Programs that encourage high-school students from low-income families to prepare for college may have a secondary benefit: luring those students’ parents into college alongside them.

That is the premise of a paper scheduled to be discussed today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in San Diego. The paper’s authors, who are based at the University of Pennsylvania, studied precollege programs in Indiana, including the well-known 21st Century Scholars program.

The researchers found that the Indiana programs do not systematically collect data about parents’ behavior. But they did find a good deal of anecdotal evidence that when low-income parents learn through the programs about how to help their children register for classes and apply for financial aid, they sometimes decide to enroll as well.

Among other things, an administrator in the 21st Century Scholars program told them about an evening meeting at which a college-admissions officer persuaded roughly 10 parents to fill out financial-aid forms for themselves. And one parent told the researchers that she had decided to register and told her children, “Hey, you know, I’m right there with you guys, so let’s do this together.”

Finding new ways to bring adults into college is important, the authors argue, because the United States is falling behind other nations’ levels of educational attainment, and that gap cannot be closed solely by increasing the number of traditional-age college students.

At the same time, the authors warn that recruiting adults via their children’s precollege programs is a limited strategy at best. Such programs are aimed at young people, and they are not oriented toward the most common barriers to adults’ enrollment, including a lack of financial aid for part-time students.

The paper’s authors are Laura W. Perna, an associate professor of education at Penn, and Erin Walsh and Rachél Fester, who are graduate students in Ms. Perna’s program. —David Glenn