MAYODAN, N.C. — On the labyrinthine path to the American higher education dream, Alex Lucas holds hands and nudges nervous students through the roadblocks.

The 24-year-old graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill works as a college adviser at McMichael High School in rural Rockingham County, where about 70 percent of students are low-income and only a third of graduates ended up at a four-year university last year. Lucas is a one-woman crusader at McMichael, where she goes to any lengths to bombard students with a message that is new to many of them: You can go to college.

She plasters the hallways with student-made posters featuring North Carolina’s public and private colleges. She scribbles a parent’s phone number on her hand so that she can pester a student about a key deadline. Whenever one of her charges receives an acceptance letter, she proudly posts the student’s name and school on a little flag on the window of McMichael’s guidance suite.

On a recent day, she dashed from mock scholarship interviews to test prep sessions, with a running to-do list in her head.

“I need to get these students to believe that getting a college education is worth it to them and that the investment that they have to make  and the time and money is worth it to them,” she explained. “And then I have to help them achieve it. It’s a two-step process the believe and then the achieve that I’m going for.”

Lucas is a trained member of the College Advising Corps, a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit that placed 375 advisers at high schools in14 states this year.

Modeled on the idea of the Peace Corps or Teach for America, the organization hires recent graduates to work in rural and

urban high-need schools, to help qualified students find their way to college. The corps has 24 university partners that contribute funding and advisers.

The nonprofit received national attention in January at a White House summit on higher education affordability and accessibility. On that day, the John M. Belk Endowment of Charlotte announced a three-year, $10 million grant for a big expansion in North Carolina, where there are 31 advisers. Another 60 will be added in the next three years.

The North Carolina university partners are UNC-CH, North Carolina State, Davidson College and Duke University, which announced this month that it would join.

Kristy Teskey, executive director of the endowment, said the grant aims to move the dial on college-going in North Carolina’s rural communities.

She quotes a Georgetown University study that indicates that by 2018, 59 percent of jobs in the state will require some form of higher education. Yet the 2010 census showed that only 27 percent of adults in rural communities have a two-year or four-year degree.

“When you’re first generation and no one in your family has gone through the experience and you don’t have a support system of any kind to help with that, it’s these types of programs that can make the difference for large populations,” Teskey said. “By the end of three years, we hope to have touched 54,000 students’ lives in helping them make good decisions around higher education.”

Teskey said the endowment was swayed by data from Stanford University evaluators who have studied the College Advising Corps and found better rates of college acceptance and financial aid applications at schools with advisers _ 10 percentage points higher in some cases.

In North Carolina overall, the evaluators found the four-year college enrollment rate was 4.7 percentage points higher at schools with an adviser.

The results were better in rural areas such as Rockingham, where enrollment in four-year colleges was 8.5 percentage points higher, and enrollment at two- or four-year colleges was 10 percentage points higher compared with schools without advisers.

During a three-hour span on a recent day, Lucas reviewed financial aid forms for one student, prepped two anxious seniors for scholarship interviews and tutored three other students on vexing algebra problems for the ACT exam.

In the mock interviews, she tells students to look adults in the eye, shake their hands and dress professionally. Have a resume in hand, she advises, and watch the posture. Don’t be afraid of selling your accomplishments, she tells them. When students say, “Um” too often, she lets them know.

Anna Waddell, a senior from Stoneville, is nervous about the scholarship and risks being tripped up on the perennial question about strengths and weaknesses.

“You’ve got so many positives, that even when you give a weakness, I want it to be a secret strength,” Lucas tells her. “It’s going to be awesome.”

Waddell leaves the session feeling more confident. She calls herself a first-generation college student, even though her mother attended a community college. Her two older siblings work minimum-wage jobs, which helped spur Waddell’s hunger for a college degree.

She applied to eight colleges and was accepted to all. She’ll attend UNC-CH in the fall. For now, she’s trying to figure out how to afford it. That’s where Lucas comes in. She circulates a list of dozens of scholarships available. “I’ve always known I wanted to go to college,” Waddell said. “But execution? I didn’t know what to do.”

(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

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