Recruiting by Colleges

* “Facing Hard Sell in High School” (March 30) needs a second part. My daughter has a 145 IQ and a 4.2 GPA because she takes college-level courses in high school which are accredited above 4.0. She scored 1180 on the SAT with no preparation and while trying to cram the test in between her job and 12-hour practices for her instructor/performer role with the 1994 Young Americans Nation Music Outreach Tour.

In addition to her scholastic gifts, she is a talented dancer and songstress and is just back from two months on the road with the Young Americans in a tour that brought music and dance instruction to youth across much of the nation. She is a high school senior and maintained her schoolwork abroad the tour bus while on this trip.

No college has ever recruited her. She applied to and has been accepted at Loyola Marymount, Chapman University and UCLA. She wants to go to Loyola because its program best suits her intended major. Loyola told us that no scholarships are available to our daughter.

My wife and I are elementary schoolteachers, and I work a second job. We live in a 25-year-old house in a mid-middle-class neighborhood. We have low home equity and our mortgage payment alone is 35% of our income. We have no significant discretionary income or savings. So, our daughter will likely end up going to a junior college. With her intelligence, talent and determination, she will probably stick to her career plans, but the road to that realization is not certain, given the economics of it all.

Minorities do deserve special opportunity because our society still practices hidden and overt racial discrimination. And junior colleges and state universities are excellent institutions. Yet, something is wrong when scholarship monies are not available to top scholars like my daughter. Our society and economy will pay a price for that, too.

JOHN F. ROSSMANN

Tustin