More black students graduate from the University of Virginia within six years than from any other public university in the country, and here's why: institutional commitment, an admissions process that selects strong students, generous financial aid and a network of peer advisers.

Not only that, they've got Sylvia Terry, the associate dean of African-American affairs. She has re-created the high expectations and the support she learned from her parents, her small town and the historically black college her family attended.

She is trying, one by one, to ensure that these students get the intellectual, cultural and economic benefits of a college degree. She bakes them cakes, e-mails them poems and expects them to make good. She will celebrate with a couple hundred of them at a graduation ceremony today.

"Sometimes you can point to one person who makes such a huge difference," said John Blackburn, director of admissions. "She just nurtures every kid who comes through the door."

Race relations at UVA have never been perfect, and in recent years there have been flare-ups over racist graffiti and other issues. But there is an institutional commitment from President John T. Casteen III on down to ensuring that black students stay in school and graduate.

The school provides generous financial aid for needy families and emphasizes recruiting, academic support and an intense system of peer mentoring that Terry has built up.

Nationally, there is a gap of nearly 20 points between the percentage of black and white students who graduate. Just 44 percent of black students finish within six years, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which has found UVA to be the leader "by far" among public schools for the past 14 years.

The most recent figure from UVA, for black students who began college in 2001, is just shy of 90 percent. That rate is lower than those at the top schools in the country (Harvard has steadily been in the mid-90s). But it is better than at most of the schools UVA considers peers, such as the University of California at Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, Cornell University and Vanderbilt University.

The reasons some black students drop out include cost, poor academic preparation from weak high schools, the racial climate and a lack of support because there isn't a family tradition of college, according to Bruce Slater, the journal's managing editor.

One of the earliest black students at UVA told Terry he always looked up at the dorm room of the school's first black undergrad to earn a degree, Robert Bland. The light was always on; Bland was always studying. The young student would tell himself, if Bobby Bland can do it, I can.

It turned into a saying among the black students at UVA: Bobby stayed.

Terry kept it in mind. "I wanted to make sure that when students came to UVA, they didn't just come. As Bobby stayed, I wanted them to stay."

She said studies show that students are more likely to stay if they feel engaged and involved in a place and feel they have people to turn to. "It's so much easier to leave a place if you haven't built up connections," Terry said. "It's so much easier to leave if no one has shown an interest in you." She paused and smiled. "We want it to not be easy."