DePaul Cristo Rey’s Graduate Success Program helps alum earn college degrees
DePaul Cristo Rey High School (DPCR), a private, co-ed Catholic high school in Clifton, has seen 100% of its students accepted to a college over the past 12 years. While impressive for any school, it’s particularly impressive at DPCR, as many of its students have not had a family member attend college before.
This is a great accomplishment for both the school and its students, but the work doesn’t end once a student starts attending college. To address the struggles and obstacles its grads face after entering college, DPCR created its Graduate Success Program. The school believes it is the only alumni support program of its size in the area.
“The Graduate Success Program launched with DPCR’s first graduating class in 2015. And that was in a response to our first college-going alumni and some of the financial barriers to college completion that they were experiencing,” says Brittany Ranz, director of Graduate Success. “Some very generous donors did not want any alumni to stop out of college due to a tuition gap, or maybe they needed a textbook that they couldn’t access.”
Since 2015, the Graduate Success Program has supported college-going alumni in a variety of ways, from microgrants to help with tuition or textbooks (totaling in more than $700,000 of assistance) to weekly check-ins and campus visits.
“We obviously provide the financial assistance if an alum who’s in college is experiencing a financial hardship with tuition or textbooks, but I also provide study tips and college advice. If a student is experiencing [or] having a hard time in class or something like that, I’ll connect them to support offices at their college. I can answer any financial aid questions they might have. A little bit of academic advising. And then the thing that I think is most important is with teenagers, essentially young adults, you have to be in their face all the time r else they’re just going to forget about resources that are available to them like the Grad Success program. So every Monday I text all of our college going alums because I just really want them to know, ‘Hey, I’m here for you,” says Ranz.
For alums like Michael Williams and Cherie Applebury, this assistance has proven to be invaluable.
Williams graduated from DPCR in 2018, graduated from Xavier University with his bachelor’s degree in 2022 and earned his MBA from Notre Dame University in 2023. Today, he works as an account executive for Proline Technologies. He says those check-ins while working on both his bachelor’s and MBA helped keep him motivated.
“[They] checked in with me every week, made sure I was on top of my studies, asked if I needed anything, any computers, any school materials. They were a big help for me,” he says. “It made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Even though I wasn’t that far from home, it was just another path that I can lean on because I needed it.”
Applebury also appreciated the regular check-ins. She graduated from DPCR in 2020, graduated from Mount St. Joseph University in 2025 and is currently student teaching and pursuing her master’s degree in education at the Mount.
“I would say it was just as hands on and they still support me the same [as DPCR did in high school]. For some people, after they’re out of high school, they kind of disconnect. But I was able to still talk to my teachers, still ask them for guidance,” she says. “My mother did pass while I was at Mount St. Joseph and so many of them took the time out of their day to not only check on me and support me through the time and help me figure out how to connect with my current university, but they also did come to my mother’s funeral.”
In addition to check-ins over the phone or through text, Ranz visits students at their colleges. So far, she has visited 31 campuses.
“When I go and visit students on campus, it’s primarily the first-year students. But if there’s second- and third-year students from DPCR, I’ll get everyone together. And really, I just kind of want to make it a casual check-in and meet them where they are and celebrate the transition because they mature so much between senior year to the fall being a freshman,” says Ranz.
It’s also an opportunity to provide some in-person help. Ranz points to a time she helped a student when the university wasn’t properly applying her full-ride scholarship to her tuition.
“We went to like five different offices at her college,” she says. “I really had to advocate for her that it was their mistake, don’t punish her.”
The Graduate Success Program is doing what it was designed to do: 81% of alums who have received grants are still enrolled in college or have graduated. And DPCR only sees more opportunity for students in the future.
“Nationally, only about 15% of low-income students graduate from college, which shows me there is a lot of work to do, both nationally and locally. We are proud that our graduates are completing college at twice that rate because we know the systemic barriers our grads are up against. DPCR’s commitment to support its students to and through college is making a real impact-and that impact is only growing,” says Ranz.
