Under the leadership of Mayor Richard Daley and Board of Education President Gery Chico, Chicago has recently undertaken a partnership involving local colleges, high schools, corporations, and volunteers, aimed at dramatically increasing the number of low-income students going to college and staying there until graduation.

The centerpiece of this initiative is an intensive four-day workshop where low-income high school students go to a college campus and complete the entire application process, including essay writing, personalized college counseling, identification of curriculum "gaps," and discussions of college life and strategies for adjusting to it. The students then receive continuing help as they complete high school from school staff or community volunteers who serve as "college mentors."

It sounds simple, but it addresses a big, complex problem. Millions of low-income kids-- especially from minority communities--who could succeed in college never apply, or don't apply to the right schools, or prepare inadequate applications, or even if they are enrolled, have enormous trouble adjusting to college life and work and often drop out.

There's a common-sense explanation for this "college gap": These kids often do not benefit from the extensive support networks--involving schools, parents, alumni and, community groups--that guide so many of their middle- or upper-class peers through the grueling, 6-month college application and preparation process. Many college outreach or affirmative action programs concentrate on competing for the small pool of low-income students who score well on standardized tests. But the kids who don't are precisely those who need to build better applications through recommendations, essays, timely submission of financial documents, and careful selection of colleges.

The Chicago initiative is being operated by a national non-profit group called College Summit, (which has designed and tested the counseling workshop model in Colorado and northern New Mexico, and plans similar initiatives in Florida and in Washington, DC). Since its inception in 1993, College Summit students have enrolled in college at a rate of 79 percent, as opposed to a 34 percent rate nationwide for high school graduates from the same income levels. Even more dramatically, the college retention rate so far is 80 percent. These are stunning, important results.

If such results are achieved on a broad scale in Chicago, this initiative could become the perfect counterpart to the city's ongoing drive to lift student achievement by ending "social promotion" and helping students master skills and knowledge appropriate to their grade level through expanded after-school and summer school learning opportunities. And if the College Summit model works in Chicago, we hope a major statewide university system somewhere will pick it up and give it the scale of support needed for truly transformative results.

Chicago has decisively rejected the counsel of despair suggesting that poor and minority kids can only be educated if standards are kept low, and instead is helping students meet rigorous standards through the practical help and encouragement they need. Instead of lowering floors, Chicago and College Summit are opening doors.