Senshay Lofton woke up at 5 a.m. last month to help load boxes into her family’s car and then watched as her mom, dad and older sister drove past the bungalows of the city’s Southwest Side toward the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“I didn’t cry,” says the slight 17-year-old with long thin braids. Like many sending someone off to college, Senshay felt that mix of feelings; some “it’s a big change” sadness, along with a dose of happiness and pride. “She made it through,” Senshay says.
Senshay then walked through Little Village to Farragut Career Academy. It was the first week of her senior year. She thought she’d spend the next months stressing about getting in — and especially paying for — college.
That changed last week.
Current seniors at Farragut and four other Chicago public high schools thought they had just missed out on a golden opportunity offered to four previous classes — a scholarship that covered tuition and all other expenses for graduates and paid for their parents to take classes.
But Hope Chicago told the seniors and their parents last week they also were going to get a big scholarship, though it was to be scaled back.
“It made me real relieved,” Senshay says. Her mom immediately texted her sister Senkhia in Champaign, whose smiling face flashed on the screen during a presentation announcing the additional year of the scholarship.
As a Hope scholarship recipient, Senshay will join her sister and her dad, Seneca Lofton. He just started taking classes to become a construction manager. Lofton became a father young and has worked as a laborer for 20 years. He says the classes can take him from being the one taking orders — “pick this up, move that, dig this ditch” — to having an expertise.
Seneca Lofton, 37, with his daughter Senshay Lofton, 17, outside her school, Farragut Career Academy in Little Village. Senshay just learned she will be eligible for a scholarship when she graduates in June through Hope Chicago. The organization also allows parents to take college classes and Seneca Lofton is training to be a construction manager.
Anastasia Busby/For the Sun-Times
Big plans, practical realities
The one-year extension comes as Hope Chicago is at a crossroads. For individual families, like the Loftons, the scholarships are making a profound impact, offering the potential to raise their economic status for the long term.
But the lofty goals that earned its founders national attention in 2022 seem more distant now. Initially, Hope aimed to be the largest scholarship program in the nation, with the goal of raising $1 billion dollars to send 30,000 students to college for free over 10 years.
Hope Chicago has struggled to raise that much money and it has learned just how hard it can be for Black and Latino students from low-income families to persist in college, even if it is paid for. Over time, it has come up with a formula for supporting students at college that’s just starting to show results.
Similar free college programs have floundered in the past, mostly because they are so expensive.
The two millionaires who originally pledged $25 million are still deeply involved, according to the Hope Chicago leaders. The organization says it has raised about $90 million and spent about $55 million so far, brought in from a variety of sources, including the Walgreens Foundation and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois.
So far, Hope Chicago has sent about 2,600 students to college. But its leaders only feel confident they can commit to extending the scholarship to one more class of students at this time. And for the Class of 2026, they are limiting the yearly tuition scholarship to $12,000.
That will cover tuition at some schools, like Governors State, but not at Illinois State or the University of Illinois. Hope Chicago estimates it will spend about $15 million on this class. But the organization says most families will receive financial aid for costs that are not covered by the scholarship.
The initial announcement in February 2022 was buoyed by Janice Jackson, the popular leader of Chicago Public Schools, who was running Hope Chicago at the time.
Jackson left Hope Chicago this spring to run a civic engagement program at the Aspen Institute and was replaced by the president of a small suburban college. The new CEO, Aaron Kuecker, said the organization is taking stock of what they’ve learned as they reshape the initiative for the long term.
“The future of Hope Chicago is about scale, sustainability and unleashing the full potential of our city,” said Kuecker in a statement.
Hope Chicago led more students to college
Senkhia remembers the day of the original Hope announcement, probably like every student at the five schools tapped for the scholarships. A freshman member of the ROTC and, she wore her polyester green uniform and was called to usher a mystery event in the auditorium.
At first, she and her friends thought it was boring.
Then, Jackson and Pete Kadens, a blond-haired millionaire, took the stage and, in Oprah Winfrey “you get a car” fashion, announced that all the students enrolled at the time and their parents would get to go to college for free.
Victory music filled the room and confetti rained down.
Kadens, who made millions growing cannabis, went on a national media tour, telling CBS’ 60 minutes that he realized how lucky in life he was, winning the birth, ZIP code and education lottery.
