Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Beginning today, we’re making some changes to Fixes. Columns will now appear weekly on Wednesdays. After each column, the authors will respond to readers in the comments. In addition to leaving comments, readers can visit Fixes on Facebook and Twitter for more discussion.

— The Editors

~~~

In 1988, Deborah Bial was working in a New York City after-school program when she ran into a former student, Lamont. He was a smart kid, a successful student who had won a scholarship to an elite college. But it hadn’t worked out, and now he was back home in the Bronx. “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me,” he told her.

The next year Bial started the Posse Foundation. From her work with students around the city, she chose five New York City high school students who were clearly leaders — dynamic, intelligent, creative, resilient — but who might not have had the SAT scores to get into good schools. Vanderbilt University was willing to admit them all, tuition-free. The students met regularly in their senior year of high school, through the summer, and at college. Surrounded by their posse, they all thrived.



Today the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.

Most Posse Scholars would not have qualified for their colleges by the normal criteria. Posse Scholars’ combined median reading and math SAT score is only 1050, while the median combined score at the colleges Posse students attend varies from 1210 to 1475. Nevertheless, they succeed. Ninety percent of Posse Scholars graduate — half of them on the dean’s list and a quarter with academic honors. A survey (pdf) of 20 years of alumni found that nearly 80 percent of the respondents said they had founded or led groups or clubs. There are only 40 Posse Scholars among Bryn Mawr’s 1,300 students, but a Posse student has won the school’s best all-around student award three times in the past seven years. Posse is changing the way universities look at qualifications for college, and what makes for college success.

Sheila Griffin

Sheyenne Brown went to Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, which before its closure in 2009 was one of the worst schools in New York City. Her parents had always worked — her mother as an administrative assistant, her father in sales. But in her junior year, her family was evicted from their home — by marshals — the same day her father lost his job. They moved into a series of homeless shelters, some of them decent, some like prison cells. “We were people who do the right thing and follow the path, and you still end up in a situation you believe only happens to you if you do the wrong thing,” she said. Brown went to work at McDonald’s, putting in between 20 and 48 hours a week for $5.15 per hour. Her combined SAT score was 1080. She did not seem destined to attend an elite college.

But in her senior year, at least one of her teachers nominated her to be a Posse Scholar. She competed against thousands of other New York City students (with 14,000 nominations nationwide for 600 slots, the program is more competitive than Harvard) and won a place with 10 other students at Middlebury, a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont. She had never heard of it.

Starting in January, Brown and the 10 others in her posse began to meet weekly with a Posse staff member. The purpose of the sessions was to solidify the group and teach them what they needed to succeed at Middlebury: how to write at a college level, but just as important, how to negotiate the social world: how to deal with a diversity of race and socioeconomic status, how to communicate with people who were very different — “finding ways to express what you want to say so that people get your point and don’t feel disrespected,” she said. She was living in the shelter at the time.

“In a way Middlebury was exactly what I needed,” she said. “It was a convenient bubble where everything was safe and O.K. and you don’t have to tell everybody your business.”

The posse was key. “It’s so easy to get lost. I couldn’t imagine going to college without a group of people I already knew. I don’t think I would have made it.” They were all studying different things, she said. They didn’t do homework together, but they held each other accountable for doing it. “If you needed somebody to get you out of bed and get you to the library, Antoinette” — a Posse member — “would get you to the library.” The Posse members, she said, held each other up to the standard they had set: “how are you doing in class, how you behaved socially and whether you were supporting people you agreed to support.”

Brown graduated in 2009, cum laude. Conscious of her good fortune and eager to give back, she joined Teach for America and taught 6th grade social studies at a KIPP charter school in Newark. Now she is in graduate school at Columbia, studying theater.

Of Brown’s posse of 11, one man didn’t graduate — he’s in the Navy. Of the others, one worked after graduation at the United States embassy in Egypt. One is at MTV. One in AmeriCorps, one in the Peace Corps, one in Buenos Aires running a bar-restaurant.

The aforementioned Antoinette is Antoinette Rangel — “a firecracker,” said Brown. At LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, a highly sought-after public school, Rangel was a great student and community leader. “But not a standardized test-taker,” she said. “ I took a prep course and studied tons. But I got a terrible score. It was going to hold me back — that’s what was so great about Posse.”

