Thaddeus Talbot is increasing graduation and employment rates for black men at Cornell.

Courtesy of Thaddeus Talbot

Class of 2015

Talbot is the co-president of Scholars Working Ambitiously to Graduate (S.W.A.G.), a mentorship program started to address the poor graduation rate among black male students at Cornell.

He’s seen 13.2% of S.W.A.G. students achieve the Dean's list, compared to the 11.5% overall rate for black men, and in the last academic year Talbot saw all S.W.A.G. seniors graduate with full-time jobs. Retention rates among black men have increased 10%; in 2008 the graduation rate of black male students at Cornell was 80.7%, and Talbot anticipates the number to be a lot higher because of S.W.A.G. when they are re-calculated.

S.W.A.G., which started with 30 mentor-mentee pairs, is now up to nearly 50 pairs — about a third of the black men at Cornell. Talbot also engineered the start of a new 10-week S.W.A.G. Academy that includes several modules on topics important to helping black male students at Cornell succeed in and after college. Talbot teaches many of the modules himself.

Also involved on the fundraising side, Talbot has brought in more than $30,000 in alumni donations to fuel the program. Talbot is determined to make Cornell’s S.W.A.G. program a model of national success, and has started looking to expand SWAG to other colleges and even to high schools, starting with a local high school in Ithaca.

Talbot will be traveling to Zambia this summer with the Southern African Institute of Policy and Research to research global health- and labor-related topics. In the long-term, Talbot eventually aims to go to law school and become a New York City Supreme Court Justice.