Very brief into. The article goes on to discuss how this private/public project over 90 other school districts and cites have started similar projects
Did free college save this city?
By Simon Montlake - DECEMBER 17, 2016
The Kalamazoo Promise helped revive a Rust Belt town. It holds lessons for other cities.
DECEMBER 17, 2016 KALAMAZOO, MICH.—Tracy Zarei has wanted to teach children ever since she was in the second grade. She knew she would have to go to college to become a teacher.
“She was a straight-A student,” says her mother, Sheri, who was working double shifts in a nursing home to pay rent on their mobile home. “She cried when she got her first B.”
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The Kalamazoo Promise, one of the most generous scholarships of its kind, had begun in this city of 75,000, a former manufacturing hub fallen on Dickensian hard times.
Today, 11 years later, it remains one of the most ambitious education and social experiments in the nation – a test of how far private money can go in reviving a city. It has tried to do so not by investing in some trendy new industrial park but in young people themselves, creating an educated generation for the knowledge economy. It’s a vision of a college-going culture that can be the balm for income inequality and recipe for Rust Belt renewal...
