College Prep from Day One

If you were a parent in Santa Ana, Calif., you wouldn't necessarily dream big dreams for your kids. The town is poor, 91% Hispanic, out of the mainstream. With luck, the kids will get high school diplomas, maybe a couple of years in community college. University? Out of the question. But what if the university wanted your kids and reached out to make sure they got in?

Meet Angie Contreras and Leslie Morales. The seventh-graders are standing beside each other only because their counselor, Patrick Yrarrazaval-Correa, has pulled them out of the lunchtime crowd at Santa Ana's Willard Middle School, in the shadow of the University of California at Irvine. "They don't like each other," Yrarrazaval-Correa says. "You know how middle school is." But the girls are his example of a new era. They used to be C and D math students. Now, after months at the math academy run by U.C. Irvine students at Willard, they are getting A's and B's and are ready for eighth-grade algebra, a prerequisite for the high school math courses necessary for college.

In nonwhite, non-Asian minority communities across California, college prep is beginning younger and younger. It is a legacy of Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California, and a reaction to the prospect of Hispanics' and blacks' vanishing from state campuses.

Until 1996, U.C. Irvine relied on affirmative action to keep its conscience clear. The programmed trickle of acceptances helped 5% of local Hispanic students get into the U.C. campus. It was politically correct but mostly cosmetic. Stephen Carroll, a senior researcher at the Rand Corp., notes that percentages of blacks and Hispanics on California college campuses actually dropped under the old policy: "I am skeptical that affirmative action accomplished a heck of a lot for minorities." Even defenders concede its faults. "I think it was coming close to leading us to a quota system," says U.C. Irvine chancellor Ralph Cicerone.

There is nothing token about the new outreach programs. They are not remedial but creative, even difficult. Dick and Jane have been replaced by Antigone and Pericles. Middle-school math tutorials go on for hours and progress to higher algebra. SAT drills are constant, and college essays are rewritten many times. "Its a huge difference," says U.C. Irvine student tutor Sonia Velazquez. "Kids know when it's remedial and they're being talked down to, no matter how nice you put it." But to be in the outreach program means to be special, bright, even cool. When Willard held sign-ups for its math academy, a program that meant spending all Saturday morning at school, the library was swamped as 90 kids fought for 60 spots.

For their children to be part of the math academies, parents have to commit to 4-hr. Saturday-morning sessions of U.C. Irvine's Parent Academy. There they are coached in what classes their kids need to get into college, how to gauge SAT scores and how to apply for financial aid. "These programs help parents have self-esteem, feel proud," says Mel Pelayo, a computer-network administrator who left school in third grade. "I didn't go to college, but I'm not a loser. I can help my kids."