By Don Krim
OMG, what will we at Jóvenes Adelante (JA) do with this record flood of eager applicants seeking to change the trajectory of their lives?! With 612 initial applications, we invited 375 of those to submit full ones. We expect a record number of 150-200 highly qualified aspiring students to complete an essay, submit school choices, budgets, family income history, and this year for the first time, a vocational assessment questionnaire (for those coming directly out of high school.)
Intimidating, certainly! Challenging, yes! Fortunately, we have spent years developing the agility to be quick on our feet at Jóvenes Adelante, and if we need to call 300 applicants and offer assistance and find out if applicants are stuck, we have the capacity to do so. That is the power of the terrific, highly committed and professional staff team that JA has built over the last years, a team with the strength, insight, and experience needed to boost our scholars into the impactful lives they seek.
For Jóvenes Adelante, a bad scenario would be either not enough applicants or not enough financial sponsors. A worse nightmare: high quality students waiting, and not enough funding or committed guiding mentor capacity to take them. Fortunately, at Jóvenes Adelante our process tends to find the best applicants, and then our community of supporters tends to come through! Our goal going into this academic cycle was to support 35 new students. Now, with this wonderful flood of qualified applicants, our staff is willing to stretch its capacity to serve 40 new scholars. That leaves it up to all of us to find the donors to meet the demand. As of this writing, we have, already, 27.5 sponsorship commitments. You read that right—we are only at the beginning of February, and we are more than 2/3 of the way to our initial goal.
Critically, for the first time in years, approximately 2/3 of our applicants are coming directly out of high school (we do support students already in university if they have six semesters more to go). We are so excited by this result because it shows that our efforts to bring aspirational hopes to high schoolers are proving successful! Here’s hoping it marks a trend (in due time we will tap our contacts at the Secretary of Education and find out how many students graduated from high school this year, as well as during the peak COVID-19 years).
Jóvenes Adelante supports students on average for five years, including their professional credentialing. Our base premium scholarship + a new laptop is often only the beginning. As is more widely known, each student has an individual mentor; we have a team of volunteer psychologists to support our students. Less known: our staff guidance counselor and the selection team are paying greater attention to how our students are choosing their career paths. Our new master’s degree pilot support for selected JA graduates is designed to address specialization, and English tutoring support ranging from beginner to international certification-level exams is meant to continue student differentiation in the marketplace, as are our success skills programs.
When the entire package of university support is put together, JA leads the way in restoring and bringing educational equity to local San Miguel-region students. These first-generation university students with high vision but low resources are making the great socio-economic leap forward via higher education. That is the meaning of Jóvenes Adelante! Our 83% graduation rate tells the story: financial support is not enough to reach parity with more socio-economically advantaged students, but JA’s comprehensive program helps parity become a reality (the state and national average is 26%).
I have often written that “no one does it alone.” Our students cannot, and neither can JA. We cannot do what we do without continued, committed, ongoing community support. After all, we are not responding to some immediate crisis—we are focused on long-term investment in the local population that is sorely needed. We cannot do this systemically without a unified strategy that takes into account local, regional, national, and continental economic trends. While it may seem a cliche, “think globally, act locally” has tremendous meaning when immersed in the sphere of education in an era where almost the entire world is still stuck in early 19th century models, while economic and vocational trends often change at warp speed. I am often asked if JA considers alternative educational models to support, and the answer of course is “yes.” That said, our direct market of applicant students is telling us they need us. And the Mexican school structure, including at the university level, is not a flexible one. There are limits to what we can do. We are now and have always been student centric. In the here and now, in San Miguel de Allende and all over Mexico, more students are seeking higher education. Our mission is to help them succeed while we hold a vision that a future Mexico will be very different from what it is today.
On March 16 at 1:30pm at Smart Space, Salida de Celaya 34, Jóvenes Adelante will present its first in-person annual report since the COVID-19 epidemic began. We would love to see you there, and although the focus, of course, will be on the achievements of 2022, we always offer a sneak peek at the progress of 2023, challenges, and questions we are internally asking.
With your support, JA will meet its new goal of supporting up to 40 new students in 2023, in addition to our ongoing 113, and our graduate students. Did you know that Jóvenes Adelante can accept a half sponsor, and we will match your generosity (which is manageable for you) with a partner, or you can form a sponsorship pool with friends, as long as someone is responsible for the full financial support of the assigned student in the end? To be a financial sponsor contact donkrim@jovenesadelante.org
