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McCabe Fund evaluations

Maria, a young Mexican immigrant who aspired to be the first in her family to attend college, is proof of the impact pre-college access programs can have. At her Los Angeles high school she had a 3.9 grade point average and was ranked 10th in her class. She was president of the senior class, the environment club and La Raza Unida, a leading Latino service organization.

Unfortunately Maria's SAT scores didn’t match her academic achievements and leadership abilities. With help from the CollegeMatch program, which assists high-achieving, low-income students in Los Angeles by offering them the same types of college-prep counseling common in affluent high schools, Maria worked with an SAT tutor and improved her writing skills. Ultimately she earned a 680 on the SAT II writing exam. She’s now enrolled in a prestigious private institution and it is positioned to receive $160,000 in financial aid over four years from the college and from private sources.

Deciphering what kinds of pre-college access programs work for students like Maria is the focus of a Lumina Foundation for Education evaluation conducted in conjunction with one of its large grant programs — the McCabe Fund.

The evaluation will involve analysis of data and site visits to collect qualitative information. An advisory council of students, program directors and evaluators will guide the questioning as well as the interpretation of results.

“We want to determine what works for each group of students,” says Rachelle Swan, evaluation associate with Lumina Foundation. Swan says the advisory council will represent students from a variety of backgrounds so the evaluation can benefit from their experiences.

In addition to traditional minority populations of African-American, Hispanic and Native American students, the evaluation also will examine which program components and styles work best for low-income, first-generation, urban and rural students. Swan expects the evaluation to begin by the end of this year with the final report issued by next fall.

The McCabe Fund is one of Lumina Foundation’s signature programs. Each year it supports 15 to 25 nonprofit organizations that work with students — particularly low-income, minority and first-generation college students — to help them gain access to postsecondary education.

Programs supported by the McCabe Fund include financial-aid and college-preparation seminars, college tours, rigorous college-access summer programs, and programs to match students one-on-one with mentors, tutors and school counselors. To date, the Foundation has awarded nearly $6 million in grants since 2002, supporting 76 pre-college access programs in 27 states. The CollegeMatch program that helped Maria is one of the McCabe Fund’s earliest grants.

An evaluation of the first 14 grants shows promising results. The programs served 2,250 students from 143 public schools and seven community programs. Of 272 seniors who participated in these programs, 99 percent graduated from high school, and 94 percent applied to college.

Additional data for a smaller subset of these seniors — 144 who applied to college — show that 90 percent (130) enrolled in college the following year. The majority of these students (84 percent) enrolled in four-year degree programs. Compared to the national average rate of college enrollment right out of high school, which is 65 percent, these first-generation, low-income or minority students are succeeding by a substantial margin, Swan says.

The McCabe Fund — named for Lumina Foundation's founding chairman of the board, Edward McCabe — awards two-year grants to organizations invited to apply. Beginning in 2005, organizations can receive grants of up to $100,000. Three-fourths of the amount is awarded initially, and organizations are challenged to match the remaining funds in the second year in an effort to show program sustainability.