By Carole Rafferty
Mercury News Staff Writer
Guillermo Vargas, 16, always wanted to go to a four year university.
But the Guatemalan immigrant came from a poor Southern California family and thought the best he could achieve was a community college.
Today, Vargas—and 21 other low-income, at-risk, but academically bright high school students—will graduate from a Stanford summer program in leadership and environmental science that will pave their way to the best universities in the country.
Of the last 22 graduates, 17 were admitted to Stanford on scholarships, and the remaining five attended schools including Harvard, Columbia and Yale.
As co-founder Michael McCullough said, "We have a 100 percent success rate."
All graduates from the past five years have attended college, and none have dropped out, he added.
In addition, last year alone the program helped students raise more than $1.5 million in merit-and-need-based financial aid for their education.
The 5-year-old privately funded program—Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program—finds its students among inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Oakland and Berkeley, the outback of the Mojave Desert, and the small rural towns of the Central Valley.
After a rigorous selection process, 22 students are chosen from about 500 applicants, McCullough chooses the candidates not just for their high grades, but for their altruism, empathy, and commitment to improving their community.
"We interview students for about four hours," he said. "We make them hang out in a group before and after the interview and see who is too quiet, who is too loud, who is altruistic and who is not."
It's essential to get the right mix of personalities, McCullough said, as well as students who will adapt to the communality of the program ad bring out the best of themselves and others.
In June, the students arrive at Stanford for a six-week course. They live together in the student dorms, eat together in the dining hall, and are exposed to some of the brightest minds—and professional resources—that Stanford has to offer.
One year, McCullough said, the students took a field trip to meet the justices of the California Supreme Court.
McCullough said he was always impressed by these kids, who have outstanding academic records, despite the odds of poverty, unstable home environments and negative peer pressure.
Johnny Madrid, 16, for example, a slight boy with an impish smile, has been in 19 foster homes.
Yet he fiercely maintains a 4.4 grade-point average and plans to be a lawyer. Johnny, of Southern California, is toying with the notion of working to change the foster care system.
His background is what drives him, he said.
"I don't want to sink to the bottom of the heap like others who have been through the system," he adds.
As part of the Stanford program, Johnny has committed to doing an outreach program in his community when he returns. He has decided on a questionnaire for foster care children to find out their opinion of the system and how it can be improved.
"Nobody has ever asked them before," he said.
Because of his good grades, Johnny received a scholarship to a private high school and is undecided about whether he will attend Stanford, Harvard, UCLA or perhaps the Air Force Academy.
At lunch—when the students are gathered in the dining hall at Lambda Nu—Johnny rises to the podium, delivering a Dylan Thomas poem for his fellow students to reflect upon.
"Do not go gentle into that good night," he reads.
"Old age shoud burn and rave at close of day: Rage, rage, against dying of the light…"
Co-founder Ana Mallari, a third-year Stanford Law School student and former Environmental Defense Fund consulting scientist, said the students' backgrounds and families are often unstable. Sometimes they are responsible for younger siblings, and even a parent who cannot handle life, added Mallari.
"But here they can reach for their dreams and not get bogged down in pettiness," said Mallari. "They can focus on themselves for a while, which often they haven't been able to do before."
This year, she said, 11 former students from the program have returned for the summer session as counselors. All have been accepted into prestigious universities.
The students keep in touch with the program even after they have graduated, prompting McCullough to say that really, the program lasts for six years rather than six weeks.
Mallari said she was particularly proud of one student, Lourdes Flores, who completed the program in 1996.
Flores is a Stanford undergraduate.
She came form a poor Hollister family, and during high school, supplemented her family's income by picking raspberries in the fields. Sometimes, Mallari said, she would work from dawn to dusk, and despite an unstable home life and speaking English as a second language, maintained straight A's at high school and scored in the 95th percentile on her SAT's.
After the program, Flores applied to and was accepted at Yale, Princeton, Cornell and the University of California-Berkeley, but she chose to come to Stanford.
I'm just inspired by my students," said Mallari. "It's really a privilege to be around them, especially at this important juncture in their lives."