Martin University’s Steve Glenn got right to the point. “Who can tell me why people go to college?” he asked a group of Indianapolis middle school students midway through lunch.

A young man near the vending machines in the student lounge at Martin University put down his pizza. “Get a degree, I guess,” he ventured.

“And what will a degree get you?” countered Glenn, director of a Martin outreach program for low- to moderate-income students.

“A high-paying job,” a girl in the back answered.

“Right. And I’m guessing that everyone in this room wants a nice car, right?” said Glenn, prompting a predictable chorus of enthusiastic assent.

“Well,” he continued, “to get a nice car you need a good job. And to get a good job you need a college degree.”

Most middle- to upper-class kids would no doubt view Glenn’s pitch — one he makes to hundreds of inner-city students each year — as superfluous. But in low-income neighborhoods, the concept of going to college isn’t a foregone conclusion; in fact, it typically seems exotic, if not impossible. “For underprivileged kids, college is amorphous,” said William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis (CHEPA) at the University of Southern California. “They can’t understand why they’d want to go to a four-year institution.”

Glenn, a high-energy former college basketball player, is working to change that. It’s his mission to instill a sense of educational entitlement in students who may never have given a moment’s thought to continuing their studies beyond high school.

Glenn makes his presentations on behalf of Martin — a 1,300-student, private, liberal arts institution in Indianapolis — in particular and the entire higher education community in general. Ultimately, he doesn’t care where the students he addresses go to school. His only concern is that they will one day enroll in a college or university.

As enthusiastically as he embraces selling urban students on the long-term benefits of higher education, Glenn knows he is occupying a role that should be filled by parents and guidance counselors. He says many of the students he addresses tell him: “Nobody is talking about this at home.”

Nor does there seem to be much discussion about college and affordability in the guidance offices of urban secondary schools — at least not in the Los Angeles-area high schools that were the subject of a 2005 study by Tierney and other CHEPA researchers. The reason for that dearth of conversation is simple: In some of the schools studied, the average counselor-student ratio was an astounding 5,000 to 1. The counselors who are available, the report added, spend most of their time on discipline and scheduling — not on showing students how to get into or pay for college. As a result, said the study — Show Us the Money: Low-Income Students, Families and Financial Aid — urban students tend to overestimate the cost of college and underestimate the amount of financial aid available to them.

It’s not that the guidance offices aren’t filled with material explaining the various scholarships, grants and student loan programs. The information is there, said Tierney. But other priorities prevent counselors from getting the information into students’ hands.

Also, lower-income students are less likely to use the Internet as a resource for college applications and financial aid, Tierney added. “And whether they’re rich or poor, the reality is that it’s much cooler to look at Coldplay’s Web site than the College Board Web site,” he pointed out. “Virtual tours of college campuses might be fun, or sometimes checking out actual college classes can be fun. But it’s really not fun to fill out financial aid forms.”

Bobby Fong, president of Butler University in Indianapolis, said it is incumbent on colleges as well as counselors to better communicate the real cost of college to families and potential students.

“Most of us know that you don’t have to pay sticker price for a car,” said Fong. “Unfortunately, it seems we still have to explain that you don’t have to pay sticker price for an education.”

Upper-income families certainly understand that the published cost is very rarely the actual price that a student pays to attend Butler, a private, somewhat selective (4,400 students) and expensive ($34,690 per year, including room and board) liberal arts institution. To attract talented students, Butler and most other private institutions — and a growing number of public ones as well — provide institutional grants, effectively offering a “discount” on their published tuition rates. Some of these sticker-price reductions are based on financial need, but increasing proportions are based on merit — a student’s achievements in academic or other pursuits.

This trend toward tuition discounting, say many in higher education, has fueled competition among institutions and has contributed to what Fong characterizes as harmful “gamesmanship.” The families most eager to play the game, said Fong, generally have household incomes well into the six-figure range. “It’s almost a prestige factor that your kid got a merit scholarship to a liberal arts university,” Fong said. “The people who are well able to pay full (tuition) have discovered they can negotiate among schools.”

Even if lower-income students understand that they and their families will not be responsible for paying for the bulk of college costs, a new set of circumstances often kicks in. “My second-hardest job, after convincing them to go to college, is getting them to fill out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) on time,” said Glenn, referring to the form that the government and all institutions use to guide their financial aid decisions. The trepidation over filling out forms is often compounded if a low-income family finds it necessary to supplement grants with loans. “The parents are particularly troubled about taking out loans,” said Tierney. “Some of them may never have had any interaction with a bank. Ever.”

His suggestion for shoring up the pipeline between urban schools and higher education is for more colleges to emulate Martin University. Tierney would like every college and university in the country to forge a cooperative relationship with high schools in five to 10 financially strapped school districts. Under his plan, each institution would dispatch graduate students and on-campus counselors to the high schools to offer students college counseling.

“People have been talking for a long time about a need for greater integration between schools and colleges,” said Tierney. “If we can provide information in a way that kids like, they’ll (listen to it). Most kids are well meaning and want to succeed. But they’re kids. They need support, and they need to understand how to make it happen.”