California College Guide : Disadvantaged Receiving Early Taste of College Life : Outreach: Institutions seeking a broader range of students offer summer programs for high school and junior high minorities in hopes of attracting them in the future.

For seven weeks last summer, Lizbeth Hernandez, 16, rose early each weekday morning to ride a bus from South-Central Los Angeles to UCLA, where she spent four hours in a fast-paced algebra class.

Once she finished the two hours of homework, she was free to talk with her advisers, discuss problems with fellow students or sample campus recreational or academic facilities until 5 p.m., when the school bus left Westwood to return her and 27 classmates to Jefferson High School, their regular campus.

“I feel more like an adult here. . . . I’ve had the chance to see what college life is like,” said Hernandez of her participation in the UCLA Extension’s Bruin X-CELL program.

She is one of perhaps thousands of young, disadvantaged minority students who spent a large chunk of their summer vacations on college campuses last year.

As institutions of higher learning look for ways to include a broader range of students and keep their enrollments up during a dip in the size of the college-age population, they are increasingly turning to summer programs to reach those who are likely to be the first in their families to go to college.

It no longer is uncommon to find high school or junior high school students on campus in the summer, in growing numbers of school- or foundation-financed sessions aimed at pulling low-income, underrepresented minorities into the academic mainstream. Those are groups whose representation in college is lower than their proportion in the general population.

“More and more colleges are doing more to increase the pool of future students, and they are starting at earlier ages,” said Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors. “There is a recognition that it is important to consider college as an option early. Each year of (secondary) school closes some doors if the student hasn’t done the right thing.”

While Burtnett’s organization has not kept a tally of such programs, he said it is evident that they are growing rapidly.

“There certainly are more colleges today doing more on-campus and off-campus activities aimed at a younger population,” Burtnett said. “In the last five to seven years, the growth has been dramatic.”

Consider this small sampling of the summer programs offered across the nation last year:

* In St. Paul, Minn., Macalester College’s MACCESS program provided 30 local minority high school students with four-week, on-campus classes in critical thinking and oral and written communication. After the classroom sessions ended, the students moved on to paid internships at area businesses and service agencies. Participants, who were in the upper one-third of their high school classes, were teamed with Macalester students as mentors throughout the program, which continues into the school year. As at many of its counterparts across the country, the cost of this program was shared by the college and private foundations.

* In River Forest, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, Rosary College, a Catholic liberal arts institution, enrolled 29 high school sophomores in its College Preparedness Program for Hispanic High School Students. Begun in 1987, the four-week sessions feature courses in math, science reasoning, English and reading, as well as sessions about college admissions procedures. Parent information sessions, conducted in Spanish, were included in the program, and, as a way of reducing the financial pressure on students to seek summer jobs, participants got a stipend of $4.50 an hour to attend classes. Noting that 50% of Rosary’s undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college, school officials see the summer program as “a logical extension of the college’s mission.”

* In Bethlehem, Pa., Lehigh University, well known for its engineering school, put on a free, three-day “Materials Camp” for about 25 middle school and high school students to stimulate interest in materials science and engineering. Students lived on campus and did lab experiments, watched scientific demonstrations and visited local industries and a Philadelphia science museum.

* In Portland, Ore., 25 ninth- and 10th-graders studied math and science at Reed College for two weeks as part of a new Summer Science Program offered through the city’s Grant High School. The program was aimed at promising underrepresented minorities, low-income students and those whose parents did not attend college. In addition to courses and field trips, participants met with Reed students and received information from the faculty on college requirements. Those who attended every day received a $200 stipend.

In Southern California, with its rapidly growing minority and immigrant populations, nearly every college or university, large or small, public or private, has begun some form of outreach program. And most urban universities, such as UCLA and USC, have several.

Most programs target a specific group or academic area.

Cal State Fullerton, for example, launched its novel MISS program--Mathematics Intensive Summer Session--for Orange County female high school students three summers ago. “Women are underrepresented in the sciences,” said Ina C. Katz, MISS co-director. “And you can’t get into the natural science fields without a strong math background.”

The Urban Debate Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles brought 80 to 90 disadvantaged or minority youngsters to campus from public and Catholic schools around the country. The participants, ages 14 to 18, spent a week on campus to hone their communications skills.

“The students view the institute as a vehicle to further their education, improve their speaking skills, prepare them for college or possibly law school and to visit a college campus for the first time,” said associate professor Jay Busse. “The purpose . . . is to give students more of a level playing field while instilling in them the importance of scholarship, values and higher education.”

Not surprisingly, some of the students in the summer outreach programs have returned to the same campuses for college. But Burtnett said recruitment is not the primary motivation behind the sudden growth in such programs.

“I think most colleges view it as an investment which may or may not bring a specific return to that particular institution,” Burtnett said. “They are not marketing their particular institution; they are marketing higher education.”

Linda Loya, the college counselor at the 3,900-student Huntington Park High School, said the mostly Latino school currently has five colleges or universities working with its students this school year.

“It makes a huge difference,” Loya said of the outreach programs’ impact on getting more students to go to college. “They provide a lot more information and attention than I alone could give, and they provide a lot of role models for our Latino students.”

The UCLA Extension’s Bruin X-CELL Program, offered in cooperation with the Los Angeles Unified School District, is an outgrowth of classroom observations that UCLA student Pamela Hernandez made at Jefferson as part of an education course she took last school year.

Noting that many of Jefferson’s students, mostly minorities, could not fit in all the courses they needed to qualify for university admission, Hernandez proposed a summer program for helping students meet the requirements while getting a taste of college life. The university’s Extension Office helped her put together the program and find funding.

For participant Lizbeth Hernandez, who hopes to be accepted at a UC campus after she graduates this year, the fast pace of the algebra class was challenging but exhilarating.

“I wanted to get stronger in math. We go so fast here, but we get a lot of help,” Hernandez said of the program. “I think this is going to make high school seem easier for me.”

Maria Garcia, 16, a junior at Jefferson, said it was tough to give up much of her summer break to study so hard.

But Garcia, who has her heart set on going to UC Berkeley, concluded that attending the summer program was worth the sacrifice:

“It helped us have a better chance in life.”