Coming in from Chicago, it’s not a pretty ride to Thomas M. McDermott Jr.’s office. A mile to the north, you roll down from an unlovely concrete overpass that spans a trio of railroad tracks, greeted by a blighted strip of U.S. 41 that leads past the formerly marvelous structure that used to house the State Bank of Hammond. A wooden eagle, painted feathers slowly flaking off, is perched on the neoclassic building between tree-sized columns and golden gryphons on the edge of decay. The remainder of the road to McDermott is littered with similarly disused buildings, many plastered with “For Sale” placards: first, an old body shop; next, the Calumet Theatre; and then a boarded-up fast-food joint with drive-thru signs ripped from their casings, unrecognizable as belonging to any particular chain. The empty buildings are symbols of a decline that’s cast its pall over the city for decades, as industrial plants were shuttered and the population, which peaked at well above 100,000 in the 1960s, trickled down near 77,000.

McDermott’s office at City Hall, an imposing, Depression-era structure still in prime condition, is separated from the blight by only a stairwell and a manicured lawn. Across the street stands Hammond High School, where the graduation rate has fallen to 36 percent.

This baby-faced mayor, though, thinks he can turn his city around. If he weren’t a true believer, he would not slave away most days from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, hoping to revive the city where he spent much of his youth and where his father, former Mayor Thomas M. McDermott Sr., struggled against the same interminable forces of corporate restructuring and globalization, machine politics and the cruel cycle of poverty that now confront his son.

Like all small-city mayors, McDermott attends parades, reshuffles budgets and glad-hands with local business leaders. But there’s one item on the 39-year-old’s political agenda that is different and might help lift the city from its plight: a program called College Bound, which pledges to pay college tuition for children of all Hammond homeowners. While it may seem an odd use of tax revenue, McDermott and his advisers insist the initiative will attract home buyers, raising property values and civic commitment even as it ups the education and skill levels of the city’s population.

Across the rust belt and the nation, dozens of cities are pursuing similar projects, betting millions of dollars that free college education can foster widespread social change. A handful, including Kalamazoo, Mich., which pioneered the concept, were instant beneficiaries of generous donations from wealthy benefactors. Most, like Hammond, have had to fight for public funds or beg citizens for small contributions. For all their nascent successes, it’s still not clear whether these massive civic investments are an innovative idea to aid ailing cities or a well-meaning misuse of money better spent elsewhere.

McDermott, whose parents divorced when he was young, split his childhood between Napa, Calif., where his mother relocated, and his father’s home in Hammond. In high school, he scored average grades. Public service intrigued him, but he didn’t think he’d ever have a shot at any office. “I wasn’t even college material, much less thinking about running for mayor,” McDermott says.

He enlisted in the Navy, where he worked as an electrician and developed a work ethic, got married and had two kids. (He and his wife, Marissa, now have four.) After six years, he returned to Northwest Indiana and took a job as a supervisor at a local power plant, spending nights in classes at Purdue University, Calumet, the huge Indiana school’s local campus. McDermott graduated with almost straight A’s and then quit his job in 1997 to attend law school at the University of Notre Dame. After practicing as an attorney for a few years, he ran in his first political campaign in 2004 and won, becoming the youngest mayor in Hammond’s history.

It’s a lovely redemption tale of the triumph of education and hard work over aimless, youthful laziness, and McDermott often shares it with students when he visits Hammond high schools to promote College Bound. But despite his precocious electoral success, the city McDermott presides over is nowhere near a happy ending.

Long gone are the days when young men could walk out the doors of high school on graduation day into an industrial plant desperate for workers, ready to offer head-of-household wages and benefits for life. Hammond was never fully a steel town like nearby Gary, Ind., but much of its economy relied on plants that fabricated products from the mills’ steel. The slow march of globalization brought consolidation and competition to the steel industry, and with the collapse of the mills in Gary and South Chicago came job cuts and plant closings in Hammond.

As the economy declined, crime rose and Hammond began to empty, like many industrial cities throughout the Midwest. Some residents left in search of new jobs; many who could afford it moved south to Dyer, Munster, Crown Point and other safer, cleaner Indiana suburbs, only to be replaced by low-income folks from nearby Chicago.

To be sure, some neighborhoods in Hammond are filled with beautiful, five-bedroom, $700,000 homes. But as a whole, the city’s statistics are embarrassing: One in 5 families lived below the poverty line as of the 2000 census. Barely half the freshmen who enter its public high schools graduate, and 1 in 4 adults is a high school dropout. Without the economic boon from the Horseshoe Casino, which opened in 1996 in the marina on the north edge of the city, Hammond might already be a ghost town.

“I have a city that’s challenged,” McDermott says, in the tender tone of a mother discussing a disabled child. “Schools are challenged; the population is changing; we’re getting poorer; we’re losing homeowners.”

Though McDermott enjoys significant support in the city, having won re-election last year, he’s often blamed for not fixing Hammond’s seemingly intract able problems. At Mayor’s Night Out, a monthly community forum, residents routinely savage him with tough questions and insults. “I’ve had people go in there and say, ‘You’re a horrible mayor; I think you’re dumb,’” McDermott says.

