These are exciting times for high school seniors. Acceptance letters ---- and rejections ---- from colleges and universities are arriving every day in the mail. It's worse than a shame that thousands of teenagers may miss out on a college education for lack of money, while millions of dollars in scholarships are going unclaimed.

It happens every year.

"You've hit on a very important factor," said Oceanside Unified School District Superintendent Ken Noonan. "A lot of money goes unclaimed because kids just don't apply. That troubles us."

A report released this week by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC found that lack of awareness about financial aid has stranded thousands of aspiring Latino students on a "paper frontier" that is keeping them out of college.

The Sallie Mae Fund, that nation's largest provider of student loans, found that more than two-thirds of 1,200 Latino parents surveyed nationwide said they did not receive information about financial aid while their children were in high school.

University of California spokeswoman Lavonne Luquis told The Associated Press that those findings were particularly disturbing because one of the first budget cuts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed for next year's budget was to eliminate $85.3 million in college outreach programs ---- $52 million from Cal State and $33.3 million from the UC system.

But we're not willing to blame this one on the governor.

A cursory look at a single shelf in the Escondido Library on Thursday turned up 11 books containing 6,000 pages wholly dedicated to college scholarships. "Peterson's College Handbook 2004" contains information on "nearly $45 billion in financial aid." Other titles include "The College Scholarship Handbook," "The Scholarship Book (4,000 scholarships totaling $2 billion)," "Financial Aid for Veterans, Military Personnel and Dependents," "Financial Aid for Native Americans," "The 2004 Hispanic Scholarship Directory" and "The College Blue Book, Vol. V ---- Scholarships, Fellowships, Grants and Loans."

There is plenty of money out there. In fact, two years ago, $90 million in state-supplied Cal Grants went unclaimed because students missed deadlines, submitted incomplete applications, failed to send in transcripts or simply failed to apply.

"The money is out there," Noonan said. "We know it's out there. And a lot of it goes by because kids just don't get those applications in. A lot of it, I think, is just procrastination."

It's no secret that for years now our spendthrift legislators have been filching money promised to our schools to try to fill the enormous hole in our state budget. One result is that California ranks last in the nation in its ratio of high school students to counselors: 945-to-1 in 2002, compared with a national average of 490-to-1.

But again, we refuse to blame the governor. The outreach money Schwarzenegger whacked was "not for high school counselors," Noonan said. "That (was) for university staffs."

Students ---- and parents ---- have to do their homework. The resources are there ---- in the libraries, in local charitable foundations, in state and federal grants and loans. It would be oh so pleasant if colleges came and knocked on doors and asked kids to apply, but that's probably not going to happen.

"Our counselors bend over backwards," Noonan said, "but there are just a lot of kids that just don't apply. ... The kids just have to make the application."