For the second year in a row, Scripps was the top producing women’s college for Teach for America. With 15.7 percent of the senior class applying, the College had the highest percentage of senior applicants. Schools with comparably high percentages include Notre Dame, Yale, and University of Michigan. The Scripps senior applicants had an acceptance rate of 29 percent—well above the national average of 17 percent.
This summer, five Scripps seniors will join the elite cadre of students recruited by the national teaching corps dedicated to eradicating educational inequity.
“I’m not at all surprised by the strong acceptance rate at Scripps,” said Melanie Robak, a recruitment fellow at Teach for America. “We love to see the thoughtful and capable women from Scripps taking this on.”
The five Scripps recruits for 2007 are Stephanie Widmer, a philosophy major from Concord, Calif.; Liza Enrich, a chemistry major from Lexington, Mass.; Lauren Ross, a studio art major from Iowa City, Iowa; Mary Grimes, a dance major from San Rafael, Calif.; and Cori Hanagami, a biology major from Aiea, Hawaii.
The organization began as founder Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis project at Princeton in 1989 and has grown increasingly popular and selective. The program rejects 83 percent of its applicants. To put this into perspective, only 13 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities reject more than 50 percent of their applicants.
As the country’s largest provider of teachers for low-income communities, 4,400 Teach for America participants worked with 375,000 students last year. The Scripps women who choose to dedicate two years of their life to teach and effect change in under-
resourced urban and rural public schools join more than 12,000 Teach for America alumni who, still in their 20s and 30s, are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform.
“The level of confidence I gained at Scripps has been one of the foremost assets for me as a teacher,” says Tara Sheram ’06, a first-year corps member of Teach for America. “Being young and inexperienced in this profession, many people have doubted my abilities, but I have never doubted myself. I know that I am a critical thinker, a leader, and a woman of courage—and I can do 
anything. Scripps cemented those ideas in me.” Last fall, Tara began her new role as teacher in a bilingual, second-grade classroom in Phoenix. Tara was one of 11 Scripps graduates from the Class of 2006 to sign up with Teach for America.