College Bound

“The culture at ‘Iolani was that you were going to go to college,” Aoki
says. “I was just riding that, not really thinking about it much. It’s
what you do at ‘Iolani. So I just looked at U.S. News and World Report
and it said Stanford was a good school, so I thought I would apply there.”

Aoki, 36, studied political science at Stanford, where he met Wren Wescoatt,
a local boy from Moloka’i, who attended Kamehameha School. The two shared
a similar conviction-that attending a competitive university wasn’t simply
a matter of solid test scores, but that the “culture” of a private institution
contributes a significant foundation for success.

Photo: Jimmy Forrest

“The private schools we went to added so much to our own educational
expectations,” says Wescoatt, also 36, who received his bachelor’s in
communications from Stanford. “Not because of the academic rigor of the
curriculum. More so because of the culture of academic expectation.”

Basically, it was cool to study and work hard. But growing up, they both
encountered many who didn’t have access to test prep classes or the culture
that rewarded academic excellence. Six years ago, they formed College
Connections to help give Hawai’i’s youth the opportunity to get into good
colleges, regardless of academic culture or income. The nonprofit organization
offers tutoring and college planning on a sliding scale.

“You can have two equally smart, good people who have such different
academic experiences,” says Aoki, who received a 2002 Ho’okele award for
nonprofit leadership for his work at College Connections. “Opportunities
lost because they didn’t even register for the SAT, or they didn’t know
about financial aid. Some of the reasons for the disparity are not very
good. Kids who have access to an SAT test prep class [will increase scores
by] 50 to 100 points, just by virtue of knowing the instructions and having
practiced it at least once.”

The company has a free, local, online financial aid search, in addition
to college advising, test preparation, “college knowledge” and tutoring
services. The company also invites competitive national universities (such
as Brown, Princeton)-which sometimes don’t make it to the Islands-to attend
its annual college fair.

College Connections is under contract with the state to provide “strategic”
tutoring services for students in need as a result of No Child Left Behind,
the 2002 federal law that requires schools to show “adequate yearly progress”
of state learning standards. These services account for about 50 percent
of their clients and, as a result, 90 percent of their clients receive
some sort of financial aid from government grants.

When it began in 1999, College Connections was an all-volunteer affair.
This year, it will employ more than 100 tutors and will reach 2,000 students.
It has plans to expand service to the Neighbor Islands with live, online
tutoring sessions.

Both Aoki and Wescoatt work at the nonprofit part time and run other
for-profit businesses. Aoki is founder and president of 3Point Consulting,
a public-interest research firm, and Wescoatt runs an online retail store
that sells GPS systems.

They both believe that education creates opportunities and between them
they have enough letters to make an alphabet soup. In addition to his
bachelor’s from Stanford, Aoki has his law degree from the University
of Michigan and his master’s in public policy from Harvard University.
Wescoatt, in addition to his bachelor’s from Stanford, received his master’s
in education from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“Yeah, when we started this, the one thing we said was ‘we know how to
apply to school,'” Aoki says.

Making a Difference is presented in partnership with Hawai’i Community
Foundation, a statewide grant-making organization supported by generous
individuals, families and businesses to benefit Hawai’i’s people. For
information: www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org