Kyle Spencer

Most, who were recently accepted into the program and accustomed to stellar grades and accolades from teachers and parents, were excited and even a little cocky.

But when they ripped open the envelopes, some students gasped. Others shouted. The average score, out of 100%, lingered around 60%.

“It was a reality check,” Artiles said. “I was shocked.”

Every year, this purposely dramatic moment is how students accepted into the SEO Scholars program (Sponsors for Educational Opportunity) begin their time with the organization, which started in 1963: with the realization that they are being profoundly underserved by their schools.

“Then, we immediately tell them to rip it up,” said William Goodloe, SEO’s president and chief executive. “We tell them they have done nothing wrong. We move to the future.”

What follows is the sobering realization of what needs to be done. Students are told that if they commit to the full eight years of the program, attend its after-school, weekend and summer classes, sign up for its enrichment programs, and take advantage of the organization’s college application counselors, mentors and coaches, they will more than make up for what they did not learn in elementary and middle school. They will go to college and excel.

It is no idle claim. The scholars program — headquartered in New York City but with a San Francisco cohort as well — has a 90% college graduation rate, thanks to support by some of the richest donors in the United States, including finance titan Henry Kravis, who leads the SEO board.

SEO also has several offshoots, helping low-income students secure jobs in finance and law. Since 2006, when it transitioned from a smaller scale mentoring outfit to the rigorous, academic-oriented one it is today, it has helped hundreds of low-income students get degrees.

Organizations like SEO Scholars, which turn down far more students than they take, have their critics. Although organizational leaders say they have a holistic selection process and are more interested in committed students than they are in top grade earners, it is still a brutal selection process. Students are generally referred by teachers and principals and must supply report cards, recommendations and a series of short essays, and be interviewed. For every student handed a ticket to and through college, hundreds are denied.

But with its $15 million annual budget, and a commitment to spend $7,000 a year, per student, SEO Scholars has joined a small but growing band of elite college prep programs garnering success by turning themselves into one-stop shopping outlets, offering their students, over the span of many years, the same high-end support as their upper-middle-class peers.

The hallmark of all of these programs is a disheartening reality: Students, no matter how capable, who attend low-performing high schools are often held to lower standards that make success in college nearly out of reach.

There are many programs that try to rectify this, but most are for the short term — a year of tutoring, a few months of SAT prep, a weekend college essay class. They do not address the well-researched and widely understood fact about college persistence.

“You can move the needle a little with these one-off programs,” said Elisabeth Barnett, a senior research scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University. “But to actually graduate a lot of first-generation students, you need to move the needle a lot.”

Organizations like the 30-year-old Posse Foundation have worked to address this for years. Like SEO Scholars, the Posse Foundation has a 90% graduation rate. But to get there, it too, takes the long view, helping hundreds of high school seniors a year secure scholarships, offering them months of college-readiness workshops and facilitating faculty advisory programs once they are on campus, as well as peer mentoring groups and tutoring, until the end of their sophomore year, a time when national dropout rates for low-income students begin to fall.

The 16-year-old New York-based Opportunity Network, which boasts a 93% six-year graduation rate for its now 1,000 fellows, is also comprehensive and long term. It engages students early in high school with a strong academic enrichment program, rigorous SAT prep and college essay writing workshops, transition-to-college boot camps and campus advisory support.

And Yonkers Partners in Education, a Westchester County-based college prep program founded in 2007, enrolls 600 of its 1,200 students in a six-year program that starts in the ninth grade and follows students until the end of their sophomore year of college. The program also offers a strong academic component, and its first class of college-bound students, who are now in their third year of college, has a 93% retention rate.

Samuel Wallis, the program’s executive director, said that if you want to really help students get through college, “The earlier you start, the better.”

Educators at SEO Scholars also place a high premium on rectifying the kind of socioemotional pitfalls that trip up so many first-generation college students.

A team of counselors works around the clock, taking calls from frazzled students — one has gotten a disappointing grade on a midterm, another is having trouble with a roommate. Some SEO students just need to talk with someone who knows how hard they studied for a really challenging calculus exam, or they need an adult who can advocate for them because someone in the bursar’s office cannot find their financial aid paperwork.

But the bedrock of the SEO Scholars program is what happens long before the students get to a college campus.

On a recent Saturday morning, on the third floor of Baruch College’s lower Manhattan campus, this emphasis was on display, as more than 200 high school sophomores, loaded backpacks slung over their shoulders, headed to class. In one, students spent more than an hour preparing to read an oft-talked about article in The Atlantic about the role of sports in American high schools. They noted the words they did not know — embedded, mediocrity, glorify, intractable — and gathered in small groups to hash over their use and meaning.

In one math class, students sat at desks arranged in a semicircle, facing their instructor, Katherine Pauletti, an adjunct professor at Manhattan College and a doctoral student at nearby New York University. Pauletti, casual but intense, sat on a desk in the front of the room and grilled them on the importance of understanding what numbers can and cannot tell you.

“One-hundred-and-three Toyota seat belts were found to be defective,” she said. “Is this good, bad or just OK?” She paused for emphasis. “How can we judge?” There was silence. Then a student blurted out, “You don’t have enough information!”

Several students nodded knowingly.

Artiles said the program has helped him. He felt confident when he arrived at Columbia University. He had done a summer Korean-language program in Seoul, and he had already completed an internship on the Morningside Heights campus. He had the number of an SEO “college persistence adviser” programmed into his cellphone. And this year, when he learned the students in his Contemporary Civilization class would be reading Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he was ready.

He had already read it with SEO Scholars.

This article originally appeared in

Helping Low-Income Students Navigate College

NEW YORK — Diogene Artiles, now a sophomore at Columbia University, recalls gathering in a Manhattan auditorium his freshman year of high school with dozens of ninth graders. They clutched sealed envelopes containing the results of a test they had taken a few weeks earlier, administered by SEO Scholars, a college prep program that ushers low-income students to and through college.

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Kyle Spencer

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Helping Low-Income Students Navigate College