Twenty-eight years after leaving New York City, I moved back to become president of Teachers College. One of my first stops was the “old neighborhood” in the South Bronx where I grew up. Little did I know that I would discover in that visit, and others to follow, how profoundly the path to college in America has changed over the past three decades.
In the first visit, I walked around my old schoolyard, which was littered with broken glass, used condoms, and empty crack vials. I walked the block from the school to my old apartment building. The smells and sounds of the neighborhood were different. Spanish was the language of the street, not English or Yiddish. There was more graffiti, more trash on the street, and overflowing garbage pails on the corners. The front of my old apartment building now had a massive iron gate.
Many of my familiar haunts were gone: the pool hall, which allowed me and my friends to play when we were under age; the movie theater where we were thrown out for running up and down the aisles screaming; the ice-cream parlor where I took my first dates; and the factory where my father and I bought hot bagels on Sunday mornings. I had lived all over the country, but the old neighborhood was the one place I thought of as home. Now I barely knew where I was. Men on the street stared at me, or at least I thought they did. I had walked down those blocks thousands of times, but I had never before been afraid.
I returned to Teachers College with a profound sense of loss. After a peripatetic life, the physical constant that I remembered from childhood had vanished.
My subsequent visits were less emotional, and I’d like to believe that had more to do with reality. I saw that the streets, subway stations, and most buildings I grew up with were still there—my apartment building, my school, the library, stores, synagogues, and churches—just used for different purposes. The synagogue, where I had my bar mitzvah, was now a church, and the Jewish deli, which had the best pastrami I’d ever eaten, had become a bodega. Although more neglected and run-down, it was still the old neighborhood.
I visited my old apartment, and there I met Carlos, who lived in my old bedroom. He was 14, the same age I was when I lived there. His bed was in the same place as mine. When he woke up in the morning, he looked out the same window I did. He ate his meals in the same kitchen where I ate mine and watched TV in the same living room, where the furniture was arranged in the same way.
There were large differences, however, in the worlds in which we lived. Carlos’s neighborhood was Dominican and poor. Mine was white and working class. Since I left, unemployment and violence had soared, and single-parent families and high-school dropouts were now the norm.
But the fundamental difference between my old neighborhood and his is that the American dream has died. Although most of our parents hadn’t finished high school, my friends and I knew we were going to college with the same certainty that we would be having breakfast the next day. A highway of young people ahead of us—brothers, sisters, neighbors, relatives—proved that the move from our neighborhood to the middle class could be done, opening the way for us. In the end, Marvin and Eddie became doctors. Jimmy became a school principal and Barry a teacher. Jay became a lawyer and Debby a nurse. Steven became a Wall Street investor. Elliot worked for the federal government. Terry went to Harvard and was never heard from again.
Today the dream has all but disappeared. The highway to mobility is gone. Most of the children in my old neighborhood are consigned to remain in a world of poverty, inadequate educations, dead-end jobs, and violence.
I came to see that world firsthand as Carlos and I, over time, got to know each other. He asked me questions about what the neighborhood was like when I lived there, and I asked him about the present. The conversation continued through Carlos’s years in middle school, high school, and college, where he is now. After a decade of conducting research together on Carlos, his friends, and their neighborhood, Laura Scheiber, a doctoral candidate in comparative and international education at Teachers College, and I wrote a record of what we learned in Unequal Fortunes: Snapshots From the South Bronx, just published by Teachers College Press.
I also got to know some of Carlos’s friends, including Juan Carlos and Leo Disla, Carlos’s best friend. I became particularly close to Leo. A charismatic boy, he got his education on the streets as much as in school. At 12, he took a gang beating meant for someone else. The next year, for protection, he joined the Latin Kings.
Leo did not graduate from middle school. It wasn’t that he was dumb—he scored highest in his class on a citywide test—but he cut class when he was bored. Still, he slipped through the cracks and was registered at a high school where rival gangs controlled different floors, classrooms were chaotic, and staff members were indifferent. By his third week of high school, Leo stopped going altogether.
