In Antonio Thomas' case, Lewis knew that an appropriate financial aid package could add up to $20,000 or more – the difference between Antonio going away to college or remaining in a region where decaying tobacco-drying barns and abandoned factories dominate the landscape.

Ultimately, he narrowed his choices to two Virginia schools, Hampden-Sydney College and Roanoke College, and a third institution 440 miles away in Kentucky: Berea College. Antonio didn't know it, but it was the Advising Corps network – the same one that landed Britteny Madine in Charlottesville – that inspired him to apply for admission to Berea, a school he'd never heard of. The network sprang into action after a conversation between Lewis and a fellow Advising Corps guide about Antonio's preference for a small college. The friend suggested Berea and provided Lewis with a contact on the Kentucky campus. Lewis called the contact. She then persuaded Antonio to fill out an application.

Antonio hedged when Berea sent him an acceptance letter. Except for a brief trip to Florida, he had spent virtually his entire life in Virginia. "Ms. Lewis told me, 'Once you go there, you'll know,'" he says. So Antonio and his parents visited Berea. Ms. Lewis knew what she was talking about. Antonio felt immediately that the fit was right, and his gut feeling was reinforced when Berea sealed the deal by offering a full scholarship.

Nicole Hurd had an inkling that there would be many stories like Antonio's when a first-generation University of Virginia student stopped by her office in 2004, just after the Advising Corps had been founded (as the College Guides).

"Thank you, Dean Hurd," he said. "You don't know how many people who sat next to me in high school should be here, but who aren't."

The data from the program's first full year demonstrate what can occur when a young adult, fresh out of college, starts opening doors for low-income students. In 2005, students attending the 14 Virginia high schools that eventually inaugurated the program sent a total of 1,363 applications to six of the state's public college and universities. Under the tutelage of the Guides, the Class of 2006 sent out 1,552 applications to those same six schools, an increase of nearly 14 percent.

When it finishes the next phase of its growth in 2008-09, the Advising Corps, through a Cooke Foundation grant, will send young mentors – graduates of the University of California-Berkeley, Tufts University, the University of Alabama, Loyola of Maryland, Franklin & Marshall College, Brown University, the University of Utah, the University of Missouri and Penn State University, in addition to Virginia and UNC – into high schools from coast to coast.

Before assignment to a high school, each adviser will participate in a six-week program similar to the one that prepared Ebonie Leonard, Meghan Bridges, Camille Cates and Dexter Robinson this summer in Chapel Hill, N.C. Leonard's inspiration to work with the Corps during the year before she attends graduate school came in a conversation during a visit to a middle school special-education class taught by her sister. Some of the students could barely define college, Leonard recalled, let alone comprehend its function. A young Latino was among the students who did get it. His message to Leonard resonates to this day: College is for other kids, he told her – not for a Latino kid with a learning disorder.

"It really hurt my heart," she says, "because he had already set himself up in middle school not to take a college track. Middle school, maybe high school graduation was his ultimate goal." She says stories like his "really made me want to do this job."

Every adviser has a personal story that helps explain his or her choice to forego more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to spend a year at modest wages ($20,000 for 10 months' service, plus $5,000 to put toward their own education expenses) counseling students in low-income high schools.

For Leonard, it was that chance encounter in a special-ed class. For Kim Morris, it was her own mother, who had her first child at age 16 and went on to raise two others while putting herself through college. For Paulin Cheatham, who served as a Guide last year at Bassett High School, 30 miles west of Danville, it was his own experience as a first-generation college student.

"Most of the Guides are first-generation or low-income themselves, and that gives them the ability to say, 'Hey, I've been there myself,'" says Hurd.

In fact, the Advising Corps owes its existence in part to the kindness shown the son of an immigrant autoworker who grew up poor in Michigan. As a young man, the autoworker's son, Larry Farmer, was taken under wing by a near-peer volunteer coach who nurtured and encouraged him, pushed and prodded him and, ultimately, led him to the admissions office at the University of Notre Dame.

Decades later, his daughter – Nicole Farmer Hurd, B.A., Notre Dame '92; M.A., Georgetown University, '96; Ph.D, University of Virginia, '02 – sees her father's experience being replayed in the work of the Guides. "Just as my father needed that guidance as a first-generation college student, that's one thing that doesn't change over time. Those social and cultural and financial barriers are real for generations of students. And so, just as someone looked out after my father, this program has college graduates looking out for others."