Editor’s note: The following op-ed piece appeared in the Dec. 12, 2007, issue of the Dallas Morning News.

Making college accessible: So, you're a good student and you've graduated from high school ...

By Robert L. Thornton III
Immediate Past Chairman
DCCCD Foundation

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert's recent DISD scholarship announcement clearly acknowledges that a lot of work needs to be done to improve education in our community and that he is prepared to offer financial assistance as well as the weight of his office to keep this critical issue in the forefront. Our hats are off to him.

It's also no secret that all across our country, big-city education is turning a darker shade of bleak and that future prospects for our inner-city youth continue to be seriously threatened. To understand this, you need to know only two facts:

• Eighty percent of the new jobs being created in this country today require a minimum of two years of college education.
• By the time a Dallas ISD ninth-grade class becomes a 12th-grade class, more than 50 percent of the kids are gone. They've dropped out, quit school permanently and have consequently foreclosed on the best shot they will ever have for a decent economic future.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there are many local programs just now gaining traction, as well as civic leaders stepping up to provide critical support to Superintendent Michael Hinojosa in his efforts to turn this thing around. Many of these initiatives are designed to help kids stay in school, stay engaged and become fully focused on their future – be they mentoring programs, Advanced Placement courses, dual credit classes, tough-love truancy reduction regimens or after-school and Saturday tutoring sessions. They all count.

But what if the kids do their part, successfully stay the course, and graduate from high school – what then? What happens next? Where's the college money going to come from for kids from low-income households? Even if they can find money for tuition, there are still significant costs for books and fees. Going off to college requires big-time transportation and room-and-board expenses that frequently become "deal-killers" when it come to attending school away from home.

That's where the Dallas County Community College and its Rising Star Scholarship Program steps in. No other city has anything like it. Its premise is simple, and compelling: Every high school graduate in Dallas County from a family of economic need, who has earned a B average or better, gets to go to college. Everyone. That's huge.

Rising Star provides books and tuition for a two-year associate degree at one of our seven community colleges or certification in one of more than 100 different occupational degrees offered. It can also provide for earning the necessary credits for ultimate transfer to a four-year institution or receive fast-track job training.

We grow nurses and construction managers and chefs; we develop computer programmers and accountants, engineers and entrepreneurs. And there is a college within 15 minutes of everyone in Dallas County.

Started just a few years ago, Rising Star has already served nearly 10,000 Dallas County students with full-ride scholarships, with more than 6,000 of these students having graduated from Dallas ISD. Today, there are 2,700 Rising Star scholars enrolled at our colleges, 92 percent of whom are ethnically diverse and more than 85 percent representing the first members of their families to go to college. That's huge, too.

It's a combination of both relevance and scale, and the numbers are large enough that over time you will begin to see structural changes take shape where young kids from poor neighborhoods actually develop an expectation that they will go to college. We hope so.

While we all applaud the exceptional kid from the tough neighborhood who earns a scholarship to Harvard and then goes on to becomes a successful banker in New York – the future of Dallas doesn't depend on it. Growing productive citizens in large numbers does.

That's why many of us have come to conclude that our splendid community college system and its Rising Star program represent the absolute best way to give large numbers of our kids a real opportunity to acquire the skills and education they need to earn their way into the middle class and help themselves, their families and our community.
Rising Star is a big, big deal for Dallas.