The Yoke of Student Loans

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Adult Learners, American Individualism, CMU, Debt Peonage, Financial Aid, Financial Literacy, First-Generation Students, HSBC, In Time (2011), Interest Rates, Loan Payments, Marine Midland Bank, Navient, Nontraditional Students, Perkins Loans, Pitt, Poverty, Sallie Mae, Self-Reflection, Stafford Loans, Student Loans

Time, money, debt, yoke = same difference, from screen short from movie In Time (2011), October 27, 2011. (http://collider.com/in-time-review/).

This week in July thirty years ago, I took out the first of what would be a series of student loans. Loans that would help cover eight of my ten years of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In three-and-a-half-months, I will be ending my twentieth year paying off those loans. If I had to do it all over again, I may have stayed in New York State to take advantage of the TAP award (need-based financial aid). That way, I wouldn’t have needed to borrow for my undergrad. But given my near desperation for wanting to escape grinding poverty, 616 and my family, Mount Vernon, New York, and the stigma that was my life living there among hostile and indifferent classmates, teachers, and neighbors, borrowing $2,625 on July 16 of ’87 didn’t seem so bad.

Yep, my first subsidized/unsubsidized Stafford student loan was a modest one. It was a set maximum based on the old laws limiting student borrowing (especially for college freshmen) three decades ago. I remember thinking to myself, “How the heck am I gonna pay this back?,” as I went through an hour of phone calls between Pitt’s financial aid office and Marine Midland Bank (now part of HSBC). The latter was where I had my first bank account, where I had deposited $500 of scholarship money from Mount Vernon’s Afro-Caribbean Club. That’s how little I knew about the process – I went with a bank that didn’t exist outside of New York State to work with a school in Western Pennsylvania!

Pact with the Devil, July 18, 2017. (http://evil.wikia.com/wiki/Pact_with_the_Devil)

Because I wasn’t yet eighteen, I needed my Mom to co-sign my loan. Because my Mom didn’t have collateral, she needed to add two relatives who did have assets to my first loan. In the end, Mom chose my maternal grandmother Beulah and my great-great-aunt in Seattle Inez (who just happened to be Johnny Gill’s great or great-great grandmother — didn’t know it at the time) as relatives with collateral who could be on the hook if I or she ever defaulted on our future payments. Of course, Mom didn’t actually seek permission from my then sixty-year-old grandma in rural Arkansas or my better-off, octogenarian, great-great aunt for this sign-off. Apparently, Marine Midland didn’t care, either. And that’s how it was for the next four years, having relatives whom I had never met (and in the case of great-great aunt Inez, who died at 101 years old in the early ’00s, would never meet) as collateral for my loans.

I’d also take out the smaller Perkins Loan for my undergraduate time at Pitt, an additional $2,000 per year, for three of my four years there. In all, I’d borrow more than $16,000 in four years, with a high of $4,000 in Stafford Loans in my junior year, 1989-90.

It bothered me every time I had to re-up for student loans. Not just because of the false notion of American individualism, the idea that I shouldn’t need anyone’s help to go earn a degree. It bothered me because I feared, sometimes to the point of nightmares, that I’d never be able to pay this money back.

Graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and the loosening of the student loan rules and amounts under President Clinton in 1994 made things better and worse. I barely borrowed my first two and a half years of grad school at both Pitt and CMU, to the tune of $1,800 in all. CMU paid me so little as a grad student that I had little choice if I ever planned on eating more than one meal a day but to borrow. And that’s how most of my borrowing occurred between January 1994 and January 1997, to either have to supplement my meager stipend (before the year of my Spencer Dissertation fellowship). Or, to use the funds to help support my dissertation research, the travel to/from and living arrangements while in DC in 1994 and 1995. Unlike many of my graduate school colleagues (especially the ones working on professional master’s degrees or a law degree), I didn’t use my loans to go on extended weekends to Bermuda or to take summer vacations in the Grand Caymans.

