Mesa Arizona Gets $3 Million for Education

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded Mesa a $3 million grant to boost the community’s low college completion rate.
Mesa is one of just four cities to get the funds, along with New York, San Francisco and Riverside, Calif.
Locally, the city and educators are working on how they can double the number of low-income youths who get a college degree within a decade. Only 8 percent of low-income residents in Mesa have a degree by age 26. The effort is headed by the city, Mesa Community College and the Mesa Unified School District.
Mesa has higher high-school graduation rates than the state or nationwide average, said Joe O’Reilly, the director of student achievement support research and evaluation for Mesa schools. But more and more jobs require a college degree or other training.
“Just getting them out of high school isn’t enough,” O’Reilly said.
While 86 percent of students surveyed say they’ll attend college, only 56 percent actually do. Educators also want to reduce the number of students who quit college for various reasons.
The United States has fallen behind other countries, even some developing nations, in terms of college education, said Shouan Pan, president of Mesa Community College.
“If America wants to be a superpower so to speak, maintain our leading status or even our daily quality of life, we have to dramatically increase the proportion of citizens who have post secondary education,” Pan said.
The city, MCC and Mesa schools have worked for the Gates Foundation grant since 2008. The city got a $250,000 grant in October to start developing a plan. That effort resulted in this grant, which will span three years.
The city has worked for two years with Mesa Community College and the Mesa Unified School District to get more low-income youths in college — and to stay until they get a degree.
Mesa City Manager Chris Brady said the plan involves targeting specific demographics and focusing efforts on those least likely to attend college.
The weak economy won’t prevent the effort from working, Brady said, because it should involve less money than it does a change in how the community approaches youths.
“It’s more about the choices they make and why they make them,” Brady said.
Mesa sees the grant as a potential boost to economic development. The city is trying to recruit colleges, and higher numbers of college-bound students will make the area a more attractive market.
With college graduates making almost twice the income of high school-only graduates over a lifetime, they’ll pay more taxes and be more likely to invest in the city’s aging neighborhoods.
“These are the people who, if we don’t give them the tools to get post-secondary education, they become a burden to the city,” Pan said.