Six years after starting college, 24% of first-generation students hold a bachelor’s degree, compared with 59% of students whose parents also attended, according to U.S. Department of Education data compiled by the Council for Opportunity in Education.
One Bay Area program aims squarely at that gap, and Jean-Pierre Conte has backed it for years. SEO Scholars San Francisco reports an 85% college graduation rate among its alumni, more than 30 percentage points above the national average, and its most recent graduates were admitted to Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell and Princeton.
An Eight-Year Commitment, Not a Four-Year One
SEO Scholars San Francisco was founded in 2011 by Adam Karr, an alumnus of SEO’s career-training program, extending a model the national organization built in New York in 1963. It follows students from ninth grade through their first year of college, more than double the span most scholarship programs cover.
The Bay Area chapter serves more than 300 scholars a year and delivers over 700 hours of academic instruction outside regular school hours, along with mentorship, help with college applications and early exposure to career fields. Every SEO Scholar in San Francisco has been admitted to a four-year college, the organization reports.
More than 92% of the program’s scholars are first-generation college-bound students, and all of them come from low-income Bay Area households, according to the organization’s own program data. Nationally, first-generation students made up 56% of undergraduates as of the most recent federal count, a share that has fallen from 64% in 1990 as more students arrive at college with a parent who already has a degree.
Persistence Is Key
Six years after enrolling, 52% of first-generation students have left school with no credential at all, compared with 30% of continuing-generation students, the same federal data shows. That gap opens well after admission, during the years a student is already enrolled.
SEO Scholars carries its students through their first year of college rather than ending at the admissions letter. Support keeps running through exactly the stretch where the national numbers show first-generation students most often leave school without finishing.
The income gap tracks the completion gap closely. First-generation graduates who do finish a bachelor’s degree earn a median of $38,500 twelve months out, compared with $40,000 for graduates whose parents also attended college, and they carry slightly less student debt on average, $32,141 versus $36,089 four years after graduation. The gaps narrow once a degree is actually in hand. Getting to that point is the harder part.
What Conte’s Foundation Put Behind It
Jean-Pierre Conte, founder and managing partner of his family office, Lupine Crest Capital, was a first-generation college student himself. He has been a consistent supporter of SEO Scholars and the organization’s work.
Conte has also shown up for the program in person. He was among the honorees at SEO Scholars San Francisco’s 2022 Achievement Benefit, which raised more than $4 million for the program that year.
