This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Every year, many students who have overcome daunting obstacles in high school received good news.

They've been accepted to college. Many of them are low-income students without

standing 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 intending do not actually get to college in the fall is

surprisingly high. This is Lindsey 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 graduations 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 called 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, they did their extracurricular activities, they wrote their college essays,

they've often applied for and received financial aid. Why wouldn't they show up at college?

In the summer between high school graduation and what would be timely college matriculation,

they're falling off track. This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you an episode that we first broadcast

in the summer of 2017 about the problem of the last mile and how to fix it.

Hello, I'm Austin Bertchell, I'm a rising sophomore at Georgia State University. Austin grew up in

a working-class family about an hour outside of Atlanta and from a very young age, he saw college

as his ticket to a better life. Growing up, my father worked at a produce standing. He opened a

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