Arkansas Company’s Tuition Pledge Boosts College Enrollment

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The three-year-old El Dorado Promise has opened up opportunities that once were closed to many students at the south Arkansas city’s public high school.

Before January 2007, when the scholarships-for-all program was announced in El Dorado, just under 60 percent of the school’s graduates enrolled in college each year, according to Superintendent Bob Watson — a rate below the state’s average of 63 percent, and even further below the national average of 67 percent.

Now 79 percent of graduates enroll in college.

“The kids are highly motivated,” Watson said. “They are taking more courses to prepare them for college.”

Watson and others in El Dorado say the difference stems largely from the El Dorado Promise program announced three years ago to cheers at a high school assembly.

The promise pledges that Murphy Oil Corp., based in El Dorado, will pay tuition for every graduate of El Dorado High School who enrolls in college.

In pledging $50 million over 20 years to the scholarship program, Murphy Oil executives said they hoped it might make a difference for the town and its schools, where enrollment had been steadily declining.

“We created the Promise to further invest in El Dorado’s greatest resource, our children,” Claiborne Deming, Murphy Oil’s president and chief executive officer, said when the program was announced.

The enrollment decline has not just been halted, but reversed. In the three years since the start of the scholarship program, enrollment at El Dorado public schools has grown by 4 percent, according to figures from Murphy Oil, and now stands at 4,577.

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