Of course, I graduated in May ’97, and lo and behold, I couldn’t find full-time work. And with the exception of the months of July, August, and September 1998, I wouldn’t have full-time or full-time equivalent work until I left Pittsburgh for work in the DC area in the summer of 1999. But, my consolidated student loans through the dispensations of Sallie Mae never took that into account when my first payment became due Thanksgiving Week 1997. I was able to get a reduced payment of $20 per month for the first two years. I didn’t default, but it made paying off my student loans that much harder. It didn’t help that Sallie Mae had locked in my interest rate at eight percent, retroactive to July 1987, and unchangeable under any circumstances. Even with consumer interest rates the way they have been for the past decade.

Relationship between lenders and payees, July 27, 2015. (http://forbes.com).

Flush or not, full-time or underemployed or somewhere in between, the student loan payments, deferments, and forebearances have been non-stop for two decades. Even credit card companies will leave folks alone if they make regular minimum payments. Not so with student loans or with Sallie Mae (now Navient, which must mean assholes in financial aid-speak). Despite everything I’ve been through financially over the years, I finally paid off the original principal of my consolidated student loans about two years ago. Great. It still means that I have left another decade of payments on accumulated interest before I can be forever free of this nearly endless cycle.

Here’s the real thing that I think I’d do over again, that should be done about this corrupt and serfdom-like process. Sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years old is way too young to be making financial decisions that I or anyone else will have to live with for four decades or more. Even deciding to serve in the military isn’t a decades’ long commitment (unless one chooses to re-up or goes to officer’s school). At the very least, no one under twenty-one should have to commit themselves to debt peonage, including student loans. As for me, working thirty hours a week on or off campus between 1987 and 1997 to cover costs and necessities would’ve been preferable to this iron collar.

The real problem, of course, is that adult learners are taking out many of these loans these days. Even though they may be old enough to know better, they aren’t experienced enough. Lumina Foundation and other organizations have concentrated on “financial literacy” as the way out. This is wrong-headed, as it does nothing to change this financially enslaving system. Really, it would take free and significantly-reduced undergraduate tuition to do the trick. But where’s the fun, profit, and human misery in that?

End of the Dorm Room State

30 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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25 Welsford Street, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Computing and Information Systems, Father-Son Relationship, Financial Aid, Freshman Year, Homelessness, La Guardia Airport, Lothrop Hall, Naivete, Pitt, Pork Neck Bones and Rice, South Oakland, Tuna Fish, unemployment, US Air, Western Union

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

On this day and date twenty-eight years ago was the Saturday end to my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. Like today here in the DMV, it was a cool and cloudy day, a day in which I was tired from the year, but hopeful now that I had survived many of my inner doubts and outward troubles to make it to another fall of courses.

But there was a lot of unfinished business at Pitt. And, no, after my first Dean’s List, it wasn’t my grades. Six weeks earlier that year was March 15. That was the deadline for me to put down a $350 deposit to guarantee a dorm room for next year. Otherwise, I’d have to participate in a lottery for one. And the deadline for that was April 30th.

As of that morning, I had more than enough money to cover my deposit, as I’d gotten paid for my eighty or so hours of computer lab work with Pitt from the month of March. That money was way too late now. I knew that I’d have to go back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to find work for the summer, to have the money I needed to find a place to live for the fall when I’d come back to Pitt.

25 Welsford Street, Pittsburgh (where I lived my sophomore and junior years at Pitt), August 2015. (Google Maps).

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask my parents. Mom didn’t have the money, between my idiot stepfather, my four younger siblings and my older brother Darren. Eight-hundred and fifty dollars of AFDC, food stamps, and WIC per month can only be stretched so far in a place as expensive as the New York metropolitan area. And my father Jimme, well, I let him know a month before the dorm reservation deadline that I needed the money. He said at least twice that he had wired me the funds via Western Union. I checked both times with the check cashing place in North Oakland, only to walk out empty-handed.

The timing just didn’t work out. That’s what I told myself, at least. I’d find a better place to live than Lothrop Hall. Between carousing Pitt basketball players, underaged boozers, the more than occasional tokers, and the terrible cafeteria food, I was probably better off living off-campus anyway.

