Jim McCorkell
Founder and CEO, Admission Possible
St. Paul, Minnesota
2011 In Harmony with Hope® Award winner
[Press Release IHH 2011] [About IHH Award] [Live Streaming]
As a kid growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jim McCorkell set up a lawn-mowing business, going door to door and politely stating that he would “be happy to take on your lawn this summer.” Showing an early appreciation for enterprise, he promptly sub-contracted out all the manual labor. McCorkell has applied that same enterprising spirit to his remarkable nonprofit venture called Admission Possible. Just over 10 years ago, McCorkell established a college prep program for low-income youth and was the first in the nation to use the enthusiastic and idealistic labor pool of recent college graduates serving as AmeriCorps to provide the highly personalized support needed to ensure the program’s success. The results are dramatic. Ninety-eight percent of Admission Possible’s students earn admission to college; and nearly 80% of enrollees have earned their four-year degrees or are on the path to do so.
McCorkell’s abiding mission is to make a post-secondary education a reality for the 200,000 at-risk kids each year who graduate high school prepared for college but who, thanks to cultural and functional barriers, aren’t able to get there. The need is real: college participation rates in low-income families are 32% lower than those of wealthy families. That gap remains virtually unchanged since 1970, not long after President Johnson announced the war on poverty—and is symptomatic of our country’s continued, indeed, growing inequality.
McCorkell knows of what he speaks, as he was one of those kids. Neither of McCorkell’s parents finished high school, though they did later earn their G.E.D.’s, and he grew up poor. But he was lucky. His family was stable and his parents supported and encouraged the pursuit of higher education. Additionally a few key teachers and friends recognized his enormous potential and gave him the support he needed to achieve his college goal. McCorkell earned a scholarship to Carleton College before going on to get master’s degrees, first in political science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned extra money during those student years as a tutor for the test preparation company Kaplan, giving him experience that would prove valuable in subsequent years.
McCorkell entered Harvard intent on studying the interplay of poverty, race and gender, specifically as it related to housing, and with the goal of starting a nonprofit after getting his degree. As he dug deeper and deeper, he became convinced that education was the fundamental piece of the puzzle. With education comes a greater degree of economic security, health improves, and housing becomes more stable. He started to wonder, what if the kind of fee-based test preparation Kaplan students received could be geared towards low-income students? The seed was planted, and it began to germinate during his year-long stint with the national service organization City Year.
In 2000 McCorkell returned to Minnesota, and filed for 501(c)3 status for the nonprofit he always knew he’d start. In this new organization, he married his enterprising spirit with his call to serve the greater good. Naming his new venture Admission Possible, its mission is to make a college education a possibility for low-income students, like himself. The organization uses AmeriCorps members to serve as coaches to students; McCorkell was the first person in the country to leverage the AmeriCorps service infrastructure for college access, and it is essential to the model’s success. Admission Possible is able to provide intensive intervention and a strong mentor relationship—the two elements that are fundamental for success in this space, according to research—for students in the program, and to do it in a way that is affordable. It costs only $3,000 for a student’s two years in the high school program. That is one-seventh the cost of similar federally funded programs. An independent social return on investment study conducted in 2005 estimated that Admission Possible offers a 500% return on investment to society through higher contributions to the tax base and a reduction in rates of incarceration and utilization of costly social services.
Everybody wins. Through Admission Possible, low-income students are given the social support and the educational tools they need to effectively compete for admission to colleges and universities. The universities also benefit: Admission Possible provides them with an effective mechanism for identifying and recruiting a more racially and socioeconomically diverse student population. And with an increasingly competitive global economy, the United States—with a 300,000-person annual shortage in post-secondary educated workers through 2018 —benefits by having a more highly educated workforce. Finally, through its relationship with AmeriCorps, the program incubates hundreds of passionate, committed young changemakers who will take the skills from this first role and apply them throughout their careers. “I couldn’t have imagined a first position to have out of college that could be any better than this. It has blown things wide open in terms of what I can do in the future as I pursue my interest in education,” said D.J. Erickson a first-year Corps member who’s coaching juniors at the Twin Cities’ St. Louis Park High School.
