From the Farmlands to the Quad

Jontel Armstead could travel only one hour from home to tour a college of her choice. That was the edict from her grandfather.

She had moved into his suburban home just west of Richmond, Va., from her parents’ house in Maryland, fleeing what she described as a battlefield. Her parents fought. Her extended family was in turmoil. Living with her grandfather, she thought, offered her the best chance at getting to college and leaving the chaos behind.

By the fall of her senior year in high school, in 2017, it looked like her plan was working. She held better than a 4.0 weighted grade-point average, and Chick-Fil-A, where she worked part time, offered her a scholarship to help cover the cost of college.

Still, her grandfather’s seeming ambivalence about where or even whether she went to college was a sober reminder that, when it came to her higher-education ambitions, she was on her own. “I didn’t have any type of family support,” Armstead says.

Fortunately for her, the University of Virginia was exactly an hour’s drive from where she lived. When she told her high-school counselor, who was herself a UVA grad, that she wanted to attend the state’s flagship university, she received discouraging feedback. “My counselor didn’t think I could get in,” Armstead says.

Undaunted, Armstead made the trip to Charlottesville, toured the campus, and became even more determined to go to UVA. After she filled out the application and wrote the essay, she was admitted. And still, her accomplishment was met with no ovations at home. “I didn’t get any congratulations from my family,” Armstead says.

Getting in meant she had hurdled the first obstacle in her dream of a college education. There were still more impediments to come. The thought of going off to college left her anxious. She would be leaving behind siblings. How would they fare? Armstead, whose father is Black and mother is Latina, would be landing in Charlottesville a year after the notorious Unite the Right rally. She would navigate a campus that was founded by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and is an elite public university bathed in a patrician ethos, a place where until 2003 men were expected to wear sport coats to home football games.

Once on campus, in the fall of 2018, her struggles continued. The isolation she anticipated turned real. Her family was willing to either drive her to the campus or pick her up, but, according to Armstead, not both. When Thanksgiving or winter break came, she had to find a one-way ride.

The hindrances forged a sense of resilience in Armstead — and a purpose. In college she declared a major in political and social thought, and imagined she would eventually become a lawyer and maybe enter politics. By the time she left four years later, she had chosen a path more closely tied with direct service for young people like she once was, the ones who dream of college, have the grades to get in, and the passion and talent to excel. All they need is support.

During her senior year at UVA, Armstead decided to join the Virginia College Advising Corps. She landed at Sussex Central High School, the only public high school in Virginia’s rural Sussex County. She met students who were facing impediments to their college-going dreams that looked eerily familiar. Some lacked familial support for their college aspirations, while even more faced financial pressures that made seeking higher education seem implausible. But she would face another obstacle that didn’t color her own dream of attaining a college degree, but one her students grappled with — doubt. And not doubts about their own abilities, but questions about the value of a college education.

The Virginia College Advising Corps, or VCAC, belongs to the nonprofit College Advising Corps network. Part of AmeriCorps and supported largely by donors, foundations, and universities, the program works across 15 states. While states like North Carolina rely on their flagship universities and private and land-grant colleges to administer and assist with fund raising and data collection, VCAC’s work is centered in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia. The mission, however, remains the same: to convince teenagers from high schools that tend not to send a lot of students to college that they have a place in higher education. It’s a challenge.

The organization relies on recent college graduates to help high-school students make postsecondary-education plans, fill out applications and financial-aid forms, and edit their admissions essays.

“It’s powerful that someone close in age can say that ‘I have done this and you can do this too,’” says Joy Pugh, assistant vice provost for enrollment and executive director of Virginia College Advising Corps.

VCAC dispatches 60 advisers across 63 schools in the state. In some schools where the organization operates, many students are the first in their families to graduate high school and to consider college. It’s often not easy for advisers to convince students to leave home or put off work in exchange for an education. VCAC helped more than 8,000 students across the state attend college in 2021 and 2022, many of whom might not have done so without the help.

Their trajectories broadly mirror national trends. Community college is the most popular option for students advised by VCAC, with roughly 40 percent of them landing at places like Piedmont Virginia and Patrick & Henry Community Colleges in 2021 and 2022. Nationally, a little more than a third of college students are enrolled in community college.

