In an effort to address the generational impact of the school-to-prison pipeline, CalPoly Humboldt has joined a growing trend in California among institutions of higher education that offer a path to a college degree for incarcerated individuals. But the CalPoly program offers an additional benefit: a federal Pell grant. It is the to introduce a federal Pell grant to cover the cost of earning a bachelor's degree inside a prison. The program is offered also as part of the College of the Redwood's Pelican Bay Scholars program.
The new opportunity this year adds to the benefits of , which originally and has a history of success. Since 2016, Project Rebound has conferred nearly 750 Bachelor鈥檚 and Master鈥檚 degrees to formerly incarcerated students and maintained a less than one percent recidivism rate. Project Rebound has established California as a national model by leveraging the largest four-year university system in the country to scale a life-affirming, cost-effective response to the extensive impacts of mass incarceration.
Maxwell Schnurer, a communications professor at CalPoly Humboldt joins the Exchange to discuss details of the impact of the university's role in the program, along with Jenn Capp, Provost and VP of Academic Affairs at CalPoly.
