Eight elite schools look to recruit from community colleges

NEW YORK -- The signs are everywhere, from the BMWs parked on campus, to the students' designer cellphones, to the number of families paying full price even as tuition and fees climb past $40,000. The most prestigious colleges are overwhelmingly attended by the wealthy.

It's a problem colleges have tried to address with more financial aid, but with mixed success. At the most selective schools, a 2003 study found, 3 percent of students came from the poorest quarter of families, while 74 percent came from the richest.

Now, a small group of selective colleges is turning its attention to what may be an untapped reservoir of able, low-income students: the 6.5 million people who attend community colleges.

Five well-known private colleges and three highly selective public schools were to announce plans today to accommodate about 1,100 more community college transfer students from low- to moderate-income families over the next four years.

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation will contribute about $7 million for support programs, while the colleges will spend more than $20 million of their own money on support programs and financial aid.

The private colleges participating are Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Bucknell, Cornell, and the University of Southern California. The public colleges are the flagship campuses of the Universities of Michigan, California, and North Carolina.

Although the numbers amount to a relative handful, the hope is that the variety and prestige of the schools involved will persuade others to take a chance on students who have started at two-year schools for financial or family reasons.

''There's a lot of focus at Harvard and lots of other places on the fact that there are no low-income students at those schools, or very few," said Joshua Wyner, the Cooke Foundation's vice president for programs. ''The place where a lot of them are that nobody seems to be looking is community colleges."

A 2005 Department of Education study found that more than one-third of 12th-graders in 1992 who went first to community college and earned more than 10 credits eventually transferred to a four-year college. But few go to the most selective schools. On elite campuses, typically about one in 1,000 students transferred from a two-year school, Wyner said.

Some of the participating colleges, like University of California and Mount Holyoke, have close ties with ''feeder" community colleges and will expand programs.

Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, will provide a full-time academic counselor inside nearby Holyoke Community College to identify transfer candidates and help them prepare. It hopes to add about 10 slots per year.

The University of California will add about 480 slots. Typically, a handful of Bucknell's 30 or so transfers per year come from community colleges, but the school aims to increase that number to 15.

''I think the last time campuses really enriched themselves was the GI bill, when people came back from the war," said Kurt Thiede, a Bucknell enrollment vice president. With changing demographics and rising college prices, ''this is a way that places like Bucknell can keep their current status in terms of quality, but also enrich their campuses in a way that frankly hasn't happened in 30 or 40 years."