Every year, J-P Conte books a flight to New York. Not for a deal, not for a board meeting, but to stand in front of a room of high school students and talk about private equity. For Conte, the presentations extend from something personal. As a first-generation college graduate who benefited from mentorship through his father’s Wall Street connections, he has described the experience of having professional doors opened for him as foundational to how he thinks about giving back. “I’ve always felt the need to give back,” he has noted in interviews. The annual New York trips are one concrete way that conviction takes shape.
What SEO Scholars Actually Do
SEO runs an eight-year academic program for public high school students across New York City, San Francisco, North Carolina, and Miami. The program carries a strong track record: according to SEO’s program data, 100 percent of Scholars gain admission to four-year colleges, 85 percent earn a bachelor’s degree, and 80 percent are the first in their families to attend college.
The program structure places real demands on participants. Students log more than 600 additional hours of academic instruction beyond their standard school day, with after-school sessions, Saturday classes, and multi-week summer programs running throughout high school. J-P Conte has spoken directly about the weight of that commitment: “These are kids who, voluntarily in eighth grade, agree to go into this program and do after-school work, work on Saturdays, work during the summer, and extra tutoring to supplement their public school education. Plus, they agreed to mentoring to get them to go to college.”
For Conte, the level of effort students bring to the program is the point. These are not passive recipients of support; they are students who chose, at a young age, to take on considerably more.
What JP Conte Brings to the Room
The annual presentations are notable for what they are not. They are not recruitment events, nor are they abstract career overviews. J-P Conte arrives to discuss private equity as a concrete professional path: how the industry functions, what roles exist within it, and what the route in might look like for a student with no prior exposure to financial services.
Research from the American Council on Education found that first-generation college students often need direct exposure to professionals in the fields they are considering, with 20 percent of surveyed students identifying networking, mentoring, or similar as their primary needs for career development.
Conte has been direct about what draws him back year after year. “Every year, I go to New York and give a presentation about private equity, the industry, and how these students can get into this sector,” he has said. What he describes as the “information gap” — the distance between students who have professional networks at home and those who don’t — is the specific challenge the presentations are built around.
For students who are the first in their families to consider careers in finance, the industry can seem inaccessible less because of ability and more because of unfamiliarity. Conte’s own background followed a similar pattern: mentorship from professionals in his father’s network opened access that would otherwise have been outside his reach. The SEO presentations are, in part, an attempt to offer that same opening to another generation.
Multiplying Reach, Not Just Writing Checks
What separates JP Conte’s involvement with SEO from a standard donor relationship is the degree to which he engaged with how the organization was run. When the Bay Area chapter encountered leadership challenges, Conte pushed for changes that produced results he has since described in concrete terms. “We multiplied the reach of SEO in the Bay Area by five to seven times,” he has said.
The San Francisco program, which launched in 2011, grew through the kind of direct organizational engagement Conte applied to it. He has been candid about that approach. “A lot of nonprofits aren’t run crisply,” he has said, noting he approaches them with the same results-focused mindset he brings to investment work.
Why the Annual Trips Keep Happening
JP Conte has described his own upbringing in terms that help explain why the New York visits remain a consistent part of his schedule. His father worked as a tailor and clothing salesman, a career that brought him into contact with Wall Street professionals who later extended mentorship and professional access to a young man with no built-in route into those networks. “They gave me internships, mentoring, good advice, and it really helped close the information gap, which exists when your parents don’t go to college or aren’t on that track,” he has said.
The SEO presentations are a version of that exchange, made available to students who carry the ambition but lack the access. “A light went off, and I came to the conclusion that I need to start sooner, in high school or earlier, to really help change the trajectory,” Conte has said.
For JP Conte, the relationship with SEO is not a transaction. It rests on a conviction that professional visibility, offered early enough and with enough specificity, can shift what a student believes is possible long before a career has formally begun.
