“The University notified Posse Scholars and affiliated faculty in late June that it will be ending its partnership with The Posse Foundation, making the incoming Class of 2030 cohort the program’s last.”
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She added that administrators said the University wanted to focus on programs specifically serving first-generation and low-income students, as opposed to Posse’s merit-based scholarships.
This quote from the article highlights a relative weakness of Posse. Many of the highly rejective schools don’t want to give merit money, especially merit money to families who can afford to pay. As stated in the article, Posse doesn’t have an income limit for qualifying families/students (as Questbridge does). Even tho a large proportion of Posse students are first-gen, they are not necessarily from low income families.
I hope they replace the 10 posse slots per year by increasing QB students or working with Beacon scholars (an org mentioned in the article.) I do generally support schools moving merit money to need based money, and hope they do that.
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Let’s be honest. Northwestern has over 2,000 freshmen every year. Around 950 are deemed to have “financial need” and receive some sort of aid. They claim to be providing around $245 million a year in financial aid. Those 10 Posse scholars, who are officially getting only tuition, are truly a drop in the bucket. The cost of tuition for 40 Posse scholars comes out to 1.2% of all of the financial aid that Northwestern is claiming to be paying a year.
I am 100% certain that Northwestern can easily afford those Posse Scholars, AND another 30 QB students every year. So the argument that they are cutting 10 low and mid income kids a year so that they can afford 10 REALLY low income kids seems to me to be pretty weak.
That argument is also dishonest, because the primary purpose of Posse is not to increase the number of Poor Students that a college can claim on their CDS and on the PEDS entry. Claiming that they are ending their relationship with Posse because they think that Posse is not good enough at doing something that is not their primary mission is both specious and is engaging in moving the goalposts.
I know that many people see Posse as one more organization who tries to increase the percent of low income URMs in colleges. That is probably why people think that QB and Posse are interchangeable, and why Questbridge is “better”.
But that sort of thinking is the result of not actually reading Posse’s mission, or not understanding Posse’s mission. Posse has a very different mission than Questbridge.
The mission of QB is to increase the number of high achieving, low income students.
That is not the primary purpose of Posse, nor is it the primary mission of Posse. The mission of Posse is to identify diverse leaders and support them in attending and finishing college, in a manner which diversifies leadership. In fact, the part of the mission “diversify leadership” is more likely to be the reason that Northwestern is ending its relationship with Posse.
From Posse’s mission statement (bolded italics are mine):
The bolded italics are words that trigger review by anti-DEI taskforces in the federal government (directly from guidelines that my spouse received for writing federal grants).
So my strong suspicion is that Northwestern is ending its Posse program because they’re afraid that the Federal Government will call it “too DEI” and punish them for it. After knuckling under and paying $75 million for their supposed DEI Sins, it seems to me that Northwestern is engaging in preemptive surrendering to further possible demands from the anti DEI taskforces of the federal government.
QB talks about income, which MAY protect it from some anti-DEI crusaders. However, It is always possible to find DEI in anything, if you try hard enough, and if you are not too concerned with factual evidence.
PS. While most of Posse scholars are low and mid income families (bottom 60% by income), at the end of the day, Posse is a merit scholarship, not financial aid. However, almost every other major merit scholarship is based on achievements that are generally only possible for upper income families. That includes National Merit related ones.
Edited to add: I may be being uncharitable to Northwestern - they may not be engaging in preemptive surrendering, they may be actually surrendering the pressure that they already are being subjected to.
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I’m not sure why you wrote this long response to me, mentioning things that I didn’t address.
The cost to a college for the Posse program is more than just the student financial aid expense, but you know this. Colleges pay an annual fee to Posse, plus the cost of ongoing programming/support for these students.
There are plenty of schools that have dropped their partnership with Posse (10-12?) Many of these schools have the structure, other partnerships and/or employees in place to recruit the diverse candidates they seek…some have found they don’t need Posse anymore to do that for them.
Some of the schools that have left Posse have chosen to either take on more QB students or work with other college access orgs instead of Posse…so it’s not about the dollar investment, it’s about the partner.
