the first time Los Angeles native Julie Katske visited the Hill, she was in the fourth grade. The trip had two goals: to introduce Katske and her twin brother to snow, and to cement their college aspirations. "I pointed at the clock tower and told them, 'This is the goal,' " recalls their mother,Maria Zagorzycki '75. For Katske, who has known "since birth" that she would attend college and graduate school, the campus tour remains vivid. "My elementary school made this big point of emphasizing, 'If you don't do well now, if you don't work really hard now, you're not going to get into a good college.'My brother and I were having panic attacks over it--one project, you get a B, and your life is gone. I distinctly remember asking the tour guide if colleges look at junior high or elementary school grades."

Now seventeen and a rising senior at a small private high school, Katske returned to campus this year for the three-week Summer College, a residential academic program launched in 1962 that introduces ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-graders to the rigors of higher education. On the late June weekend preceding the program's start, Katske and Zagorzycki joined the thousands of families visiting the Hill as part of their summer vacations, going on campus tours and attending information sessions in the various colleges. For Katske and Zagorzycki, it was a familiar drill; already, they had visited UCLA, Georgetown, George Washington, and Princeton. And before returning to the West Coast, they would hit more schools in Boston and New York City.

Sixteen-year-old Siede Coleman, an aspiring architect from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and her mom tackled a similarly ambitious slate of tours. At Cornell, they took the daily "Freshman Experience Tour," complete with a visit to a North Campus dorm room. They'd already been to Columbia and Syracuse and were planning visits to a half-dozen more campuses. Online research may be informative, say students like Katske and Coleman, but the campus tour road trip reveals crucial details a website can't convey. "It's really no substitute for the college itself," says Katske. "It can't give you the weather. It can't tell you how long the walk is going to be from the Ag Quad to the Arts Quad."

for students with resources, the college search has become increasingly sophisticated: myriad campus visits and enrollment in summer programs, taking-- and retaking--standardized admission tests and dizzying numbers of advanced placement courses and exams. Some families even retain personal counselors who charge thousands of dollars to help students refine their interests, identify target schools, and craft compelling essays for their applications.

Meanwhile, students from less privileged households--as well as many racial minorities and those who are the first in their families to aim for college--struggle to navigate the increasingly expensive and complicated process to apply to, enroll in, and graduate from four-year institutions. "In 2003, while 80 percent of high-income high school completers were enrolled in college by the following October, only 53 percent of low-income students were," declares the nonprofit Institute for Higher Education Policy in a report titled Convergence: Trends threatening to narrow college opportunity in America. "The same story--gains mitigated by stubborn gaps--holds true for enrollments of students of color."

By 2014, racial and ethnic minorities will comprise more than 40 percent of all high school graduates, and by 2015, 37 percent of new college students will be African American, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islander. Cornell's Class of 2009, the last cohort for which data are available, is 30 percent students of color. The percentage of Asian American students on the Hill is three times the percentage of Asian Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four in the general population--but Hispanic and African American students enroll at only about one-third of their percentage in the general population of that age. And as the cost of tuition continues rising faster than family incomes, disparities in the quality of publicly funded education continue to grow.

"When you go into those elite high schools whose names everyone knows, the students are already educated about college," says David DeVries, director of undergraduate admissions for Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. "They know the questions to ask. They've been preparing for years--and their parents have been preparing for even longer." In underserved areas, where earning a high school diploma is a major achievement, different rules apply. "Students haven't been thinking about college," says DeVries. "They don't know what to ask and they don't know what they should be doing to prepare for college--yet they're eager."

At Cornell, where opportunity for all students was enshrined in the founder's motto, that dichotomy translates into a growing imperative for administrators to think critically--and creatively-- about appealing to harder-to-reach students, including those not enrolled in the private schools and rigorous public magnets that launch students into selective four-year colleges and universities. "We know there are many more talented individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, from other countries in the world who also need to have the opportunity to attend a school like Cornell," says Doris Davis, associate provost for admissions and enrollment. "We need to be concerned about closing the educational gap that exists not only in our country, but throughout the world."

