First-generation college applications are surging in Texas. Here’s why.
Until a few months ago, Getsemani Ramirez didn’t think she’d be able to go to college.
Ramirez, a senior at Sam Houston High School in Arlington, dreams of working in the medical field. Someday, she wants to open a clinic in her neighborhood in East Arlington to help people who couldn’t afford to get care anywhere else.
But she knew those dreams required a college education, something no one else in her family had gotten. She also knew her parents wouldn’t be able to help financially. So at the end of her junior year, she began to resign herself to the idea of not going to college and doing something else with her life instead.
But last summer, Ramirez attended a program at Texas Christian University where college advisers talked to students about things like college applications and financial aid. As she heard more about the amount of assistance that’s available to low-income families, she started to see college as more of a possibility.
“After that day, I just felt a lot of relief,” she said.
Ramirez isn’t alone. New data suggests that Texas saw major growth this year in college applications from first-generation students — those who would be the first in their families to go to college. School counselors and other college-access advisers in Tarrant County schools say they’re seeing those results play out here, as well.
Common App data shows surge in first-gen college applications
By Feb. 1, 43,322 first-generation students applied for college, according to figures from Common App, a nonprofit that offers a single college application form that students can use to apply at more than 1,000 colleges across the country, including most schools in Texas. That total represents a 72% increase over the same point last year. That uptick comes after several years of more modest, but steady, growth in applications from first-generation students in Texas.
Over the past decade, Texas lawmakers have adopted a number of policies aimed at getting more high school students to see college as a viable option. Among them is a 2019 law requiring students to apply for state or federal financial aid, or submit a signed opt-out form, before graduating from high school.
Another law, passed in 2023, allows students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches to take dual-enrollment courses tuition-free, giving them an opportunity to earn college credit at no cost before they graduate from high school. A number of colleges, including Tarrant County Community College, began waiving tuition for dual-credit courses for all students after the law went into effect.
Cynthia Carter, a counselor at Sam Houston High School, attributed much of the uptick in college applications from first-generation students to the requirement that students fill out a FAFSA before they graduate. Counselors can try to get students to understand that federal financial aid can open up possibilities for them, she said, but nothing is so persuasive as telling seniors that they can’t graduate if they don’t fill out the form.
About 90% of Sam Houston’s students are economically disadvantaged, according to the Texas Education Agency. That means almost all conversations about college begin with the question of how students will be able to afford it, Carter said. Many students and their families don’t understand how much money is available to help low-income students go to college, she said. For example, federal Pell Grants offer low-income students up to $7,395 in financial aid. That amount, plus some institutional aid, can put college within reach for many students, she said, especially if they go to school nearby and live with their parents.
Campus leaders at Sam Houston make a point to celebrate anytime a student gets a scholarship, Carter said. The school secretary reads names and scholarship amounts during morning announcements, and sometime in the spring, the school’s drumline, dance team and cheerleaders lead scholarship recipients through the school in a mini parade. It’s the same kind of celebration the school holds when one of its teams makes the playoffs, she said.
“If we do it for football, soccer and basketball, we do it for kids going to college,” she said.
But even as she and other counselors work to make some students’ college dreams possible, Carter has watched a college education move from difficult to attain to a near impossibility for others. Last June, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton worked with the Trump administration to end the Texas Dream Act, a 24-year-old state law that granted in-state tuition to undocumented students who graduated from Texas high schools and had lived in the state for at least three years.
Undocumented students have never been able to receive federal financial aid, but until recently, they were eligible for Texas state aid. But the dismantling of the Texas Dream Act ended that practice, as well.
Carter said she worries about the students affected by that change. Teachers and school counselors spend years telling their students to believe in their own potential and chase their dreams, she said. She worries that many students took that message to heart, then saw their dreams evaporate.
“What they dreamed and hoped to be when they were in elementary school and they had those little dress-up days, and all the professionals came and showed them all their careers — what happens to this child’s dream once all of that is stripped away?” she said.
Tarrant County college advocates see more first-generation students
Other college-access advocates in Tarrant County say they’re seeing signs of the same uptick in first-generation college students the data shows statewide. Danyatta Harrell, director of TCU’s College Advising Corps, said in an email that the program’s college advisers are seeing higher student turnout at events they host and more high school students initiating conversations about college options.
TCU’s College Advising Corps places recent college graduates in underserved high schools across Tarrant County to help low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students get to college. The fact that many of the advisers were first-generation college students themselves helps high school students see them as trusted role models, Harrell said.
Jason Titus, managing director of programs at the T3 Partnership, said the organization has seen steady growth in the number of students at the high schools it serves going on to college. The nonprofit, which is also known as Tarrant To and Through, works with schools in Fort Worth, Crowley and Castleberry ISDs, as well as Lamar High School in Arlington ISD.
Although T3 doesn’t track which of its students are first-generation, Titus said the demographics of the districts where the organization works means that “a large number” of them would be the first in their families to go to college.
Titus said he suspects that one of the factors behind the uptick in first-generation students is that there are many organizations across the state working to make that happen. T3 works specifically with high school students in Tarrant County, but there are organizations doing the same work across Texas. For example, RGV Focus works with students in the Rio Grande Valley, and Emerge does similar work in Houston. Although they’re all limited in scope, those groups work closely together to share ideas and best practices, he said.
Another factor is that resources to help low-income students afford college have grown, Titus said. Several colleges and universities have launched scholarship programs that offer free tuition to students whose families earn below a certain threshold. For example, the TCU for Texans program covers tuition for students who are Texas residents and come from families whose adjusted gross income is $70,000 or less. And last year, the University of Texas System expanded its Promise Plus program to offer free tuition to Texas residents who earn $100,000 or less.
But Titus said he thinks the biggest piece of the equation is that, as more first-generation students make it to college, they share information with younger friends and siblings about how to navigate the process and what college life is like. Once younger students see someone close to them succeed in college, they begin to see it as attainable, he said. College advisers like the ones at T3 work hard to establish trust with high school students, he said, but those students will always place the highest trust in their friends and relatives.
“The number one adviser of students is other students,” he said.
Parents urged Arlington high school senior to follow her dreams
Ramirez, the Sam Houston senior, said she hopes to be able to fulfill that role for other students. High school counselors and other advisers have been a big help with understanding deadlines and dealing with applications and financial aid paperwork, she said. But she doesn’t have many older friends or relatives who are in college now, so she doesn’t have many peers she can talk to about what college life is like or how to handle the transition from high school. Even now, as she decides where she wants to go to college, she doesn’t have anyone to talk to about how they handled that decision.
Although her parents can’t offer much help with paying for college and don’t have any insight to offer on how to navigate the process, Ramirez said they’ve supported her in other ways. Since she was little, they’ve always encouraged her to dream bigger, not smaller, she said. And when it came time to start making decisions about what she would do after high school, they encouraged her to keep chasing those dreams.
After all, they remind her, she can’t lose anything by trying.
This story was originally published December 8, 2025 at 4:30 AM.