You can convince yourself of a lot of things in the hours before a US Air flight to La Guardia when you’re staring at 120 days of living at 616 and being in Mount Vernon. Both places where I’d barely fit in before thirty-three weeks of college and relative independence. I was about to reclaim my emotionless role as the eldest son, all but running a house that was never mine to run in the first place. The fact of my questionable residential status as a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh could wait.

Like with so many things going on in my life that leap year, I was terribly wrong. I found myself unemployed for the summer, homeless in Pittsburgh for five days, and broke and malnourished for most of the Fall ’88 semester. From April 30th to the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’d live with financial crisis, without a place to lay my head, and with tuna fish sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice as food for many of those days.

I did make friends my freshman year, and I did have friends my sophomore year, some of whom probably would’ve taken me in had they known about my troubles. But that’s the thing about abuse and poverty and race in a country that purports to be great and yet contradicts itself. You seldom tell anyone about anything bad in your life, out of embarrassment or out of pride, because you don’t want to be the living embodiment of a stereotype. Still, when I hinted about my lack of eats in October and November, my friends and even my classmates did help.

Fast-forward to ’92, the spring my father refused to believe that I knocked off my MA in Pitt’s history program in two semesters. He had told my brother Darren and his drinking buddies for years that he had paid my way through college. I also found out about that bit of Jimme braggadocio that spring.

Bumble Bee Tuna in oil (not water for me – still has been almost 28 years since eating), April 30, 2016. (http://www.upcitemdb.com).

When I went over to his place in late June to show him my MA degree, he even tried to tell me how he paid for my BA for four years. “What are you talking about?,” I said.

“My bachelor’s cost $32,000, and my other expenses over four years were another $20,000. In four years, you sent me $480 total,” I yelled, even though my drunk father was only a couple of feet away.

“Naw, naw, naw, I paid, I paid,” my father kept saying, with very little of the confidence than he had displayed before.

The total of my father’s payments for me and college was actually $880, including $480 he Western Union-ed to me my first three semesters. I’d forgotten the $400 I managed to get from him in August ’88 so that I could find a place to live my sophomore year in Pittsburgh. It is true, without that money, and without me surviving my first days in Pittsburgh minus a dorm room, I wouldn’t have finished college. But as a father myself, I’m not sure I’d ever claim credit for that, drunk or sober.

The Cold Light of Grades

05 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Ann Jannetta, Challenge Scholarship, Continental Airlines, Crush #2, Dean's List, Disillusionment, East Asian History, Financial Aid, General Foods, Grades, Grinding, Homesickness, Humanities, Internalized Racism, Masculinity, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, Newark International Airport, Phyllis, Pitt, Racism, Self-Discovery, Sexism, Stereotype Threat, Travel

University of Pittsburgh after a snow storm, Cathedral of Learning, downloaded January 5, 2016. (http://www.everystockphoto.com).

Dateline, Tuesday, January 5, 2016. Exactly twenty-eight years ago on this day and date, I left Mount Vernon and New York for my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I sensed, but did not know, that this was a make-or-break time for me as a student and as a person. At least when that day began. I had a 5 pm Continental Airlines flight out of Newark (my last time flying out of there, thank God!), and had plenty of time to kill before catching a cab to East 241st at 2 pm to catch the 2 Subway to 42nd, the Shuttle to Grand Central, and then the Carey Bus to New Jersey.

Then the mailman arrived a bit earlier than I expected, around 12:30 pm. I’d been anticipating and dreading this moment for seventeen days, since Saturday, December 19, the morning of my last final in Pascal.

The day I was scheduled to go back to Pittsburgh was also the day I finally received my grades. I earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grades I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible. That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Phyllis, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give Mom the chance to see my grades.

Because I was seventeen when my first semester began, my Mom was still the responsible adult and my Mom’s address the primary address for my academic records. This was the first and last time I received my Pitt grades this way.

