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Like many promising students from modest backgrounds, Nolan Arkansas started his college search with a major barrier: He was unaware of all of his options and undervalued his own potential. But a growing movement of nonprofit talent hunters and advisers is seeking to raise the ambitions of disadvantaged students and connect them with premier colleges, attacking a widespread problem researchers call “undermatching.”

Stanford University is the most selective in the country for undergraduate admissions, drawing more than 40,000 applicants a year and turning away 19 for every one it accepts. But a select cadre of high school seniors is getting into the private university in Silicon Valley at a much higher rate. They are scholars in a nonprofit advising program called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, which helps students from low-income families apply to college. Fifteen of them applied to Stanford last fall for early admission to the class entering in 2018. In December, the program reports, 14 got in.

A clinically relevant "liquid biopsy" test can be used to profile cancer genomes from blood and predict survival outcomes for patients with metastatic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). Although TNBC represents just 10-15 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses, the disease is responsible for 35 percent of all breast cancer-related deaths. While significant advances in understanding the genomic drivers of primary TNBC have been made in the past decade, relatively little is known about metastatic disease because surgical tumor biopsies are rarely obtained from these patients. Funding for the study was provided by the Gerstner Family Foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, The Pink Agenda, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, V Foundation for Cancer Research and National Cancer Institute.

The Gerstner Family Foundation renewed its support for scholarships for top students attending high schools in the Diocese of Palm Beach. The Foundation began its support of scholarships in the Diocese in 2005 and is pleased to continue the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Distinguished High School Scholars Program with this new gift of $1.584 million.

The State University of New York and the SUNY Impact Foundation today announced the launch of a student emergency aid pilot program at seven SUNY campuses supported by more than $600,000 in donations from the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Heckscher Foundation for Children. These funds will be awarded to students experiencing an unforeseen financial hardship or emergency situation, with the goal of keeping more students on track toward graduation.