You’re young, you’re poor. You don’t know anyone who has gone to college – not your parents or grandparents, not anyone in your neighborhood.

Here’s what you probably know about it: “It’s too expensive. I can’t go.”

Families of low income and limited schooling typically misperceive the cost of higher education as higher than it actually is. “I can’t go” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as students fail to take the courses and earn the grades they need to pursue degrees beyond high school.

Worse, they may not finish high school at all.

But there’s a way to silence the “I can’t go” that stops so many students: Change the “It’s too expensive” to “It’s free.”

An increasing number of colleges have been doing just. Harvard, Stanford and other elite private schools, for example, have completely eliminated tuition, room and board for students whose families make less than $60,000.

Closer to home, the University of Washington and Washington State University have adopted, respectively, the “Husky Promise” and “Cougar Commitment.” Under both policies, students whose family income is below 65 percent of the state’s median do not have to pay tuition or fees.

Now the entire state has taken another step in the same direction. It has created a new scholarship – College Bound – for low-income middle school students. It is modeled on an Indiana program that has brought more poor students into higher education in that state.

The concept: Get through high school, earn at least a 2.0 GPA, stay out of trouble – and the state will pay for college.

One virtue of College Bound is that it grabs students long before high school graduation, when some of them will have already done irreparable damage to their futures. A middle-schooler aware that college is a genuine option is far more likely to make that option a reality.

College Bound will cost money. The 2007 Legislature earmarked $8.1 million to get it started. This is on top of the $180 million the state pays each year for need-based college assistance.

But creating college opportunity where it doesn’t exist is one of the surest investments society can make. The G.I. Bill that sent World War II veterans to school after the war is the textbook example: It helped balloon the middle class, and the entire economy benefited.

Scholarships that target students of low income will do much the same thing.