VCAC sent less than 4 percent of its students to selective colleges (defined as Ivy League institutions, highly selective private colleges, and public flagship universities) in 2021 and 2022, according to data provided by the University of Virginia. That falls within the national average for attendance at the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities.

The students Armstead helps at Sussex Central are no exception. Most will attend institutions like Richard Bland College, a junior college not far from Sussex Central High School. Armstead, who is in her second and final year in the program, wants to achieve something that has eluded her so far: “I want to get a kid into UVA,” she says.

But it’s a long way from Sussex to Charlottesville, and plenty of obstacles lie in the way.

Sussex Central High School is a majority Black institution in south central Virginia. The winding road to the school cuts a clear path through Hunting Quarter Swamp. Logging trucks barrel down the road hauling the precious pine that helps to fuel the local economy. The land is lush and in the breaks between the tall stands of pine are rows of peanut plants and soybeans. The almost monochromatic landscape of green is broken up by the occasional tan of a mature cornfield and the brown and white of a cotton field. Much of it is close to harvest on a mid-September day when a Chronicle reporter visits the high school.

“Peanuts, pork, and pine,” says Tracy Jackson, Sussex Central’s school counselor. “That’s the economy here.”

As the stretch of roadway that leads to the high school crosses Anderson Branch, a tentacle of the swamp that stretches northward, cellphone service can get spotty. It’s a feature of life at what those in the school’s office call the “school in the middle of the swamp.” The internet is prone to outages, and many students lack broadband access at home.

Armstead’s office is tucked around the corner from the main hallway running through the central office. It’s barely big enough to fit three people at once, and it’s covered in pennants that she requested from colleges toward the end of her first year — historically Black colleges like Maryland’s Morgan State University, as well as her own UVA and Ivy League institutions like Cornell University. Also hanging in the office is her graduation sash, which notes she was a first-generation college student. It’s a signal to students who have doubts about attending college because they would be the first, that, yes, they can do it, too.

The notion that college is a wise investment of time and money is something that needs to be made explicit to students, says Drexel Pierce Jr., the school’s principal. He knows this too well. Pierce spent a decade as a school counselor before becoming a principal this year. “We have a generation of parents and grandparents who do not understand the importance and the process of attending college,” he says during a conversation with Armstead about college counseling. “In a rural area our students don’t have access to opportunities others see on a regular basis. To a student living here in a trailer court, they see the McDonald’s and the 7-Eleven but they don’t see much beyond that.”

People don’t stray far from home in this close-knit farming community. For the children who are lucky enough to have a family in farming, there is pressure to begin work as soon as possible. Some families will tell their sons and daughters to learn a trade that is valuable on their farm and in the surrounding area.

“I have students climbing over each other to get into welding because it’s needed to help with the family farm,” says Jackson, the counselor.

For those whose families don’t own a farm, many will don hairnets and work inside the nearby Smithfield Foods processing plant, preparing hams that will sit on dining-room tables across the country and world. Some will work at the Davis Travel Center, a rest stop along Interstate 95, where they will sell sodas, coffee, and snacks to truck drivers and travelers.

Jackson spent the early 2000s as a counselor at Sussex Central before taking a break and returning in 2017. One thing that was true during both of her tenures is the role distance plays for so many students. Two major highways - Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 460 cut through Sussex. But it’s not uncommon to hear that many of them have never left Sussex County.

“I take a trip up 95 to Richmond for granted,” she says. “Many of our students have never been to Richmond. 460 will take you to Virginia Beach an hour and half away, but many of our students have never been to the beach.”

Like so many rural communities, Sussex suffers from high poverty rates. More than 90 percent of the students who attended Sussex Central during the 2021-22 school year were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Pierce saw the desperation of poverty during a recent exchange with a girl who attended Sussex. Asked what she wanted to do after high school, the girl answered, make money. No plan on how to make money, but that was the goal.

“The girl’s family had been evicted,” Pierce says. “To her, money is the answer, not college.”

