Reality Changers: Building First Generation College Students

This post was written by Nancy Martin, facilitator of YTFG’s Multiple Pathways to Graduation Work Group and consultant to youth-serving organizations.

During our recent meeting in San Diego, members of the Youth Transition Funders Group visited Reality Changers, a wildly successful college preparation program providing low-income, inner-city youth with the resources to become first generation college students by providing academic support, financial assistance, opportunities for community service, and leadership training.

Helping Students to Cross the Tightrope of Adolescence and Building College Students

"How do we expect young people to make it across the tightrope of adolescence if we are screaming 'DON'T LOOK DOWN!' at them?" That's the question Chris Yanov, Founder and President of Reality Changers, asked in 2001, when he was a middle school teacher in City Heights, one of San Diego's poorest neighborhoods. Yanov rejected the traditional prevention messages (Don't do drugs! Don't be in gangs!) and started a college preparation program with four students and a commitment to giving no more face time to negative behaviors. Thirteen years later, Reality Changers has seen 750 students successfully complete high school and a four-year degree by helping them keep a steady view on high school and college success. "If it doesn't celebrate college, we just don't do it," says Yanov.

Making City Heights a "College Town"

Yanov and his twenty-eight staff (about half of whom are program graduates) are seeking to create a college-going culture in a neighborhood where only 3% of the adults have college degrees and 40% of children live within a block of where a homicide has occurred. Reality Changers provides 225 students in grades eight through eleven in the College Town program with evening tutoring, leadership education, and summer college experiences, and 300 twelfth-grade students in the College Apps Academy with college application assistance. The program is offered to students of all levels of past success. In fact, Reality Changers purposefully "creams off the bottom," filling 20% of its College Town space with students with a GPA of 2.0 or below. Nearly all (97%) of Reality Changers graduates who fulfill the five-year program's expectations are on-track to graduate or have already graduated from a four-year university. (Nationally about 56% of first-year college students graduate within six years.) Ten program graduates are Gates Millennium Scholars.

Low Program Cost and Impressive Return on Investment

Reality Changers offers a fantastic "return on investment": About $1,000 covers the cost of a student's participation in a year of the College Town program. $25,000 covers the cost of a twenty-student College Apps section for the fourteen-month program, and produces $1,000,000 in scholarships for low-income youth in San Diego County. Since 2013, the program's graduates have earned about $25,000,000 in college scholarships.

Given the program's clear success, our group asked Yanov about scaling the Reality Changers model, to which he responded that they would like to go deeper with their efforts to make City Heights a College Town before they think about expanding to other areas.  "Gangs don't have a waiting list, so why should we?" he asks.