Charles Rutheiser

In my new book, The Opportunity Makers, I chronicle not just the history of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) but the stories of many young people who, with the help of SEO, have not only achieved success in college and their careers but have helped to create opportunities for others. Evin Floyd Robinson is one of those young people. Thanks to SEO Scholars, an academic program that gets low-income students to and through college, Evin went from being a high school st

In my previous blog post, I made the case for thinking about opportunity in more nuanced terms and the importance of higher education as a launching pad. To be clear, there is nothing magical about a college degree—it is only a credential that signifies that the bearer ostensibly possesses certain knowledge and skills. But the value of higher education also lies in the generation of experiences, relationships and the capacity to cultivate relationships. These are sometimes ca

My friends like to joke that I have never met a simple question to which I couldn’t provide a complicated answer. This post will probably increase the number of people who share their opinion. But in my defense, opportunity is often thought of in overly-simplistic terms. We need a greater appreciation of the complexities of opportunity if we, as a society, are to ensure more equal access to it. The notion of opportunity is closely connected with the very idea of America; the