BIPOC and first-generation college students face unique challenges in college adjustment, acculturation, and persistence. While interventions to foster SEL are key to addressing gaps in college preparation, much SEL practice and research fails to meaningfully grapple with the material conditions and systemic inequalities that constrain opportunity for BIPOC youth. In contrast, YO offers a supportive and affirming context for SEL while also explicitly building young people’s critical social analysis and their efficacy around critical action for social justice. While this brief draws from a small sample of YO alumni who have not yet completed college, their reflections about how skills and dispositions developed through YO supported them in navigating culturally incongruent campuses offer evidence for the value of approaches that incorporate critical consciousness as a key dimension of youth development and raise questions for future research. The transformative SEL framework provides a useful lens for understanding the promise of SEL as a strategy for advancing justice and equity.

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