I was so mad. But I was more disillusioned than angry, especially with myself and my view of the world. I knew I had no margin for error this Winter/Spring semester at Pitt. I needed to raise my overall GPA to a 3.0 or higher in order to keep my academic scholarship for my sophomore year. I could barely afford Pitt as it was, between room and board and books. It wasn’t as if I could depend on Mom and my father to keep sending me money. They had sent a total of $480 my way that first semester. I was still $1,200 behind on my Pitt bill, even with student loans and me working sixteen hours a week.

The days after I got back to my dorm I spent assessing my situation and what to do about it. The first decision I made was to consolidate the funds I managed to secure at the end of December. I had General Foods cover my remaining room and board payments for the school year, increased my Stafford Loan amount for the semester, and marched down to Thackeray Hall. I waited all day to take care of my bills, get my few hundred dollars of leftover cash from all of my aid — all of which I needed for books — and registered for classes. The last part took the most time, and was the hardest to do. The low the second morning of the semester was two below zero, and the high that day was eight above. Fahrenheit, not Celsius. I stood in line outside for over an hour in that weather surrounded by two feet of snow with the occasional winds and snow drifts before getting inside at nine that morning.

But in the moments I had that week, between some quiet time for myself and in discussing my performance with two of my professors (I just couldn’t believe I earned a C in East Asian History!), I realized two or three things. One was that I over-performed, given how depressed I was the last seven weeks of the semester. I missed nearly three out of every four classes in November, and nearly forty percent of my East Asian History class during the entire semester. I went without a textbook for Honors Calc I after someone stole it from my job in the computer labs in the Cathedral of Learning at the end of October. I managed a solid C in the course anyway. It could’ve been much worse.

Two was that my East Asian History professor Ann Jannetta was right. I really was “lucky” to have managed a C in an upper-level history course my first semester of college. I still acted as if I was in Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School or MVHS, that a C was some indication of low IQ or confirmation that Whites had bigger brains or something. Jannetta was very encouraging. It was the first time any of my professors had made me feel like I belonged in college.

The most important thing I realized, though, was that I couldn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of me bringing my A-game (or A- game, maybe) every semester and in every course. Phyllis didn’t matter. My internalized sexism or what others though of me because of their racism didn’t matter. My idiot classmates or parents didn’t matter. Heck, being hungry, cold, and short on money didn’t matter. All that mattered was my ability to do what I did best back then. Get A’s in bunches when I needed to.

Of course, all these things really did matter. I merely decided to play the game of college that semester with a combination of fear and anger, arrogance and obliviousness. To the tune of a 3.33 and the Dean’s List! Yay me!

But when that semester ended on Saturday, April 30, those demons and distractions resurfaced. Oh, the days before I spent five days homeless and weeks eating tuna fish and pork neck bones!

The Ivy League Dilemma

17 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, race, Upper West Side, Youth

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Acceptance Letters, Advice, Class of 1987, Classmates, College Decisions, Columbia University, Counsel, Financial Aid, Humanities, Manhood, MVHS, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Private Investigators, scholarships, University of Pittsburgh, Yale University

Columbia University's Butler Library at night, New York City, October 13, 2008. (Andrew Chen via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

A quarter-century ago this weekend, I made the decision to attend the University of Pittsburgh over Columbia University. Given that I lived in Mount Vernon, New York, this was a decidedly weird decision. So much so that I didn’t tell my mother of my plans for nearly two weeks, and waited until April to tell my classmates. But there’s a well marbled story here, of bad Ivy League practices, not to mention my need to get away from family and classmates alike.

I applied to eight schools in all, including Yale, Columbia and Pitt. If it weren’t for Pitt’s brochure of pizza and students having a good time, I wouldn’t have applied there to begin with. The only rejection I received was from Yale, in early February ’87. Oh well!

Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, December 20, 2010. (http://www.photohome.com). In public domain.

