LOS ANGELES — Dory Streett didn't beat around the bush when she spoke to students at a Los Angeles high school recently about Colby College, a liberal arts school in Maine. It's 3,000 miles from home, there's snow for long stretches and its community of Waterville has only 16,000 residents.

"It's almost as far as you can get," the recruiter told a dozen seniors at Gertz-Ressler High School. The photos she showed of Colby's bucolic campus did seem a galaxy away to many of the mainly low-income students whose school sits beside Interstate 10.

But Streett, who also emphasized Colby's small classes and generous financial aid, urged students to consider a college outside of Southern California: "It's for kids who want something different ... who know they will be in urban areas most of their lives and want to try something different for four years."

It's a message heard more often in California these days, as East Coast and Midwest colleges face an anticipated drop in their local applicant pools and cast a wider net for prospective students.

After a decade of campus-crowding growth, the size of the nation's high school graduating class has begun to decline with this year's seniors and is projected to drop 4.5 percent by 2014. Then, modest growth is expected to resume.

The change, however, is uneven, with the deepest dips — up to 20 percent over the next few years — forecast for New England and upper Midwest states, home to numerous colleges.

Schools from those regions are boosting recruiting in California and other populous states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, and looking for more students overseas, especially from China and India.

The population trend "certainly concerns schools in the Midwest and the Northeast. And it will force many ... to start recruiting outside of their traditional regions," said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Uncertainty about the economy and families' abilities to pay also is forcing colleges, especially private ones, to scramble to make sure enough qualified students apply.

"Postsecondary institutions accustomed to filling entering classes with relative ease will likely face greater competition for fewer traditional-age students," declared an influential report, "Knocking at the College Door," released this year by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

Felema Yemane, a senior at Los Angeles' Pilgrim School, says she is nervous about applying to college but hopes the demographic decline might boost her chances.

"Just the fact that it's a little bit smaller gives us a little more chance," said Yemane, who is applying to private and public schools on the East Coast and in California.

Local high school counselors say they are hearing from more schools that want to send representatives. "We are finding schools recruiting in California that we haven't seen in the past," said Helene Kunkel, a college adviser at Palisades Charter High School.

For the first time, Central College in Iowa, and Quinnipiac University in Connecticut are sending envoys to Southern California. Others, including Northeastern University in Boston and the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, have established California offices or placed full-time recruiters here.

Still others, including the University of Vermont, the University of Connecticut, Michigan's Kalamazoo College and Minnesota's College of St. Benedict-St. John's University, are coming more often and visiting more schools.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of high school graduates in the U.S. peaked this spring with about 3.35 million "Echo Boom" youngsters, offspring of Baby Boomers. The number is projected to drop by about 18,000 next spring and continue to decline for the next five years.

New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania are projected to have significant dips while states such as Texas, Florida and Arizona are slated for growth.

California is in a universe of its own. The "College Door" report estimates that the number of California students graduating from high school peaked at 423,615 in 2008. The state projects a slight decrease for 2009 and a nearly 7 percent decline by 2017.

However, California's population of young people will remain the largest by far — about double that of Florida and New York — and will continue to draw recruiters.