The success of the Posse Foundation and its partnership with Vanderbilt is highlighted in Disrupt Everything-and Win: Take Control of Your Future (Hatchette Book Group/Little, Brown and Company, 2025) by James Patterson, MA'70, and Patrick Leddin, associate professor at Owen Graduate School of Management. A pre-publication version of the book was distributed to all 2025 graduates during Commencement. Disrupt Everything was released Sept. 29 and is available at major booksellers.
This story is an excerpt from the book.
In her early twenties, Debbie Bial is working with youth in New York City when she notices a troubling trend: bright, talented students from diverse backgrounds are dropping out of college. "They were going off to college, and we noticed that many of them were coming home, dropping out. It made no sense because we knew them personally. We knew they were smart, talented, and capable," she recalls.
A simple remark from one student sparks a solution: "I never would have dropped out of college if I'd had my posse with me." This statement stops Debbie in her tracks and ignites a brilliant idea: Why not have a posse or a team of kids go to college together?
This moment leads to the creation of the Posse Foundation, which sends students to college as part of a supportive group of between ten and twelve peers. Debbie needs assistance to get started and finds it in Terry Deal, then a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College and a specialist in organizational behavior and development work.
I never would have dropped out of college if I'd had my posse with me.
"He loved the idea and helped get the players involved," Debbie recounts. Vanderbilt takes a chance on the first Posse class, recognizing the potential in these students despite SAT scores that fall below Vanderbilt norms.
Over the years, Posse cohorts have thrived, silencing critics and proving the validity of a new disruptive model for college admissions based on finding public high school students with extraordinary academic and leadership potential who might have been overlooked by traditional college‑selection processes. Today, Posse's partner colleges and universities award Posse scholars full‑tuition leadership scholarships.
But it was not always that way.
When the foundation begins, Posse needs to raise 20 percent of scholarship funding itself. Five years in, Debbie and Terry are having trouble doing so. Fortunately, Michael Ainslie, then the CEO of Sotheby's and a member of Vanderbilt's Board of Trust, steps in to help find a solution. "Posse intrigued me because this program offered an elite college opportunity to a new cadre of deserving students. It was fundamentally challenging for kids to get admitted to college. We needed to disrupt the old model," he says.
Michael brings Debbie to a restaurant near Lincoln Center, where he lays out a plan. "Let's create a new 501(c)(3), the Posse Foundation. You be the executive director, and I will become the chairman of the board, and we will create a board in the next few weeks." Debbie agrees.
"By the time we met Michael, we knew the program worked," she recounts, "but we had a financial model that wasn't sustainable. We were building up a debt to our university partner. Michael offered a disruptive idea. He believed that we were finding such outstanding students that the university partner would fund all of the scholarships and then proceeded to convince Vanderbilt's chancellor of this new approach."
At the end of 2023, the Posse Foundation has net assets approaching $150 million.
In 2021, the foundation evolves when Lin‑Manuel Miranda partners with Posse to create the Posse Arts and Posse Puerto Rico programs. Posse is now sending scholars to five new university partners, including the California Institute of the Arts and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Doug Christiansen, Vanderbilt vice provost for university enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid, points out that "Vanderbilt would not be the institution it is today without Posse. Since 1989, the program has helped us think differently about who needs to be in a classroom to make it more educationally dynamic and sound. It is a collaboration that, after thirty‑five years, continues to yield incredible results."
One such result is Dr. Shirley M. Collado, part of that first Vanderbilt Posse. At age fifteen, Shirley meets Debbie through the CityKids Foundation in New York City, and a few years later, Debbie asks her, "Have you ever thought about going away to college?" Initially, Shirley thinks it's impossible - her family relies on her too much. But a pivotal endorsement changes everything: Her maternal grandmother tells Shirley's father, "God is giving you this as a gift that none of us could ever give your daughter, and she's earned it, so let her go." With her family's blessing, Shirley embarks on the first Posse journey.
Dr. Shirley M. Collado graduates from Vanderbilt with honors and earns her PhD at Duke. She has completed ten years on the Vanderbilt Board of Trust and is the first woman of color to be voted in as trustee emerita at VU, the first woman of color to serve as an officer of the Board of Trust at VU, and the first Posse scholar to serve on a university or college board of trustees. She becomes the ninth president of Ithaca College and the first person of color to lead the institution - and the first Dominican American to ever lead a four‑year college or university in the United States. She then partners with Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder and board chair of College Track, and becomes president and CEO of College Track.
Monique Nelson‑Nwachuku is another Posse scholar. Today, she serves as the CEO of UniWorld Group, a leading multicultural marketing agency. Like Shirley Collado, she is one of thousands of Posse scholars who earned the chance to participate in the program and used it to change herself and others.
Juan Rajlin, vice president and treasurer of Alphabet and Google and a member of Posse's National Board, puts it this way: "I grew up in Argentina and came to the US to go to school. So access to education quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. Posse's mission - to give access to college to kids with extraordinary leadership ability who might be over‑ looked - is personal to me, as it is to many others who sit on the board. We all share a true passion for the mission of Posse."
Debbie Bial's vision and dedication showcase the transformative power of community and mutual support as well as a commitment to continual refinement and improvement - resulting in an organization that disrupts itself in order to grow stronger and better than ever before. An ability and willingness to review achievements, reflect on them, revise approaches, and recommit to improvement is called the Refine step of the Positive Disruptor Loop.
THE REFINE MODEL
Many people skip this crucial Refine step after achieving a degree of success, but doing so can hinder long‑term progress.
Two retired Army four‑star generals, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, have emphasized the importance of the Refine step during discussions. Petraeus put it this way: "We used to say that after a particular operation or training event . . . the more you beat yourself up, the more open you are about what you didn't get right - the more you're going to learn from it." But don't "beat yourself up" too badly, as long as you learn and improve. Consider Debbie's story, full of refinement efforts - she realized the financial model wouldn't work and, with Michael's help, found a new way forward.
REVIEW: Look at the results. Debbie initially identified a problem with the Posse Foundation's financial model and saw the need for a sustainable solution.
REFLECT: Consider progress and impact. Debbie was willing to listen and learn from Michael so she could understand the broader implications of the financial model.
REVISE: Adjust the approach. Debbie and Michael revised the funding approach to ensure sustainability, which involved creating a new foundation and building a dedicated board.
RECOMMIT: Commit to getting better. Debbie's continual commitment to improving the program led to its significant growth and expanded reach.
The Posse Foundation's disruptive efforts tie into the overarching theme of relationships and family. All relationships form, change, and deepen - including those between Michael and Debbie, among Posse scholars, and between Debbie and everyone who's gone through the program. Beyond the scholars themselves, the powerful impact of positive disruption can be felt through countless families and generations touched by Posse. The program has transformed individual lives and strengthened family bonds, creating generational change through education and opportunity.
- Read about the expansion of the Vanderbilt Posse Scholarship program to Miami and Atlanta
- Read about how Disrupt Everything co-authors James Patterson and Patrick Leddin took advantage of a campus-wide power outage to prove how disruption can be a force for good
