Expanding College Advising Services
for SFUSD Students
“The college admissions process can be very overwhelming and confusing,” said Erick Gonzalez-Gomez, a first-generation college student who recently graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School. It’s a sentiment shared by many high school seniors across the country, and it’s one of the many reasons the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is working to expand college advising services for students.
During the 2020-2021 school year, SFUSD’s College & Career Readiness Department, in partnership with the Stupski Foundation, launched a College Access initiative to meet the advising needs of the district’s most underserved students. Now entering its third year, the initiative has already impacted more than 2,500 students across 11 SFUSD high schools and has made important strides in creating a stronger college access culture districtwide.
The Stupski Foundation’s three-year investment to Spark SF Public Schools has helped SFUSD to shift the way it supports students on their paths to college - aligning services to streamline college advising practices, enabling stronger site-based collaboration, and incorporating more frequent data reviews to better understand what additional resources and counseling services students may need.
Through workshops, one-on-one support, outreach to families in their primary language, and Cash for College community events, schools increased their financial aid support to students by approximately 50% during the 2021-2022 school year.
School sites are seeing major increases in the number of Black, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged students completing financial aid.
The program has also increased college access services through near-to-peer College Ambassadors, dedicated College Rooms or resource spaces at each school, and collaboration with community-based organizations (CBOs) like 10,000 Degrees, uAspire, JCYC, Mission Graduates, and 100% College Prep. Each program site has a College Access team that meets biweekly to encourage collaboration across CBO partners, College Ambassadors, school counselors, administrators, and teachers so everyone is on the same page in regards to postsecondary support and opportunities.
“A lot of students say they don’t want to go to college but then you start talking to them about the process, including financial aid and how it works, and they start to change their mind because they see what the possibilities are on the other side,” said Mareling Balladares, who graduated from SF International High School in 2018 and has been a College Ambassador since 2020.
The College Ambassador role features college-age mentors - many of whom are SFUSD alum and represent the same focal student populations that the program aims to serve. They support students with everything from college admissions and Dream Act applications, to financial aid and scholarship applications.
“If it wasn’t for the College Ambassadors, I wouldn’t have been able to fully plan out my college path, said Gonzalez-Gomez, who just started at City College of San Francisco this fall to study computer science. “They were there to guide me so I didn’t have to tackle the process by myself.”