Etiquette Lessons and ABCs in One College Prep Program

A firm handshake delivered with eye contact can be as crucial to success after high school as soaring SAT scores.

That is the philosophy being promoted by an increasingly popular crop of organizations that help public school students get into college and onto career tracks, by concentrating on school culture.

At Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy (BETA) on the John F. Kennedy Campus, College Summit, a non-profit organization with the stated goal of creating a “college-going culture” has been at work for two years now, trying to instill the notion in all the school’s seniors that college is within their reach.

“We talk about academics; we talk about social skills,” said Victor John, a community coordinator at BETA and a College Summit advisor.

Andres Marrero, a member of BETA’s first graduating class in 2008 who now attends City College, attributes much of his success after high school to the program — so much so that he now works as an intern in the College Summit office.

“It came in at a very low point in my life where I was cutting class,” he said.

He hung out with the “wrong crowd” and doing well at high school, he said, was far from a priority.

“I can’t afford this, so it just wasn’t for me,” he remembers thinking about college.

As a college freshman and a College Summit alumni leader, however, he has hosted “rap sessions” in his dorm room and advises students coming up through BETA behind him on what to do and how to think about college.

“It’s kind of hard being a minority student, especially in a low-class family, going to high school in an educational system where you’re destined to fail or programmed to fail in a way,” he said.

What turned things around for Mr. Marrero, he says, was the four-day retreat for what’s called “peer leaders” that he went on as part of the Summit program, at Eastern Connecticut University.

“I mean the dorms were beautiful; the campus was beautiful,” he said.

Higher education started to look like more than just books, and for the first time he says he could actually picture himself there.

For that kind of inspiration, College Summit charges schools about $200 per pupil. The money is used for professional development and a curriculum designed to break down the obstacles that threaten to keep students from college or a successful career after high school. The high school’s seniors meet for 45-minute sessions daily, and next year a pilot involving other grades will be launched at BETA.

So far, 100 percent of BETA students who have participated in the program (the entire senior class for two years, or a little more than 100 students in total) have applied to college. Summit has not yet tracked enrollment rates and does not track acceptance rates.

College Summit generally selects schools with low-income populations that are in need of improved college enrollment numbers, and BETA also gave it the opportunity to have an impact on an entirely new school.

College Summit is a national nonprofit organization with an office based in Brooklyn. It operates in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan at 46 schools in New York City.

According to Mr. John, BETA has a high percentage of Latino, African- American and Caribbean-American students and is also 85 percent male. Male students of color, he said, have some of the lowest high school graduation rates.

“We teach them how to write a resume. We talk to them about etiquette,” he said.

Students get writing coaches and learn to open up through personal essays. Faculty are asked to wear shirts with their college emblems to school and to answer questions about their own experiences and students are taken to colleges to see for themselves.

In addition, Mr. John says he teaches students to take off their hats when they enter a building, not to answer cell phones during meetings and to be on time.

“You’re not prepared if you don’t have the full package,” he said.