Juniors and seniors who have been admitted into the program meet twice a week for two hours after school with their coach. Each group is comprised of 10-15 kids, who find in each other, kindred spirits. Over the two years they work together, a deep bond is forged—both between the students and between the students and their coach. The coaches serve Monday through Thursday at their assigned high school. There they coach up to 40 students each. On Fridays, the students don’t meet but the coaches do, back at the Admission Possible office to take part in a weekly assessment and ongoing training.
Coaches use Admission Possible’s copyrighted curriculum, created to engage the students and guide them through the two-year access program. On average, each student will spend 320 hours in Admission Possible’s program. The students and their coaches work first on test preparation, to improve student ACT/SAT scores. Most students take part in summer enrichment programs, which their coaches help them find. Next the coaches introduce the students to college life by taking them to visit a number of nearby campuses. They help their students work on their applications, including all requests for financial aid and scholarships. Finally, Admission Possible ensures that the transition to college is successful by fully preparing students. Upon completion of the high school program, students join Admission Possible’s college program where they continue to be supported by a college coach supporting students using a technology-based toolkit of supports.
Infusing everything they do at Admission Possible is a culture of positive idealism—so important to the organization that its central tenets are spelled out on their Web site (among them: strive to be delightful, challenge cynicism, be grateful, have fun…). It works: the Princeton Review recently named Admission Possible one of the best entry level job offerings in the country. The staff culture makes its way through the coaches to the students who, energized by being surrounded and supported by other college-bound students and strong adult mentors for perhaps the first time in their lives, are eager to spread the program’s gospel. They happily do community service and practice tests on weekends and they share their enthusiasm with freshmen and sophomores through formal college planning workshops at their schools.
Always striving for perfection, McCorkell has inculcated a results-focused agenda at Admission Possible: he uses data and feedback to review every aspect of his program, tweaking a little here, a little there…would it make a difference to take the ACT test on a different date, for instance. Real-time intervention is possible thanks to a web-based tracking system that monitors student outcomes. That data is analyzed every Friday by the staff to make sure everyone and everything is on track. Larger studies of the overall effectiveness of the program have also been conducted by outside groups. Most recently a 2011 Harvard historical analysis demonstrated Admission Possible students were 140% more likely to attend a four-year college and 75% more likely to attend any form of post-secondary than their similar peers. Earlier evaluations like that in 2010 by ICF International released these findings: Admission Possible students raised their ACT scores by an impressive 22% and college acceptance rates were actually 99%. Another external evaluation is taking place now: a Harvard University researcher is undertaking a two-year randomized, controlled study of the program.
Eleven years after the first group of 35 students, Admission Possible has helped 15,000 students through their programs—taking that first, crucial step out of poverty. Each year, Admission Possible enriches the lives of 7,400 low-income students. In 2010-11, there were 1,650 juniors and seniors enrolled in its core high school program; 3,000 freshmen and sophomores took its college information seminars; and 2,750 program graduates took advantage of its college programming. In a short time, Admission Possible has made its impact felt; it is so successful that there are 15 schools currently on the wait list in the Twin Cities area alone. More than 500 recent college graduates applied for the 100 AmeriCorps and VISTA spots that Admission Possible needs to fill next year. Natalie Rule Burns, the organization’s Director of External Relations, said, “The rate of our replication is limited only by funding.”
The Admission Possible model undeniably works—better than any other college readiness program—and it is replicable and scalable. Additionally, McCorkell has molded an efficient, effective model that works equally well in his absence. For these reasons, the Admission Possible board voted to start a careful national expansion, first with an expansion pilot launch to Milwaukee in 2008; then with an aggressive national expansion plan launched in 2010 to reach 20,000 low-income students annually in 10 sites by 2015. Growing at a rate of one to two new markets per year, Admission Possible just announced its third site in Omaha, Nebraska, this summer.
Jim McCorkell may have had the business sense to innovate a model that can do without him but there’s little question that he can’t do without it—this is his life’s work. Every step he has taken has deliberately guided him down the path to Admission Possible. Rule Burns calls him “impressive and inspiring” but also entirely earnest and up-front: “You’ll never get spun by Jim. He’s doing this with a vision that the future of America’s children should be determined solely by their talent, motivation and effort, not their parents’ socioeconomic status.” It’s just that simple.