“I used to think that college and going to college was the great equalizer,” he said. “In truth, what we’ve come to find out is that college is the great stratifier in this country. It furthers the gap between the haves and the have nots.”
Jackson chose five high schools — Farragut, Morgan Park, Al Raby, Noble Charter School-Johnson, and Juarez — in South and West side communities of mostly low-income working class families. Their graduation rates were below average, as were their college enrollment.
Besides the Noble Charter School, they are neighborhood schools that do not select most of their students. Students seek out charter schools but they have no admissions requirements.
One of Hope Chicago’s powerful early lessons was that given the chance to pursue education after high school, many students jump at it. In the first year of Hope’s involvement, college enrollment rates increased at the five schools by an average of about 20 percentage points — up to 74%.
Hope Chicago says preliminary numbers show that about 83% of the Class of 2025 graduates signed up for college this fall.
Making it to graduation was a struggle
The harder piece has been getting students to stay in college past that first year. In CPS overall, the one-year college persistence rate for Black students in the Class of 2022 was about 64%; for Latino students it was slightly higher at 72%, according to district data.
For the first two years of Hope Chicago scholars, it was a little lower, about 52% for Black students and 70% for Latino students.
A unique aspect of Hope Chicago is that the scholarships are open to all graduates, even those with low GPAs. Perhaps not surprisingly, those with the lowest grades were the most likely to drop out of college after the first year, Hope Chicago’s data shows.
In a nod to this reality, students in the Class of 2026 with GPAs below 2.0 will have to enroll in a community college before transferring to a four-year university.
Michele Howard, chief program officer for Hope Chicago since the beginning, says the organization has been working hard to improve those numbers. A lot of things can derail students, she says, from not feeling welcome, to the need to earn money, to grappling with what may be happening at home or in their communities.
Howard says Hope Chicago has learned that it needs to be in regular contact with its students. They partner with 20 colleges and universities in Illinois, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and small campuses like Lake Forest College. On each of these campuses, Hope Chicago has a liaison who looks out for students.
They also started sending out a survey every three weeks, asking students how they are feeling and asking practical questions, like if they have all the books they need.
“Maybe it’s like, ‘Hey, this student has great grades, but she just responded and said that her uncle died and she is feeling depressed,’” Howard says. She will ask the liaison to follow up with that student to say, “‘We actually need you to call her, like now.’”
Senkhia Lofton, in a common area in her freshman dorm at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is among the fourth class of students in the Hope Chicago scholarship program. The leaders says they’ve learned how to better support students on campus and that’s helping to boost the number of students who return after their first year.
Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times
A few years into the program, more recent Hope Scholars are also benefiting from small groups of other scholars at some schools, such as Illinois State. Some campuses have small percentages of Black and Latino students, especially ones from low-income families, and it can be hard to fit in, says Howard.
The Class of 2024 saw marked improvements in the college persistence rate, with 71% of Black students persisting after one year and nearly 80% of Latino students, Hope Chicago data shows.
Pauline Slyvain-Lewis, a mother of a Morgan Park High School senior, says the support network Hope Chicago has created is one of the things she is most excited about. She says a lot of universities are pulling back supports that target Black and Latino students.
Her son, Jacque Lewis, plans to focus on going to one of Hope Chicago’s partner universities. He likes the idea that he could go with a few of his friends.
“We don’t have to start over when we go to college,” he says.
The principal of Farragut, Virag Nanavati, says he wishes every student and every family took advantage of the scholarships like the Loftons have. Farragut High School’s graduation rate remained relatively low, at about 65% in 2023 and 2024, even with the prospect that graduates could earn a free ticket to college.
Nanavati says he’s heartbroken that so many young people and their families didn’t use the scholarship last year, his first full year as principal.
When he announced to Senshay and her classmates last week the scholarship coming their way, he shared his own story. Nanavanti, who came to the United States from India at 14 years old, told them he struggled to find a way to pay for college.
He told the students they carry the weight of their parents’ dreams.
“Parents work two, three jobs,” he said. “Mom works days, dad works nights and you do that because you hope that your student lives a better life than you. It is the American dream … it is the hope.”
Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on X @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.