This may get your blood boiling. And that would be good because of what we are doing to our low-income students who make up 8 out of 10 graduates from Dallas County high schools. We take these great kids, who kept their side of the social bargain to earn their high school diplomas, and put them in colleges and universities where 9 out of 10 fail. We do this every year. It’s a tragic setup of our kids and a poor return on our $150,000 investment in each K-12 education.

The data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board shows that 87% of low-income Latino students and 91% of low-income African American kids who enroll in college drop out. But don’t they later enroll elsewhere, you ask? And, aren’t they better off having some college than none? No, and no. Consider the average dropout has $25,000 or more in debt and no degree; any grants are frozen and the student will owe the departing school funds. No. It’s game over for these kids with so much potential.

Hold that thought while we look at the Dallas County Promise. This is a promising program that says if you want to go to college, your tuition and books are paid for. All you have do is start at a Dallas County Community College first. Makes total sense, since 8 out of 10 kids graduating from our high schools are low-income, and fewer than 15% are ready for a four-year college, based on test scores. Free tuition, free books. That’s huge. So why are only 1 in 5 students who need a two-year start showing up?

Here’s the issue. In a word, it’s advisement, or more accurately bad advisement. We advise kids not based on what’s best for them, or by the realities of costs or curricula, but based on what feels good and what makes the system look good. While well-meaning, this is destructive to our kids who need honest advice the most. We should be guiding students to the colleges where they have the best chance of success.

Here’s the prevailing model for high school advisement that we need to change:

Advisement focuses on four-year schools and encourages students to apply to as many of them as possible.

Very little or no attention is given to the total cost of attendance, the academic rigor or the social-emotional gap a student will face. We see hundreds of students in the weeks before they show up at their colleges, unaware of these shortfalls, or how they will cover them.

Our schools brag on the millions of dollars in combined scholarships graduates win, but this amounts to only about $1,500 per student per year per institution. Meanwhile, only half of the students eligible for public grants complete the paperwork, so they miss out on grants that are many times greater than these scholarships.

Students are often told to max out their debt and go to the best schools they got accepted to.

Community colleges are discouraged and often not counted as “success,” even with Dallas County Promise in place.

The students who don’t express college aspirations, make up two-thirds to three-fourths of each graduating class, are given little guidance. For example, advising students to earn a one-year vocational certificate would be helpful, especially since we desperately need workers with these skills.

Our market needs diversity and degrees. No one cares where you got your degree today, only that you have one. The risk of going to a “named” school is greatly outweighed by the reward of a degree from somewhere.

Let’s demand that our public, charter and private school boards change this. In fact, there is very good incentive to do so. Recent Texas legislation, HB 3, provides substantial bonuses, more than $40 million for Dallas ISD alone, to improve its CCMR (college, career or military readiness) measures.

Pushing our kids to fail is a costly error. It’s time we start advising our students based on what is best for them, not others.

Dan Hooper is the founder and executive director of ScholarShot. He wrote this for the Dallas Morning News.