Elite institutions connect with community colleges.

MANY PEOPLE HAVE LONG SEEN community colleges as bridges to opportunity. But four-year colleges and universities haven't always gotten the drift.

A new grant from a nonprofit foundation is aiming to change the relationships between community colleges and elite four-year IHEs. With millions of dollars in funding from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, eight selective institutions will launch partnerships with dozens of two-year schools.

The goals: To boost the number of transfer students, fatten financial aid options, and ease students' abilities to settle in on four-year campuses. "This is about recognizing the range of community college students, and creating a pathway for those who are qualified and deserve it," says Joshua Wyner, vice president of programs for the foundation.

The grants--totaling $6.78 million and complemented by $20.5 million from the grantees--will affect students in several ways. The four-year institutions (Amherst, Bucknell, Cornell, Mount Holyoke, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, The University of North Carolina, and University of Southern California) will enroll a combined 1,100 additional low- to middle-income community college transfers over the next four years.

The institutions will also assist 2,100 community college students with issues of access and information. The hope is that ideas sprouting from these efforts will serve as inspiration for other institutions, say foundation executives at the foundation, which is hosting a national conference on replication strategies this June. "A lot has been written over the last few years about the lack of low-income students at elite colleges and universities," says Wyner. "This strategy had not been mentioned as a way of bridging the gap."

With many selective colleges yearning to draw more diverse student populations to their quadrangles, the grant project serves the needs of students as well as colleges. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, more than 47 percent of black college students, 56 percent of Hispanics, 48 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 57 percent of Native Americans are enrolled at community colleges.

"We know that there are a lot of really bright and talented students out there at community colleges and high schools who don't think about schools like Amherst, either because they don't know about us or because they think they can't afford it," says Stacy Schmeidel, director of Public Affairs for grant recipient Amherst College (Mass.). "We're trying to say, don't rule us out."

Greenfield Community College in northwest Massachusetts will be among the two-year schools partnering with Amherst to bolster transfers. "The students that this will attract have a lot to teach all of us," says Robert Pura, president of GCC. "I think [the four-year institutions] will be richer as a result of what our students bring to their classrooms."