Supporting Senior Students in College Matriculation

CLIENT:

The School City of Hammond

HAMMOND, IN

In 2015, The School City of Hammond was looking for a way to best support their senior students in college matriculation.

The Challenge

The ability and capacity of counseling departments to serve college-bound students declined as their responsibilities increased. Students were undermatching in colleges and scholarships. We stepped in to establish a way to position themselves to best support students in this profile.

Our goal was to find opportunities to appropriately blend the content expertise needed to help this process (FAFSA completion, Common App navigating, Financial Aid Award decoding) with trusted relationships with seniors.

The Solution

In conjunction with the district and key stakeholders, we designed and continue to support The College Blueprint program that helps seniors matriculate to college. We implemented coaching and resources for select teachers to implement the program.

The Outcome

Our ongoing efforts to attend classes, provide resources, collect data, and engage 1:1 with instructors helped students and families tremendously throughout this process. The results are astounding!

After coaching 7 teachers, we had over 1,200 college applications completed and 3.5 million dollars in financial aid awarded in a single year.

From only 5 students in 2015, The College Blueprint program grew to more than 150 students across 5 high schools. It has evolved to be a peer mentorship program with matriculation and persistence data of over 90% of students enrolling and 75% persisting into year two at over 20 different universities across the country.

Let’s do the intentional work.