One measure of the effectiveness of Suffolk Public Schools is the amount of scholarship money the system’s graduates receive each year. It’s always a point of pride for school administrators to announce the total scholarship haul for each school during those schools’ graduation ceremonies.

The same thing was true this year. Officials from the school system have announced that graduates from Nansemond River, King’s Fork and Lakeland high schools received scholarships worth $2 million, $1.88 million and $3.7 million, respectively. That’s a total of nearly $7.6 million in scholarship money, an 18-percent increase over last year’s total.

There are many hurdles to post-secondary education, and the cost to pursue it is one of the highest, especially in a place like Suffolk, where many low-and moderate-income parents feel they can only dream of giving their children the chance to go to college. And as students and their parents have painfully learned, college loans can be a burden for many years after the degree has been earned.

Helping to close the gap between family income and college expenses are the many full and partial scholarships that contributed to the multi-million-dollar total brought in by Suffolk students this year.

That total is a testament, of course, to a lot of hard work by the students in academics and sports and on the scholarship applications themselves. It’s also a testament to the hard work of guidance counselors at the city’s three public high schools, whose efforts helped connect the students to the available funds.

Good work all around.