Ramos characterizes his high school's guidance and college counseling resources as woefully inadequate. Only when he began to look at colleges and read up on the requirements did he hear about Achievement tests (now the SAT-II), he says.

"'What the hell are these?'" he recalls thinking. "I just accepted that I would have to work a little bit harder to try to make up for the advantages [others] already had," Ramos says. "You're limited by what you had access to beforehand."

Tserotas also says that her high school did not give her adequate academic skills for college. Rather than emphasizing accelerated intellectual accomplishment, the focus was keeping people interested--and keeping them in school.

"I never wrote a paper in high school. We watched movies," she says.

Her high school offered only three Advanced Placement courses, and few students ever scored higher than 2 out of a possible 5.

"It wasn't for lack of trying; the resources weren't there," she says.

Despite scoring a 1 in biology, a 1 in English and a 2 in calculus, Tserotas was valedictorian of her graduating class even though she had significant duties at home, being chiefly responsible for household work since age 9.

"I think I worked harder than anyone else in the school," she says.

Another student from the Bronx, Julissa Reynoso '98, was able to earn a scholarship to Aquinas High School, a private Catholic school. About 60 percent of her graduating class went on to higher education, but mostly to community colleges.

"I had never even heard of Harvard until my junior year," Reynoso says.

She was able to get her first real taste of a world outside of the South Bronx when she went to Georgetown University for a summer program.

"I had never been exposed to a world outside of South Bronx," Reynoso recalls. "Rarely did I go to downtown Manhattan where there were a lot of white people and a lot of wealthy people. There was a clear line of division between those people and where I lived."

Because of this division, upwardly mobile minority parents seeking educational opportunity for their children--or hoping to avoid the trails which faced Tserotas or Ramos--often retreat to suburbs and predominantly white high schools.

And it is primarily these students, not those of the inner-city, who attend Harvard.

"The majority of blacks I know here did not come from inner-city or predominantly black high schools, and I think that's a problem," says a senior black woman who asks not to be identified. Harvard needs to do more to recruit those students. It's also problematic of our educational system in general that inner-city schools tend to lack the resources and may not have students of the caliber or scores that Harvard uses."