Recent TCU graduates encourage thousands of high school students to pursue college

16 TCU grads are serving as college advisers (photo courtesy of Matt Burckhalter)

Fort Worth, Texas

10/21/2011

This year, 16 TCU graduates answered the call to join Advise TX Advising Corps to serve as near-peer college advisers to lead low-income and first-generation students to college. The organization is headquartered at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Public School Initiatives; TCU joins Texas A&M University and Trinity University as its most recent chapter. According to the Advise TX website (advisetx.org), a growing number of high school students lack adequate access to information about going to college. The organization places "exceptional recent college graduates from all fields of study on high school campuses" following intensive training.

According to Matt Burckhalter, coordinator for Advise TX at TCU, through the month of September TCU's 16 advisers worked with 26,699 students at their partner high schools.

"Our advisers distributed 233 college application fee waivers, 691 ACT fee waivers, and 744 SAT fee waivers," Burckhalter said. "Our advisers registered 753 students for the ACT and 757 students for the SAT. These are all great numbers, but the real big one is the number of students we're servicing--26,699 is a lot of students for us to impact!"

TCU's 16 advisers are working at 16 high schools in nine school districts, representing a diverse mix of urban, suburban and rural high schools:

Fort Worth ISD: North Side, Diamond Hill-Jarvis, South Hills, Dunbar, and Polytechnic

Arlington ISD: Sam Houston, Bowie and Juan Seguin

Irving ISD: MacArthur and Irving

Birdville ISD: Haltom

Lake Worth ISD: Lake Worth

Tyler ISD: John Tyler

Longview ISD: Longview

Athens ISD: Athens

Eustace ISD: Eustace