ask the teacher specifically what is required to fix them.

That wording amounts to “polite persistence,” Mann said. “The teachers are immediately on their side.”

Through months of trial and error, Mann learned to narrow his focus to a few pinch points. The most obvious: homework.

“These were students who weren’t getting enough parental support for homework, or who just didn’t want to do it,” Mann said. “They weren’t mature enough to realize that it was destroying their future right in front of us.”

Homework was an easy fix. But where Target 3.0 gets interesting is how Mann isolated the tricky culprit for students who had high homework marks but low GPAs: missed assignments.

Photo: Uncommon Schools

Being that most North Star students — and charter students in general — come from minority, low-income families, they tend to have familial responsibilities that go beyond what are expected of their more affluent counterparts. While missed assignments can result from simply being out sick, they can also stem from days out of school dealing with more serious and uncontrollable issues — such as the North Star student who missed many days to take care of her quadriplegic brother who was shot in the spine.

On the surface, these students had decent homework grades for the assignments they turned in and did well on in-class tests. But suddenly, at the end of the course, their GPAs plunged. Because that’s when the teachers hit the calculate button on their computers and all the zeros from missed assignments caused students’ overall grades to plummet.

“It took me almost a year to figure out what was happening,” Mann said. “But that turned out to be a third of the reason why students had GPAs below 2.5.”

Part of the solution, he said, was to instruct teachers to immediately enter zeros for missed assignments, so students were aware of how those missed assignments affected their overall grades, and could try to make up for it while the semester was still in session. Step two, Mann said, was the “polite persistence” strategy he insisted students follow: Go to the teachers and settle the missed assignments.

In just one semester, 40 percent of the students in Mann’s group raised their GPAs above 2.5. “That was a surprise to me.”

GPA is just part of Uncommon’s strategy to boost the college graduation rate by tweaking (in a big way) the academic experience students have while still at North Star.

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The second piece of North Star’s middle- and high-school initiative push to raise college graduation rates by tweaking the middle and high school experience is to target SAT scores. Even small boosts in the math and verbal scores make big differences in college, Bambrick-Santoyo and other leaders there concluded based on results from Uncommon alumni.

“Your GPA is the ultimate measure of grit in high school. That’s all about work ethic, about your ability to persevere,” Bambrick-Santoyo said. “But while we may fight it, the SAT is a very objective measure of college readiness. English and math are the foundations.”

In 2005, the average combined math and verbal score for North Star seniors was 932 out of a perfect 1600. Starting in 2012 and going forward, the average scores have never dropped below 1,000.

“Those 70 points are more than marginal,” Bambrick-Santoyo said. “Our students have been dramatically more successful at handling college work when they’ve gotten above that bar.”

Especially important, he said, was the SAT verbal score. “If you can’t read at [a] level to get a 500 [out of 800] on the SAT, you can’t handle college-level reading work, especially scientific articles.”

One of the major issues North Star teachers identified was that instead of thinking critically for themselves, many students would just listen and use the analyses of the one or two students who spoke up during class.

As a result, all the students were able to write decent papers — but without ever truly understanding the meaning of what they were writing. They were getting free rides off those couple of students, a ride not available to them on tests or independent reading exercises.

That discovery led to an instructional change: After students finished a new reading, they wrote their own analyses first and discussed it in class later.

The next big fix: the sciences.

Photo: Uncommon Schools

The third finding from Uncommon’s research into its graduates: Almost none of them majored in the sciences.

“We were having single-digit percentages of our students stay in the STEM fields,” Bambrick-Santoyo said. (.) “They might have taken a class at the beginning of college, but they were dropping out like flies. The dirty little secret is that we were sort of creating a pathway to humanities in college, but not to anything else.”

Science labs at Uncommon had been too “hold [students] by the hand,” which led to major shock when students entered a college lab, Bambrick-Santoyo said. “Their reaction was, ‘Do you mean I’m on my own in a lab for seven hours and I have to produce a report the next day?’”

To ramp up rigor, Uncommon sought partnerships with colleges and found a common interest: Partnering with North Star gave the universities an opportunity to demonstrate what federal grants demand: a “broader impact” on the local community. Soon, science professors started appearing on the North Star campus to present and discuss their work. As a result, Uncommon students found opportunities to work in college science labs.

Soon after, the number of North Star students entering college with a declared interest in the sciences rose to 33 percent between 2013 and 2015 from a mere 6 percent between 2004 and 2010.

It’s impossible to predict whether those students will persist through the sciences going forward, but the sampling to date has been positive, Bambrick-Santoyo said.

“A lab is no longer a foreign place,” he pointed out. “The idea of doing scientific research is no longer daunting and new.”

What mattered, concluded the charter leaders, was getting your students through college — ensuring they earned a four-year bachelor’s degree within six years of graduating from high school.

