As high-school seniors begin to choose colleges in the coining months, officials at many public flagships nervously hope that their renewed outreach to Black students reverses steep and disappointing enrollment drops. Those declines, some of them by double-digit percentages, have caused extensive soul searching and near panic among academia's leadership. While experts don't blame any single reason for the numbers tanking in 2004, they agree that the occurrence has underscored the disturbing fact that the pool of high-achieving Black high schoolers remains too small. Among the 2004 college-bound high-school graduates in the country, 110,000 of them who disclosed their ethnicities on their SATs scored a 1300 out of a possible 1600 on the standardized tests, according to the College Board. Of those, only 2,055 were Black. A recent national survey of young adults ages 18 to 25 shows that substantial numbers, including 51 percent of Blacks, believe their high-school teachers and classes should have done more to prepare them for college-level work. More than half of those surveyed across all ethnicities by the Public Agenda research group report a shortage of counselors at their high schools, and nearly half say their counselors had given them so little time that they felt like they were merely another face in the crowd. But the survey indicates that 69 percent of Blacks hold themselves accountable, saying they could have worked harder in high school and paid more attention.