In the US, determined efforts are increasingly being made to get good, but poor, students through college – students who excel in school, but for one reason or another fail to graduate from university. Many school districts now help every high-school junior take the SAT. Delaware has a programme for advising needy students on college application procedures. A coalition led by Bloomberg Philanthropies is about to fund 130 full-time college counsellors and enlist 4000 part-time student advisers to build for all university applicants the kind of support network that students from affluent backgrounds routinely take for granted. This is all reported in this week’s New York Times.

In Myanmar, Thabyay Education Foundation leads the way in offering this kind of service to local students wanting to study abroad. Maybe, though, as donors think through ways of assisting in filling still enormous gaps in the country’s higher education system, they could focus on issues like this – not simply providing scholarships, which are of course essential, but also seeking to boost access by making a daunting application process just a little easier for good students from marginalized communities.