"First-Gen students are the fastest growing population to enter college in the next decade. While they can be resilient, resourceful and remarkable in many ways, they also may come from the least resourced high schools, the most overworked and underserved counselors and parents who can't help them at the rate that their middle and upper middle class parents can with their extensive networks.

Any one college, no matter how great their First-Gen programs, cannot provide the vast networks for role models, mentors, internships and jobs that these talented students deserve. That is why at GlobalMindED we have the bold goal of algorithmically connecting 25,000,000 First-Gen students, grads, those who work with them and those who want to hire them by 2025.

In the meantime, we hold our annual conference in June where we will have 1,000 inclusive leaders strong, and create six GlobalMindED Collaborative pilots at six different types of colleges so that we can build and share collective intelligence on how to better serve these students with the connections they need to succeed.

Finally, we ask every college President to think about their Inclusive Agenda and determine how these talented First-Gen students can be at the table to both inform and advance their campus culture of open, diverse and respectful values and discourse. We also ask college leadership to publish a website with all of their First-Gen to college faculty, so that incoming students have campus role models. We hope you will do this with your alumni as well and then assist us with our Bold Goal so that First-Gen students can be included with a wider framework of valuable career connections.

Thanks to the leaders of COE for establishing this first ever and now annual Celebrate First-Gen Day throughout the United States. We look forward to working with all of you to open the doors of professional success so that we can all benefit from a capable, diverse talent pipeline to power our economic future."