All it takes is hard work and determination… and money.

Preparing for a college education is challenging. Students must meet rigorous course demands, perform well on high-stakes standardized tests and navigate the entangled college admissions process. Tuition payments are overwhelming. What is the common denominator of all this? Money—in the school system and in the family.

It’s a well-known fact that students from low-income families are less likely to enroll in and to finish college. In fact, about 50 percent of low-income students enroll in college right after high school, compared with 80 percent of high-income students. The results are more extreme with low-income, first-generation students who are one fifth as likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree after six years as students who are neither low income nor first generation.

First, to dispel myths about determination deterring students from college success, look at the facts. Even for academically high-performing students, income greatly affects higher education attainment rates. A Department of Education longitudinal study found that students from low-income families are 30 to 45 percent less likely to complete college than their high-income peers, regardless of student scores on eighth grade math tests.

Now, consider the requirements for college preparation.

Students need to be able to take rigorous classes such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. About 60 percent of high schools in the nation offer at least one AP class. Unfortunately, these are not distributed equally among high schools, and money is the cause. California is a prime example as it correlates a school’s financial situation with its minority status. High schools with 75 to 100 percent minority concentrations offer 30 percent fewer AP courses than high schools with 10 percent or fewer minorities. Also, AP courses are far more expensive to operate than regular high school classes, due to higher teacher salaries, smaller class sizes and the higher cost of materials.

Additionally, the lower demand for AP courses in low-income high schools might not justify the cost. Federal grant incentives to support AP programs exist but are ineffective. In 1999, fewer than 93,000 low-income students took AP tests; by 2002, this increased to a meager 140,000 students. This looks like progress, but minority students still only accounted for about nine percent of the total AP tests taken that year.

Students need to perform well in relation to their peers on standardized exams, such as the SAT and ACT. Some free materials are offered online for each test, but course preparation classes such as those offered by Princeton Review and Kaplan are prohibitively expensive for low-income students. The Princeton Review Web site advertises savings of 200 dollars for their private tutoring services but doesn’t list prices for test preparation courses.

Students must next maneuver through the college admissions process. Low-income students have limited access to counselors and are unable to pay for one of the 4,000 to 5,000 private educational consultants in the U.S. today. These consultants are concentrated on the East and West Coasts and are located in larger cities and affluent suburbs across the country. With an hourly rate of 160 to 300 dollars, a package in which a consultant guides a student from the end of tenth grade through twelfth grade costs on average 3,700 dollars.

Then, there’s the overwhelming consideration of paying for college; the cost of attending a university has risen almost five percent, after adjusting for inflation, over the past 10 years. There are federal programs such as the FAFSA and Pell Grants, but neither is sufficient.

More than five million low-income undergraduates are unable to pay for school even after receiving Pell Grants and maxing out supplemental financial aid such as scholarships and student loans. The largest award only covers about 32 percent of tuition for an average four-year public institution. In 2005, even with their Pell Grant awards in hand, students in the lowest income quintile still had a college payment requirement of 73 percent of the family’s total income.

It’s time to stop blaming low-income students and to start accepting the role money plays in college preparation. Then, then the development can begin of more viable programs that create equal opportunities for all income levels.