This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Every year, many students who have overcome daunting obstacles in high school receive good news.
They've been accepted to college.
Many of them are low income students with outstanding academic track records.
And they represent a success story.
The american dream made real.
With hard work, students who don't have a lot of advantages can bootstrap their way into higher education and a better life.
Only it doesn't always work out.
The rate with which kids who are college and tending do not actually get to college in the fall is surprisingly high.
This is Lindsay Page, an education researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.
In one sample that we look at in the Boston area, we find that upwards of 20% of kids who at the time of high school graduation say that they're continuing on to college.
About 20% of those kids don't actually show up in the fall.
20%.
Among low income kids, that number is even higher.
They're getting tripped up somehow, right at the finish line.
Researchers call this phenomenon summer melt.
For universities, it's long been a puzzling problem because these are the kids who made it.
They took the sats, they got good grades.
They took AP classes.