Mr. Chairman and members of the House Subcommittee on 21^st Century Competitiveness, thank you for holding this hearing today on "Expanding Access to College in America."

My name is Tina Milano and I am the Executive Director of the National College Access Network. The National College Access Network (NCAN) is an alliance of community-based, primarily privately supported, college access programs serving students in 46 locations throughout the country. I will submit a detailed written statement and you may visit our website at www.collegeaccess.org for information on our members’ college access programs.

The college access program that may be most familiar to the members of the committee is DC CAP, started by The Washington Post Chairman and CEO, Don Graham, three years ago right here in Washington. The goal of DC CAP and all of the other member programs is to increase the number of low-income, primarily first generation students who enroll in and graduate from college. College access programs do this by sending staff to work in high schools to offer college admission, career, and financial aid counseling to students and to make sure these students have the money they need to pay their college tuition.

Other NCAN members operate College Access Centers where students of all ages can go to get personal assistance with college admissions, careers and scholarship searches. Through the work of these community-based programs, thousands of low-income students enroll in college every year.

NCAN welcomes the focus on college access and the critical need for an educated workforce in our country that has been a recurring theme of this reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. It is a strange contradiction that while the United States Department of Labor predicts that 90 percent of new jobs in the 21^st century will require college-level training, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance reports that financial barriers prevent 48 percent of college-qualified, low-income high school students from attending a four-year college, and 22 percent from attending any college at all, within two years of high school graduation.

The reauthorization of the Higher Education Act gives Congress the opportunity to consider the rapidly approaching confluence of four factors: the high cost of college, the reduced purchasing power of federal grants to students, the unreasonably large numbers of students whom guidance counselors are expected to assist (in California the ratio is approaching 1000/1) and the dearth of well-paying careers available to those without a college education. I am glad to have the opportunity to talk with you this morning about one of the possible solutions.

Community leaders, many of them successful entrepreneurs, created almost every NCAN-member program. The way these programs operate is simple. Staff members provide two things – counseling and money. Advisors work in high schools and community centers to educate students and their parents about how crucial it is for them to make postsecondary education part of their future. Most access programs also give "last dollar" scholarships to students who have been accepted into college but whose financial aid packages – including Pell grants, loans, work-study and institutional grants – fall short of enabling the students to actually attend.

Recently, most college access programs expanded their services to younger students and their parents. The Cleveland program is working with more than 5,000 middle-school students – arranging for them to visit college campuses, making sure they are signing up for the right academic courses, and meeting with parents about how to help their children prepare for college. At the other end of the spectrum, some programs have extended their counseling services and mentoring to students who have enrolled in college and may be at risk of dropping out.

This public-private partnership is enormously successful. The return on a community’s investment is impressive and the success rate of students is remarkable – 70 percent of them graduate. This compares favorably to the national graduation rate of 53 percent (National Center of Educational Statistics, IPEDS Graduation Rate Survey, 2001).

These programs are data-driven, low cost and proven to work for all students. For every dollar access programs give away, they help students leverage another $12 to use to pay their tuition. With just a bit of seed money, it is possible to unleash a community’s potential to help its own. With a small amount of federal funding, it would be possible for NCAN to get hundreds more of these programs started throughout the country.

By combining increased federal student aid grants and recognition of community-based solutions through programs such as GEAR-UP and TRIO, as well as NCAN’s model of college access programs, the federal government can contribute to the synergy created by communities, schools, institutions of higher education, foundations, and local and state governments as these organizations work to increase our nation’s college going rates.

Thank you for this opportunity to voice our appreciation for the Committee’s attention to the important issue of access to higher education for low-income students. I and the members of the National College Access Network stand ready to meet this challenge. At the appropriate time, I am happy to answer your questions and share more about the work of the National College Access Network. Thank you.