New pilot program encourages low-income high school students to aim for Ivy League schools

Many high-achieving low-income highs school students have no idea that they may be able to enroll in an Ivy League school.

These students typically enroll in less prestigious colleges closer to home because they do not know that schools like Harvard and Yale are even an option. Others worry that they cannot afford it.

Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner recently published that details the results of a recent Hamilton Project’s pilot program called Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project that aims to help low income academic scholars enroll in Ivy League schools.

They mailed information packets to 40,000 such high school students between 2010 and 2012. The information packets were based on ten years of research.

Each packet was tailored to each specific student’s needs. The packets included admission information to universities that matched the students’ academic profile, financial aid information, and application fee waivers.

“At a relatively low cost of about $6 per student contacted, ECO sent the following to high-achieving, low-income students: targeted and personalized information on their college options, information on the process for applying, and details of the financial information relevant to their situations,” Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner said in their paper .

The results were astounding.

The students who received the packets applied to more colleges than those who did not receive a packet. These students were more likely to apply to a college with a higher graduation rate than the control group, and were also more likely to choose a college that fit their academic profile.

"This is not something, I want to emphasize, that a college or university could do for itself, or that a high-achieving student could do for him or herself[,] Once we put together all the data to do it, there's no reason why you can't do it for every low-income high-achieving student," Hoxby told The National Journal .

A quality college education will open a lot of doors to low income students, and could easily propel them to a higher income and tax bracket.