Learning by Going to the Source : Education: Inner-city children find out on campus what college life is all about--and how they, too, can succeed.

Shamanika Price is only in the fifth grade, but already she is enjoying the college rush.

“I’ve been to Cal State Long Beach and Compton College,” Shamanika said as she strolled across campus at Loyola Marymount University, where she recently spent a day touring and talking with professors and students about the joys of higher education.

Shamanika, who attends George Washington Carver Elementary School in Compton, has also spent several Saturdays at King/Drew School of Medicine under a program for future doctors.

“They’re important people,” the 10-year-old said in explaining why she is considering a medical career.

Shamanika is among hundreds of inner-city children visiting college campuses under programs designed to acquaint younger and low-income minority children with opportunities in higher education.

The program at Loyola Marymount, called “I’m Going To College,” is sponsored by the Early Awareness Committee of the California Assn. of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Loyola was one of four campuses chosen by the association to play host for a day to a group of students.

During their campus visit, Shamanika and more than 90 other Compton youngsters picked up mock scholarship checks and visited a mock college bookstore, where each child received a hardcover dictionary, a T-shirt and a nylon, neon-colored backpack and a choice of two free books.

Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson has two programs that bring elementary and junior high school youngsters, and later their parents, to campus on a Saturday. The programs are called Program Discovery and College Readiness and are funded, in part, by the state Department of Education.

Dominguez Hills professors have designed a day of special classes for the youngsters. Later, when the parents come to campus, they sit through the same classes and learn about the many ways to finance college.

At El Camino College, a similar program is called Early Start. Funded by the college and Southern California Edison, it brings eighth-graders to campus for tours and a four-week summer school in which they take lessons in subjects such as math, English and computers, as well as a class on how to study and how to take notes.

The following school year the same youngsters, now in ninth grade, come to campus for what the college calls Saturday Academies that feature college prep seminars and tutoring programs.

Although the early awareness programs vary in design and duration, they all have the same thrust--to persuade low-income, minority youngsters that if they hunker down on their studies and lay out a plan, they have the same chance as anyone to make it to college.

Unlike previous college recruitment efforts aimed at inner-city students, the programs cater to youngsters not yet in high school.

“The need is desperate,” said Carolyn Hardy, who runs the El Camino program. “We have really got to do a better job of reaching out to these kids. We lose them by the time they get into high school.”

Early awareness programs are critical, said Luz Reyes, coordinator of the College Readiness Program at Dominguez Hills. To be accepted in college, she said, students must begin taking prerequisite courses in the ninth grade.

Too many students in low-income, inner-city schools, she said, are automatically steered into vocational, rather than academic, classes. In the past, Reyes said, college recruiters looking for inner-city, minority prospects were dismayed to find that some of the brightest high school seniors had not taken college preparatory classes.

“We’re specifically targeting those students who are either at grade level or slightly below grade level,” Reyes said. “At most of these schools they already have programs for the gifted.”

Maureen Hassler, Loyola’s associate director of financial aid, said terms such as at-risk are often used to describe the youngsters in the programs. Such terms, she said, sound “horrible.”

They are youngsters who by virtue of family income or their parents’ level of education, might not be introduced to the idea of college or might not know how to go about planning for a higher education, she said.

Financial aid administrators, Hassler acknowledged, want youngsters to know that there are loans, grants and scholarships out there for them.

Much of El Camino’s program, Hardy said, is aimed at dispelling myths. “A lot of times,” she said of the youngsters, “they just don’t know what college is like. They think it’s not a place for them. They think only smart people go to college or only people who have money.”

Another myth, said Reyes, is that college is boring. Before students come to the campus for their Saturday visit, she said, the university sends teams to the schools to conduct special classes designed to pique student interest.

“For example, we have a volcano experiment where we actually make the volcano erupt,” Reyes said. “And we have a chemistry class where they sit through 30 minutes of chemistry and they don’t even know it’s chemistry.”

At Loyola, the approach is the same. A biology class taught the children about blood types, allowing them to use microscopes.

All three colleges preface the time on campus with one or more visits to the youngsters’ schools by college administrators and students, often minority students who can serve as role models.

Loyola’s Hassler said she knows her program is sparking the interest it was designed to ignite. When she and her team visited fourth-graders at the Carver school this year, Hassler said, third-graders came running out of their classrooms wanting to know when it would be their turn to visit the campus.