Lastly, some of the schools that have dropped their Posse partnership have also cited the move from merit to need based aid…their money, their prerogative. When talking about these highly rejective schools it can become problematic/a bad look to single out certain students as ‘meritorious’…because all students accepted to these schools are per se ‘meritorious.’
I get you are a supporter of Posse, and I have nothing against Posse. Posse could have made changes as schools declined to continue their partnerships. Blaming the current DEI situation seems to ignore what a number of ex-partners have communicated publicly after severing their partnership with Posse, as well as the feedback they gave directly to Posse leadership.
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I only recently realized that Posse didn’t have an income limit when I saw that the son of a college classmate was awarded a Posse scholarship. This classmate went on to earn an MBA from a top 10 university and is a VP at a huge global brand…so definitely not a first generation or low (or middle!) income family. That said, the kid seems great and I’m sure will add a lot to the school where he’s headed.
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I had the same misimpression. I know of 2 scholars in our community over the past 4 years and I was surprised either qualified. One lives in a multi-million dollar home in a gated community and the other is from a family that rents locally but owns homes overseas. Don’t get me wrong, both are really smart and good leaders but neither are first gen college students (parents attended college overseas) nor financially struggling. There were obviously other compelling reasons for their selection but everyone was surprised they qualified.
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My son was a Posse finalist. We’re upper middle class and qualify for zero need based aid. He is neither a minority nor first gen. He is, in fact, a 5th generation student at his current school. We were fairly certain he wouldn’t be selected based on demographics, but as it is merit/leadership based, we thought it was worth a shot. At a minimum, he gained interview experience.
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It started as a response to your two claims, but yes, I also wrote about other things that were related to the announcement, not to what you wrote. I apologize if it seems that the entire post is a response to you specifically. Unfortunately, this one will be the same, sorry (this is also for anybody who has the patience to go through my LOOOOONG post - it’s not all a response to @Mwfan1921).
Some colleges join Posse for the PR and then end their relationship when they assume that they no longer need the PR. You can see that with colleges that connect to Posse when they have high acceptance rates, but when they become more popular, they stop.
Yes, others, like Denison, stopped being connected to Posse because Posse was not yet recruiting students in their state. That’s pretty fair, and I heard from a Posse faculty mentor that they replaced Posse with a similar program aimed at Ohio students.
As for “taking more QB students” that’s problematic, since no college actually announces how many QB students they accept each year. So that falls under the “trust me” category.
Fair enough, as long as that actually is what happens.
However, that is often not the case. For example, at Grinnell, the percent of students who receive any financial aid has actually dropped slightly since the ended their relationship with Posse in 2016 (though that may be because full need students are more expensive). On the other hand, the percent of students who received merit awards without needing financial aid has gone up (in 2016 it was 18% of the students, now it’s 26%), and the average amount of money that each got is higher (in 2016 it was the equivalent $22.6K in 2024 dollars, and in 2024 it was $26.2K). So there is often a difference between what colleges claim is the reason, and what the reason actually is.
Saying “we want more control over the admission process and we want to determine who deserves merit” is legitimate, but doesn’t sound as good as “we want to use that money to help students are poor”.
There are also a few times that the program just didn’t work, like the Posse Veterans at LACs. The educational experience offered by LACs is generally not the sort of educational experience that fit what a Veteran wants or needs.
Not if their is a mismatch between the mission of Posse and what a college wants. If a college’s President or Board of Trustees no longer agrees with the mission, or wants Posse to change the selection process, then it is over. The selection process and the mission are fundamental to what Posse is, and Posse is not going to fundamentally change to match the changing philosophies and visions of Colleges Presidents and Boards of Trustees, as these change.
Posse does change the process when it needs and when it serves the mission as a whole. They needed to change the selection process during the pandemic, and this allowed them to expand to many places using online interviews.
Posse has been around for 37 years, and the number of partner colleges actually increases, despite the fact that some colleges end their relationship with Posse. Some actually increase the number of cohorts. Vanderbilt (where it all started) has just upped its number of Posses to 5.
However, the selection process of Posse limits its growth. Posse has three sets of interviews, and then 8 months in which the Posse get to know each other. Posse also monitors the Posses, has retreats each year, and has a Posse mentor at each college. That requires many people with a much wider set of skills, and cannot be centralized. That is also why they only recruited from large urban areas until they figured out the online interview process.