Middlebury was a different world. “My classmates would talk about their high school experience taking a seminar with eight students on the Vietnam War, taught by a Ph.D.,” she said. “I’d say, yeah, that’s just like my experience — classes of 45 people with teachers who just graduated from college.

“When I was feeling overwhelmed the first couple of months I could call Sheyenne or Danny and go to their dorm room and cry on their shoulder. The Posse was people you pulled all-nighters with.”

She was always in student government, leading it her senior year. She played rugby, sang jazz (“half or more of the Posse was at every recital”), taught English, volunteered at a senior citizens’ home and led a trip to the Dominican Republic. She started law school at Northeastern, interned with a federal judge, then took leave from law school to start her current job, working in the White House as a press assistant.

The stories of Brown and Rangel tell us not just that the SAT is an inadequate predictor of college success, but that it can be malignant. Many colleges acknowledge its limitations. DePauw University, a Posse partner school, asked its institutional research department to do a study of past students to see which factors correlated with academic success. “The one thing that made no difference whatsoever was standardized test scores,” said Cindy Babington, vice president for student services at DePauw.

But colleges are finding it hard to move away from their heavy dependence on those scores. “We couldn’t admit a class of 640 students going through the process Posse does — it’s too time-intensive,” Babington said.

Sheila Griffin

Posse chooses its scholars through a series of group and individual interviews, a system it calls the Dynamic Assessment Process. It brings hundreds of kids into a room and puts them through activities that test their problem-solving, leadership, communication and collaboration skills, their initiative and resourcefulness. “If you’re hiring someone for a leadership position in a company,” said Bial, “those are the very things we’re looking for.”

Posse offers schools an efficient way to find the kind of students it chooses — they can ride on its selection process. After it chooses its winners, it releases the list of finalists who didn’t win. The 40 colleges that are Posse partners can then recruit from the list. “Every single one of these students has been approached at least three times by partner schools,” said Bial.

The second way that Posse is subversive is that it shows that academic chops do not completely determine college success. It demonstrates other important factors: whether a student has social support, a sense of belonging and a network that can offer advice. People from a dominant culture take these things for granted, but minority students have to build them. Posse helps. Every Posse member I talked to said having the group is crucial.

Related More From Fixes Read previous contributions to this series.

At DePauw, Babington said that the success of the Posse model inspired the school to put all first-year students — not just those from Posse — into small groups with an upper-class student as a mentor. They meet regularly to talk about topics like time management, high-risk drinking and preparing for midterms.

Babington said that at the same time it instituted this program, called First Year Experience, the school also moved its fraternity and sorority recruiting to later in the year and built more student housing. The changes “dramatically improved the retention rate,” said Babington, from 86 or 87 percent of freshmen returning the next year to 91 or 92 percent. “I do attribute a lot of it to First Year Experience.”

There’s one other provocative issue raised by Posse’s results: the damage wreaked by stereotype threat. The objects of a stereotype can find their performance greatly affected by simply being reminded that the stereotype exists. Researchers, for example, gave a math test (pdf) to a group of Asian female students. Before the test, the women filled out one of three types of questionnaires. One asked about their gender, one about their ethnicity, and one asked about neither. Those who were reminded they were Asian did the best on the math test. Those reminded they were female did the worst. Another researcher found that when black adults were given tests four times in 2008, on two of those occasions their scores were much higher than the other two. What made the difference? Barack Obama. When the test was given right after his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, or just after his election, the scores of black test-takers were statistically equal to the scores of whites. On the other occasions, the whites scored higher.

The Posse program offers more support for the existence of stereotype threat. Maybe one reason that Posse students of color do well is that the Posse brand identity is so strong. “The buzz around the school is that these Posse kids are cool and smart,” said Carlos Salcedo, a Brandeis Posse scholar who is now a vice president in equity derivative sales at Barclays. Perhaps students who are reminded all day that they are Posse scholars find it is a stereotype that lifts them.

The Posse program reveals the poverty of the conventional wisdom governing academic success. Our rules for college admission, and ideas about college achievement, are linear, but in reality, college achievement is complex. The factors are much more diverse than our educational system is built to accommodate. So are the people who succeed.

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”