For Chicano students to make it to college -- and complete their degrees -- requires ambition, hard work and drive. Many also need financial aid and special recruitment, says a UC Davis education professor whose book, "Over the Ivy Walls: The Educational Mobility of Low-Income Chicanos" was published this fall. With financial aid less available and recruitment efforts for Chicanos slowing, Patricia Gandara warns that "without renewed intervention, ... the next generation of Chicanos will find the barriers to elite educations even higher" than they were for the group of high-achieving Chicanos studied in her book. More than half of the 50 Mexican Americans Gandara studied -- born in the 1940s and 1950s and who now hold M.D., Ph.D. or J.D. degrees -- attribute their university education in part to recruitment programs for Chicanos. This support was critical even though these students were highly qualified and could compete academically in any environment, Gandara says. In addition to the outside help they received, those in the study credit their success to a "culture of possibility" that existed in their parents' low-income homes -- that anything was possible for them and perhaps even destined -- and their own intense, personal drives for achievement.