In five years, he’s made some progress: He’s helped bring in retailers (and employers) like The Home Depot, and the homicide rate has dropped by nearly half on his watch. But until he persuaded the city to create the College Bound program, McDermott had done little to undo the toll of decades of change for the worse.

On Thanksgiving Day 2005, McDermott was with his wife’s family in New York when his friend and attorney, Kevin Smith, called to tell him about a story he’d heard on National Public Radio. An anonymous group of donors in Kalamazoo, two hours’ drive northeast of Hammond, had created a multimillion-dollar endowment to pay for every child in the school district to attend college. By building a source of youthful human capital, they hoped to re-energize the city, which shares a parallel history with Hammond and battles similar social ills.

McDermott seized on the idea. He knew Hammond would have a tough time raising philanthropic funds, but maybe the town could use public money to support a program like the Kalamazoo Promise. He began running the numbers: How many students would use the program? Where would they go to college? What’s the tuition?

His back-of-the-envelope calculation reached a figure: $5 million. We can do this, he thought. Casino gaming revenue provided about $30 million per year for Hammond’s economic development and capital projects like road construction and police stations. Why not invest a slice of it in Hammond’s rising generation?

He called Tom Dabertin, a former government and schools bureaucrat who runs a consulting firm that often works for the city. “I have this idea,” McDermott began. Within months, an ordinance had gone before the City Council. Unlike dozens of other mayors who heard about the Kalamazoo Promise and tried to copy it but couldn’t raise enough money or win approval, McDermott would successfully launch College Bound before the 2006-2007 academic year.

Each of the so-called “promise” programs is different, and Hammond’s is tailored toward McDermott’s priorities. The city lost about 1,000 residents in the decade leading up to the 2000 census. When McDermott took office, its population was falling by almost that many every year. Fewer than 2 in 3 of Hammond’s 32,000 homes were owner-occupied (compared with 90 percent in nearby towns); many had been abandoned.

Video: Hammond, Ind. in the 1950s

So McDermott aimed one of College Bound’s few strict requirements squarely at the issue: Only children of Hammond homeowners would be eligible. If parents relocated to the city to take advantage of the program, their children younger than seventh-graders would receive full funding, with older kids eligible for lesser scholarships on a scale that slid down to 60 percent of tuition for current seniors in high school. Children of renters who purchased a home that year would be treated the same as those of established owners: with a full ride. In Hammond, where just 11 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree, any education incentive might deepen the talent pool and attract employers — or some graduates might become entrepreneurs themselves. But when it comes to the program’s chief goal, McDermott doesn’t mince words.

“My primary concern is selling homes. That the mayor’s job,” he says. “But there’s also the fact that we can improve kids’ lives.”

McDermott unveiled College Bound in a speech at Hammond High in March 2006. After a series of hearings throughout the city and the addition of a 40-hours-per-summer community service requirement for students during years they received scholarships, the Hammond City Council unanimously approved it.

But the Indiana State Board of Accounts didn’t like the idea of using casino cash to send kids to college, as statutes required the money to be spent on economic development, and scholarship funds didn’t obviously fall into that category. McDermott, a Democrat, spent months crusading on the program’s behalf, eventually appealing to Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, who assented.

“I believe if you’re right, regardless of what you hear and the feedback from people, if you believe you’re acting in their best interests, you gotta do it; you gotta be brave,” McDermott says. “At the end of the day, you look like the smart guy, but it’s hard to get there.”

Indeed, College Bound has since brought Hammond national attention, including a spot on the short list for the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 2007 City Livability Award. It also helped generate support to re-elect McDermott last fall despite public disapproval of some of his policies — particularly his cutting all Health Department funding, ostensibly to reduce the high local tax rate. In its first two years, the scholarship initiative sent 241 Hammond kids to college, the majority from local public schools, where about 500 students graduate each year. (Well more than 300 applied for the coming academic year, though the final number of scholarships was not available when this article was written.) The program now costs about $2 million per year; that figure is projected to double eventually.

In Hammond and elsewhere, city-based scholarships have caught on with politicians and policy wonks because of their potential — at least, theoretically — as a catch-all method of revitalizing a community. For many citizens, though, the promises are often about one thing: cash.

The average cost of tuition at a four-year publicly supported university rose about 25 percent in the first years of this decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Despite more scholarship money available than ever before (somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars annually, depending on who’s counting), grant and loan dollars targeted at low- and middle-income families haven’t kept pace with financial need. Back in the Nixon administration, federal Pell grants covered as much as 72 percent of the cost of four-year colleges; today, they cover less than one-third.

Merit-based financial aid, given to students whose higher academic achievement often indicates greater family financial resources, grew a whopping 250 percent between 1996 and 2006, according to the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs. Need-based aid from state governments, aimed at lower-income students, grew just 58 percent during the same period.

It’s no wonder promise programs have garnered enthusiasm from citizens in places as disparate as El Dorado, Ark., where Murphy Oil Corp. pledged $50 million in scholarships over the next 20 years; Pittsburgh, where local medical center UPMC kicked in $10 million now and promised $90 million in challenge funds; and Denver, which boasts a highly educated professional class of migrants from other U.S. cities but an embarrassing public school system and where a K-12 revamp is moving in conjunction with a scholarship fundraising campaign anchored by a $50 million challenge grant from a wealthy couple.