A walk through the school highlights the tension between getting an education and getting a job. Posters on the wall remind students to stay in school and attend every day unless they’re actually sick. Material needs in this community can short-circuit educational attainment along the path through high school. A typical freshman class at Sussex Central averages about 100 students. But more than a few won’t make it to graduation. According to data collected by the State of Virginia, nearly 10 percent of the students who should have graduated from Sussex Central in the spring of 2023 dropped out before collecting a high-school diploma, almost twice the state average. Along the way, students leave for work. The pull of a paycheck at the farms, fields, and factories is often too much.

In Armstead’s first year she saw how hard it is for her students to leave Sussex County. She has met students whose parents put utility bills in their children’s name because of poor credit and payment history. She worked with some who help their parents run businesses and others where neither their parents nor their siblings have graduated high school.

Even when students express interest in going to college, they might receive little or no emotional support. “I had a kid whose family called him stupid for wanting to go to college,” Armstead told The Chronicle.

Earning a college degree is uncommon in Sussex. Nationwide, about a third of adults over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and nearly 9 percent hold an associate degree. In Sussex County, only 13 percent of adults over 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and just 6 percent hold an associate degree, according to five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey.

Ty McNamee, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Mississippi, has studied the challenges students from rural areas face in pursuing higher education. Many, if not most students, he says, are disconnected from tangible evidence of the benefits that derive from a college degree.

“Given how far rural domains are from resources that include higher education, these students are physically isolated from those resources,” McNamee said. “The students are isolated within tight networks where people don’t have a lot of educational attainment. Since rural areas are more likely to have blue-collar jobs, white-collar professionals are less likely to move back to rural areas since there are so few white-collar jobs.”

As Pierce told The Chronicle, it used to be more common that Sussex graduates would come back to the area as teachers. Now most college graduates venture off to places that hold more promise of financial prosperity.

And then there is the campus landscape itself. Young people from rural areas can arrive at college and see a wider definition of diversity — often for the first time.

“For many rural kids, they have been in either black or white spaces, or black and white spaces,” McNamee said.

At college they may be encountering Asian, Latinx, and international students for the very first time, McNamee added. For some this is a wonderful experience, for others it can be overwhelming.

Assumptions on some campuses about who is “rural” can turn off many prospective students, especially Black ones, from going away to college. “Folks like to paint rural populations as white,” McNamee says, “and that erases the experience of rural students of color from the conversations.”

A few steps past the central office is the social hub of Sussex Central High, the cafeteria. It’s a large open space where students gather, do homework, and talk between classes or during free periods. Armstead plops herself down in a chair on the outer edge of the cafeteria where students can see her and where she can see students she wants to talk with. And on this day, she finds a student brimming with potential: a senior named William Bowers. He dons a bright smile and walks with the cool confidence of a teenager who is a tad bigger and faster than his peers — a fact that William is quick to bring up. He opens his conversation with Armstead by arguing that he is indeed the tallest kid in school, and that he has proof.

“I have to be the tallest,” the young man says. “I play center on the basketball team.”

Armstead laughs.

Clutched in his right hand is his brag sheet, a list of his goals and accomplishments. It also includes his activities, and one in particular grabs Armstead’s attention.

“You did Boys State this summer,” Armstead says, referring to the summer leadership program run by the American Legion. She looks back up at William and smiles.

“My aunt recommended me to do it,” William responds. “We had to figure out how we would construct our own government.”

As tall as he is and as bright as his smile shines, William could easily fly under the radar. He’s not the best athlete in the school and he probably won’t graduate first in his class. In fact, Armstead almost missed him. Because of his transfer between his sophomore and junior years, he was initially misclassified and wasn’t on the roster of rising juniors during the spring semester. She didn’t know to look for him. But others in the guidance office kept insisting she needed to connect with William, telling Armstead he was a bright student who could make it to a top college with a bit of guidance.

Armstead glances over the list of colleges where William wants to apply. His first choice is the University of Virginia, which makes her smile. He could be the first student she helps get into her alma mater. But he faces tough odds even with his high GPA and participation in extracurriculars.

Among the 8,000 students assisted by VCAC in the 2021 and 2022 high-school graduating classes, 220 enrolled at UVA. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy for William.

