Bloomfield College: High school freshman can earn tuition

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Bloomfield College has announced that it will be the first college in New Jersey to provide high school students with the opportunity to earn college scholarships as early as freshman year in high school.

Students would be able to do this by joining a relatively new platform called Raise.me. The platform would allow a student to log-in final grades, school activities, or record their attendance. Once this has been done, they would receive a promise from Bloomfield College for a specific “amount” of money to be applied to a personal micro-scholarship, if the student is accepted and decides to attend the college.

For instance, Bloomfield College would add $100 to a student’s personal micro-scholarship fund if they had perfect attendance for a year; $300 for each extracurricular activity; and $700 for every “A” in a core or fine arts course.

According to Raise.me, 150 institutions of higher education have already agreed to sign on with them. The college provides students with the scholarship money. They also must pay a fee to Raise.me, but the high school student would not.

Adam Castro, vice-president of enrollment at Bloomfield College, said a student can earn a scholarship valued for as much as $20,000 during each high school year, or $80,000 by the time they graduate.

“The type of student who is going to max-out at $80,000 is going to be a strong student,” Castro said in his campus office last week.

According to Castro, Raise.me is about accessing and affording a college education. He believes it would not only give a student the incentive to succeed in college by permitting them to earn a college scholarship in high school, but the student also would not have to wait until their high school senior year to know if they are receiving a college scholarship.

Castro said a four-year tuition at Bloomfield College is currently $28,600 per year and scholarships to students using Raise.me are only good for four-year degrees.

This September will be the first opportunity for high school students to start earning micro-scholarships to Bloomfield College.

Each of the colleges that has signed on with Raise.me will follow its own criteria about what a high school student must accomplish to earn their scholarship funds.

“Essentially, we wanted to make academic achievement primary,” Castro said, “such as advanced placement classes and coursework; taking the SATs early; joining a sport or community work. But most important is leadership skills. A student needs those in a small-school environment.”

According to Katie Mooney, director of Northeast partnerships for Raise.me, she works with colleges to create unique micro-scholarship programs.
“This can include academic performance, course difficulty, extracurricular activities, leadership, community service, college engagement, or awards,” she said in an email.

Aneesh Ramin, who is in charge of growth for Raise.me, said the information a student provides to the platform does not replace a high school transcript. What Raise.me does, he said, is give the student immediate feedback on their achievement. He said the company has been in existence for three years.

“Over 250,000 students have signed up,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s all self-reporting. The college must verify. What is important is that the student gets immediate feedback. They get a pop-up. It says, ‘You just earned this much from this college.’ For low-income students, we think this system provides transparency.”

According to Mooney, a student’s high school may not necessarily know that the student has signed on with Raise.me.

“Information sharing is student powered,” she said. “Students share the information they enter on Raise.me with colleges and counselors they select. That is an important part of our privacy policy. Ultimately, colleges determine how best to verify information students have provided.”

Bloomfield College has 2,000 students and annually gives $20 million in merit scholarships, Castro said. Micro-scholarships, generated by the Raise.me platform, will also come from this source. Castro said it would be an advantage for a potential Bloomfield College student to sign up with Raise.me because the platform would provide the college with more information about the student than would a college application.

“Raise.me goes into depth,” Castro said. “We’re going to push students to go into it. And it also makes high school students come to a decision about attending Bloomfield College. We get the bulk of our interest from students in the 11th and 12th grades. To move that process up is certainly a benefit to the process of engaging with students earlier. That is what we’re looking to do.”

Castro said that Bloomfield College currently has 165 students with permanent addresses in the township. Eighty-two Bloomfield College students list themselves as Bloomfield High School graduates.

“For this fall, the 2016 freshman class, we currently have 10 commitments from BHS seniors,” he said. “That number will surely go up before the fall starts.”

If a student on the Raise.me platform should decide to attend Bloomfield College, but not right away, Castro said the college will honor its scholarship commitment for one year, although there is no formal policy yet. But he said he was inclined to extend that time frame for Raise.me participants.
Castro said there is the exciting potential of Raise.me to expose the college to students from a larger geographic area. Currently, 90 percent of its students are from New Jersey. But Castro believes Raise.me will help the college to attract high school students throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

“We have something unique to offer here,” he said of Bloomfield College. “The key is getting high school students to campus sooner. First, you increase campus visitations; then enrollments increase.”

He also said that to earn a micro-scholarship from Bloomfield College, a student would have to sign up with the college through Raise.me.
“But they can sign up at any time and enter the historical date, as appropriate, and earn scholarships for previous work,” he said.