She enters 6th grade and is already saving for college

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today two education-related topics. We meet an up-and-coming high school student whose focus is on saving for college. And we’ll look at what the affirmative action decision could mean for students who don’t attend schools with race-conscious admissions policies.

The question for Caileigh Boyce was: how much is in your savings account?

“Something like, $5,000,” said Caileigh, who just graduated fifth grade at Public School 112Q in Long Island City, Queens, and will be entering high school in the fall.

“I wish,” said her mother, Celeste Lawton, standing behind her and rolling her eyes. “Six hundred and fifty-two dollars.”

Is that enough to pay for college? “Maybe not, like already,” Caileigh told me last week, before raising another $118, for a total of $770. “But it’s a start.”

And that’s the point.

Caileigh is one of nearly 3,300 rising sixth graders who got their own savings account for the 2017-2018 academic year, when Caileigh started preschool. Collectively, they have since invested $1.26 million for college in NYC Scholarship Accounts.

That works out to just under $400 per child on average, though one child in the program put down $1,747 — still maybe not enough to pay for tuition, but there’s time. The non-profit organization that administers the program NYC Kids RISEprojects that the average preschooler’s bill could easily be worth $3,000 by the time he or she graduates from high school.

Lawton didn’t know about the program until a teacher at the school told her and her daughter about it, Lawton told me last week. “I did my own research and found out that you don’t really have to do anything,” Lawton said. “The community organizations — nonprofits — give the money to the kids and it goes straight into their accounts.”

NYC Kids RISE, which runs the Save for College program in partnership with the Department of Education, says research points to other benefits. Even a small college bill seems to increase a student’s chances of getting an education after high school. One study concluded that a low- and middle-income child with less than $500 in a college savings account is more than three times more likely to enroll in university and four times more likely to graduate than a child without an account.

Fifth graders’ accounts were automatically opened with $100 from the Gray Foundation, founded by Jon Gray, the president and chief operating officer of the private equity giant Blackstone, and his wife, Mindy Gray. Lawton was surprised by how easy the process was. “First name, last name,” she said. “It grows as she grows.”

The program expanded to nearly every preschooler in a public school in the city, including charter schools, in the 2021-2022 school year — more than 75,000 children in total. (The money in their accounts came from the city, $100 for each preschooler; NYC Kids RISE put it into each child’s account. The money is invested in the New York 529 Direct Plan, named for the section of the Internal Revenue Code that describes the tax benefits of college savings accounts.)

As Caileigh learned, account setup paves the way for community groups and businesses to funnel money to students. This means that “the message of expectation, the message of what is possible, is reinforced from several directions,” says Debra-Ellen Glickstein, executive director of NYC Kids RISE.

Some 19 “community grants” have been paid into children’s accounts by businesses in Queens, as well as religious organizations and community groups. Caileigh received seven, including $126.26 from one and $48.89 from the other.

And, like every child in the program in her school district, she received $18.86 from the 2019 Concert for College, a standing room-only gospel performance during Black History Month that sent the money from an auditorium of $20 per seat to the school bill. of the children.

“There was a lot of work to get to that amount,” Caileigh said, and Lawton said she had encouraged friends to send graduation gifts to Caileigh’s account. “Everyone wants to give money,” Lawton said, “but I’m giving money to the college bill because college is going to be expensive.”

Lawton said the bill amounted to “a promise for the future”.

“It gives me peace,” she says. “The community says we want you to go to school. It’s money that you can use for college or for vocational school or nursing school.

Weather

Expect showers and thunderstorms from the afternoon through the evening, with a maximum of nearly 90 during the day.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Effective today. Suspended tomorrow (Independence Day).

As it turns out, race-conscious admissions helped only a fraction of black and Hispanic college students. Fewer than 200 universities are believed to have affirmative action admissions policies and to award no more than 15,000 degrees per year to students who would not have enrolled without affirmative action — 2 percent of all black, Hispanic, and Native American students in four-year colleges. according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University.

That leaves much more for whom those schools are not an option academically or financially – students who encounter hurdles in paying for or completing college.

As my colleagues Sarah Mervosh and Troy Closson have explained, many of those students go straight to work after high school or go to less selective universities that don’t consider race and ethnicity for admission. At least a third of all undergraduate students — including half of Hispanic students — attend community colleges, which typically allow open enrollment. Some drop out and put their education on hold to continue working, sometimes for more than a semester or academic year.

“Somewhere it went from ‘I want to go to school’ to ‘I just want to survive,'” says Dolly Ramos, who recently completed her nursing degree. To get there, she accumulated college credits from several colleges in upstate New York. Sometimes she lived in a youth shelter and slept on the floor of a professor’s room.

METROPOLITAN Diary

Lonely performance

Dear Diary:

It was late one night in the seventies. I was taking the PATH train home to Hoboken from Christopher Street after a rehearsal when I noticed a series of cameras pointed at the turnstiles.

What a boring job it must be to stare at them all night, I thought.

There was no one else waiting on the platform, so I decided on a whim to do a silly, Shirley Temple-esque tap dance to amuse whoever was watching the cameras. I faked up and down the stairs a few times and ended up with a big finish. Ta-da!

As I bowed, I was startled to hear a series of slow claps somewhere in the dark. Looking around, I saw that a young man had stepped out from behind one of the columns at the far end of the platform and was applauding.

I was embarrassed, but smiled playfully.

“Thanks,” I yelled.

Some time after that, one night I was standing in a long line outside an Upper East Side movie theater with some friends when a man behind me tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned around.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but did you do a tap dance at the Christopher Street PATH station a few years ago?”

I was absolutely stunned.

“Oh no,” I said. “Did you watch the monitors that night?”

“No,” he said. “I was the man at the end of the platform. I clapped for you.’

— Francesca Rizzo

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

I’m taking the rest of the week off, and a few days next week as well. Until then, I read New York Today, as do you, as several of my Metro colleagues keep us posted. — JB

PS Here’s today’s Mini crossword And Game match. You can find all our puzzles here.

Ashley Shannon Wu and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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