Eventually he got into the Job Corps, but fights were ubiquitous there, too, and the only classes that Leo cared about—auto mechanics—were dropped. So he stayed home, watched television, dreamed of getting his GED, and tried to stay away from trouble. But, in the end, Leo was shot and killed by the police around the corner from the window that Carlos—and I—had looked out for so many years.
The young people I got to know experienced firsthand the devastating effects of racism, dead-end jobs, homelessness, high crime rates, appalling schools, violence and drugs, and a broken legal system in that neighborhood today. But unlike Leo, Juan Carlos and Carlos made it to and through college.
What helped them beat the odds, which say that only about one in five young people from the nation’s bottom income quartile, and one in three Hispanics, will attend college?
The reasons for their successes lay partly in the supports that Carlos and Juan Carlos were able to find for themselves—mentors and advocates who showed them that college was possible and gave them contact with the world outside the neighborhood. In previous research, interviewing poor, first-generation college students, I had discovered that, in every case, a mentor had steered the student from the neighborhood to college. Juan Carlos had several teachers and counselors in that role. For Carlos, it was seeing that Juan Carlos got to college that inspired him to try. Juan Carlos decided to apply to college after visiting Vassar College, and Carlos made the same decision after spending time on the campus with Juan Carlos. Because of those experiences, the boys no longer viewed college as something reserved for people unlike themselves, which is the experience for many poor, urban youngsters of color, who know little or nothing about college.
To some degree, Juan Carlos and Carlos found the right colleges, socially and academically, with caring admissions counselors and good transition programs. In the end, Juan Carlos transferred from Vassar to a New York City college, but that had as much to do with circumstances in his life as with a bad academic fit.
Not least, the students had good financial-aid counseling. Leo’s brother had been admitted to a small liberal-arts college with the maximum federal student loan—only to discover, when the first bill arrived, that room and board would not be covered. Few low-income youngsters understand the difference between the sticker price and the actual cost of attending college, and they generally know little about the myriad financial-aid programs that may be available. In contrast, from the beginning of their college experience, Juan Carlos and Carlos had good counseling through New York State’s Higher Education Opportunity Program.
In communities like the South Bronx, where social and family supports have been frayed, students from low-income families need the same kind of help—counseling, nutrition, academic and cultural enrichment, test preparation, college visits, financial support, you name it—that are readily and regularly available to students of means. Such programs exist and are providing the kind of support that Juan Carlos and Carlos stumbled onto. The “I Have A Dream” Foundation has, since 1981, provided scholarships and extensive services to help ameliorate the social challenges facing low-income youngsters. The Harlem Children’s Zone integrates social services and community-building with a strong academic approach that makes college the goal from the start. The Making Waves Education Program in the California Bay Area provides social and academic support to impoverished students.
But programs like those still reach a small percentage of the young people who most need them, which makes those efforts seem little more than a lottery that benefits the lucky few. If we cannot recreate the social structures that gave my old neighborhood a sense of safety, cohesion, and hope for the future, we must do the next best thing: open up the nation’s campuses to better serve those populations and work with school districts and government officials to build guaranteed access and financial support.
That strategy is being tested in Syracuse. Say Yes to Education, which for years provided a range of social, wellness, and financial supports to students from individual classrooms adopted by its benefactor, George Weiss, is expanding its scope and reach in more communities to serve tens of thousands of youths. In partnership with Syracuse University, Onondaga County, the mayor of Syracuse, and the public-school system and union, Say Yes is working to leverage municipal, academic, and civic assets to deliver its promise of college for all. Some of the nation’s most-prestigious colleges have signed on to accept students and help pay for their educations.
It’s time to provide similar programs in every American city, and for colleges to lead the way. Any child who moves up and out of a community like my old neighborhood must create the road for himself or herself, much as the pioneers did going West. For every one who finds a path to college, there are thousands—millions—of others who can’t. The cost of losing them by the wayside is incalculable.