But the Baldwin Promise came with a change in the way the community talked about education, something that may have been more valuable than cash. From the day students start kindergarten, they’re coached to excel so they can go to college. In elementary school and middle school and high school, students, their parents, and the community, think about college and life after Baldwin schools. If nothing else, the Baldwin Promise effectively marketed college to a town that seemed fairly ambivalent about it before.

It’s unclear if the Baldwin Promise will have long-lasting results—students may yet drop out—but its successes and failures are important as states such as Tennessee and Oregon launch programs that try to market college to their residents by making two years of community college free. President Obama proposed a similar plan in January, saying in his speech that “in America, a quality education cannot be a privilege that is reserved for a few.” On the campaign trail, too, candidates say that every American deserves the opportunity to have a college education, and that the nation needs to educate its young people to stay competitive. The story of Baldwin begins to answer the question: What does it look like if everyone in a community goes to college?

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Baldwin is a town that swells in population during fishing season, when tourists come and catch trout, salmon, and bass. For the rest of the year, it’s a small place where everyone can’t help but know everyone else, since they run into one another at the town’s ice-cream shop or the baseball fields, where teams play on long summer nights. The school system is tiny, with the elementary, middle, and high schools located on one campus, the type of place where a kid on the football team can change clothes during halftime to take up his place playing drums in the marching band. (The then-president of the National Honor Society, Alec Wroblewski, did just that until he graduated in June.)

Passing through Baldwin on the way to a fishing trip, one might not think it’s the type of place that would dream big. The houses are small and some are in disrepair, and the busiest spots in town, at first glance, seem to be the gas stations. Baldwin is the county seat of Lake County, where 27.9 percent of residents live below the poverty level, according to census data. That’s the second-highest poverty level in the state of Michigan. Just 8 percent of people living in Lake County have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 25 percent of the state of Michigan.

But Baldwin did dream big. The Baldwin Promise was the brainchild of a resident named Rich Simonson, a Baldwin native who left the area for his career in politics, during which time he ran Gerald Ford’s campaign in Michigan. He returned to Baldwin to retire, and one day while having breakfast with friends at a local restaurant, Simonson came up with a proposal: Why not ask everyone they knew to give some money to the community so that every local student could go to college? His friends were skeptical, said Ellen Kerans, who was at the breakfast, but he was dogged, and went about asking everybody he knew for $500. The Kalamazoo Promise had wealthy anonymous donors, he said, but Baldwin had its community, and they cared about their town and wanted to invest in it.

He convinced school employees to donate and summer residents too. People who couldn’t give $500 up front could enroll in a payment plan. The group set a goal of $140,000, and they surprised even themselves when they raised $160,000, Kerans told me.