With only a few thousand African American and Latino high school students scoring 1310 and above on SAT tests, selective colleges often find themselves -- scholarship money in hand -- colliding into one another as they attempt to lure these highly-sought-after students to their campuses.

"It seemed to me that too frequently we were not pausing to see if we could develop a [different] constituency," says Dr. Colton Johnson, dean of the college at Vassar.

In 1985, Vassar began to do exactly that. The Poughkeepsie, New York-college joined with LaGuardia Community College -- and later, nine other two-year institutions -- to encourage community college students to become scholars of the first rank

The success of the program is explored in a new report just published by the American Association of Higher Education. Transforming Students' Lives: How `Exploring Transfer' Works, and Why describes Vassar's Exploring Transfer (ET) program.

As of September 1996, according to the report, 399 community college students -- including 191 from LaGuardia -- have gone through the program. Of those, 254 -- or 64 percent -- transferred to four-year institutions. Of the transfer students, ninety-seven had earned bachelor's degrees; seventy-seven had matriculated at Vassar, fifty-nine of whom had earned degrees there; and thirty-three had gone to graduate school, of whom twenty-one had earned graduate degrees.

"We think our results are even better than we publish because there are some people we can't find," says Janet Lieberman, co-author of the report.

"Our program challenges students with high potential, who might be unaware of their ability to tap that potential and learn how to achieve," says the special assistant to LaGuardia Community College's president and cofounder of the program. "The success of so many of our participants shows that we can expect more from students at community colleges and that society could benefit if other institutions consider developing similar programs."