Can the two-year-old Promise Scholars Program—a pan-Atlantic university initiative—reverse decades-long racial underrepresentation baked into the region’s business schools? Academic and community leaders say the signs are promising.

Ashley Hill, who spends nearly every waking moment helping kids prepare for college, remembers her own freshman experience at Dalhousie University like it was yesterday, even though it was 13 years ago. “I was the only black face in a roomful of white,” says the former honours student from Auburn Drive High School in Dartmouth. “I didn’t feel I had anyone in my corner. So, after I failed my first year, I had to drop out.”

Still, the 30-year-old Hill—who eventually asked to be reinstated, obtained her BA in sociology, and, last year, founded The PREP Academy to help university-bound Black youth in the province surmount cultural isolation—can’t stop smiling. What else can you do when the institution that once showed you the door now wants to pick your brains about how to prevent that from ever happening to anybody else?

“This time,” she says sanguinely, “they approached me.”

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