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Matchmaker
March/April 2005
by M. Tracey Ober ’85

J. B. Schramm ’86 founded College Summit in 1993 to raise college enrollment rates among low-income students. The nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., gives workshops for students on how to fill out college applications and trains high school teachers to steer seniors through the application process. College Summit, which operates in five areas across the country, says that nearly 80 percent of its students enroll in college—almost double the national rate for their income level—and they stay in college at the rate of 80 percent.

Y: For the second time, Fast Company magazine has listed you in its top 25 “social capitalists.” You once won a fellowship for social entrepreneurship. Can you write “social entrepreneur” on your tax return?

S: Without smiling? I do believe that it’s important to try and figure out how you can not just do a project, but actually change the system so that it lasts. “Social entrepreneur,” in my mind, means you try to do that using the power of the market.

Y: How did you get started with College Summit? What drove you to do it?

S: I grew up attending inner-city schools in Denver and had the experience of going with my buddies from elementary, to junior high, to senior high—and I thought we were all going to college, but we didn’t. And the difference wasn’t that they weren’t college-capable. The difference was my parents had been to college and knew how to help me through the process, and their parents hadn’t. I relied on my parents, and they relied on a system in our school that didn’t work.

Y: You went from Yale to Harvard Divinity School, where you worked as an academic adviser to freshmen. How did that influence your thinking?

S: I got to see the memos going back and forth between the admissions officers, and it was clear that the university was hungry for low-income talent. I remember a comment in the margins of one low-income student’s application: “God, we could use ten more of these.”

Y: Why do universities want “more of these”?

S: Low-income students, one, bring racial diversity; two, bring a different kind of diversity because of their experience growing up in low-income neighborhoods. And then thirdly, these students bring federal entitlement dollars and state scholarship dollars. So it’s not a question of altruism. It’s a question of enriching the college class socially, and it’s also a question of getting resources from government sources.

At that point I realized there was a market gap. There was a supply of talent back at my high school and the demand for it at the university setting, and those two forces weren’t getting connected.

Y: How does College Summit work towards that?

S: There’s a good system in the country for measuring and transmitting data on grades and standardized tests for low-income kids, but there is no good system for transmitting data on personal strengths. That’s where it clicked for me. The challenge was: how can I make sure that the colleges know that when there was a shooting in our neighborhood, Alf was the one who went and got the parents organized to have a meeting in our teen center along with the police?

Y: How do you get those stories out of those kids?

S: Mostly a lot of free writing at the workshops—where students are encouraged to write whatever comes out of their pen and pencil and just write, write, write. The group of students and their writing coach read it and pick out where the edge is, what the gold nugget is, and they work from that.

Y: Low-income students won’t have the same “gold nuggets” as middle-class students.

S: No. What they’re doing is developing the emotional IQ of navigating the street, where there are significant threats and pressures at a very early age. They have to handle being able to do homework while also taking care of two younger siblings and holding down a part-time job. Those are things that are valuable in the college market. Those are things that are valuable when you work for a corporation. Those are skills.

Y: So you’re marketing those skills to the buyers who want them.

S: That’s right. Historically the problem with charity in this country is that charity asked an innovator to come up with some solution to a problem and then sought donors, philanthropy, to pay for it—which, because of the obvious limitations of philanthropy, meant that you could only do it small-scale. The only way you can try and meet the size of the need in a city, rather than in a block, is to involve institutions that have a self-interest in seeing it get solved.

Y: This sounds like Harvard biz school, not div school.

S: I’m a liberal arts baby through Yale, and even through Harvard. I got a liberal arts education that’s helped me think and problem-solve, so that when I was running a teen center, and I kept seeing capable kids walk out of that place and end up hanging out on the street, their eyes dulled, I had the capacity to figure out a solution. I think that’s part of what Yale gives you—the chutzpah to take it on and to assume that it can be solved.  

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