Early visits lure poor into college

Growing up in a working-class Boston neighborhood, Leide Cabral's path to college wasn't always clear. "I wanted to go, but I didn't know how that was going to happen," the high school senior says. She attended an underperforming middle school and remembers her class making the math teacher cry almost every day. Now she plans to major in math at Hamilton College next fall in Clinton, N.Y.

Leide credits an after-school program that got her thinking about college early. Every year, a Boston-based nonprofit organization called Citizen Schools takes dozens of eighth graders to tour a variety of college campuses. They sample college classes, eat in the dining halls, and get application tips from admissions officers.

Getting students from underserved communities to think about college early is crucial, says Diana Cordova, director of the Center of Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity at the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C. "We're trying to catch them younger, because by the time they get to high school, it may be too late," she says.

Campus visits are one of the activities funded by Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or Gear Up, a federal program that gave an average of $2.7 million to each of 36 states in 2005. Gear Up grants for high-poverty middle and high schools aim to raise the number of low-income students enrolling in college.

A 2003 study by The Century Foundation, a public policy research center in New York, found that only 3 percent of students enrolled in selective institutions of higher learning were from the poorest socioeconomic quarter, compared with 74 percent from the wealthiest.

In a 2005 book, "Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education," the authors reported that enrollment figures are comparatively low for first-generation college students. They looked at 19 of the nation's most elite colleges and universities and found that only about 6 percent of their students were the first members of their families to attend college. Nationally, however, 38 percent of all 16-year-olds have parents who did not attend college.

John Werner cofounded the Citizen Schools program in 1995. The on-campus experience, he says, lets students "taste and feel the prize that they're going after." Seeing science at the college level, for example, opens their eyes to life beyond the worksheet. "It's like seeing in black and white, and then suddenly they see in color," he says. Mr. Werner hopes to roll out structured college visits to all of the program's 24 school sites nationwide in the next few years. Students in the program already visit schools such as the University of Vermont and Brown University, as well as various community colleges and design schools.

On a Citizen Schools trip to Hamilton College last month, almost 90 eighth-grade students from Boston public schools handled snakes in a biology class, learned some German, and went on the air at the radio station.

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