Narrowing that divide, says Davis, requires multiple approaches--from building relationships between the University's American Indian Program and individual Native American tribes to coordinating efforts with churches and community centers, and forging collaborations with local agencies that bring multicultural students to campus. In recent years, the University has overhauled its view book and relaunched its website with an eye toward prospective students, and it has also generated new brochures targeted at specific demographic segments, from high school sophomores to the parents of rising seniors.

Diversity efforts include two weekends when recruited students come to campus--often on Cornell's dime. The first, in the fall, targets prospective applicants nominated by their high schools; the second, during Cornell Days in April, brings accepted students to the Hill for meetings with faculty in their college, visits to classes in their intended major, get-togethers with current minority students, and an overnight stay in a dorm room. "When you're a member of the Ivy League, there are some students who will self-select out based upon their understanding that perhaps the institution might not be welcoming or might be out of their reach as far as cost," says Jason Locke, Cornell's director of undergraduate admissions. "We have to let students know that we're open and that we can make a Cornell education affordable. I don't think we've figured it out yet. I don't think many institutions have."

Beyond pure recruitment, the University's outreach efforts-- many mandated by such funding agencies as NASA and the NSF, or components of Cornell's land-grant mission--can also play a role, says Steve Hamilton, the associate provost for outreach. In recent years, the University has sought recruitment synergies with programs that bring teachers and school groups to campus, and those that deploy Cornell faculty, staff, and students as ambassadors for higher education. "It makes sense to coordinate and look for mutual reinforcement," says Hamilton. "Cornell certainly should be out there trying to find the best talent and recruit talented minority students, but the pool is too small. Cornell ought to be involved in enlarging it."

A key part of that mission is recognizing the effect of socioeconomic status and race on the quality of early education available to prospective students.At the Engineering college, for example, applicants must have completed calculus, physics, and chemistry by the time they enroll on the Hill. In most school districts, that means taking algebra, geometry, and pre-calculus classes in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade. Pre-med applicants are generally expected to have taken at least honors biology, usually offered in tenth grade, and an advanced bio class if it's available.

For bright kids in schools without rigorous coursework or adequate guidance on scheduling, a selective university like Cornell can slip from their grasp long before the time comes to file an application. "The class-diversity nut is tough to crack because of the problem of inadequate preparation," says DeVries, who has struggled to keep his own preteen sons thinking long-term even in Ithaca's relatively focused school system. "It's as true of the rural, poor white kid as it is an urban, poor Latino.We need to be going earlier into the pipeline to model the kind of behaviors and interests that will catch students' imaginations."

To that end, Cornell faculty and staff participate in such programs as Chicago's High-Jump and New York City's Prep-for- Prep, efforts that help middle school students from underserved populations gain admission to elite private and magnet high schools. The Division of Undergraduate Biology sends Cornell students to middle schools throughout the region to inspire kids to pursue careers in the life sciences, while the Engineering college hosts two summer programs, Curie and Catalyst, that introduce girls and minorities early in their high school years to professions in science, technology, engineering, and math. If she had her way, says DiOnetta Jones, director of diversity programs for Engineering, she'd have programs for middle school students, too. "The earlier we get to students, the better," she says. "From an outreach perspective, if you don't choose Cornell, we're still happy as long as you go to college and major in an engineering discipline. But part of the outreach piece is preparing students who might apply to Cornell, and that means the sooner we get to them, the better."

Community colleges represent another resource for bringing low-income and minority students to campus. In March, the University was awarded an $810,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to strengthen its partnerships with local community colleges, a primary academic destination for students who enroll in colleges close to home for cultural and financial reasons, and a longtime source of transfer applicants, especially to the stateassisted schools. "When I first joined the admissions profession [in the early Eighties], the primary method of recruiting students was high school and college fairs," says Doris Davis. "That has expanded ten-fold in terms of the many different ways in which we communicate with students, parents, organizations, churches. The bottom line is that we have to find a way to communicate with the broadest range of students."

