Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by David Leonhardt for The New York Times in which he discusses an immensely promising program that offers an alternative to the tragic “brain drain” of unfulfilled talent among children in families or fragments of families living below the poverty level. This program pairs low-income/high-potential students with elite colleges. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

* * *

Arianna Tricky was opening a piece of mail in her bedroom during junior year of high school when a pamphlet fell out of the envelope. The pamphlet seemed to offer the impossible: the prospect of a full scholarship to several of her dream colleges.

She went running out to her father, a house painter, who was sitting on the family’s porch in Grass Valley, a California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “You have to see this,” she told him. “This is the scholarship that will get me to the best schools in the country.”

The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, Which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through Quest Bridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like Quest Bridge’s.

Founded by a married couple in Northern California — she an entrepreneur, he a doctor-turned-medical-investor — Quest Bridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.

The growth of Quest Bridge has broader lessons for higher education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic ladder is so hard in the United States today, as I’ve written before. But Quest Bridge’s efforts are innovative enough to deserve their own attention.

In addition to the hundreds of its students on college campuses today, hundreds more have graduated over the last decade. They’ve gone on to become professors, teachers, business people, doctors and many other things. Ms. Tricky, a senior at the University of Virginia who is also getting a master’s in education, plans to become an elementary-school teacher in a low-income area.

College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.

Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

David Leonhardt is the managing editor of a new New York Times website covering politics and policy, scheduled to begin in 2014. He was previously the paper’s Washington bureau chief, as well as an economics columnist. He is the author of the e-book, Here’s the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth, published by The Times and Byliner.

To learn more about David, please click here.