Education is the civil rights issue of our time. That’s what Leslie Cornfeld decided after a decade advising New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama’s two education secretaries — and seeing how few low-income students went to the universities that lead to high-paying jobs.
Intent on increasing access, Cornfeld founded in 2019 the National Education Equity Lab, a nonprofit with $25,000 of startup funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its mission is to advance socioeconomic mobility for high school students lacking the typical paths to top colleges. As Cornfeld explains, the Lab was “founded on the belief that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.”
In six years, the Lab reports that it has brought 60 college courses from 17 universities to more than 40,000 high school students in 33 states. Eighty percent of students have passed the courses, and those students have earned 75,000 cumulative college credits for a potential $100 million in college tuition savings. The Lab focuses only on Title I eligible public schools — those with a high percentage of low-income families.
The Lab’s leaders and major funders trace the organization’s rapid growth to a single-minded focus on lower income students’ needs and challenges. The Lab has created hybrid teaching teams from high schools and colleges to deliver online courses. And it has grown not from a “theory of change” but from student-teacher demand, attracting repeat gifts from foundations and individual philanthropists.
“We are serving low-income, under-resourced scholars, and this model was developed for them,” Cornfeld said. “We are bringing colleges into the schools and changing the culture.”
Getting on the Radar
From 2015 to 2017, Cornfeld spent part of her time in the Obama administration visiting the nation’s under-resourced high schools.
“We heard the same themes over and over again from principals, district leaders, and students,” she recalled. “Even the most talented, hard-working scholars — in rural communities, poor urban communities, Native American communities — cannot get on the radar of more selective universities.”
Even if they could get on elite universities’ radar, the high school students did not believe they were college-ready or college-worthy, Cornfeld said. Meanwhile, when she and her D.C. colleagues met with higher-education leaders, they repeatedly claimed, “We wish that we could find talented lower-income scholars, but we just can’t find them.”
For Cornfeld, this made no sense since universities seemed to have had no trouble finding the very best athletes, often from low-income backgrounds, to play on their teams. Why couldn’t they find the very best low-income students to fill their classrooms?
Cornfeld also was informed by a 2017 analysis of more than 30 million college students from 1999 to 2013, led by economist Raj Chetty. He and his team showed through “mobility report cards” that the most selective colleges in the U.S., enabling the highest career opportunities and incomes, were the least socioeconomically diverse.
At Harvard College, which Cornfeld attended, 67 percent of students came from families with top 20 percent incomes, while only about 1.8 percent came from poor families. Such disparities are common across Ivy League and other prestigious schools.
Cornfeld decided to connect the dots and bring elite universities into non-elite schools. In fall 2019, with a staff of three, the National Education Equity Lab delivered its first course, Harvard Professor Elisa New’s “Poetry in America: The City From Whitman to Hip-Hop,” to two dozen high schools.
But rather than import university courses, the Lab developed a range of supports. Those include: connecting professors with students by Zoom; training high school teachers as course co-teachers; and hiring college undergraduates as teaching fellows and mentors in course work and applying to and navigating college.
Today, Lab offerings can be found coast-to-coast, including in every Title I school in Florida’s Miami-Dade County and over 120 low-income schools in New York City. Aiming high, the Lab plans to serve 1 million high school students through its hybrid college courses and student supports within a decade.
Should the Lab’s goal be achieved, it would surpass the number of low-income students annually taking Advanced Placement tests. College Board, the nonprofit that develops and administers the tests, has moved aggressively to expand the number of high school students taking A.P. courses and tests over the past two decades. But as the New York Times reported, some 60 percent of A.P. exams taken by low-income students in 2023 scored too low for college credit — 1 or 2 out of 5. That statistic has not budged in 20 years.
A Lean Nonprofit
Although the National Education Equity Lab is large in aspiration, it remains small in two significant ways. First, the nonprofit has only 32 full-time staff. Second, its annual revenue in 2024 was $7.5 million, with earned revenue covering 40 percent of the budget, according to the Lab.
Carnegie has provided the Lab two more grants — $200,000 in 2021 and $3 million this year. And over the past six years, the Lab has attracted funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates, Apollo Opportunity, NBA, and Morgan Stanley foundations, among others.
Saskia Levy Thompson, a program director in Carnegie’s education program, said in an email that the recent $3 million grant was motivated by the Lab’s impressive growth and student outcomes. “While NEEL’s expansion goals are ambitious, they have consistently achieved 50 percent year-over-year growth in response to outsized demand from school district and university partners,” Thompson wrote.
Grant makers also like that Lab courses can lower the cost of a college degree, by allowing students to matriculate with some of the credits they need to graduate as well as accelerate students’ journey to a college diploma.
This summer, the Apollo Opportunity Foundation gave a second grant to the Lab, for a total of $3 million, in addition to ongoing pro-bono consulting that included financial modeling for last year.
The Lab also has attracted support from individuals. Since 2019, 271 people have made donations in the range of $1,000 to $25,000. Another 209 people have given $1,000 and below.
Venture capitalist Henry McCance is the Lab’s biggest individual benefactor. In 2021, he read a New York Times article about the Lab and gave Cornfeld a call. “My VC background very much focuses on backing the best people,” McCance said. He also was impressed by the caliber of Lab advisers and board members, such as former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Children’s Defense Fund Founder Marian Wright Edelman.
