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When Tyler Price began his junior year in high school, an already shaky home life turned even more precarious after family members drew sides more distinctly than they had ever drawn them before—and an altercation with his stepfather led to stab wounds.

The stress on Price, seventeen, made him physically sick, he says, and he lost fifty pounds, started working more than he went to school, and then he was kicked out of the third high school he had attended. Price credits his participation in the Oregon Young Scholars Program (OYSP) at the University of Oregon, and his consistent contact throughout this period with Carla Gary, OYSP creator and program director, with keeping him connected and turning his life around.

“The people at Oregon Young Scholars were everything I could ask for,” Price says, “I feel it has provided me with a lot of structure, and Carla has pretty much been my mother. She has mentally pushed me forward.”

OYSP, in its fifth year, prepares and supports low-income high school students and their families for the college experience. Many young people in the program are the first in their families to consider higher education. Organized by the University of Oregon’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED), the program admits graduating eighth graders, primarily from Eugene and Portland, to a four-year program that meets a week in the summer (two weeks for seniors) and then once a month during the school year. The program focuses on academic success in core courses such as math and English, and promotes analytical thinking and team work, while also providing internship and financial aid counseling, college test preparation sessions, and informational meetings on the admissions process, scholarships, and résumé preparation.

“Oregon Young Scholars prepares students who are academically competitive, or who have the capacity to be so, in high school to be scholars, either in an academic field or at a professional school,” says Gary, an assistant vice president for institutional equity and diversity. “Our work is to help them see what they are capable of, to help them feel confident, and to learn the language of education—to know what a college track and admissions process are like.”

This August, Price and forty-four other students lived at the UO to immerse themselves in a curriculum that included project work in the areas of business, sociology, public planning, chemistry, art, and law. University faculty members and Eugene-area teachers were the instructors of the curriculum organized by Charles Kalnbach of the Lundquist College of Business and overseen with primary leadership by Kassia Dellabough of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts.

For Price and the other students, college is not the natural goal upon entering high school—for a number of reasons: no one in their families has attended college; their families neither encourage nor have the hope of affording college; and their home life is unstable and fettered by drugs, domestic violence, and poverty.

Price says moving between households was a constant for him, as was financial trouble. But OYSP created enough stability to overcome even these inconsistencies in a young person’s life: eleven of the thirteen OYSP graduating seniors last year are going to college, and all four seniors from this year’s class are headed that way as well. Despite leaving high school his junior year, Price is earning his GED at Lane Community College, where he plans to go this fall to continue his studies in early childhood education.