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Mentor Illinois is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to pay and empower students at great Illinois colleges to help talented Illinois high school students from non-college or low-income backgrounds apply to college. Read more about our tax-exempt status.
© 2025 by Mentor Illinois. All rights reserved.
ABOUT US
Mentor Illinois focuses on doing one thing—and doing it exceptionally well: helping Illinois high school students from non-college families and low-income backgrounds get into college, one individual at a time.
This is what drives us
For many Illinois high school students, the college application process is a major barrier to college.
Deciding whether and where to study after high school can be daunting, especially for students from families in which neither parent attended college or financial resources are limited.
Most schools lack the resources to personally guide students through college applications, many parents are unfamiliar with the process, and there are very few other good sources of help.
Mentor Illinois was founded to enable more high school students in Illinois to go to college by guiding them through college applications.
Why this matters
Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms what many already believed: it's advantageous to have a College degree
That's why Illinois has the 60 by 2025 goal: 60% of adults aged 25-64 will have a college degree by 2025.
It's 2025. We're at 57.1%. Close, but no cigar.
However, data from the ISBE shows that a lot of kids from underserved communities aren’t getting this advantage (Illinois stats for college enrollment). Why?
Here's why:
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There is an inverse relation between the number of students per guidance counselor in a school district and the percentage of students from that district who enroll in college the following year
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Not only do there need to be fewer students per counselor, the students need to receive more personalized advice to really profit.
$930
Median weekly earnings for a person with a High School Diploma
$1543
Median weekly earnings for a person with a Bachelor's degree
4.2%
Unemployment rate for people with a High School diploma
2.5%
Unemployment rate for people with a Bachelor's degree
The Future We Work Toward
Our Vision
Mentor Illinois envisions a world in which every high school student in Illinois has access to excellent one-on-one guidance about how to apply to college.
College applications should not be a barrier to college.
The Main Thing We Do
Our Mission
Mentor Illinois' mission is to provide excellent one-on-one guidance about how to apply to college to every high school student in Illinois who wishes to apply and who does not otherwise have access to such guidance. As a top priority, we serve students from non-college families and from low-income backgrounds.
We provide excellent one-on-one college application guidance.
Our Unique Approach
To fulfill our mission, Mentor Illinois has adopted a unique approach which distinguishes us from other organizations working to increase college access for disadvantaged students:
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We recruit and hire a corps of mentors from among students attending great colleges in Illinois;
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We empower those mentors with proven week-by-week processes for guiding high school students through college applications; and
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We match the mentors with first-generation and low-income Illinois high school students, whom the mentors then guide through applications and to college efficiently and successfully.
History
Mentor Illinois was founded in 2025 in response to founder Carlos Hsu Speck's recognition that many great high school kids have difficulty navigating college applications—and that this difficulty stops many kids from going to college.
First, as a high school junior and senior, Carlos found it very complex and time-consuming to apply to college himself. Then, many of Carlos' classmates told him that they had just as much difficulty as he did. Finally, Carlos learned that some top students from other schools didn't even know where to start.
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After our annual rugby game against a particular school in downtown Chicago, my teammates and I sat down to dinner with the opposing players, and I got into a conversation with their captain.
He was a smart, charismatic and hard-driving athlete—but when I asked him what he planned to do after high school, he just said:
'I want to go to college, but I don't know what to do.' ”
- Carlos Hsu Speck
Mentor Illinois was founded to help great high school kids like the Chicago athlete quoted above to pursue their college dreams.
Here is what we are doing in the 2025-2026 academic year:
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Mentor Illinois is launching our college guidance program by recruiting an inaugural corps of highly qualified mentors from some of Illinois' top colleges;
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We are working with high school guidance counselors in some of the State's most disadvantaged public school districts to identify juniors and seniors in high school in need of college application help; and
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We are matching those mentors and students to one another through a structured online guidance system that we hope will substantially increase the ease and success with which high school students transition to post-secondary education.
Mentor Illinois also is looking for a federally certified tax-exempt nonprofit corporation to serve as our fiscal sponsor, and we are seeking advice and funding from potential support partners.
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Will you join us?”
- Carlos Hsu Speck
Founder Carlos Hsu Speck
Carlos Hsu Speck is a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois who graduated from high school in Georgetown, Illinois.
In high school, Carlos played rugby, directed the choir, acted in two plays, and earned the highest possible score on 10 A.P. exams, before graduating as Salutatorian and a National Merit Scholarship Finalist.
Now at the college level, Carlos is researching music cognition, and he plans to study overlaps between natural and artificial intelligence through a double-major in neuroscience and computer science.
Carlos founded Mentor Illinois in July 2025 after observing first-hand the overwhelming difficulty that many great Illinois kids face in navigating the complex transition from high school to college.
"Will you join us?"