The difficult, I’ll do right now
The impossible, will take a little while
-Billie Holiday
There was a comment on another blog that just
annoyed the crap out of me and continued to bug me. It insinuated that lower
income kids can’t go to college and that college only has middle and upper
middle class kids running around it. My own and the experiences of friends
proves that so wrong and I am so sick of that mindset. Also since this is
Inshaw, the quick tie in to this is a) it’s my blog and b) Shaw and other
gentrifying neighborhoods have lower income kids, who may wind up going to
college.
Let me start with my aunts and mom. They were girls,
in the late 60s. The family was black and sharecroppers in rural North Carolina.
My oldest aunt only had two dresses, everyone else got hand-me-downs. Not
exactly rolling in dough. My aunts went to small black colleges and became
teachers. They helped fund their education by working at colored resorts, one
in NY state. Mom didn’t go to college because grandpa, on his deathbed, asked
her to take care of grandma. Mom did however, many years later went to
community college and became a CNA.
i’d like to pimp out my alma mater, berea college. you HAVE to be poor to get accepted there. and its free if you get in.
no tuition at all.
it has its down sides sure, but FREE trumped it for me. its been turning poor folks into educated folks since 1855. and it was the 2nd college in the nation to accept black students.
http://www.berea.edu
i knew people from crazy low income backgrounds there. horribly crazy poor.
I am a contractor for the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid division, which administers the Title IV aid programs to promote college educations to people who could not otherwise afford it. I have heard people say that many parents, teachers and others tell children that they can’t go to college. I have never encountered that myself, but the Federal Student Aid organization works to inform everyone, and especially under served populations, that they CAN go to college if the really want to. I understand why people would be upset with the message that lower income kids can’t go to college. I would encourage people to check out http://college.gov to get inspired, and then http://studentaid.ed.gov to actually look into attending college if you believe it is beyond your reach.
I come from a large family, and my parents income was somewhere around $18K when I went to college about 20 years ago. I didn’t get a penny from my folks, but was able to make it through four years by maxing out on all of the student aid available including workstudy, pell grants, and what amounted to about $20K in student debt. My High School English teacher can take the credit for pushing me to make this step telling me not to be afraid of taking out the loans because one day I would take out a loan bigger than this to buy a car. I lived on beans and rice, and envied my friends who got parent care packages and money from home.
It wasn’t easy, but I did finish, and I paid off my loans several years later. My English teacher was right, and I thank her for helping me understand that poor kids could go to college.