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They do have a 800 million stadium.
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Posse was kind of a mixed bag for us. S23 would have had to give up his summer job at a sleep away camp to stay in town for the summer programming. We also felt that the support offered during the year wasn’t a need (for him). We were willing to make the trade off for full tuition at GW, which is an expensive school. It all worked out in the end. He’s very happy at his current school.
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I have been a volunteer interviewer for Posse for some years now (since my kid was a Posse Scholar), and I can say that if your kid was nominated for Posse, that already means that he’s pretty awesome. I have never actually seen a nominee who wasn’t an impressive person.
Posse is indeed a commitment, and it’s not for everybody. Besides the 8 month commitment, some nominees are not happy with the college with which they are matched. Generally Posse does a pretty good job matching finalists and colleges, but just because a college is a match doesn’t mean that it’s a college that the kid wants to attend.
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This can be an issue. When I worked in a HS counseling office, I would estimate about half of the students we intended on nominating for Posse said ‘thanks, no thanks’, when they found out the workshop commitment and its location (downtown Chicago, students lived on far south side. Not to mention many had jobs.) This was before Posse had any virtual programs, not sure those are operational in large urban areas.
This gets at the crux of the issue, for me. I would say virtually all the students who attend highly rejective schools are impressive in some way. I’ve read something like 8,000 apps in the last three cycles, and I expect nearly every student I admitted and/or recommended to admit was a leader in some way with impressive ECs, high grades/rigor/test scores.
Hence the potentially problematic issue with choosing some students, by virtue of a process that is not open to all, to receive merit money at schools that give no, or very little, merit money.
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This may have been part of the issue as well. We have seen students here on CC who are unhappy with the match and want to back out. That in turn weakens the program to the extent a cohort has been established. @MWolf , iirc you have helped a couple of these students.
Posse is a great program. At the same time, I can also imagine that many schools can meet their priorities - whether for diversity, FA eligible students, or high leadership potential- in some other way. While many (most?) still have a way to go in being truly inclusive for all, they have also gotten better at it, so may be supporting more students “inhouse” with what Posse provided their cohort.
Does the veterans program still exist? I think a lot of schools must have thought they were checking more than one box with that cohort and, until a few years ago, I never realized there was another Posse program.
It does, and its partners are TAMU, CWRU, and UVA. As somebody who did their undergrad after serving in the military, I think that the best partners are colleges which have a a decent sized population of older students, and are in more densely populated areas where the Veterans can have a social life outside of campus.
While I understand what Posse was trying to achieve with Vassar, I was not surprised that it was difficult to get veterans who are good fit in a LAC. Fit is very important in any LAC, and veteran are older than other LAC students, and are in very different places in their lives than the vast majority of LAC students.
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It’s Wesleyan as well as Vassar’s loss, I’m sure.
It’s important to note that both Vassar and Wesleyan continue to successfully recruit and enroll veterans, just not through Posse. Both have dedicated people handling veteran recruiting, and both are partners with the Service to School VetLink program. Vassar has their own VassarVets initiative. Wesleyan is also one of the 20 partner schools with the Warrior-Scholar Project, and offers a dedicated application for veterans.
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According to collegefactual, Wesleyan presently enrolls 35 undergraduates drawing tuition assistance from the G.I. Bill, or roughly 1.2% of the student body.
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I’m not sure how accurate that is, and children of veterans can sometimes use the GI Bill via transfer from a veteran parent, so not all people using the GI Bill are veterans.
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I think that in Vassar’s case Posse and the College would have liked to keep the program going, but not enough veterans were applying through Posse. Posse was a bit more hopeful that there would be more applicants in the future, while Vassar was being more realistic.
Wesleyan now works with the Warrior-Scholar Project, an excellent non-profit which specializes in recruiting veterans. It doesn’t provide the support that Posse does during the 4 years of college, but it does provide a network and it has a the ability to reach out to a far larger population of veterans. Personally, I don’t think that veterans need that support in the way that recent highschool graduates do, so I can definitely see the logic in Wesleyan’s decision.
I do find it amusing, though, that the only Alumna that Wesleyan has on its present “Veteran Applicants” page is a Posse Veterans Alumna.
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