It’s finally over. My son Alex chose the college he’ll attend next year. I paid the deposit. It took less than 10 minutes
My son knows he’s lucky to have parents who can juggle resources to send him to the top private university he chooses. As the daughter of an immigrant and the first in my family to attend college, I didn’t have those choices and I get annoyed when I read those stories that tell you that where you go to college doesn’t really matter. I know it matters because I got lucky, too, and I know that for kids without money, connections, or privilege, where you go to college can sometimes make all the difference in where you end up.
How did it happen? In my middling Miami high school of 3,000 students, my counselor, who had about 600 on her watch, invited me into her office one day and told me she had met an admissions rep from New York University and assured me that I’d most likely get in with a scholarship.
So, it was a random event that led me to NYU on a full ride until the end of my sophomore year when a family crisis forced me to give up my scholarship, move home, and transfer to the state university. Only in my junior year, sitting in classes with hundreds of students, did I realize what I had given up. In an incredible act of generosity, NYU took me back and returned most of my scholarship for my senior year. During that critical period I held an important magazine internship and built a relationship with a professor who became a mentor and friend.
Of course, I could have succeeded in my career with a degree from the state university; many of my friends in other fields such as accounting did very well. But my opportunities would have been quite different and the truth is that my NYC experiences impressed the editors in Florida who hired me.
I’m always on the lookout in the classes I teach for students who may be first-generation, who need a little extra attention and I’m thrilled when they reach out to me. As an attorney and child advocate in Baltimore, I saw few young adults make it to college without intensive support from mentors and outreach programs that identify scholars.
Every year we read amazing stories about those rare high school seniors accepted to all the Ivies but I prefer articles about counselors guiding a new first generation of students, living much tougher lives than mine. In a high school in Queens, NY, a counselor, assigned by the non-profit College Advising Corps, urges her students to dream bigger than the local community college, to state universities, private universities, and the Ivies. Her salary, a modest $35,000 a year, is partly paid by NYU.
twice30 