Last spring, the New York Times printed an op-ed by the admissions dean of Kenyon College, lamenting a dearth of male applicants. This summer, the American Council of Education made headlines with its latest report on the gender gap in higher education. Nationally, the number of male undergraduates has shrunk from 44 percent in 1999–2000 to 42 percent in 2003–04, with males represented at even lower rates among older undergraduates, racial minorities, and low-income students. And while the gap was once considered a problem only for smaller, liberal arts colleges, this year even large state institutions--including the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where women comprise 58 percent of the Class of 2009--have begun feeling the pinch. At Cornell,males make up 51 percent of the 2005–06 student body, and while the numbers vary by college--with a low of 25 percent in Human Ecology and a high of 70 percent in Engineering-- administrators say they're not worried about the prospect of affirmative action for males. "We're not seeing that challenge, and I think it's because of the type of institution we are," says Jason Locke. "We want to keep our eye on something like that, but we haven't seen any noticeable changes."

back when Julie Katske was making her first visit to Cornell, a mother and father in China's Fujin Province were setting their sights on colleges in Upstate New York for their young son. They didn't mention the decision for several more years, but by the time Jin Lin '10 was in middle school, his parents had told him that, accompanied by his father, he would move to the U.S. to earn his high school diploma and pursue a college education. "I can do pretty well in China," says Lin, whose uncles and grandfather hold government posts in the local hospital and city agencies. "But if I can do well in China, probably I can do better in the United States."

The lanky seventeen-year-old is fluent in Fujinese, his regional dialect, as well as Mandarin, and he also speaks some Cantonese. But his command of spoken English is still spotty. In China, where he earned top scores in the subject, his teachers focused on reading and writing. "I don't speak at the time," says Lin of his first days in the U.S. "But if you give me a paper, basically I can understand."

Father and son settled in the Fujinese neighborhood in New York's Chinatown in late 2003, and this spring Lin graduated from Washington Irving High School. There were sixty Chinese immigrants in his class when Lin started; only ten graduated. "The students actually don't aim for college," says Lin, noting that many intend to work in their families' restaurants and drop out early. Lin's father works as a driver in Manhattan; his son applied to more than a half-dozen schools, including four SUNY colleges, NYU, and Columbia, but Lin saved money by visiting only the campuses where he was accepted. Once he knew Cornell's College of Human Ecology was an option, the decision was easy. "My father try to encourage me to go to one of the Ivy League because when he go back to China, people know it's a standard," Lin says.

This summer, while Katske learned about social psychology in an Ives Hall classroom, Lin boned up on his English, studied chemistry, and took a college achievement seminar as part of the University's Pre-Freshman Summer Program, a six-week, tuition-free enrichment program for high-potential students whom admissions staff think could use extra support in the transition to Cornell. "If you get in, the admissions counselors believe you can do the work here," says DiOnetta Jones. "However, we also might believe that Pre-Freshman Summer Program students come from atypical environments and that they will benefit from the opportunity to get acclimated to Cornell,meet people, and build new relationships, rather than having to do all those things their first semester. It's an opportunity to give them the tools to be successful."

By the program's second week, Lin and a pair of friends from Alabama and New York City had found the best late-night source for Chinese take-out and watched Fourth of July fireworks from the knoll atop the Campus Store. Lin had downloaded an online Chinese translation of The Great Gatsby, an assigned text for his summer English class and this year's New Student Reading Project. "Even the English-speaking kids may have to use the dictionary to check vocabulary," he points out, admitting that he referred to the online version occasionally. Eventually, says Lin, he plans to settle close to Chinatown, where his parents, who don't speak English, could live comfortably. "I want to finish my study here, get my dentist's degree, and then open a small office," he says. "I don't have to make a lot of money; I just need to make enough to support my family. I'll buy a big house where my parents can live and we can be happy together."

Contributing editor SHARON TREGASKIS '95 was an associate director of admissions at the College of Human Ecology in 1997–98.