Apply
Yourself
Carolina extends its reach to students whose families
can’t help much with the push toward college
or the intricacies of the admissions process.
Jordan-Matthews High School, home of the
Jets, is only 30-some miles from the brick
sidewalks and flowering trees of the Carolina campus, but as one teacher there says,
for some of its students, Chapel Hill might
as well be New York. In an area defined by
pastureland and chicken processing plants,
the Siler City school is roughly 40 percent
Latino, 35 percent Caucasian and 25 percent African-American, and for about a
quarter of its students, English is a second
language. In the past, Jordan-Matthews hasn’t sent many students to Carolina — or to
other colleges, for that matter. But on a
mid-November day, when Chancellor
James Moeser asks some 50 sophomores,
juniors and seniors gathered in the auditorium how many of them might apply to
UNC, half the hands shoot up.
One student with an eager hand raised is
17-year-old Jakelin Bonilla. With a 4. 2 GPA,
an after-school job, an array of extracurricular activities and substantial volunteer experience — with Habitat for Humanity, as a
church youth-group leader and as an interpreter in schools, courts and UNC Hospitals
— Bonilla is a strong contender for a competitive college. Already accepted to UNC-Greensboro and Guilford, she is applying to
six other schools, including Georgetown.
Jordan-Matthews has nominated her for a
by Kathleen Kearns
ONLINE: Randy
K. Jones ’ 79,
chair-elect of the
GAA’s Board of
Directors, spoke at
the board’s January
meeting about coming to Carolina as a
first-generation college student. His
audio comments
are available online
at the GAA Web site
at alumni.unc.edu/
randyjones.
Morehead-Cain Scholarship at Carolina, and
N.C. State has chosen her as a semi-finalist
for a Park Scholarship.
Nevertheless, she has questions. How
critical are SAT scores? Some colleges ask
for a letter of recommendation from someone other than a teacher — who should
that be? These are questions she can’t ask
her parents. Her mother finished only first
grade; her father got as far as third. If Jakelin goes to college, she’ll be the first in her
family to do so.
Almost a fifth of the students who
entered UNC last fall came from households in which neither parent had a four-year college degree. The number of first-generation students on campus has
increased slowly but steadily over the past
few years as a result of University programs
designed to reach underserved populations
and nontraditional students and to better
address the state’s needs. Serving such
groups has long been a priority for UNC
and has been reinforced by UNC System
President Erskine Bowles ’ 67. The UNC
Tomorrow Commission underscored this
in the report it released in December.
The Chapel Hill campus has put several
programs in place to reach low- and mod-erate-income and nontraditional students.
The Carolina Covenant and Carolina Stu-
