Georgia Tech accepts seven students from Cross Keys High

Seven students at Cross Keys High School in Brookhaven were admitted early action to Georgia Tech, the largest group to be accepted from any DeKalb County school. 

All seven are the first in their families to attend college. According to the Georgia Department of Education, Cross Keys has an approximately 88 percent Hispanic student population enrolled in the 2024-2025 school year.

Georgia Tech has admitted 2,650 early action applicants (in-state only) to the class of 2029. More than 8,100 early action applications were received this cycle, resulting in an overall admission rate of 33 percent.

The Cross Keys students’ success in part is due to College AIM, a nonprofit organization that advocates and counsels students on post-secondary options in five DeKalb County high schools.

In addition to Cross Keys, College AIM serves Towers, McNair, Stone Mountain, and Lithonia High Schools “to ensure that students have all of the post secondary opportunities they dream of and deserve,” said founder and executive director Sam Aleinikoff.

When College AIM launched a decade ago, most partner schools had fewer than 40 percent of students enrolling in post-secondary programs, which included technical colleges, community colleges, and bachelor degree programs. Now, about 70 percent of College AIM students have enrolled in a post-secondary program.

College AIM coaches hold group workshops starting in ninth grade, leading students through the options for post-secondary plans. By 12th grade, students enter individual, post-secondary advising, ranging from building a college list to making a final decision. College AIM coaches help with essay writing, completing FAFSA forms, requesting recommendations, and more — the nuts and bolts of the college application process.

Because the DeKalb County School District does not have college counselors at each high school, College AIM tries to fill the gap.

“The district is a fantastic partner, doing absolutely everything they can, and the school counselors are doing incredible work, but are stretched very thin,” Aleinikoff said.

It’s a tough job, he said, because the majority of students being served are the first in their family to attend college and lack generational knowledge. Without College AIM, students were enrolling in either for-profit colleges or colleges that were not a financial or academic fit.

“It’s not just that we have more students enrolling, but more students are enrolling in places that are a better fit for them,” Aleinikoff said. “Our coaches spend a lot of time focusing on match and fit, thinking about what the right school is for each student.”

The right fit means financially, too. College in Georgia is prohibitively expensive, in part due to being one of two states without a need-based financial aid program.

“Students are entering a system that wasn’t built for them in the first place. The challenges are systemic in nature, like cost, so we see huge college costs and minimal support coming from the state,” he said.

Aleinikoff said Georgia’s Hope Scholarship, which is now based only on merit, disproportionately goes to “wealthy white students” in Georgia.

“There’s a huge financial barrier that we are often trying to navigate with our students,” Aleinikoff said.

In 2019, College AIM started collecting data on six-year college graduation rates. At that time it was 48 percent, and the number is only rising.

“We want to ensure that our students, who often are not given the same opportunities and are excluded systematically from higher education, were given equal or better opportunities than their peers,” he said.