A guide for the college journey
Karla Salazar, executive director of ScholarMatch, discusses how the nonprofit supports students throughout their college years.
Q: What is ScholarMatch’s mission? A:
We support first-generation college students from low-income backgrounds earn a bachelor’s degree within five years. We provide virtual, individualized college success and career advising, financial support — up to $5,000 every year for up to four years — and emotional support. We place a lot of emphasis on mental health and mentoring all the way to graduation.
Q: How did ScholarMatch come about? A:
We started in 2010 as a crowdfunding platform for scholarships in San Francisco but quickly learned that we needed to evolve into a full-service college access and assistance organization. Our services are entirely free to the students, and we’re funded through a combination of individual donors, corporations and foundations.
Q: How wide is your reach?
A: We have over 400 volunteers nationwide, and ScholarMatch has served more than 6,000 students and disbursed more than $5.7 million in scholarship support in the past 13 years. In fact, every year we give $1 million in scholarships. We’re small but mighty.
Q: How does the support begin? A:
We start outreach the spring semester of students’ junior year of high school. Our high school program supports them with the college application process, from essays to interviews, the financial aid form to the final selection, and really understanding what the financial award letter means for them when they make their choice.
If they’re short prerequisites, we also have a partnership with an organization called Scouts to provide online classes required for California schools and AP courses so that students can get the credits to apply for college. We also provide tutoring for them if they need help with their SAT or ACT exam.
Q: What does support look like during college? A:
We assign them a college adviser who works with them from freshman year until they graduate. And by their sophomore year, we assign them a volunteer career coach. We also provide targeted financial support.
Of the $5,000 maximum awarded annually, $3,000 is set aside for them to use for loan repayment, career development or emergency grants. Career development might cover, for example, transportation and business attire for internships. But the No. 1 focus is, if they do have loans, to set that money aside for loan repayment. If they don’t use that flexible funding, we pay that out directly to the lender once they graduate.
Q: What do you want more people to know about your organization and the students? A:
First-generation students often don’t have family members with a robust social network to help them open doors. You could have a 4.7 GPA, but if you don’t have mentors and sponsors that are supporting you through your career trajectory, it’s going to take you longer to get there. And we’re trying to make sure that everybody has equal access to those benefits that we should all enjoy. I’m hoping that all those good individuals out there want to pay it forward and answer the call to action to get involved.