If you think the application process is too hard, you’re probably not ready for college.

Jay Mathews writes at the Washington Post.

Why smart, poor kids lied about college

Boston College professor Karen Arnold encountered a mystery in her investigation of graduates of an innovative high school program in Providence, R.I. Many of the disadvantaged students had lied to their former counselors about starting college, making the program look better than it was.

Why?

The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a network of small high schools usually called the Met, had a splendid record for getting struggling students ready for college through a series of internships that promoted academic, social and emotional development. Its graduation rate was consistently more than 95 percent. Nearly every graduate was accepted to college and 75 percent of them reported that they had enrolled.

But when Arnold, asked by the Met to get a clearer picture of its graduates, checked enrollment status in 2006 with the National Student Clearinghouse, she discovered that about a third of the program’s alleged new college students were not actually registered. She learned that the summer months before college had been too much for them. They didn’t understand the enrollment paperwork. Money problems emerged. Their parents and friends opposed their plans. They couldn’t bear to tell the Met counselors who checked up on them that they had not followed through.

Arnold’s bombshell revelations, and similar discoveries in other cities, have inspired one of the most incisive books written about the American college admission system — “Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College” by Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page. It will be published in October by Harvard Education Press.