Carnegie Corporation Awards Bard College $1.5 Million Grant to Establish New Center for Early College
 

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Bard College has received a $1.5 million grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop a new Center for Early College (CEC). The Center, which will build upon Bard’s work to further develop and expand its early college model nationally, advances Carnegie Corporation’s integrated approach to reimagining public education and high schools.  
 
“The ambition driving the Center for Early College is to create conditions in which early college education can be available to young people across the country,” says Stephen Tremaine, Vice President of Early Colleges. “With the help of this generous grant, we can make our strongest impact through sharing our own practices and policies.”
 
The first Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) opened in 2001 in Manhattan, offering public high school students, for the first time, the opportunity to graduate in four years with both an associate’s degree and a high school diploma. Over the last 15 years, this school and those Bard has opened since, have proven the model’s success in practice. Bard’s early college network now includes seven schools and programs in five states, and the concept of early college has become a powerful educational movement.
 
Emerging from work developed at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, this early college model partners the College with regional public school systems to bring tuition-free higher education to high school age students. Having proved the model’s strength and adaptability in urban school districts from Cleveland to Baltimore, Bard’s new Center for Early College will work toward adapting the model for new locations nationwide.
 
With offices at Bard High School Early College Manhattan and Simon's Rock, Bard’s Center for Early College will be directly involved in the operation and growth of existing Bard Early College campuses, as well as expanding teacher training and new applications for this model.
 
The grant focuses on the Center for Early College’s (CEC) three core objectives:
 

1. Development: To strengthen the field of practice in early college education by developing new models for growth, expanding the range of students effectively served, adapting early college practices to other teaching environments, and developing structures for sharing those practices beyond the Bard Early College Network.
2. Pedagogy: To increase the talent pipeline of early college-inspired high school educators by introducing new training and certification resources that enable those most qualified to teach college-level curriculum to adolescents in innovative high school models.
3. Advocacy: To strengthen policies and regulatory frameworks affecting early colleges to facilitate the effective and sustainable growth of high quality early colleges and other models rethinking the high school-college continuum.

 
The Simon's Rock branch of the Center for Early College houses an Office for Institutional Research and our Office of Equity and Inclusion. The campus also hosts annual training for Bard Early College faculty and an annual conference on the early college model. The BHSEC Manhattan offices will serve as the primary hub for the development and advocacy of the early college model.
 
“Our fiftieth anniversary at Simon’s Rock and fifteenth at the Bard Early Colleges simply mark a beginning for what is possible when younger students are empowered, at the moment they are most ready, with an education in the liberal arts and sciences,” says Ian Bickford, Provost of Simon’s Rock. “The Center for Early College brings together the most knowledgeable, talented, and experienced team within the greater early college movement to lead and to widen the conversation about an idea with extraordinary successes behind it and extraordinary potential ahead.”
 
Bard College’s Center for Early College will continue to build on the work of the early colleges that has grown out of Simon’s Rock in the last 15 years. This diverse and successful network establishes early college as a field of practice, broadening the public debate over who goes to college and where to ask when – a question with profound implications for complex problems of college access, cost, quality, equity, and completion.
 About the Bard Early College Network
The Bard Early Colleges are founded on the belief that many high-school-age students are eager and ready for the intellectual challenges of a college education. The Bard Early Colleges provide adolescents with a rigorous, credit-bearing, tuition-free college course of study in the liberal arts and sciences following the 9th and 10th grades.  Using a curricular model based on experience at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, the network has grown to include schools and programs in New York City (Manhattan, Queens, and Harlem); Newark, NJ; Cleveland, OH; New Orleans, LA; and Baltimore, MD.
 
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with concentrations in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; 9 early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on a 150-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College’s mission as a private institution acting in the public interest has expanded across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to the liberal arts education The undergraduate program at our main campus in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York retains a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. 
 
About the Carnegie Corporation
Carnegie Corporation of New York is America’s oldest grant making foundation, established in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the Corporation’s work focuses on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered of paramount importance: international peace, the advancement of education and knowledge, and the strength of our democracy.

This event was last updated on 10-11-2016

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