Can Messina College increase the chances of a university education for low-income students?

Sixty-five of Messina’s students are graduates of Boston high schools, including district, charter and Catholic schools, and most are from Massachusetts. All earned at least a B average in high school. Messina focused his recruitment on high schools in urban areas, including Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Brockton, Lowell and Lawrence, and Providence.

Messina College is unique in Massachusetts and at the forefront of a new — but small — national trend. Selective four-year colleges, usually with religious roots, are opening two-year schools where students who might not otherwise be admitted to a selective school can earn an associate degree and then enter the workforce or continue with a bachelor’s degree. Messina is one of the few schools of its kind to house students in dormitories, a decision Berrelleza called key to creating community and helping students succeed.

It’s a promising model. If successful, the school could provide new educational and career opportunities for underprivileged students. If graduation and transfer rates are higher than at the community colleges where students would instead go, lessons can be learned from public — and other private — schools about how to better support these students. Meanwhile, Boston College is likely to see its student body diversify as it accepts Messina graduates.

Of course, Messina College will have to prove that it can achieve higher graduation and transfer rates than other schools with similar populations. Just as importantly, it will have to prove that its model is financially sustainable — a challenge for private schools that serve students who can’t afford high tuition and don’t get the tax dollars available to public institutions. One reason Boston College can pioneer this program is a $100 million endowment earmarked to help first-generation college students that came out of its merger agreement with Pine Manor. Boston College invested $35 million in capital expenditures to open the school, with another $10 million planned for next year.

Early indications from similar schools in other states suggest that the tuition option could help students. If other elite schools in Massachusetts with strong endowments value helping students of all backgrounds succeed, this is a model worth considering.

Messina offers four majors, all of which directly connect to the workforce and a BC bachelor’s degree: data science, business, health sciences, and psychology and human development. Students take core liberal arts courses like writing and philosophy and complete an internship in their second year. Messina offers small classes, mentoring, and academic advising. Shuttles run to BC’s other campuses, where students can use the gym or library, get tutoring, or join clubs. While the annual cost of attendance is a nominal $54,600, including housing and food, Boston College pays for all but a student’s “expected family contribution” (calculated by the federal government based on their financial aid application) with grants and a $2,000 loan. Students can earn spending money through work-study.

Messina appeals to students like Lynn resident Danielle Parkinson, who moved from Jamaica three years ago and wants to become a lawyer. When she applied to college, her father, a hotel worker, was the family’s sole breadwinner. “I had anxiety attacks and just depression about how I was going to pay for college, and at one point I thought I wasn’t going to be able to go because I couldn’t afford it,” Parkinson said. Parkinson said she’s grateful to be attending an institution affiliated with a prestigious school where she feels comfortable with a diverse, nonjudgmental student body.

Today, most two-year programs in Massachusetts are at community colleges, which accept all applicants and offer an affordable path to an associate degree. (Tuition and fees average $7,000.) But four-year completion rates at the state’s community colleges averaged just 22.5 percent in 2021, according to data provided to the editorial board by the Department of Higher Education. Just 18 percent of those who started at a community college in 2019 transferred to a four-year college in 2023.

There are also for-profit two-year schools, but they tend to have the worst student outcomes. Some private four-year institutions also offer associate degrees.

There are also a few nonprofits that offer two-year technical schools that help students successfully find jobs. Examples include the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, which teaches subjects such as construction and automotive engineering, and the Urban College of Boston, which focuses on early childhood education and community services.

Messina College is unique in the way it offers a two-year residential experience and a liberal arts education to a select group of low-income students who have completed high school.

It’s a model similar to Loyola University’s Arrupe College in Chicago, an associate degree program that opened in 2015. The Rev. Steve Katsouros, Arrupe College’s founder, said that by offering financial aid, academic advising, mental health services and employer relations, the school has had more than 60 percent of its students — all first-generation and low-income — graduate in three years. About 80 percent of graduates have gone on to four-year institutions. Katsouros now runs the New York-based Come to Believe Network, which helps other schools emulate Arrupe College. New schools are about to open at Butler University in Indianapolis and the University of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx.

Students from Messina will graduate with an associate degree. While an associate degree in liberal arts doesn’t necessarily have much value in the job market, it is incredibly valuable if students who might not otherwise be admitted to Boston College can successfully transfer there. Josh Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, said that lower-income students nationwide are much less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than wealthier students. “If BC can use this as a way to bring in lower-income students at a lower price, and then allow them to transfer to BC or four-year colleges more quickly than what’s happening nationally, that would be an important model to share with the rest of the country,” Wyner said.

It will be three or four years before Messina’s record of student achievement can be measured. But any prestigious school willing to invest its resources in educating low-income, first-generation students deserves applause.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.