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When the Alamo Colleges District started the AlamoPROMISE program in 2020, the goal was to boost college enrollment in Bexar County from less than 50% to more than 70% within 10 years.
Now, with their sixth cohort halfway through their first semester, AlamoPROMISE program director Stephanie Vasquez said Bexar County is well on the way to meeting that goal.
“When we see the most recent data points that have looked at both in-state and out-of-state, we see the Bexar County college-going rate is now at 64%,” Vasquez said Monday during a panel discussion on promise scholarship programs.
Vasquez said Alamo Colleges was aided in its goal of creating a college-going culture by Bexar County’s public universities, which followed the community college system’s lead and began offering Promise scholarships shortly after Alamo Colleges did.
Promise scholarships guarantee eligible students can go to college without paying tuition. They’re usually last-dollar scholarships, covering whatever is left after state and federal aid is applied.
Alamo Colleges started by offering AlamoPROMISE to students in low-income high schools with the lowest college-going rates. Now, all Bexar County high school seniors are eligible, and more than 30,000 have enrolled since the program began.
Vasquez said it has made an especially big impact in high-poverty schools.
“We've seen locally at Alamo, when we look at pre-Promise baselines for the enrollment that was happening for our Promise high schools, to post-Promise, upwards of 41% increase in college going at those levels,” Vasquez said.
Historical data previously showed that less than 12% of Bexar County eighth graders from low-income families earned a college degree within six years of high school graduation.
Early signs show that AlamoPROMISE is having a positive impact. John Barnshaw with the national organization College Promise conducted an independent study of the program and presented his findings during the panel, which was part of a College Promise conference held at Palo Alto College in San Antonio.
“I looked at every other factor that I thought might influence it. And sure enough, AlamoPROMISE, being in AlamoPROMISE, has a positive effect on being retained and your likelihood of completion,” Barnshaw said.

Compared to other Alamo Colleges students, Barnshaw said AlamoPROMISE students are about 17% to 30% more likely to return to college for a second year. And, if they return for a second year, he said they’re eight times more likely to graduate.
Barnshaw also found that AlamoPROMISE drove enrollment growth at the Alamo Colleges during and after the pandemic.
“If I had to say in one sentence what I found, it was: AlamoPROMISE works,” Barnshaw said.
But Vasquez said there’s still a lot of work to do. Although their initial goal was focused on enrollment, now she said their focus was shifting to graduation and job placement.
According to Barnshaw, about 31% of students who enroll in college for the first time at Alamo Colleges graduate four years later. His analysis found that AlamoPROMISE students graduate at the same rate as other Alamo Colleges students.
That’s actually a high graduation rate for community colleges, partly because it doesn’t include students who transfer.
Still, although the numbers need to be put into context, Vasquez said the Alamo Colleges wants to do better.
“It does need to be socialized externally so people can really help kind of manage expectations and understand that it's not it's not a bad thing to have 30% graduate (in four years at a community college). That's actually really great,” Vasquez said.
“We are open access, so you will see some of that reflected in our metrics. But I'm not using that as a way to say it's not going to get better,” Vasquez said. “But that for us is a challenge, and that is our task at hand.”

Barnshaw found that 59% of Alamo Colleges students and 56% of AlamoPROMISE students don’t return the following fall after their first time enrolling in college.
The Alamo Colleges don’t have admissions requirements, but students do need to maintain a 2.0 grade point average in order to stay enrolled.
Vasquez said that could account for why some students drop out, but it’s not the full story.
“I think it's the combination of things. So, one can be academic preparation, right? But I think especially with an open-access population that we serve, sometimes it's other competing priorities,” Vasquez said. “They may take a semester off because (they) need to go and supplement (their) family's income.”
Vasquez said about 4,000 of the 30,000 AlamoPROMISE students have graduated or transferred so far. Another 13,600 Promise students are currently enrolled.
Because students must take classes every fall and spring semester to remain an AlamoPROMISE student, Vasquez said some of the remaining 12,400 students may still graduate from Alamo Colleges. They just won’t be considered a Promise student.
In addition to the analysis by College Promise, a recent economic impact report conducted by St. Mary’s University Professor Belinda Román found that AlamoPROMISE added about $634 million in economic growth to Bexar County over the first four years of the program. That includes federal grant dollars and jobs created to operate the program.