Even as urban schools struggle to find some way to educate their kids, they encounter new challenges. The most basic of those challenges is simple: a high school degree isn't enough.

Boston's public schools graduated about 3,000 students last year. Of those, something like one-third go directly to college full time. That number alone is one striking measure of the system's failures; nationally, the figure is closer to two-thirds.

The first impulse is to ascribe Boston's laggard performance to the education it delivers. But while the city's schools deserve some of the blame, they don't deserve it all. In recent years the school department has made a real effort to focus on educational quality.And the MCAS testing system, still hotly debated, will unquestionably eliminate the kind of social promotion that allowed high schools to award meaningless diplomas.

So why don't otherwise eligible students go to college? In some families, post-secondary education is deemed unnecessary. In others, particularly families who have recently immigrated here or have never sent kids on to college, application and financial aid forms are overwhelmingly complex. In most cases, finances play a role. Hard-strapped families would often rather see their grownup children earning money instead of writing term papers.

Just ask Roslindale's Wanda Suriel. Her parents came to Boston from the Dominican Republic. The notion of attending college was almost foreign. The application process was daunting and the money required for a four-year degree was well out of her family's reach.

The solution? ACCESS, a remarkable but mostly unknown Boston-based nonprofit created in 1984 by the business-funded Boston Plan for Excellence.

The idea of ACCESS is to take away the excuses and ``make sure that no graduate of a Boston public school is denied a chance to go to college,'' says its executive director, Ellen Rooney.

ACCESS does this by reaching out to seniors in the city's public schools, helping them wend their ways through the complicated college admission and financial aid system.

It also provides a unique kind of scholarship assistance. Called ``last dollar'' scholarships, ACCESS will make up the difference between what a graduating senior needs to attend college and what he or she has actually received from others in the way of aid.

The program has had its successes. Counselors from ACCESS worked with more than one-third of all graduating seniors last year. Of those, 265 received ACCESS scholarships averaging close to $1,000. That's an impressive figure. It means the program helped one-quarter of the system's students who went to college full time.

It's particularly impressive when one considers the alternative. Without ACCESS' intervention, a lot of those students would never  have even pursued the notion of attending college. Without the program's money, most of them could never have afforded college even if they had gotten in.

Yet for all of its merits, ACCESS suffers from many of the problems that seem to plague educational innovations. It's small, underfunded and disorganized.

ACCESS operates with essentially a three-person staff out of shared office space in the basement of a downtown building.

It depends on a couple of college interns and one part-time staffer to reach out to students in Boston's 23 high schools. Communication with parents is rare. Its records are a mess; the program, for example, doesn't even know how many of its scholarship recipients over the past 15 years have ever gotten their degrees.

At just $1.2 million, its budget is small. Most of that comes from interest earned on its $10 million endowment, an endowment that comes almost entirely from contributions by local businesses. As a result, money for scholarships is limited, so limited in fact that ACCESS had to deny 147 students scholarships last year solely because money was short.

These are problems that Rooney was brought in to fix. Formerly the well-liked chair of the Boston Licensing Board (the panel that grants local liquor licenses), Rooney wants to raise money, professionalize the organization and expand its reach. She notes with regret that nearly 400 applicants for ACCESS scholarships never completed the application process - a figure that speaks tellingly to the obstacles students and their families face in making the jump from high school to college.

College once was a luxury, a level of education reserved for the upper tier in an economy dominated by blue-collar trades.

No more. The so-called knowledge economy is really an education economy. Workers without some form of advanced education face bleak futures.

And Wanda Suriel? ACCESS worked with her in 1994, during her senior year at West Roxbury High School. It helped her through the application process and gave her a scholarship to Regis College. The only one in her family to attend college, she is now, just a few years out of school, assistant director of admissions at her alma mater.

Hers is the kind of success story ACCESS likes to hear about. The organization's challenge is to make those stories commonplace.

Tom Keane writes every Friday for the Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.