The St. Louis region is pretty average when it comes to the percentage of residents with a high school diploma.

But when it comes to the share of residents with a bachelor's degree, the region sinks closer to the bottom of the list compared with other major metropolitan areas.

"It's a classic St. Louis story," said Terry Jones, a University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist who recently completed a study on college access in the region. "We're not at the very bottom of the pack, but we are in the bottom half. And in most years, in most indicators, we're lagging behind the national average."

A new coalition of corporate executives and nonprofit organizations is trying to change that. The St. Louis Regional College Access Pipeline Project, which got off the ground around the first of the year, has the lofty goal of nearly doubling the college completion rate in the region from 28 percent to 50 percent by 2020.

The first major initiative of the project was to commission the report from Jones to assess the region's current status and efforts to address the post-secondary completion.

With the data now in hand, the project is hosting a half-day symposium today at the St. Louis Art Museum that organizers hope will be a call to action.

Faith Sandler and Jane Donahue, co-chairs of the pipeline project's steering committee, came together after noticing a spike in programs aimed at increasing college access in the region. The amount of federal and private money for such efforts has also increased.

College access programs often offer students tutoring, test preparation, and intensive college counseling that they might not otherwise get at their high schools.

But Donahue said the region has lacked coordination to make sure such programs are as effective as they should be.

"There was no coordinated strategy or community discussion," said Donahue, who is also vice president of the Deaconess Foundation. "This is about aligning all of the good efforts out there."

In total, Jones identified 35 organizations — nonprofit groups and colleges — in the region that are doing work in college access or retention. But he found that those services are not evenly spread throughout the region. Of the 25,000 low-income students in the seven-county region, only about 1 in 3 of them are exposed to one of those programs. That's largely because many of the programs are focused on the urban core in 25 schools. Meanwhile, about 57 high schools in the region are not served by any of these programs.

"Everybody has tended to gravitate to a relatively small number of public schools," Jones said. But many low-income students in parts of Warren, Jefferson and Franklin counties who are not on the path to go to college also would benefit from the programs, he added.

And in some cases, Jones found that several groups were doing similar work in the same school — as many as seven in Soldan High School, for example — but they were not necessarily aware of the other's efforts, he said.

The St. Louis region ranks 24th of 35 large metro regions in its share of residents with a bachelor's degree, according to U.S. Census data cited by Jones in his study. While the percentage of college graduates has increased between 1990 and 2007, Jones said the rise has lagged behind the increase in high school completion and the performance of other major metro regions.

The data Jones compiled from various sources also points to well-established findings, such as that people with post-secondary degrees on average make more money, lead healthier lifestyles and are more likely to engage in civic activities such as voting and volunteering.

One of the scheduled speakers at today's event is Greg Darnieder, who was tapped earlier this year to become U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's special assistant on college access. It's the first position of its kind and is focused on President Barack Obama's goal of the U.S. reclaiming its place as the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020.

Darnieder, a St. Louis University graduate, praised the St. Louis pipeline project's efforts thus far and noted that the philanthropic, business, education and legislative communities need to work on this together.

"This work has to be done in partnership," he said. "The challenge goes beyond the capacity of any K-12 system to address this."

Communities need to address the dropout crisis while also boosting learning in the classroom and making sure more students make it to college, he said.

In the St. Louis region, there has been some anecdotal and statistical evidence that the college access programs and district-wide efforts have been paying off. The proportion of the region's high school graduates taking the ACT rose to 69 percent, up from 60 percent, between 2004 and 2008, according to Jones' study.

And more students are filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which has been criticized for being too complicated.

"It used to be a false barrier because that stupid form stood in the way," said Sandler, who is also executive director of the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis.

But still, there is much to be done. Jones and others lament that there is not a good tracking system to follow students through the pipeline from grade school to college to measure the effectiveness of these efforts.

"We measure unemployment very carefully, but we do not measure college access," Jones said. "We don't have a tracking system. That inhibits our ability to know how well we are doing."