When Jose Alvarez logged on to social media last week, he swelled with pride.

Instead of silly memes and a bunch of in-jokes, his friends were all sharing news of their college class schedules, orientations and pictures of their new dorm rooms.

“It’s so fun to see everyone talking about college,” Alvarez said.

A year ago, he never would have expected so many of his Grand Prairie High School classmates in college, he said. Three-fourths of the school’s student body is economically disadvantaged, and the hurdles to a post-secondary education are high.

But in came the Dallas County Promise, he said, and it provided many of his friends — and himself — a viable path.

The Promise, launched in October 2017 by the Dallas County Community College District and education nonprofit Commit, pledged to send every graduating senior at 31 area high schools, including Grand Prairie, to community college for free.

While the effort exceeded many of its benchmarks in its infancy — getting 96 percent of 9,000 seniors to sign the pledge, and 67 percent of them to complete their financial aid forms in a timely fashion — the true proof of the program’s success came on the first day of classes.

The early returns are in — and they are significant.

As of Monday, 2,841 graduates from those 31 high schools are attending classes at a DCCCD campus or at the University of North Texas Dallas, a fellow partner, according to data from Commit.

That’s 40 percent growth in enrollment at DCCCD from those 31 schools (from 1,872 in 2017 to 2,659 in 2018), while UNT Dallas’ enrollment went up 30 percent (from 138 to 182).

Given that the 2017-18 school year was initially planned as the program’s “soft launch,” DCCCD Chancellor Joe May said, what the Promise has accomplished in such a short time is remarkable.

Based on a highly successful state program in Tennessee, the Promise is a last-dollar scholarship, meaning it covers the gaps between the cost of attending and state and federal grants the students receive. The goal is to boost post-secondary attainment across the board: four-year and associate’s degrees and trade certifications.

“Getting these kids in college when they didn’t have plans to go, or didn’t think that they had a way to go, that they couldn’t afford it, it’s transformational,” May said. “When I graduated from high school, there were plenty of good jobs out there — where someone could buy a house, make a good living — without an education beyond high school. That’s just not the case anymore.”

For Alvarez, the Promise came at a critical time, in the middle of his senior year. He'd always thought about continuing his education after high school, and had designs on attending Texas State or Texas A&M, but wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to make ends meet.

The Promise solved a lot of those problems, he said.

Attending a four-year college is still the target, Alvarez said. But he can stay at home, get up to 60 college credits, and a dental hygienist certificate “just in case life happens,” without being worried about tuition, room and board, and books.

While initially skeptical of Promise, Alvarez — the Grand Prairie senior class president — soon became one of its biggest boosters on his high school campus.

“I saw how this could help me, this could really help a lot of my friends,” he said. “We don’t have to have students working at McDonald’s or at the mall or in construction — some of the jobs that a lot of people get right out of high school. ... Imagine how much we as Dallas, Texas, will grow, if we have people who are more educated that live here.”

The Promise’s managing director, Eric Ban, credited the early successes to the combined energy from a wide swath of groups: high school counselors and principals, K-12 leadership, the community college district, university and college administrators, and workforce and community leaders.

“The collaborative leadership we’ve seen, that’s what really produces results,” Ban said.

Ban won’t have a complete picture until October, when he can gather data that will show if some of the 9,000 students who signed the pledge but didn’t attend DCCCD or UNT Dallas are at other two- or four-year institutions.

And the Promise still has some new wrinkles to figure out. One of the initial plans was to offer each high school graduate a mentor in their field of study, giving what are often first-generation college students an opportunity to build social capital. Those connections can help students translate their studies into a good-paying job, Ban said.

The mentoring program will be solidified this fall, with mentor matching likely happening early in the spring 2019 semester.

Additionally, the Promise has been expanded to 12 more Dallas County schools this school year: Duncanville, Irving’s Singley Academy, Irving MacArthur, Carrollton Newman Smith, Carrollton R.L. Turner, Grand Prairie’s Dubiski Career High School, North Garland, South Garland, Skyline, Woodrow Wilson, Richardson and Richardson Berkner.

“We want to get better,” Ban said.