People hear “college advising” and picture lists and essay edits. Here is what the work actually looks like, and why it changes where our students’ lives go.
Every one of our seniors applies to college and is accepted, and nearly nine in ten of our graduates are still enrolled a year and a half later, at a public school that admits students across the whole academic spectrum. None of that is luck. It is the product of individual attention: years of one-on-one advising and enrichment for every student, which your gift funds for less than $2,000 per student per year.
What ends a student’s path to college is almost never a rejection letter. It is a password that won’t reset. A tax transcript a family cannot obtain. A financial aid line that keeps a parent on hold through an entire work shift. A portal that says “not received” for a form submitted three times. A deposit deadline that passes quietly in July, after the diplomas and the photos, when no adult was watching anymore.
Our families do everything a family can do: they push, they call, they show up, they find a way. But more than 75% of our students will be the first in their family to go to college, which means they are pioneering this process, not repeating it. A family that has been through it before starts with a map: someone who has filed the aid forms, read an award letter, learned which office picks up the phone. Our students and families are drawing that map for the first time, and doing it well. The will and the work are theirs. Our advisors add the one thing only experience can: knowing the route ahead, and refusing to turn back when the system stalls.
In practice, over four years, that means:
Families with means pay private consultants $200 an hour for this kind of navigation. Your gift provides a harder, longer version of it, free of charge, to the students the system was hardest on.
The goal is not admission. It is affordability to graduate. Getting in is only half the problem; a student can be admitted to a college the family cannot sustain, or lose an affordable one to a paperwork failure. So our advisors work the money side from the start: which colleges meet full financial need, which opportunity programs a family qualifies for, and what each path will truly cost. About three quarters of our students qualify for New York State opportunity programs that can turn a reach school into a fully funded one. Finding those paths, proving eligibility, and holding the plan together is the work. Sometimes literally: one recent senior’s fully funded placement waited months on a single tax return her family could not obtain, until her father spotted the family’s tax preparer on the street and walked home with the document. She had stopped believing she could afford to go away to college. She went.
“You can’t predict where you’re going to get in. But we can predict how much money you’re going to have to pay for any given school if you get in.”
And your gift is not only the college office. A large share of ASF’s budget funds the student experience itself: after-school clubs, teaching artists in dance and art, a basketball league, paid internships, study abroad, residential pre-college summers, AP Camp, Career Day for every 10th grader, a college trip in every grade, and an overnight college trip juniors earn with attendance, not GPA. None of it is reserved for the students who already look like college material. That is deliberate. Students can’t choose futures they have never seen, so we show every student more of them. On one upstate trip, a junior left New York City for the first time in his life. He is in college today, at NYU, on a full ride.
Enrichment is also how the trust gets built. Every student has an enrichment advisor from 9th grade, and every club, summer program, and trip application is practice at applying for something that matters, with an adult who follows through. By the time an advisor asks a family for tax returns in junior year, the advisor is not a stranger. That trust is what makes everything above executable.
Context, for the curious: hands-on help with a single federal aid form raised college enrollment 25–30% for low-income students in a randomized study; the same information, without the help, did nothing (Bettinger, Long, Oreopoulos & Sanbonmatsu). Between 10% and 40% of college-intending students from low-income communities melt away the summer after graduation (Castleman & Page, Harvard Education Press). Aid-offer findings: GAO, 2022; New America & uAspire, 2018. Verification figures: NCAN and NASFAA. Call-center figures: GAO, 2024.
Capacity is the whole secret: enough advisors, with enough time, to follow through on every single student. The outcomes speak in comparisons.
SLJ figures from the published SLJ School Profile 2026; advisor caseload from the SLJ College & Career Office. Comparison figures as cited.
And the leverage is remarkable. New York City already invests roughly $36,000 per student per year in its public schools. ASF’s entire annual budget works out to less than $2,000 per student, and that figure is not advising alone: it covers the whole of it, the college office and the entire enrichment program together. That small private supplement determines whether the public’s far larger investment ends in a degree.
This isn’t a hopeful theory. Intensive, individualized advising is the most rigorously proven intervention in college access: a multi-site randomized trial of intensive advising for low-income, first-generation students found it raised bachelor’s-degree completion by 8 percentage points, for about $4,000 per student (Barr & Castleman, 2021). Few effects that large have ever been measured in education. Your gift funds the thing the evidence says works, at a school that has been doing it for two decades.
There is no admissions trick behind these numbers. SLJ is a public school that serves all students regardless of middle school achievement. By Department of Education design, its seats go to students across the whole academic spectrum, half of them essentially by lottery. Many students arrive performing below grade level. Same population, same public system, plus a culture of excellent teaching and one small foundation’s worth of extra capacity for college, career, and enrichment.
That is what makes this school worth more than its own hallways. Harvard researchers profiled SLJ in Restoring Opportunity (Harvard Education Press, 2014) as one of a handful of American schools demonstrably succeeding against inequality, publishing its practices so other educators could learn from them. In 2026, The Hechinger Report featured our college office as a national example of how schools keep advising deeply human.
And the proof compounds. An alum from our Class of 2014 went to Syracuse on a full ride through its opportunity program, finished law school, and practices today as an attorney. He now invites current students to watch him at work in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, blocks from the school. The students donors funded a decade ago are becoming the mentors today’s students learn from.
New York City runs the largest school district in the United States: nearly one million students, more than Los Angeles and Chicago combined. Every June, this school renews the same public proof: that district already holds everything its students need, except the capacity. Your gift is the capacity.
“I love my job because it is to help young people see the best in themselves, and help other people see that too.”
All of this runs on private gifts. Make one today, in any amount, or join us at the 2026 Benefit on Tuesday, October 20 at 230 Fifth in Manhattan: every ticket and sponsorship funds exactly the work you just read about.