Hold us accountable, the educators said, for how our kids do once they leave us, marking a remarkable paradigm shift in the way charter schools define success.

The initial spark may have happened in the 2008–09 school year, when KIPP realized its graduates were struggling in college. The network changed the name of its college success program from “KIPP To College” to “KIPP Through College” — a seemingly small tweak that signaled huge changes ahead.

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Uncommon Schools was hearing similar feedback from its alumni, who faced financial challenges, struggled with being away from home, and felt uncomfortable at predominantly white colleges. Changes were required to ensure alumni not only gained access to college but actually earned degrees.

So Uncommon Schools moved in the same direction as KIPP, and other charter networks followed. The shift is yet another example of the intense sharing of best practices between America’s top charter networks, as documented in .

Today, the college graduation goal has been widely adopted, even by many single-site charters. At the small, relatively new Boston Prep, which serves students in grades 6–12, for example, classes are referred to not by the year students will graduate from high school, but the year they expect students to graduate from college. Next month, incoming sixth-graders will begin introducing themselves as the Class of 2028.

For several reasons, this dramatic strategic shift has drawn limited attention outside the charter school world, in part because to outsiders it seems to be a cross between brash and outlandish.

For starters, the proof of achieving the goal seemed nonexistent, at least at the time. Many charter networks were first launched only with elementary grades, and were too new to even conceptualize future alumni who could become college graduates.

“You don’t just let family members leave home without helping them achieve their future goals”

Another reason the new goal has drawn so little attention is the common acceptance that students and the colleges they attend — not the students’ high schools, or even middle schools, in some cases — are responsible for whether those students earn college degrees.

But the charter networks are sticking to their new strategic goals, despite skepticism that high schools should be held responsible for whether their graduates earn college degrees. KIPP kids, CEO Richard Barth told me, are like family. You don’t just let family members leave home without helping them achieve their future goals.

At most, traditional high schools publish “college readiness” reports. In California, for example, parents can learn how many students at their local high school met the required by the University of California system.

Many traditional high schools and private schools also grade themselves by calculating the number of their graduates accepted into colleges — but then rarely follow up to ensure that those students even enroll in their freshman year of college, let alone complete their studies to earn degrees.

Problem is, the traditional high school measures of college readiness are crude, as seen by the of incoming college freshmen who require remedial coursework before they are even allowed to take for-credit courses — a fault that leads to millions of degree-earning failures.

This makes the new goal set by the major charter school networks, to grade themselves on the percentage of their students who go on to earn four-year college degrees in six years, all the more radical — especially given the fact that these networks educate low-income, minority students, whose college graduation rates pale in comparison to their more affluent white peers — , compared with 77 percent of students from high-income families as of 2015.

If public and private high schools across the country catch on, this seemingly small ideological tweak in the charter sector has the potential to transform the entire American education system.

A Lofty Goal

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to start answering the question of whether that goal is achievable.

We identified nine large charter networks with enough alumni to roughly calculate degree-earning success rates. Chicago-based Noble Network of Charter Schools, for example, has more than 10,300 alumni, 1,444 of them past the six-year mark. Other networks have far fewer at the six-year point, but a sufficient number to measure meaningfully.

At this point in time, the quality of the data available for tracking their progress ranges from rough estimates to moderately precise, with the bulk coming from the non-government National Student Clearinghouse, which matches high school, college, and other identifier records to track students as they progress through higher education. The charter networks purchase the data from the Clearinghouse.

To account for imperfections in the Clearinghouse data, some charter networks also use internal tracking systems to ensure no student falls through the cracks. Others rely solely on the raw Clearinghouse numbers and don’t have systems in place to track on top of the Clearinghouse.

Another important notation about the data, which we explore in greater detail here, has to do with the denominator.

Photo: Courtesy KIPP

KIPP is a fervent believer that college graduation cohort data should be tracked from ninth grade — not 12th grade, the starting point that the other charter networks included in this study use.

For students who attend KIPP middle schools, KIPP tracks them when they graduate from eighth grade to ensure they are kept track of, regardless of whether they go to a KIPP high school.

For students who go to non-KIPP middle schools and start attending KIPP as high schoolers, they track them when they start ninth grade.

The problem with starting in 12th grade, argues KIPP, is that it could tempt schools to push out weaker students during high school years, thus allowing the stronger students to boost the schools’ college-going and college-completion rates.

KIPP may be right. But in The Alumni, where KIPP is the only network that is currently tracking students from ninth grade, we have decided it is important to share cohort graduation rates that start in 12th grade. What’s key to this series is learning what works in boosting that college graduation rate — lessons that could be passed along to all schools, not just charters. Moving everyone to the gold standard is the next step.

