ACCESS CEO and Springfield Program Director in the Repiblican about the importance of college education:

Viewpoint: Access to college is the key to success for poor families, communities

Sunday, January 08, 2012

The single best way to pull a family – or a community – out of poverty is a college education.

The average college graduate earns $1 million more over the course of a lifetime than the classmate who ends education at 12th grade. On average, college grads will earn $22,000 per year more than counterparts with no degree. And the children of that college graduate are 80 percent more likely to go to college themselves.

Simply put: If we can help a deserving Springfield senior get the funds to go to college and stay there, he or she will in turn become a dramatically more productive breadwinner, and will almost certainly send his or her own children on to college – and a more productive life.

Read more: Viewpoint: Access to college is the key to success for poor families, communities

ACCESS CEO Bob Giannino-Racine is featured in this TIME article about student loan debt:

I Owe U 

By Kristina Dell

Monday, Oct. 31, 2011 

Like many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street in New York City, Amanda Vodola is young, underemployed and loaded with student debt. She spends her days running around, helping organize the movement, and her evenings bussing tables at a dine-in movie theater in Brooklyn. Last spring, Vodola, 22, graduated from Fordham University with a degree in English. "I grew up with this narrative that to get a good job I need to go to school," she says. But the job she has "is not enough to pay the bills." And the bills she's dreading most are the ones tied to that narrative: the $30,000 she owes in college loans.

Read more: I Owe U Article Featured in TIME Magazine

ACCESS Springfield Promise Program Helps Prepare Students for College

11/24/11

SPRINGFIELD - Getting into college was only the first hurdle.

Caitlyn Mormand, a senior at Sabis Charter High School, last year had a 3.6 grade point average. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly. And, she had the good fortune of coming from a two-parent, two-income home.

But, she chose Simmons College in Boston, which carried an annual price tag of more than $52,000. And with three older brothers all attending college, that was nothing to sneeze at either. Normand, 18, doggedly pursued academic scholarships at the school and elsewhere, but still found herself about $20,000 short to finance her freshman year.

That's where the ACCESS Springfield Promise "last dollar" program came in, and an advisor who lead her like a horse to water.

Read the rest of the article here.

11/15/11 - ACCESS First One Award Ceremony Featured in Boston Magazine

ACCESS Honors Boston First Ones