Research was conducted at Bucks County Community College, Newton, Pennsylvania, during the 1969-70 academic year to determine the effects of special reading and study skills instruction combined with counseling on the success rate of "high-risk" students. A course, which involved 2 hours of instruction per week plus 1 additional hour of independent work, combined with educational/vocational counseling, was offered. Freshmen who ranked in the bottom 40 percent of their high school graduating class and whose SAT scores were below 800 with a verbal score below 400 were informed that a reading and study skills program was available. Of 82 students who met the criterion for course attendance, 41 enrolled and 33 completed the entire course. The students who did not attend were used as a comparison group. Three studies were made to determine the immediate and relative effects of attending the course: a comparison of pretested data with posttest data obtained from three subscales of the Cooperative Reading Test; a comparison of the pretest data with the posttest data from the Student Attitude subscale of the Brown-Holtzman Survey of Study Habits and Attitudes; and a comparison of semester average, English grades, and frequency of failures between the experimental group and the control group. Results of the studies showed that the experimental group's semester average was significantly improved when compared with the control group, and benefits were realized as a result of the counseling experience. (DB)