McCance was also wowed by the Lab’s model. It recognized, he said, that Covid had mainstreamed online learning and connected existing, paid-for programs (in the form of online college courses and their professors) with existing, paid-for government employees (high school teachers and administrators).
“That gave them the ability to really start influencing thousands of students with relatively limited resources,” McCance said.
Plus, he liked that the nonprofit had built-in revenue: $250 per student paid by the public school systems, which includes the wraparound support, the college credits, and university transcript. All other costs — Lab overhead and the professor and teaching fellow stipends (which typically range from $1,500 to $3,000) — are paid for by philanthropy.
Through his family foundation, McCance and his two daughters made their largest ever commitment in 2021 — $500,000 over three years to the Lab. Since then, the McCance Foundation has given $4.5 million with a commitment to give a total of $6 million, he said. The venture capitalist now also serves on the Lab’s board.
While some large-scale private interventions — like Mark Zuckerberg’s$100 million investment in Newark public schools and the Gates Foundation’s$1 billion Small Schools Initiative — have stumbled, McCance noted the Lab has fared better by starting small and proving its model.
“Then they could go to other universities, other school districts and show them the success they had in the last year and build on it,” he said.
512 High Schools and Counting
The National Education Equity Lab’s model is not without hurdles. Celeste Pico, principal of Lompoc High School in California decided to introduce two Lab courses — “Grit Lab 101” taught by Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor, as well as an Arizona State University engineering class — to increase college-prep offerings after the pandemic, including community college classes.
“But our community college partner wasn’t offering us many course options,” Pico said.
So Pico and Laná Huyck, Lompoc High’s head of counseling, agreed to introduce the two Lab courses to their students, who are 80 percent Hispanic and 80 percent eligible for free and reduced lunch.
“We’d be lying to you if we told you this has not taken a lot of time,” Pico said. Huyk noted she and Pico have spent “lots and lots of Saturdays” to write grants to onboard the Lab courses effectively.
“But we knew it was in the best interest of our students,” Pico said. “Because it’s more than having access to those classes. Our kids don’t believe they can ever afford to go to these places. So along with taking these classes and exposing them and building that strong belief that, ‘Wow, I can actually do this — I have an A in my college math class, I could go to Cornell’ — it’s helped close the gap for a lot of our students financially.”
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Pico said that increasingly the Lab learners — about an eighth of Lompoc High’s 1,600 students — are entering college having finished one year of university-level courses. In 2024-25, Lompoc offered six Lab courses, which “meant the kids had four universities to work with,” Pico said. She has eliminated several of her A.P. classes to make room for the Equity Lab’s offerings, in part because the A.P grade for the former is based on only one test.
Adrienne Battle, superintendent of the 80,000-student Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee, has also scaled up Lab courses in her district. She introduced Lab courses at three Nashville high schools in 2023; two years later, Lab courses are in four more schools.
“We’ve received quite a high positive response rate and requests from not only our school teams but also from our students and parents,” she said, adding she plans to expand Lab offering in “all 12 of my zoned high schools.”
Battle said she appreciates the Lab’s willingness to “build something that works best to serve your families and your educators.’ That is not always what school districts are presented with. Quite frankly, a lot of times there’s just a formula.”
Closing the Confidence Gap
Marah Rigaud is a first generation Haitian-American who describes herself as coming from “a background of hard workers.” She took five Lab courses at her high school in Long Island, N.Y., and now attends Yale.
“Hearing these big names like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown can appear intimidating at first,” she said. “And when you don’t have that experience, you kind of feel a bit behind and thinking that college is some kind of impossible feat. These courses give you a foundation.”
Rigaud appreciated a Georgetown course in international affairs, where she drafted policy memos. “That’s not something you do in high school,” Rigaud remembered. “My friends took an intro to international relations course at Yale, and they were complaining about how hard these policy memos were, but I already had that experience.”
Rigaud serves as president of National Education Equity Lab Honor Society, where she tells students that the Lab is like a built-in college counselor, providing information about free SAT prep courses, help with college applications and often letters of reference, networking, and technical skills.
She is one of the more than 10,000 students whose post-secondary outcomes the Lab is tracking through an ongoing study by Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins education professor. According to five years of data analysis, to be published this fall, Balfanz found that Lab students who pass a course are twice as likely to attend four-year colleges than students from similar high schools (58 percent vs. 29 percent) and also persist in college at higher rates (89 percent vs. 78 percent).
Balfanz voiced surprise that as the Lab has scaled, it “has been able to maintain and even increase the rate of student success in their courses,” he said. “Typically, when programs scale rapidly, there is a dip in outcomes.”
Can the National Education Equity Lab reach its goal of serving 1 million students within 10 years?
Cornfeld thinks so because demand for Lab courses is “higher than ever,” she said, with more than 35 new districts reaching out to join the network. “We are using existing, recorded, actual college-credit courses,” Cornfeld said. “So it costs the same if we share that in 100 high schools across the country or 1,000 high schools across the county.”
Yet there are other costs — to pay more Lab staff and the stipends for college professors and teaching fellows.
Henry McCance, the Lab’s board member and biggest funder, said, “I’ve never actually thought of whether the goal is precisely achievable or not,” but ”one hurdle, quite frankly, is capital.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
