‘Career Beginnings’ Helps Students with College-Admission

August 2011

It has no classrooms, teachers or tests of its own, but Career Beginnings, a program of the Hartford Consortium for Higher Education, has helped more than 1,800 Greater Hartford high school seniors enter college.

Career Beginnings counselors Zakiya Edens, left front, and Carla Hawkins, right, with students Sherice Green, front center, Victoria Tran, left rear, Shaniel Bowen, and Kylah Jackson.

“It really motivated me to take that step further and apply for colleges,” said Shaniel Bowen, who has graduated from Bloomfield High School – and Career Beginnings – and has been accepted at the University of Connecticut, where she will major in biomedical engineering.

Career Beginnings, which observed its 25th anniversary in May by graduating 177 students, offers workshops on the college admission paperwork process, one-on-one advising from staff, college visits, and pairing with volunteer mentors at nine schools in Hartford, Bloomfield and East Hartford.

Career Beginnings is funded by grants from more than a dozen philanthropic and business partners, including the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, which has awarded more than $435,000 in grants since 1986, including 15 grants from its Beatrice Fox Auberbach Foundation Fund.

“On average, 92 percent of our graduates enroll in college directly out of high school,” said Martin Estey, program director.

“The Hartford Foundation is pleased to be a longtime supporter of a program that provides that extra help so that students – who perhaps never thought they could – are able to enter college,” said Linda J. Kelly, president of the Hartford Foundation.

The economic value of a college education was highlighted last month in a report by Georgetown University that determined that the disparity between the wages of college-educated workers and high school-educated workers will jump from 74 percent to 96 percent if an additional 20 million postsecondary-educated workers are not added to the economy by 2025.

Career Beginnings does not replace high school guidance counselors, but supplements their work, said Estey. According to the United States Department of Education, over-worked high school guidance counselors, each with a variety of duties and almost 500 students to monitor, are only able to provide an average of 38 minutes of college admission advice per student.

To help bridge the gap, two Career Beginnings counselors spend four days a week in the schools, working in conjunction with school counselors and students to prepare applications, search for scholarships and arrange visits to colleges.

“A lot of our students are first-generation to the college experience so they and their families usually don’t know much, if anything, about the process,” said counselor Carla Hawkins. “Also, many of the parents are not involved, for many reasons. Students may not live with a parent or guardian, or the parents’ employment schedule prevents them from coming to workshops.”

One big advantage of Career Beginnings, said Sherice Green, another Bloomfield High School graduate who will attend UConn, is the early start it provides in the college-enrollment process. “By junior year everybody starts to think about college, but it’s the people who start in Career Beginnings in their freshmen and sophomore year who really have a leg up on everyone else,” Green said. “The fact that by junior year I had already visited many colleges and got to see what I liked really helped me pick which colleges I was going to apply to.”

Another big Career Beginnings benefit, said Kylah Jackson, also a Bloomfield High School graduate, is the assistance with the essay that accompanies college applications. If her first draft “had stayed the way it was,” she might not be entering UConn to major in psychology.

Career Beginnings’ volunteer mentors, after receiving training, work to build a one-on-one relationship with a student. Mentors spend a minimum of five hours per month with their students working on the college admission process. Mentors and students are paired at the end of the junior year.

“My mentor took a day off from work and took me to visit a college in Massachusetts because my parents can’t drive,” said Victoria Tran, another Bloomfield High School graduate, who has been accepted at UConn to study computer engineering.

“The students have our cell phone numbers and our email addresses so they can contact us at any time,” said counselor Zakiya Edens. “If I was a high school student, there isn’t a reason why I would not want to be a part of Career Beginnings. It provides you with all these resources, it gives you one-on-one attention, and it’s free!”

Participating schools in Hartford are Bulkeley, Weaver (all academies), Hartford Public High School (all academies), Sports and Medical Sciences Academy, Pathways to Technology, University High School of Science and Engineering, as well as Bloomfield High School, East Hartford High School, and A.I Prince Regional Vocational Technical High School.

To enroll or become a mentor in Career Beginnings, visit www.hartfordconsortium.org/what-we-do/career-beginnings.aspx.

The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving is the community foundation for the 29-town Greater Hartford region, dedicated to improving the quality of life for area residents.  The Foundation receives gifts from thousands of generous individuals and families, and in 2010, awarded grants of more than $29 million to a broad range of area nonprofit organizations, the largest amount granted in the Foundation’s 85-year history.  For more information about the Hartford Foundation, visit www.hfpg.org or call 860-548-1888.