Below are the reported numbers of students who have earned a four-year college degree within six years of high school graduation.

For the one charter network that tracks students from ninth grade:

• : Across KIPP, a network of more than 200 schools with 80,000 students located in multiple states, 38 percent of the students who graduated from a KIPP middle school, or enrolled in a KIPP high school in ninth grade, are earning college degrees. (This number would certainly be higher — and closer to the rate at Achievement First and Uncommon — save for KIPP’s radical and model honesty policy of starting the graduation clock earlier to catch any high school dropouts.) In its New York region, profiled later in this series, the graduation success rate is 46 percent. KIPP uses both Clearinghouse numbers and its own tracking system.

For the eight charter networks that track students from the beginning of 12th grade, three compile their own data on top of Clearinghouse tracking:

• : For the New York–based network, the only alumni who have reached the six-year mark graduated from North Star Academy Charter School in Newark. (The alumni from its Brooklyn high school just reached the four-year mark.) Of the 142 North Star students who reached the six-year mark, 71 earned four-year degrees: a 50 percent success rate. Based on factors such as rising GPA and SAT scores, Uncommon predicts a rising college success rate. For example, of the 80 students in the class of 2013, half graduated this June with a bachelor’s degree, four years after leaving high school, and 23 percent are still enrolled in a four-year college. This fall Uncommon will have 570 alumni enrolled in four-year colleges; by 2020 Uncommon will serve 22,000 students in grades K-12 and have about 2,000 college-age high school graduates. Uncommon uses both Clearinghouse numbers and its own tracking system.

• : The network’s first two graduating classes to reach the six-year mark had only 25 and 19 students. For those students, the college graduation rate was 32 percent, a rate they say has risen rapidly. But their subsequent classes, which have not yet graduated college, have far more students and thus can better represent the network’s success. Achievement First, which has schools located in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, has 839 students currently in college, 314 of whom are upperclassmen who can be analyzed by three criteria to project whether they will earn a diploma:

  1. The student has been in college for at least six semesters

  2. The student has earned at least 10 credits per semester

  3. The student has at least a 2.3 GPA, and the most recent semester was at least a 2.3.

Of those 314 upperclassmen, 162 fit the above criteria for being on track to graduation. This places Achievement First’s projected six-year college graduation rate at 52 percent.

• : For this Houston-based charter network, 46.7 percent of the graduates earned a bachelor’s degree. That number is based on 569 graduates who reached the six-year mark, 266 of whom earned four-year degrees by then.

The remaining networks that track students from the beginning of 12th grade rely solely on Clearinghouse data:

• : At this Texas-based network, which got its start in the high-poverty Rio Grande Valley, the rate is 35 percent.

• : Among the many alumni of this Chicago-based network, the six-year degree-earning rate is 31 percent.

• : At this Los Angeles–based network, the rate is 25 percent.

• : At this Oakland-based network, where the first graduating class was in 2005, the rate is also 25 percent.

One outlier:

• : This Los Angeles–based network will be included among the project profiles, but its graduation rate data are too cloudy to list here. For example, Green Dot says its “unmatched” Clearinghouse data are between 55 percent and 60 percent, which is unusually high. All the Green Dot graduation data will get discussed when the Alumni project profiles the network.

(The figures above raise numerous questions. Where do the numbers come from? How accurate are they? What about the dropouts? Why the big differences among the networks? For a more thorough discussion of the data, )

Photo: IDEA Public Schools

How the Figures Stack Up

If you are a high-income white or Asian parent, these degree-earning rates will not impress. Among those parents, of their children earn four-year degrees within six years after graduating from high school.

But because these charter networks almost exclusively educate low-income and minority students, the question has to be framed differently. The challenges faced by these students are incomparable to children from most upper-income families.

One quick example: In a 2017 internal survey of KIPP alumni currently in college, 43 percent said they had missed meals so they could have money for books, fees, and other expenses. Most alarming: 57 percent worried that food would run out before more money for food arrived.

So, let’s put these charter success rates in context. Among all students attending all types of schools in America, only about of students from low-income families earn college degrees within six years. That means some of the top charter networks listed above, those in the 50 percent range, are doing five times as well.

Further, there’s tantalizing evidence in the college “persistence” data kept by these charters, where they monitor alumni still in college to determine if they are on track to earn diplomas, suggesting that bigger gains may be unfolding within a few years. Since the 2010–11 school year, for example, KIPP’s New York region was able to boost its six-year diploma-earning rate from 33 percent to 46 percent.

Individual charters that were early pioneers also have sufficient numbers of alumni to take a measure of their college success. Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim, for example, opened its doors in 1997 and now has 489 graduates since the class of 2003, its first graduating class, including 220 who have reached the six-year mark. Among those: 70 percent earned four-year degrees, the highest success rate we’ve come across in this project for a charter that targets low-income students.

