Reality Changers is a nonprofit that helps prepare students for college through mentoring, tutoring, counseling and community volunteering. A new partnership guarantees admission to SDSU for Reality Changers? students.

In an effort to provide educational pathways to accomplished inner-city youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, San Diego State and a local nonprofit organization have partnered to create a guaranteed admission agreement to begin in the Fall 2011 semester.

Reality Changers, located in the urban core City Heights, prepares high school students for the transition and rigors of college through tutoring, mentoring, counseling and community volunteering.

Starting with $300 in 2001, students involved in the program have earned more than $10 million in scholarships to prestigious universities across the nation throughout the past ten years, Executive Director and Founder Chris Yanov said.

In spite of these achievements and the students’ readiness, Yanov said many Reality Changers’ students were not being accepted into SDSU, the college located practically in their backyards, partly because of the changes in university admission policies this year.

Chief of Staff to the Office of the President Betsy Kinsley said one of the reasons for this was that for this fall semester, the university was forced to reduce admission by 10.8 percent, meaning fewer than 6,000 spots were available for 62,549 undergraduate applications.

With SDSU President Stephen L. Weber sitting on Reality Changers’ community engagement committee, the idea for the agreement came to fruition during a meeting with the program’s administration in May and was finalized shortly thereafter in August, Yanov said.

“We really believe in what (Reality Changers) is doing,” Kinsley said. “They have a proven track record: 90 percent of their students have stayed in (college) and graduated.”

Yanov said as part of the admission provisions, students must remain in the program from their sophomore to senior year in high school and meet program deadlines and requirements, including a 3.3 GPA, passing random drug tests and completing a minimum of 50 hours of certified community service each year.

It is the first admission agreement to be established with a nonprofit organization and it is the first of its kind that requires participation in an on-campus service club upon admission, Kinsley said.

Because these students already have a background and connection in service, the university is envisioning a “full-circle continuum” in which the students will be able to continue giving back to their community, Kinsley said.

Reality Changers member Judd Aguiar, a senior at Mission Bay High School, said he is happy about the agreement and he concurs it allows the students to contribute to the community.

“I feel that in the community I live in, City Heights, we have a lot of brain drain,” Aguiar said. “When people go off to college, they don’t want to return to the community.”

This agreement will enable more San Diego students with the opportunity to serve their communities by pursuing an education in the city they grew up in, he said.

“It’s an impacted campus and it’s now one of the hardest California State Universities to get into,” Aguiar said. “Essentially being able to keep 20 Reality Changers students here keeps unity in the family.”

While Reality Changers serves more than 120 students within 38 different high schools in San Diego, it also currently has 150 students on the waiting list, Yanov said.

Aguiar said the need for such a program is essential in inner-city areas because those particular communities are often plagued with senseless violence and gangs.

“It’s sad because as Chris (Yanov) says, “If gangs don’t have waiting lists, Reality Changers shouldn’t either,'” Aguiar said.