NEW YORK - Deborah Bial was running youth leadership workshops in New York City public schools when she met a young man who had attended college but dropped out.

“He said he never would've dropped out of college if he had his posse with him,” Bial recalled.

For Bial, it inspired her to start the Posse Foundation, a New York-based organization that has helped hundreds of students get into college.

Last month, Bial received a $500,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The foundation awards the fellowships to people who show “extraordinary originality and dedication” in their fields.

The foundation described Bial as an education strategist who is “addressing the challenges of college access for underrepresented populations by identifying and fostering latent talent and reframing college admissions into a more inclusive process.”

Posse uses an “alternative model” to identify promising students, one that goes beyond grades and test scores.

The program gives weight to skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication, and self-motivation.

The students go through an eight-month pre-college training program before attending one of Posse's 28 partner colleges and universities on full-tuition scholarships, generally in “posses” of 10.

“One of the reasons I think the MacArthur award is a special recognition for us is the core values of the fellows program are so much in sync with the core values of the Posse program: believing in the future potential and creativity of the individual,” said Bial, 42, who said she didn't know how she would spend the no-strings-attached grant money.

“We are truly trying to identify incredible leaders.”

The foundation operates in six cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington. Since 1989, its college partners, which include Vanderbilt University, Boston University and DePauw University, have awarded 1,850 Posse students $175 million in full-tuition scholarships.

Posse's college-graduation rate is about 90 percent, Bial said, much higher than the overall 56 percent national graduation rate at four-year colleges, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

This year, the Posse Foundation received about 7,000 nominations from guidance counselors, community organizations, college advisers, teachers and principals for 350 slots, Bial said. Foundation officials will whittle the nominees down to 20 finalists per partner school, which then will select its posse.

Veronica Savage was selected as part of the first posse to attend Vanderbilt. If not for Posse, Savage said she never would've thought about attending a university like Vanderbilt.

When Savage, who grew up in a “struggling working-class family” on Manhattan's Lower East Side, arrived on the Nashville campus, she was “overwhelmed” by the culture, particularly the privilege she saw among students. Platinum credit cards. Brand-new cars. Financial freedom.

“The whole university was foreign,” Savage, now 34, recalled. “There was nothing on campus that reflected me. No Caribbean culture. No Hispanic female role models. Everything that I could identify with was gone.”

But Savage had her posse. “We stuck pretty close together,” said Savage, who graduated from Vanderbilt in 1994 with a double major in psychology and human and organizational development.

Savage, who now works as a social worker at an alternative New York City public high school, said Posse raised her confidence and expectations for herself. “It gave me validation that I had potential and talent and I could compete with privileged people.”

Gary Orfield, who teaches education at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the Posse program has been effective because it uses “more intelligent” ways to spot potential for great success, and creates a network - posses - to support and nurture that potential.

“There are valedictorians who never do anything and there are lots of people who were not (valedictorians) and didn't get top scores on their SATs who made big contributions to society,” said Orfield.

“We have a pathetically limited set of tools for making really important decisions,” he said of the college-admissions process.

While Posse aims to increase diversity in the nation's leadership, Bial emphasized that her program is not minority- or need-based; the program doesn't have quotas, she said.

“You see true diversity. You see students from every racial and ethnic demographic and students with different political ideologies and religions,” she said.

“Because the demographics of the United States are changing so rapidly and in the near future whites will no longer be the majority, it's critical that our top institutions of higher education graduate a student body that more accurately reflects the people whose voices often go unheard,” Bial said.