In the spring of 1999, Argelia Rodriguez took on a new, ambitious job with two ambitious core missions: doubling the rate of Washington, D.C., students who enroll in college and tripling the number of those who graduate from high school.
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Since the first day the District of Columbia College Access Program (DC-CAP) came into existence, Rodriguez has been running it, building a legacy of service that created opportunities and a college-going culture for the most disadvantaged youth in the District. Now, after 22 years as the nonprofit organization’s president, chief executive and architect, Rodriguez, 62, has announced that she is stepping down at the end of the school year.
“We’ve been able to break the cycle of poverty that comes from undereducation, because we know those kids will go to college,” said Rodriguez, who will continue to support DC-CAP as an adviser.
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“Our goal was to create this culture, to jump up the numbers and keep them there,” she said. “We’ve done that.”
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When the program began, fewer than 1 in 3 D.C. high school graduates enrolled in higher-education institutions and only 15 percent would graduate college within 10 years, according to DC-CAP data. Poverty and a lack of opportunities in the District kept higher education out of reach for low-income students of color, Rodriguez said.
To close the gap, a group of eight executives, including some current DC-CAP board members, successfully lobbied Congress in 1999 for legislation to establish the DC Tuition Assistance Grant, a program that affords D.C. high school graduates the benefits of in-state tuition at state colleges outside Washington. DC-CAP then placed college advisers in every District public high school and, since 2008, every public charter high school to help students get to college.
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Under Rodriguez’s leadership, and in partnership with the schools, the program gradually helped bring D.C. students’ college enrollment closer to 60 percent — and the national average.
That turnaround wasn’t an easy one. But Rodriguez, who was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States as a child, was up to it.
Rodriguez had majored in engineering at Stanford and completed an MBA at Harvard, in 1984, before going into consulting in Washington. Early in her career, however, she realized there were few people of color at the companies where she worked who were doing math or science.
Education had always been a part of her story — Rodriguez’s mother, she said, was the first Black woman to receive a PhD in mathematics and astrophysics at the University of Havana — so working in that field was, perhaps, always inevitable for Rodriguez. “That was where I needed to be,” she said. And so she left Booz Allen Hamilton and started her own independent firm in Washington, consulting for universities and D.C. Public Schools to increase STEM education among students of color.
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When Donald Graham, then the publisher of The Washington Post, asked Rodriguez to launch DC-CAP in 1999, she saw the challenge as an opportunity to intervene early in a student’s life and help students of color move into higher education. With the support of a talented team and a board of directors, then led by Graham, she set out to build a large-scale system in which every D.C. student who aspired to go to college had the opportunity.
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The congressional legislation lowered the financial barriers for D.C. students, and DC-CAP set out to foster an accompanying “college-going culture,” Rodriguez said. But to create a sustainable system embedded in the schools, she said, people had to believe in higher education and the power it had to transform the lives of students and their families.
“We had to get families and guardians to understand that to move the family generationally, they had to support the education and higher education of the kids,” Rodriguez said.
Transforming the education landscape in Washington also required the collaboration of everyone involved in the chain of education: parents, students, public officials, counselors and private donors. It particularly required persuading those in the public school system that working with DC-CAP was a good deal.
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“It took us time to build trust. When they realized that we were working together, then the numbers started to go up,” Rodriguez said.
According to DC-CAP figures, the organization has helped enroll more than 35,000 students in postsecondary education, supports more than 6,700 students in college, celebrates the success of 14,000 college graduates, and has awarded nearly $55 million in scholarships to D.C. students.
Schelly Mitchell-McMillan, a DC-CAP college adviser at McKinley Technology High School, said she has seen high school students become lawyers and pharmacists because of the program, which she called Rodriguez’s “baby.”
“We help foster each one of these [students] to make a better society and a better community for all of us,” Mitchell-McMillan said.
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Steven Adams II, an economics major at Morehouse College, credits the nonprofit as part of the reason he is attending the university today. At Woodrow Wilson High School, he joined the Alpha Leadership Program (ALP), a DC-CAP initiative Rodriguez launched in 2007 to assist and empower young men of color to graduate from high school — and to help them become socially and academically prepared to enroll in and graduate from college.
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DC-CAP helped him apply to more than 100 scholarships to pay for his tuition at Morehouse and found him his first internship, Adams said. Now the chief of staff for Morehouse’s student government association, he will be interning next summer for Goldman Sachs, he said.
DC-CAP was “there every step of the way, whenever we needed support,” Adams said.
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That support has been multifaceted. In 2009, Rodriguez launched the DC-Capital Stars Competition, a competition to showcase D.C. students’ artistic talents at the Kennedy Center. “I personally was in awe,” recalled Ted Leonsis, CEO of Monumental Sports and Entertainment and the current head of DC-CAP’s board. The performances “were unforgettable,” he said, “and inspired deep commitment to providing college resources from the audience and community.”
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In 2016, Rodriguez started the STEM Ready Program, an after-school program focused on improving achievement in math and science high school courses. And in 2019, she initiated the University Partnership Program, through which select schools commit to recruiting, financially assisting and academically supporting D.C. public and public charter high school graduates.
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Rodriguez’s tenure of more than two decades leading the nonprofit is something that “almost never happens,” said Graham, who remains on the DC-CAP board. During that time, he said, she’s dealt with 11 school superintendents and four mayors, and managed to maintain strong relationships with D.C.’s schools no matter who was in charge.
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“She’s been an important nonprofit leader in this town for a very long time,” Graham said.
“She is a tireless advocate and fighter,” said Leonsis.
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In June, Rodriguez will pass the baton to a new leader who can help DC-CAP realize its next major goals: increasing the number of college scholarships for D.C. students and investing in virtual college counseling. DC-CAP’s board of directors is launching a national search for a successor who can commit for the next 10 years, Graham said.
Rodriguez said she’ll leave the job proud, knowing her work has had a lasting impact in the District.
“Before, going to college was the exception,” she said. “But we sort of flipped the script.”