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High school senior Sydney R. Lewis knows moving from New York City to Greencastle, Ind. (pop. 10,300), to attend DePauw University in the fall will be a big adjustment. But going with a group of nine other students she's already bonded with through the Posse Foundation makes her more confident about the transition.
"This way, you have support there. Whenever you're homesick, you can go to the posse, and they can help you feel better," said Ms. Lewis, 18. "Also, you might have trouble in one class, and someone else has trouble in a class that you are pretty good at, and you can help each other. You make friends before you actually get there, so it's not just you and a swarm of a whole bunch of kids."
Posse Foundation founder Deborah Bial first got the idea for the peer-group approach to college when she was working at a nonprofit, after-school leadership program in New York City in 1989. One of her students returned from college saying he wouldn't have dropped out if he'd had his posse with him.
"It made a lot of sense. If you could send a team, a posse, a group of kids together to college, they'd be more likely to back each other up and less likely to turn around and come home," said Ms. Bial, who is now the president of the New York City-based nonprofit scholarship organization.
The Posse Foundation chooses diverse groups of high school seniors from nine major cities who have strong leadership skills and academic potential but who may not have stellar test scores and could be overlooked in the traditional college-selection process. Besides New York, the cities involved are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, and Washington. The selected students are given full-tuition scholarships by one of 51 elite partner institutions, including Vanderbilt University in Nashville; Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and the University of California, Berkeley. Last year, 15,000 students were nominated by their schools for 670 scholarships, which are not need-based.
It's a sought-after scholarship, in part because of the results. While typical college-graduation rates hover around 57 percent, about 90 percent of Posse scholars finish in four years. And nearly 80...