Dominique Cauley wants to take what she's learned back to her Ward 7 neighborhood.

But back when she and a group of 7th-grade classmates entered a precollege program for local kids with average or below average grades and extremely limited resources, her chances of success were iffy at best. “We had so many deficiencies coming into the program,” says Cauley, “that I still marvel at how I ended up here.”

She adds, “I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into, but I knew there were people at Georgetown who were doing something, who had a dream, were accomplishing things, were doing what they wanted to do—and I wanted to be like them.”

Cauley, a 21-year-old junior at Georgetown University, participated in the Georgetown Institute of College Preparation for six years, starting when she was an 11-year-old at Ronald H. Brown Middle School. Every Saturday of the school year and weekdays during the summer, she and her peers trekked from one of the more severely stressed parts of D.C. across town to the prestigious Georgetown campus. There, they took SAT prep classes and acquired skills in math, science, English, and Spanish—along with the confidence to thrive at an academically demanding college.

		AUDIO EXTRA: Life Lessons Listen to Dominique Cauley talk about the stark differences between Ward 7 and Georgetown University. Play Audio

The kids in the program face intense challenges—inside and outside the classroom. Their home turf, Ward 7, has the second lowest median income of the eight city wards—about $33,000 per year. It is in the far eastern sector of Washington, D.C., separated from downtown by the Anacostia River. In this predominantly African-American neighborhood, 30 percent of adults lack a high school diploma; just 13 percent have earned a bachelor's degree; and, according to a 2007 report of the D.C.-based State Education Agency, half of them are functionally illiterate.

From these difficult circumstances, three cohorts of students have completed the precollege program, graduating from high school in 1995, 2001, and 2005. Those who stick with the program do well; 98 percent of them (101 students out of 103) have gone on to college. Many choose historically black colleges and universities, such as Howard University and North Carolina A&T State University. Other graduates have attended Barnard College, Temple University, and Lafayette College. Six, including Cauley, have attended Georgetown.

Inevitably, some students leave the program before their senior year in high school, with attrition rates of 28 percent in the first cohort, 15 percent in the second, and 19 percent in the third. In the first group of 50 students, for example, 36 (72 percent) completed the program—and high school. Every one of those students attended college, and 85 percent of them earned an undergraduate degree. By stark contrast, only 43 percent of 9th graders in Washington, D.C., public and charter schools are likely to finish high school and only 9 percent will earn a bachelor's degree, according to a 2006 report commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Double the Numbers for College Success: A Call to Action for the District of Columbia.

Photo: Robb Scharetg

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