Dory Streett didn't beat around the bush when she spoke to students recently at a high school near downtown Los Angeles about Colby College, a liberal arts school in Maine. It's 3,000 miles from home, there's snow for long stretches and its community of Waterville has only 16,000 residents.
"It's almost as far as you can get," the recruiter told a dozen seniors at Gertz-Ressler High School. The photos she showed of Colby's bucolic campus did seem a galaxy away to many of the mainly low-income students whose school sits beside the Santa Monica Freeway.
But Streett, who also emphasized Colby's small classes and generous financial aid, urged students to consider a college outside of Southern California: "It's for kids who want something different . . . who know they will be in urban areas most of their lives and want to try something different for four years."
It's a message heard more often in California these days, as East Coast and Midwest colleges face an anticipated drop in their local applicant pools and cast a wider net for prospective students.
After a decade of campus-crowding growth, the size of the nation's high school graduating class has begun to decline with this year's seniors, and is projected to drop 4.5% by 2014. Then, modest growth is expected to resume.
The change, however, is uneven across the country, with the deepest dips -- up to 20% over the next few years -- forecast for New England and Upper Midwest states, home to numerous colleges.
Schools from those regions are boosting recruiting in California and other populous states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, and looking for more students overseas, especially from China and India.
The population trend "certainly concerns schools in the Midwest and the Northeast. And it will force many . . . to start recruiting outside of their traditional regions," said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Another trend may further reduce the collegegoing population, experts say. A growing portion of U.S. high school graduates are Latinos, who traditionally have lower rates of college attendance than whites. Unless that changes, the drop in potential freshmen may be even steeper.
Uncertainty about the economy and families' abilities to pay also is forcing colleges, especially private ones, to scramble to make sure enough qualified students apply.
