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Looking For the Fountain of Youth? Try Helping Students with College Admissions

This article is more than 7 years old.

She sent me an email asking for help. It was as simple as that.

It felt good.

Out of the blue, my niece, who lives hundreds of miles away from me, asked for my feedback on her essays for her college applications.

It was a small favor. Perhaps. But to me, since I don’t have kids and often have twinges of missing parenting moments, it was really big. It was a chance to give back to someone I love and tap into my decades of experience and knowledge.

I was flattered.

My experience is close to home and close to the heart.

On a broad scale, though, virtual online mentoring for students seeking help with college admissions is getting up a head of steam. One of the fast-growing players in this arena is the nonprofit organization, Strive for College, a free online community where aspiring college students from low-income families can connect with mentors. I’ll share more details in a minute.

Generation to Generation: The Greater Good

I learned about this inventive mentoring model ten days ago, when I attended the launch of a new initiative by Encore.org, a national nonprofit whose motto is “second acts for the greater good,” called the Generation to Generation campaign. In this first stage, the organization is focused on mentoring. 

Strive for College is one of the campaign’s 25 partners, along with Oasis (which runs the largest intergenerational tutoring/mentoring program in the country), Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and Mentor: The National Mentoring Partnership.

“So many of us are hitting the middle years and experiencing a craving to do something for and better connect with the next generation." –Marci Alboher, Encore.org’s vice president of marketing and communications, on the new Generation to Generation campaign.

Generation to Generation’s five-year target: getting one million adults over 50 to “help young people thrive” by volunteering and working with needy children, as my colleague, Richard Eisenberg, wrote in his “How To Stand Up And Show Up For America's Kids” PBS NextAvenue column last week.

“Passing it on to the next generation is the ultimate expression of what the encore movement is all about,” Marci Alboher, Encore.org’s vice president of marketing and communications told me. “So many of us are hitting the middle years and experiencing a craving to do something for and better connect with the next generation. This campaign is animated by that idea.”

She’s right. For those of us in this demographic, there’s a thirst, even if it’s untapped, or in my case, hidden from our consciousness until asked, to reach back and help the younger generation in whatever way we can.

For me, it was writing, but for you it might be something different. My Next Avenue colleague Chris Farrell recently wrote, “There’s a mushrooming mentoring movement in America. And that’s great news both for people over 50 who mentor as well for younger people who are the recipients.” 

Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, explains: Today, it's no longer "The Fountain of Youth" that restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters, but  "the Fountain with Youth" that keeps us young.

Finding a Sense of Purpose

In Encore.org’s new Generation “War”? survey of 1,510 adults, eight and ten respondents said “making the world a better place for the next generation is important or very important.”

That’s a staggering majority of respondents linking "their own sense of purpose in life," as well as their "belief in America's greatness as a nation to the well-being and prosperity of future generations," according to the report.

Now let me tell you a little more about Strive and how it’s playing a role in this movement. Nine years ago, Michael J. Carter, then a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., started a pilot program with faculty support, aimed at connecting public high school students from lower-income families, often with parents who did not go to college, with a team of his college classmate mentors to shepherd them through the application process. Today, that fledgling idea has grown into Strive for College, which provides the service gratis for high school juniors and seniors in need of financial aid.

Carter, a grandson of Mexican immigrants, grew up attending private school in San Jose, Calif., but when he transferred to a public high school in his junior year, he discovered that many of his friends weren’t planning to go college because they didn’t think they could afford to go.

“I saw the college enrollment disparity, and I became determined to help solve it,” Carter says. “I thought, ‘Who better to help those students than us, the college students, who just made it through admissions successfully?”

From that early launch, Strive now has roughly 100,000 students seeking a Strive mentor. The demand, in fact, has grown ten-fold in the past year. And the numbers are promising: Last year, the organization had a college enrollment success rate of 99 percent.

A new partnership is ramping up the number of students seeking mentors through the site. Starting this year, students applying to college through the Common Application, who specify a need for a fee waiver, will be able to register for a Strive mentor. “Many of these students will be the first in their families to seek higher education,” according to the site. “Some may need help navigating the college application process as well as filling out FAFSA documents and finding scholarships online.”

Retirees and Older Mentors Make a Connection

Now for the part that gets me really excited about Strive. Carter started out with a model called “near peer” mentoring, similar to his pilot effort. But as the demand for mentors has grown, his net has expanded to include older mentors, hence Strive’s current partnership with Encore in Generation to Generation.

The mentors are trained to help the students steer through the spider web of the college application and financial aid process. The mentoring is done via the UStrive platform (a technology company Carter started) via videoconferencing, email or voice conversations. Communications are monitored and masked for security and privacy purposes.

Carter’s ambitious aim is to help a million kids in three years. “To do that, we need mentors, and with so many boomers retired or semi-retired and searching for meaning and purpose, it’s a good fit,” says Carter.

A growing source of older mentors for Strive has been corporate partnerships with firms such as Deloitte, Deutsche Bank and MassMutual. “The corporations see it as an innovative way to do employee engagement, especially with companies like Deloitte that are spread out and virtual in nature,” says Carter. “Two years ago, the executives at Deutsche Bank encouraged me to start using their professionals as mentors, up to that point, we had only used college students.”

When you sign-up as a student on the site "it’s almost like the dating app Tinder," says Carter. "You look at the mentor profiles. Read about them, and it’s like swiping left, swiping right. You choose who you want. Many students are really attracted to having someone older, with lots of experience, or someone working in a field where they’re interested in working one day."

Mentoring Uses Skills from Previous Career

Doretta Massardo McGinnis, 53, for example, is a sought after private admissions counselor in Gladwyne, Pa., and also a Strive mentor. Three years ago, after 18 years as a law professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, she became an independent educational consultant, providing private college counseling in the Philadelphia area.

A faculty buyout program offered to all law faculty spurred her exit from academia. McGinnis decided to use it as a time to redirect to something new. “I was looking for something that would build on my skills and the things I enjoyed about my teaching job,” she says.

“My work today has the counseling component, as I had with my law students. And the feedback and guidance on the essays is very close to what I did teaching legal writing in terms of improvement in organization, clarity and style – elements of writing as critical to college essays as to legal memoranda.”

So with an in-demand private practice, why carve out time for Strive? “I’m strongly committed to working with college applicants who may be the first generation in their family to go to college," says McGinnis. "It’s personal for me. My mother did not attend college. My father was a first-gen student. The son of Italian immigrants who dreamed of becoming an engineer, he went to school at night for his BS and MS in mechanical engineering."

McGinnis currently spends about an hour a week with each of her five mentees, depending on their needs. “They may be unaware of the range of colleges and the availability of financial aid," she says. "I also provide feedback on their essays, assisting them in finding their voice, choosing a good topic and telling the most compelling story they can.”

Her reward: “I love seeing students take another step toward their dream and exposing them to options they might not have been aware of,” says McGinnis.

In other words, it feels good.

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