This year’s college admissions process may be the most cutthroat — and heartbreaking — of all time, with top colleges rejecting more students than ever before. But the news arriving via e-mail at one set of city high schools this month is very good.

The schools are not the usual suspects. Rather, they are public high schools in neighborhoods ranging from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg to Manhattan’s Harlem, with student bodies more likely to receive free lunch than to have a parent who attended college. They are enjoying an acceptance windfall that would make a Horace Mann or Dalton 17-year-old proud.

The results seem to stem from a fortunate coincidence of supply and demand; elite colleges are saying they want more economically disadvantaged students to attend, just as a set of elite public schools serving mainly poor students are reaching their peak.

“There are more talented, really sort of Amherst-, Harvard-type kids in the public schools in New York than any time I remember,” the dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, Thomas Parker, said. The Brooklyn native said he has been watching the schools for 30 years.

Mr. Parker’s school is one of those leading the diversity push. To encourage more poor students to attend, Amherst eliminated loans for families making less than $40,000 nine years ago, and last year it pledged to eliminate all loans by 2009.

It has studied some of the top New York City public schools.

The Williamsburg Charter High School in Brooklyn, for instance, is just four years old, but Mr. Parker said he knows it so well that he has memorized its address, and he also rattled off and recognized a slew of other names, including the 10-year-old Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem.

“Oh, sure, yeah, we accepted two or three kids from there this year,” he said in an interview yesterday. Frederick Douglass’s seniors are also fielding offers from Georgetown, Dartmouth, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania. The results are so good that the principal, Gregory Hodge, said the most distraught senior appears to be a girl who came to him in tears after she was wait-listed by Harvard.

“I looked at the child and I said, ‘What do you mean? You were accepted to Dartmouth, Amherst, U Penn. Are you out of your mind?'” Mr. Hodge recalled recently.

Traditionally strong exam schools, such as La Guardia High School on the Upper West Side, are also posting stellar results this April. La Guardia’s 55-student dance division has three students into Juilliard (where the freshman class is usually 20), two into Harvard, and one each into Princeton, Duke, and Carnegie Mellon, the dance department chairwoman, Michelle Mathesius, said.

The windfall these public schools are enjoying must be considered rare in the city. By the most generous count, 40% of students who begin New York City high schools never graduate. Of those who reach senior year, surveys provided by the Department of Education suggest only 45% intend to go onto four-year colleges, while 16% intend to attend two-year institutions. The number of city students taking Advanced Placement tests, considered basic college-prep fare, is rising, but last year the number of students taking AP tests was just shy of one-quarter.

Even at schools with some stellar placements, there are also students who are headed to more mundane destinations, a mix of state schools and two-year community colleges.

Nationwide, a recent study by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that elite colleges have actually enrolled fewer low-income students in recent years.

Still, there is definite interest among some colleges in exceptional New York City students.

“It looks like the places that are accepting our students are desperate,” the Williamsburg Charter School’s founder and CEO, Eddie Calderon-Melendez, said. “I think those schools are looking very desperately to reach out to city students.”

The schools also must market themselves.

Several school officials interviewed for this story have separate staff members dedicated to college placement, placing the public schools in direct competition with private ones, where full-time college counselors go to famous lengths to be their students’ champions.

A co-director of the Urban Academy Laboratory School in Manhattan, Ann Cook, said she learned how to work the process on a trip to Swarthmore College several years ago, when she met with an admissions officer. Trying to figure out how to explain her school’s unique graduation requirements — students do not take standardized tests but use a rigorous performance-assessment system instead — she referred to a progressive Brooklyn Heights private school, Saint Ann’s, which does not give grades. “I said, ‘Well, what do you do about Saint Ann’s?’ And the admissions director laughed. She said, ‘Saint Ann’s is Saint Ann’s,'” Ms. Cook said.

The moment taught her a lesson: To keep her school on the admission radar, she would have to cultivate its reputation.

Mr. Calderon-Melendez designed his strategy early on. The formula was simple: “They have money, we have urban New York City kids,” he explained. “Let’s try to make a marriage.”

A key part of the wooing, he said, was persuading the colleges of his school’s quality. In a four-page description sent to about 500 colleges and universities, Mr. Calderon-Melendez explained that his charter school’s demands exceed state guidelines, requiring more years of language and science and keeping a stricter count of Grade Point Average, something colleges “loved,” he said.

Schools like his are rare.

A senior at La Guardia High School who is mulling offers from Cornell and the University of Rochester, Lorenzo Mendez, said that while he has been self-motivated, many friends have not. “In my neighborhood, a lot of the Hispanics, they just aren’t taking these opportunities that are really out there,” he said.

A junior at Frederick Douglass Academy, Cynthia Brutus, who wants to attend the University of Pennsylvania, said the Ivy League would not have been a realistic goal for her had she gone to a high school closer to her home in Brooklyn. Naming a slew of Brooklyn high schools, she said, “I wouldn’t send my cat to those schools.”