KSI's History
Project Choice - our first program.
In 1988, Ewing Kauffman (a businessman, Kansas City Royals Baseball Club owner and philanthropist) wanted to reduce the dropout rate among urban high-school students. He believed that if he offered these students a choice for a better future, they would do whatever it took to finish high school. Thus Project Choice was born.
Project Choice worked with nearly 1,400 Kansas City high-school students. All of these students were offered the chance for a fully paid college education if they graduated on time, avoided drugs and pregnancy, and otherwise stayed out of trouble.
Mr. Kauffman showed that despite the barriers of poverty, urban "at risk" young people could be put on the road to becoming productive members of society if they received a good education.
Project Choice officially ended in 2001 with the college graduation of the final class of students in the program. During its thirteen years of operation, more than 30 percent of Choice students who started college graduated with a bachelor's degree within five years -- a considerably higher rate than the 6 percent graduation rate for all U.S. low-income college students.
Building on our success.
With the success of the Project Choice program, it was absolutely clear we should return to this idea, learning from the successes and challenges of the past and designing a program to become yet more ambitious and successful.
One key takeaway from Project Choice was that focusing on dropout prevention did not help students get ready to take that next big step to college. In fact, when Choice students arrived at college, they were not nearly as prepared for success as they could have been. Much more is known now about the predictors for college attendance and graduation among low-income students than when Mr. Kauffman started Project Choice. We knew from our past experience and this research that we could help even more students earn their college degrees.
Kauffman Scholars - earlier intervention, more comprehensive.
The inaugural class of Kauffman Scholars - the Class of 2009 - included 200 seventh-graders from the Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri public school districts and Kansas City, Missouri charter public schools.
The second class - the class of 2011 - included more than 250 students from these two school districts.