During the 2022-23 admissions cycle, the university received a record number of applicants, 55,845. UVA offered admission to 9,189 of them. Of the roughly 4,000 first-year students who started at UVA in late August, Black students constituted 8.2 percent of the incoming class.

Those odds likely got tougher with the Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the use of racial preferences in admissions. Colleges across the country have promised to bolster their efforts to recruit applicants from communities that send very few students to college. That’s the work College Advising Corps has done for more than a decade, and with the decision from the court, the organization’s commitment hasn’t waned. Ekaterina Struett, chief executive of the College Advising Corps, immediately rebuked the decision. “All of us at College Advising Corps believe that diversity is essential to our democracy,” she wrote in a letter on June 30. “We also know that postsecondary education is a critical path to a more just, equitable society. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision only intensifies our commitment to our mission.”

As much as Armstead wants William to go to UVA, the truth is that he has a better shot at gaining acceptance elsewhere, including some of his backups. Virginia Tech accepts more than half of all students who apply each year. James Madison University accepts almost three-quarters of applicants. The College of William & Mary accepts a third.

Even if William doesn’t go to his top choice, attending a public university in Virginia will pay off. According to a 2022 report from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, after deducting the cost of tuition, along with living expenses and earnings lost during their time in college, Virginia graduates recoup more monetary value from their degrees than public-university graduates do in any other state in the nation.

William’s GPA is strong, but it alone might not be enough to get him into UVA. “If he takes the time to write the essay, he can get in,” Armstead says. “He has so much potential.”

While the Supreme Court ruled that colleges can no longer consider an applicant’s racial status, it still allowed students to talk about obstacles they faced in their life and how they overcame them, and about their unique ability to contribute to the institution if admitted. The essay prompts on the Common Application reflect the decision by the court. And while there has been much chatter in the post-affirmative-action world about using the essay as a way to signal disadvantage caused by race or socioeconomic status, Armstead is not a fan of making the students she advises write about their personal struggles.

“I feel very strongly about them not having to relive their trauma in their college essay,” she says. “A lot of times people of color feel they have to write a trauma-based essay.”

If William wants to write an essay about how his background inspired him or the challenges that he faces, that he works almost 20 hours a week on top of his schoolwork and sports, Armstead won’t stop him. But her focus at Sussex Central has been on getting students to write the best essay possible. Here is where Armstead’s family roots in the military show up. She is a drill sergeant when it comes to the essays, pushing the students on structure, grammar, and punctuation. “They didn’t have any experience in writing essays. Their writing skills needed work, but they are not always aware of that,” she says. “I make them pick a prompt. Why do they want to go to school? What are their motivations behind that?”

Despite her efforts, her students have been working at a marked disadvantage in English. When she arrived in fall of 2022, the school was short-staffed, which meant seniors didn’t have an English teacher to help her shoulder the load of college essays.

Armstead knew immediately that her work was cut out for her.

As the September day winds toward its close, Armstead settles back in her chair in the autumn of her last year with VCAC. The program typically appoints the advisers for two-year terms. By the time William and the other seniors at Sussex start making plans for where they will be going to college, she will be training the next adviser and saying her goodbyes.

But as her time at Sussex Central enters its last stretch, Armstead knows her work with young people is far from over. She will continue to draw strength from the message that carries her, and one she conveys to the students she advises: “Just because someone doesn’t believe in you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in yourself.”

She hopes that her presence, as a Black woman who is the physical representation of the promise of a degree, can reshape the attitudes of rural students the same way VCAC has helped reshape the trajectory of thousands of underserved students in Virginia.

Even though she may end up leaving Sussex Central without realizing her goal of getting a student into UVA, the most common destinations in higher education for students like hers will still yield benefits. An associate degree offers young men and women access to income and career opportunities and the chance to rise from poverty. Earning such a credential can produce an additional $400,000 in lifetime earnings, according to research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

In her time left, Armstead wants to launch students and their families into a world of upward social and economic mobility. She wants her students to dream of a bigger world, beyond the pork, peanut farms, and the pine forest that surround Sussex. She wants them to see a life for themselves beyond the swamp.