Sending your child to college has long been considered part of the American Dream — but it’s becoming an increasingly pricey one. College tuition has gone up a head-spinning 197% since 1963, after adjusting for inflation. As tuition continues to rise — with the price tag edging toward $100,000 a year at some private colleges — many students find themselves buried in debt by the time they graduate.
Now, families in Hartford, Connecticut, will get some relief, thanks to an initiative from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving. The foundation’s Greater Futures Scholarship Fund will provide up to $100,000 per student over four years. More than 110 of this year’s graduating students will receive scholarships this year, and the foundation plans to continue the program into the future.
One thing that stands out about these scholarships is their size. Many community foundations provide scholarships for local students, but the awards — a few thousand dollars in most cases — haven’t kept up with soaring tuition costs. The Hartford Foundation, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, has provided scholarships for over 80 years, but its leadership decided it needed to do more.
“We were proud of the thousands of students that we have helped get to college, but as we were approaching our centennial, we wanted to do something that was more meaningful, more impactful, on a much grander scale,” said Jay Williams, the foundation’s president and CEO. “Our board had in previous years raised questions around the efficacy of the scholarship, both in terms of the amount — which was $3,000 for decades — and the impact.”
The foundation’s leadership decided to increase its scholarships significantly — to $20,000 a year per student. The foundation also teamed up with a local partner, the nonprofit Hartford Promise, which will provide additional scholarship funds of $5,000 a year, bringing the total per student to $25,000 per year. Perhaps just as important as the financial backing, Hartford Promise provides wrap-around supports — including mental health services, college counseling and career coaching — to help students persist in college and launch careers after graduation.
Williams and his team hope the Hartford Foundation’s Greater Futures Scholarship will become a model for other community foundations — and for the entire country.
“We’ve looked around and have not found a program of this scale or magnitude anywhere,” he said. “We’re excited about what this means for the future of the city, the region, the public school system. It’s not going to address all the ills and challenges that school systems face, and it isn’t going to solve the student debt crisis. But we think this is a model for partnerships between community foundations and organizations like Hartford Promise across the state of Connecticut and across the country. We believe this ultimately needs to resonate with public policy makers, because we should be investing in education in ways that are meaningful and effective.”
The Hartford families whose children won scholarships this year were over the moon when they got the news. A short video captured the moment when Williams and Dr. Sivan Hines, president and CEO of Hartford Promise, sat down to tell them. The responses were a mixture of shock, relief, hugs and tears. As one father said upon learning that his daughter and son would each receive a scholarship, “For my kids to say, ‘I went to a Hartford school, I graduated with good grades, and now I’m being offered a scholarship to go anywhere I want’ — I didn’t have that opportunity, and for them to have that just fills me with joy.”
How the foundation’s paying for the Greater Futures Scholarship — and measuring success
To cover the $30 million initial investment for the Greater Futures Scholarship, the Hartford Foundation will use $20 million of its endowment on top of funding set aside for its existing scholarship program. To raise the balance, the foundation launched a $10 million fundraising campaign, the first in its 100-year history, and has already raised close to $8 million from individual and corporate donors.
The new scholarship builds on a model already established by Hartford Promise. To qualify for Hartford Promise’s scholarship — and now for the Greater Futures award — students must be Hartford residents for all four years of high school, attend a public high school in Hartford, graduate with a 3.0 grade point average, and have a 93% attendance rate. Hartford Promise has a team that works in the city’s high schools to identify students who are on track to receive a scholarship, starting in ninth grade. The team works with students to help them stay on track, and offers college information and guidance.
“We have worked very hard to make sure as many students as possible qualify,” said Hines of Hartford Promise. “We’ve intentionally created an incentive for students to do well in school and to stay in school; we’ve also tried to address the chronic absenteeism that Hartford and many cities and schools face — particularly post-pandemic.”
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Students who receive the scholarship and head to college are assigned a coach who provides ongoing connection and support. If the student experiences mental health or academic issues, the coach helps connect them to services. These supports are essential given Hartford’s demographics, according to Hines. “Our students reflect Hartford’s population,” she said. “They’re 90% students of color, they’re 75% Pell eligible, and 70 to 75% are first-generation college students. We knew that it was not enough to just give students money for college and say, ‘good luck’; we needed to provide those really intensive wrap-around support services.”
The program has an impressive track record: 86 to 89% of Hartford Promise scholars persist in college, and their graduation rate is 76% (this is well above the national average graduation rate of 47% for Pell-eligible students, and 48% for first generation, low-income students). But Hines and her team found that too many of their graduates weren’t landing jobs after graduation. “Our scholars are first generation,” she said. “They don’t have a network, so they didn’t have an aunt, a friend, a parent to help them get a foot in the door. They don’t have an internship experience, and they were competing against kids who had done internships. They’re all working, but they were working at an Amazon warehouse, Target, jobs like that. And lastly, they didn’t realize that you have to start career planning early.”
Hartford Promise responded by providing mandatory resume workshops, mock interview workshops, and other practical career-seeking information to students while they were still in college. The nonprofit has also developed relationships with local employers. “Connecticut has a huge workforce shortage,” Hines said. “This is a state where a lot of older people are leaving and young people are not staying. But 80% of our students are coming back to Hartford; many of them have family here. So companies are loving getting connected to our students, because they’re great workers, and this is where they want to be.”
To track the impact of the new scholarship, the Hartford Foundation will be working with the CT Data Collaborative to conduct a longitudinal study. “We want to tell the story of the success of these students and be able to, for lack of a better word, evangelize in public policy spaces about the importance of these types of programs,” said Kate Szczerbacki, the Hartford Foundation’s director of learning, evaluation and capacity-building. The study will track factors including employment after graduation, student debt, and overall economic mobility. “One of the priorities of this program is to reduce student debt, which can obviously not only constrain an individual’s economic and social mobility, but their quality of life and the array of life choices that they have,” Szczerbacki said.
The Harford Foundation has other programs that stand out
Hartford was the richest city in America after the Civil War, but today, it is among the poorest, and WalletHub recently named it 45th out of 50 on its list of the best state capitals to live in. The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving is working hard to change that. Under Williams’ leadership, it has launched a number of path-breaking programs — several of which, like the Greater Futures Scholarships, go beyond typical community foundation fare. Its participatory grantmaking program, the Greater Together Community Funds, for example, distributes funds to each of the 29 towns in its region and allows them to decide how the funds will be distributed.
As my colleague Mike Scutari reported in 2021, the program is far more sweeping than what most community foundations provide, if they take the plunge on participatory grantmaking at all: “While community foundations administer a portfolio of dedicated funds, few have gone all-in on participatory grantmaking across a diverse demographic and geographic base that includes cities, rural areas and sprawling suburban enclaves.” To mark its 100th birthday, the Hartford Foundation announced that each local fund will receive an additional $100,000.
The foundation also recently announced a request for proposals for LGBTQIA+ organizations “to support the wellbeing of Greater Hartford’s LGBTQIA+ community.” The program follows a study of the local LGBTQIA+ community commissioned by the foundation.
“What’s really interesting about the [LGBTQIA+] study is that you see both sides of the same coin,” Szczerbacki said. “You do see very essential needs in the community, but you also see aspects that show resilience and joy and other assets, which is very exciting because they’re aligned. So the solutions are in the room.”
The foundation will make a number of other announcements as the year goes on, according to Williams. “The Greater Futures Scholarship Fund is a significant part — but not the only part — of our centennial activity,” he said. “Throughout this year, there are going to be a series of announcements and investments and initiatives that really speak to how appreciative we are of the past 100 years, but more importantly, our commitment to the next 100 years.”
