It's long y'all but please read it - hell just glaze over it and you'll see some good stuff.

From today's WSJ:

By most standards, Lestie Gonzalez wasn't supposed to go to college.

As a 19-year-old high school senior studying in New York's impoverished south Bronx, Mr. Gonzalez struggled in school with dyslexia. Living with his single mother and two younger brothers, he was a frequent truant and not particularly motivated to pursue higher education. In fact, his mom begged him just to graduate from high school. "I told him, even to clean toilets you need a diploma nowadays" says Awilda Gonzalez, whose ailing health keeps her from working.

Yet this September, Mr. Gonzalez will enroll at Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. For that, he thanks Byron Womack, his college guidance counselor at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom School.

Mr. Womack, who worked for months to persuade Mr. Gonzalez to apply for college, is one of a handful of tenacious, young college guidance counselors who arrived at some of the toughest New York City high schools last September. The counselors are part of a fledgling philanthropic effort led by Ann Rubenstein Tisch, whose family owns the conglomerate Loews Corp. Their mission is to combat one of the most persistent problems in low-income schools: a lack of guidance counselors and the resulting low aspirations for college.

This year, students at the four schools with Ms. Tisch's guidance counselors won scholarships totaling almost $2 million, which covered about 300 seniors.

The guidance counselor shortage is a national problem. In New York City, the average guidance counselor has a caseload of 450 students, well above the 150 to 300 students recommended by the American School Counselor Association. Even when there are counselors at schools, they aren't typically trained to help students apply to college. The ratio is worse in some other states. For instance, in Illinois, the average guidance counselor has a caseload of 700 students, while in California it is 994 students to every counselor.

Ms. Tisch's program, called College Bound, finds and pays for counselors to work in public schools that can't afford their own advisers. The counselors she picks come mostly from word of mouth; one left a job at a private school, while another came from the recruitment office of a college. "There are hundreds if not thousands of college-capable kids out there who won't go to college because of the daunting process of college admissions," Ms. Tisch says. College Bound spends about $100,000 annually at each school, which pays for the counselors' salary, training, a computer, phone line, and multiple student trips to colleges.

...

Not surprisingly, studies show that students from low-income families, students of color and students in rural and inner-city areas are most likely to attend schools with poor student-to-counselor ratios. And although minorities are attending college in record numbers, African Americans in 1998 continued to trail whites -- 15.8% vs. 28.4% -- in the number of 25- to 29-year-olds who have completed four or more years of college, according to the American Council on Education.

Those numbers trouble some business leaders, who worry that the gap will hurt their competitiveness. In January, a report by the Business-Higher Education Forum, a coalition of top chief executives and university presidents, warned that the nation is headed for a crisis in work-force skills and knowledge.

...

Back in his cluttered office, where a television screen with 16 live shots from the school's security cameras hangs from the ceiling, he laments his lack of funds. Until this year, he says, "I couldn't afford a librarian," though he desperately needed one because of the students' low literacy scores. Reluctantly, he raided his teaching budget to pay for one. Now that he has Mr. Womack on board as a guidance counselor -- one paid for by someone else -- Mr. Freeman boasts that for the first time, he hears freshmen and sophomores walking down the halls talking about what colleges they might want to attend.

To get kids thinking about college, the 33-year-old Mr. Womack hung pictures of college-bound seniors in the corridors. And luckily for the students, Mr. Womack doesn't give up easily, as Lestie Gonazalez found out this year.

"I wasn't paying attention to what he was saying about college," says Mr. Gonzalez. "I really thought I was a dumb kid that wasn't going anywhere in life."

Mr. Womack had a different impression. "I saw a kid who was struggling, but I really felt he had an opportunity." Mr. Womack ultimately persuaded the teen to visit a college campus, although it took a special incentive. "He told me there would be free food" during the visit, says Mr. Gonzalez, smiling beneath his thin goatee and mustache. "I like eating." After a few college trips, and Mr. Womack's incessant messages that he was indeed college material, Mr. Gonzalez began to believe it, too. And he started cutting class less and working to raise his grades. "It's like he became my dad," says Mr. Gonzalez.

Mr. Gonzalez's dyslexia -- which wasn't identified until last year -- was no stumbling block to Mr. Womack. He found Mercy College, north of New York City, which has a program for students with learning disabilities. Mr. Gonzalez will study to be an X-ray technician, and his tuition will be paid for by federal and state financial aid that Mr. Womack helped him tap into. He graduated from high school last month.