I was rushing to change trains at Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan earlier this year when a tall young man stepped in front of me, blocking my way through the crowd. He said my name and I looked up.
“Kelvin!” I cried. As we hugged, I considered what month it was. March. Why wasn’t he upstate at school? He knew what I was thinking.
“I’m taking a year off. Everybody told me I should go to college, but I didn’t really know what I was doing there.”
I told him that I had taken a year off from college myself. And that when my son was unhappy at his small-town college, I had recommended a transfer to Hunter College, a return to the city. I suggested he get in touch with the college counselor at the secondary school in Brooklyn where I’d taught him. “Josh can help you with a transfer,” I said.
He nodded, but I walked away unconvinced that he would ask for help. A couple of months later, another former student came out from behind the cash register at a grocery store in Brooklyn to hug me and reassure me that she would be back in college in September — she just needed to earn some money. As we caught up, she told me that yet another classmate had left a top-tier college in Maine.
The effort to increase the number of low-income students who graduate from four-year colleges, especially elite colleges, has recently been front-page news. But when I think about my students, and my own story, I wonder whether the barriers, seen and unseen, have changed at all.
[For more of this story, written by Vicki Madden, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...span-region&_r=1]
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