Over the next five weeks, I received one acceptance and packet of materials after another, including Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh. All but Columbia gave me a full financial aid package of one kind or another. All offered either a partial or a full-tuition scholarship for four years except for Columbia. Pitt had offered me one of their inaugural half-tuition academic scholarships that they called the Challenge Scholarship, meant to attract low-income students and students of color from across the country.

I called Columbia’s financial aid office in mid-March to ask why they hadn’t offered me any kind of academic scholarship. They called me back to tell me that they wanted to “make sure” that I really couldn’t afford to go their West Harlem, er, Morningside Heights school.

“But you have my Mom’s financial paperwork,” I said.

“Well, we could send out a private investigator to track down your father and take a look at his finances. If everything checks out, either he can cover part of your tuition or we can offer you a scholarship,” the man on the other end of the phone said.

I was floored by the smug arrogance coming out of the phone. “My dad hasn’t paid child support in eight years,” I said, ready for an argument.

“We want to make sure that he doesn’t have money for your tuition,” was the creditor’s response.

“Thanks but no thanks. You either trust me or you don’t,” I said with conviction, and hung up the phone.

I was torn between having some idiot private investigator digging through my father Jimme’s pitiful life and finances and saying “Go to Hell!” to Columbia. I didn’t want to see the worst case scenario occur, which was that some fool would go back to Columbia and say that Jimme could afford to pay $3,000 of my tuition per year. In the three years up to March ’87, Jimme had given me $3,500 total.

Then I thought of other pros and cons, and as I thought of them, I wrote them out. Columbia was an Ivy League school, the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t. Yet, Columbia was more expensive than Pitt by more than two dollars to one ($18,000 per year versus $7,500) and the students at Columbia would likely be similar in education, socioeconomic background and attitudes to my Humanities classmates.

But the most important factor in saying “No” to Columbia besides their financial aid sleaziness was 616 and Mount Vernon. If I went to school there, where would I live and where would I study? Home? You got to be kidding! Mount Vernon Public Library? They only stayed open until nine pm, and were never open on Sundays. On campus? That would only work if I were able to get a decent paying part-time job on campus. After sorting through this, I knew that Columbia was out.

The look on my mother’s face when I told her said it all. She was as shocked as I’d ever seen her. She kept

Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, New York City, August 25, 2006. (Wikipedia). Permission granted via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic.

trying to convince me to go upstate to Hobart and William Smith, to see about going to Columbia for their private investigator. This after a year of her telling me that applying to West Point would “make me a man” because “women love men in uniform” and applying to HBCUs made sense because she’d given $25 to the United Negro College Fund.

My classmates spent the next couple of months asking me where Pittsburgh was and why I wanted to go there. All I knew was that I needed to get away from the New York area for a while and that the University of Pittsburgh’s tuition was cheaper than almost anything I would’ve faced in New York. I knew that they had a decent computer science program — this was to be my first major. But I also knew that I wasn’t stuck if I wanted to change majors or study something other that computer science.

In the end, I obviously made the right decision for me at the time. If I had to do it again, maybe I would’ve applied to the University of Pennsylvania or Georgetown. I certainly would’ve been better off in terms of immediate career options and income. But given the friendships that I formed, the degrees I earned and the wife that I have, I’m not sure if another good choice like the ones above would’ve been any better than going to Pitt. At least for my rather fragile psyche and near nonexistent social life.

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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'91, 1991, Adulthood, Civic Arena, Class of 1991, Diversity, Fellowships, Financial Aid, Graduate School, Graduation, Job, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, NYU, Pitt, Student Loans, Uncertainty, Ungraduate Education, University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Posvar, Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic, Work

University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.

Five Ingredients to Higher Education Access and Success

11 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

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Academic Preparation, College Access and Success, Disadvantaged Students, Education Reform, Financial Aid, Higher Education Access and Success, K-16 Education, Low-Income Students, Parental Engagement, Postsecondary Education Access and Success, Race, Social Class, Social Preparation, Student Development, Student Engagement, Students of Color, Underrepresented Students, Will to Power

Five Ingredients for Cream of Mushroom Gravy with Bell Peppers, Soy Sauce, Chicken Broth and More Mushrooms, March 10, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

There should be five pillars to college access and success, similar to the Five Pillars of Islam, essential for the successful and lifelong practice of Islam. For all students, but especially for disadvantaged and underrepresented students, having a guide to the five most necessary ingredients for college entrance, matriculation and graduation is long overdue.