If these rising success rates prove to be true, the civil rights and anti-poverty implications are significant. Is it possible to identify any anti-poverty program that has demonstrated effectiveness of this magnitude?

In the education field alone, consider Head Start, an early childhood education program that platoons of statisticians have argued about for decades, citing evidence of either small gains or no gains, depending on which study. What these charter networks are doing with college graduation goes far beyond scratching around for small-bore gains.

Photo: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools

New Players on the Field

As part of this series, we profile most of the major players who have graduates past the six-year mark and describe their college preparation and tracking strategies.

Interestingly, the most compelling stories about improving college graduation rates may arise from the charter networks new to the push to make sure their graduates make it through college.

Los Angeles–based Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, for example, has a lower college success rate of 25 percent. That’s in part due to their rapid push into expanding the number of high school students they serve. They were also late to shift their focus toward tracking alumni in college, and they strive to limit additional spending on expensive guidance programs, for example, so they can offer themselves as a model that succeeds with low-income students relying on the same funding that goes to traditional public schools.

Can Alliance’s recent, low-cost method of using alumni and mentors boost their low degree-earning rates? That lesson may prove more valuable than lessons learned from KIPP’s more expensive college-tracking network, especially to traditional school districts unable to afford teams tracking their students into and through college.

If Alliance can make meaningful gains, then so could thousands of traditional school districts. And the same observation holds for Green Dot, which started its college-tracking effort only two years ago.

Photo: Courtesy KIPP

The Work of Pioneers

The charter networks profiled in this series are pioneers in this campaign — fulfilling one of their original charter school missions of becoming incubators of innovation. As such, their discoveries matter greatly.

Here’s a taste of what the front runners are learning: High school grade point averages matter far more than expected, and efforts to bolster GPA in high school give students the persistence skills needed to make it through college.

Another key lesson learned: Like it or not, SAT scores matter a lot — not just in getting admitted, but also in persisting — which means pushing high school juniors into extensive preparation work for the test.

And the bottom line of every charter network: Research the hell out of which colleges work for their kids, and make sure they go there!

What readers are likely to find compelling about the charter networks profiled in this project are the different approaches used. KIPP, for example, throws its muscle into KIPP Through College, a hands-on campaign that tracks their students all the way through college.

At Uncommon Schools, the muscle focuses more on revamping and strengthening the academic program in grades 5–12 to give their graduates a tailwind through college.

Which works better? At the moment, both networks show roughly equal results.

There are some lessons that all the networks are discovering independently. Higher-ranked colleges do a far better job seeing their students through to a diploma. (In some cases, that range can be dramatic: 90-plus percent success at an elite college, compared with 15 percent or even lower at non-selective universities.) Thus, college counselors do their best to push students to apply for their “reach” schools.

Among the middle-ranked and lower-ranked universities, some do far better than others at ensuring that low-income students win degrees. So, all the charter networks employ aggressive counseling to keep their seniors away from the lesser-rated institutions. Noble network charters has a particularly interesting story there.

Another surprise finding: Many small but selective colleges that have traditionally enrolled nearly all-white student bodies, and are located in rural communities in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, are proving to be great collaborators with inner-city charters. Those colleges are seeing graduation rates above 90 percent with charter students. Who saw that coming?

To diversify their campuses, these colleges eagerly seek out well-prepared minority students (not just minority students from the middle and upper-middle class who went to suburban or private schools, but urban minority students truly in need of a boost) and are willing to take dramatic steps to ensure their success on their campuses.

The challenge for college counselors at these urban charters: getting their students equipped to survive far from home in an environment where few of their classmates share similar backgrounds as theirs: low-income minorities, some of whom are undocumented.

Photo: Uncommon Schools

It's a Revolution

While college-degree-earning rates may be important, the longer-lasting and still barely noticed development here is the declaration by the KIPPs, Uncommons, Achievement Firsts, YES Preps, and other networks across the country that earning college degrees should be the ultimate accountability measure for their high schools.

This is something new — and potentially revolutionary.

In years past, K-12 accountability measures focused on data points such as third-grade reading scores, the number of ninth-graders taking algebra, or setting new records for the most number of AP tests taken and passed. My prediction: Those data points will remain markers but will be subsumed by the far larger data point of college completion.

Like it or not, college is the new high school, regardless of the chosen career. Who doesn’t need to be a careful reader and writer to work in sophisticated blue-collar jobs? We need to judge high schools by how many of their graduates earn college degrees within six years.

And while charter leaders don’t want to stir up more controversy by saying it out loud, the implication is clear: Traditional high schools need to get on board with the same goal. Again, college is the new high school. And that rule applies equally to low-income minority students, who make up half the student bodies of our nation’s public schools.

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