Alamo Promise expands to 47 schools
More seniors can apply to receive tuition-free college
The Alamo Colleges District is starting the semester with a bigger pool of high school seniors who can apply for a tuition-free education, having upped the number of their participating schools from 30 to 47.
The district’s board voted last month to increase the list of schools in the Alamo Promise program, increasing the number of eligible students from 12,200 to 13,500 amid recruiting for the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters.
The program covers the cost of tuition and mandatory fees for up to three years for eligible graduating seniors from the San Antonio area.
“Our goal is to hopefully enroll about 3,900 promise students for next academic year,” said Stephanie Vasquez, chief program officer for Alamo Promise. “We’ve had over 8,500 — we are getting pretty close to 9,000 as we go into January — of students that have taken that first step to sign up and saved their seat to be an Alamo Promise Scholar.”
The program launched in 2019, enrolling about 2,900 students from 25 high schools for the fall of 2020. But that number decreased to close to 2,500 for the fall of 2021 amid pandemic woes that had kept most high school seniors learning at home and disconnected from their campus resources.
Retention rates for the young program have also been about the same as the rest of the Alamo Colleges’ first-time students, Vasquez said, with about 70 percent retention during the jump from fall and spring semesters and about 50 percent from fall to fall.
“Ideally, we would like to be able to exceed that,” she said. “But this has been a really odd time to establish any sort of baseline data or even predict student patterns because things have been so fluid.”
The goal now is to raise the region’s college-going rate from 47 percent to 70 percent. That growth starts by prioritizing schools with low college attendance rates — below 50 percent among seniors up to now — and economically disadvantaged populations.
“Essentially we want to be able to get to a point where we are able to serve all of the public comprehensive high schools in the area,” Vasquez said. “And we are on that track, but we are trying to do so in a way where we start with this need criteria for that phased-in expansion.”
The students who have made that initial pledge will work with the district’s five community colleges to complete financial aid applications and the registration process ahead of the fall. There’s an initial priority deadline of Feb. 28 to enlist as many students as possible, but applications will still be accepted after that.
Over the summer, the board had approved an expansion from 25 to 30 schools, but had an opportunity to add more schools. The colleges have raised more than $12 million in private donations for the Promise program, scholarship and endowments, Vasquez said, and more than $3 million from the public side, primarily from city of San Antonio contributions.
Just this December the board approved a contribution the city pledged of $2.4 million to support the Promise scholars for the third year of the program.
“We are still keeping that momentum and what we are trying to do is to make sure that we are able to serve as many students as possible and keeping those resources and activities on a steady stream,” Vasquez said.
The program has had to adjust to changes the pandemic has caused, expanding the enrollment window to allow students to enroll mid-year for the spring or fall semesters, and being flexible about the class load commitment, Vasquez said.
“Initially we really wanted students to have basically 18 semester credit hours a year … so that they can graduate within three years or less,” Vasquez said. “And that is a goal that we want to work toward, but we don’t want to arbitrarily have a credit hour requirement that then excludes students from the program if this semester they need to take part-time credit hours because of (other) obligations.”