Denison has established a new partnership with the national college matching organization Questbridge, which aims to match high-achieving, low-income students with selective colleges and universities.

Vice President for Enrollment Management Greg Sneed, who is mainly responsible for overseeing admissions and financial aid, explained the origins of the partnership.

QuestBridge is “very well known in higher education circles at large,” Sneed explained. Sneed maintained contacts with QuestBridge representatives from his time at Grinnell College, which is an existing partner college.

According to Sneed, he and president Adam Weinberg had been in conversation with QuestBridge for several years. In the spring of 2019, they met with representatives from QuestBridge to talk more seriously about the potential for a partnership.

The partnership with Questbridge aims to address what Sneed called the “undermatching” problem, which refers to high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds not applying to prestigious colleges and universities. Questbridge works to help with “recruiting, mentoring, and placing” students, Sneed said. 

Students who apply to the Questbridge program go through a selective admissions process, and some will eventually become finalists. These finalists then rank their top 12 colleges from the 45 partner colleges that QuestBridge offers. “We as an institution would then receive a list of students who rank Denison, and then we rank that list of students and submit that back to Questbridge. From there, Questbridge goes through a matching process,” Sneed explained.

The “How It Works” page of the QuestBridge website claims that matched students are “admitted early with a full four-year scholarship,” but Sneed asserts that there is “no scholarship attached” to the process at Denison. Instead, “because [QuestBridge Scholars] are uniformly low-income students, they receive the significant need based aid that we offer,” he said.

Sneed highlighted that “one of the advantages we have in partnering with these [national] organizations is in some ways they can help support our outreach efforts in populations we have a more difficult time, just logistically, reaching.”

In late 2019, Denison announced the end of its partnership with the Posse Foundation. The class of 2024 is the final class of Posse Scholars at Denison. As part of a press release from President Weinbeg, he said that Denison would “continue to expand recruitment of, and award scholarships to, students from diverse backgrounds through partnerships with a wide range of mentoring organizations.” With QuestBridge being the first major partnership announced, it is against the backdrop of the Posse Foundation.

Sneed claims that “QuestBridge has nothing to do with any other organizations,” and is adamant that the partnership has been years in the making. Nonetheless, many students look to the Posse Foundation as an example of a valuable partnership, and have been critical of the partnership with QuestBridge.

One such student is Christian Rios Arango ‘22, who is a Boston Posse Scholar and a biochemistry major. “My initial reaction to the new partnership was disappointed and skeptical,” he said. “Considering the structure of QuestBridge, the resources and relationships made are vastly different than Posse.” 

Rios Arango emphasized the value of the community-building and support structures that were present as part of the Posse Foundation, traits which are seemingly missing from QuestBridge. “While giving a disadvantaged student full tuition to a prestigious institution is still a good act of diversity, equity, and inclusion, not preparing them for the culture shock that comes with attending a predominantly white institution is the equivalent of being complacent to educational disparities in communities,” he said.

“Given the resources Posse provided to partner institutions are virtually nonexistent in QuestBridge’s infrastructure, this made me believe that the newfound partnership is a publicity stunt,” Rios Arango stated. “Lastly, it is interesting that this transition coincidentally occurred during a year in which Denison’s acceptance rate dropped below 30%, a shared characteristic between QuestBridge’s partner schools, unlike those in Posse,” he said.

Currently, Denison is listed as the #44 liberal arts college in the United States according to the U.S. News and World Report, which is a popular college ranking service. 43 out of the other 44 QuestBridge partner schools are ranked in the top 40 liberal arts schools or national universities.

Rios Arango ended with what he sees as the important priorities for these sorts of partnerships. “I think that at the forefront of these decision making processes should be the best interest of the students benefiting from these resources,” he said. “Being ranked similarly to ‘mini ivy leagues’ is great, but means nothing if the students receiving full tuition do not see themselves fitting on campus otherwise.”