The Posse Foundation is an innovative scheme brought to fruition almost 20 years ago by Deborah Bial, an education specialist who was troubled by the high failure rate of promising minority students recruited by top-tier universities.
One such student explained to her that he would have stayed in school if he’d had his posse with him — using the popular urban expression for his network of neighborhood buddies. That’s when Bial hit on the idea of recruiting a cross-section of kids from urban public high schools, bonding them into cohesive groups of 10 or 12, and sending them off, en masse, to some of the nation’s best universities.
this year’s crop of Posse Chicago’s 72 scholarship winners will be heading to Carleton College in Minnesota, DePauw University in Indiana, Oberlin College in Ohio and Pomona College in California, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.