Half of the $5 million gift will establish the Weill Scholars Fund, which will provide tuition support and stipends for graduate students at the Ford School who come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and are committed to advancing diversity in public policy. 

Some University of Michigan students spent the summer honing their social engagement skills. Three dozen student-led start-ups that received funding from optiMize, a  program that provides grants to students who want to build self-directed projects for social change, spanned out. One, Building Successful Bridges, worked with the incoming ninth grade class of Marygrove High School in Detroit. 

The middle and high school students who are part of the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Pathways program have the smarts to get to college. They have the desire. They see themselves as college students.

Located at the U-M Detroit Center on Woodward Avenue, MEZ mainly offers space, help and machine tools to young people who want to take part in the national FIRST Robotics competition, but whose schools don’t have the resources to help them on their own.

Cherish Fields graduated from U-M with the aid of a Blavin Scholarship, a program to help foster children attain college degrees. Today, as a social worker at a Detroit agency that assists children who are wards of the state, she is helping children just like herself.

Summer employment is typically expected to support youth development in work readiness and career aspirations, but there is reason to believe it may improve educational outcomes as well, a new University of Michigan study suggests.

A U-M program, known as D-RISE, provides summer internships to high school students through a Cass Tech/U-M partnership. Its goal is to increase underrepresented minority participation in the sciences.

Cass Technical High School has developed a partnership with the University of Michigan Medical School called Doctors of Tomorrow as part of a larger effort to connect the U-M with high schools in underserved areas and to stimulate minority students’ interest in careers in the medical field.