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 intending 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 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 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, 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 Birchall. I'm a rising sophomore at Georgia State University.

Austin grew up in a working-class family about an hour outside of Atlanta,

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