Alumni Sponsors At Harvard

I'm Going To Harvard. Will You Sponsor Me is an interesting June 12, 2009 article. It is about a new service which matches alumni sponsors with students who can not afford college. As the article states:

Unithrive, which made its debut last month, matches alumni lenders and cash-strapped students, who post photographs and biographical information and can request up to $2,000. The loans are interest-free and payable within five years of graduation.

The nonprofit site is the brainchild of three recent Harvard graduates, who hope it can help ease the crisis in paying for college, especially if it is one day rolled out to other colleges that cannot afford to be as generous as their alma mater, which already awards scholarships to all students with demonstrated need.

The appeal of direct donor-to-student loans, Unithrive’s founders say, is that alumni will have a personal connection to current students: those requesting loans list hometowns, majors and classes they have taken. Alumni can lend to students with whom they feel a bond. They are promised updates three times a year from students they support — not unlike the letters that sponsors of poor children in Africa receive through the Christian Children’s Fund. In this case, however, the pitch for the charity is not being delivered by a tearful Sally Struthers but by the three founders: Joshua Kushner, who graduated last year and is a scion of a wealthy real estate family (his older brother, Jared Kushner, bought The New York Observer shortly after he graduated from Harvard), Nimay Mehta and Tanuj Parikh, who graduated this month.

This sounds like a great idea. Are law schools next??

Mitchell H. Rubinstein