Where Access Becomes Momentum

The PATH Initiative is University & Beyond's community-facing arm — a set of targeted interventions designed to close the opportunity gap for two groups the traditional college-counseling industry often overlooks: onshore international students navigating U.S. admissions from inside the country, often without the support networks their domestic peers take for granted, and first-generation scholars whose families are going through the process for the very first time.

Where most of UNB's programs — C3, REHS, MedPath, the Student Internship Program — are built around individual students and structured multi-month tracks, PATH works at the community level. It exists to answer a simpler, more urgent question: before a family can plan a strategy, do they even have the information and access they need to start? For many onshore international and first-generation households, the honest answer is no — not because the ambition or the ability is missing, but because the room where admissions officers, financial aid counselors, and people who've already done this are gathered simply hasn't been open to them.

PATH's response is to build that room directly — through free public events, direct lines to university admissions staff, and community partnerships that meet families where they already are, in familiar spaces and cultural contexts, rather than asking them to first decode an unfamiliar system on their own.