I should know. Between six years of Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools in the ’80s, twenty years off and on as an instructor and professor, and a decade’s worth of nonprofit work in fields like civic education and K-16 education reform. So many students — especially those without the financial means and the academic preparation necessary to be successful at the college level — fail for lack of knowledge and lack of access to such knowledge as well.

Based on reports like the Pathways to College Network‘s A Shared Agenda (2004) and the Social Science

Questions That Matter Report Cover, June 15, 2006. Social Science Research Council

Research Council’s Questions That Matter (2006), the book Double the Numbers (2004) edited by staff from Jobs for the Future, as well as the work of innovative organizations like The Posse Foundation, below are what I believe are the five ingredients of higher education access and success, in order of their importance.

1. Social Preparation: Students must be prepared for the world outside of their towns, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, apartment buildings, homes and individual families. Most disadvantaged and underrepresented students are inadequately prepared for the cultural, social class, philosophical, ideological and spiritual differences between them and most traditional college and college-age students. Leadership development, critical thinking (and not just for academic purposes), a sense of belonging, a passion for active learning are all the seasonings needed to help students become socially comfortable in a postsecondary setting. Academic preparation is one important aspect of a student’s social preparation for college, but it’s not the only one.

2. Academic Preparation: This is of obvious importance, but in terms of higher education access and success, it’s actually overemphasized. Or at least, the acquisition of facts and the assessments used to determine how successful students were at assimilating these facts has been overdone. This high-stakes testing phase in the history of American education has also put too much of the task of preparation on individual teachers, and not enough on the students themselves. Academic preparation for college requires broad knowledge. But it also requires students to be able to analyzes and interpret facts, to begin to put facts together in combinations that cannot be derived by simply reading a textbook or from a teacher’s lesson plan. That requires good-to-great teachers, administrators, and students.

3. Parent, Family and Community Engagement: This aspect of K-16 educational success never gets the attention it deserves. Active parents and adults in schools can and does create the atmosphere necessary for students’ academic and social preparation in the college access and success process. There are times, of course, in which parental engagement can evolve into abuse of staff and teachers, particularly with parents and families who have unrealistic expectations of their children and their children’s teachers. For disadvantaged and underrepresented students, however, it’s of the utmost importance for parents and other concerned adults to be engaged in this process, to apply pressure on schools and students when necessary.

4. Financial Means and Aid: This is a nice phrase, but the fact is, student loans account for nearly three-fifths of the funds for a four-year degree for most students. The real issue here is to not only take advantage of scholarships, application fee-waivers and need-based aid like the Pell Grant and SEOG grants. It’s also to use social preparation and engaged parents to find additional funds and to agitate for more need-based state and federal aid. Or to use academic preparation to obtain the substantial private and state-level merit-based scholarships to cover the skyrocketing costs of college.

5. Will to Power: Researchers and practitioners rarely discuss this aspect of postsecondary access and success. But the bottom line is, the difference between success and failure for any student really is how much pain they are willing to endure to be successful in finishing a college degrees. Even with the proper academic preparation, excellent social preparation, solid financial aid and consistent parental and community engagement, it’s ultimately up to each student to decide to overcome whatever obstacles they face, especially once they become a college student. While willpower alone isn’t enough, it’s still a necessary ingredient to make the other four ingredients jell.

Columns In The Inner Court of The Baal Temple, December 4, 2007. Ddxc. Already in the public domain.

Had I known even half of this back in the day, I wouldn’t have been homeless my sophomore year at Pitt, struggling financially most of my time as an undergrad, or reluctant to take on leadership roles prior to my senior year. But my will to realize success and graduate overcame all of that, making the difference between where I am now and where I was so long ago.