Last April, HISD’s Board of Education voted to accept $8.5 million in grants to support the district’s college readiness programs. One of the initiatives those funds made possible was the creation of a 28-person corps of college success advisors, whose ambitious goal is to boost college application, attendance, and completion rates among HISD graduates.

After just one semester of having the corps in place, HISD is already seeing a significant increase in the number of students applying to college — and that has caught the attention of local news media.

The corps’ success is the subject of a Jan. 22 article on Houston Public Media’s website, in which reporter Laura Isensee notes the district’s college application rate has jumped the most among Hispanic students.

“The program so far is making a pretty significant difference,” said Ruth Lopez Turley, a Rice University professor quoted in the article.

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