One brisk autumn evening in 2007, I found myself standing with my mother on a dark street corner in New York City. My father, a few steps ahead, was asking a friend if we could stay with him that night. Earlier that day we had been evicted from our small apartment, with little time to collect our belongings and nowhere to go.
That night was a long way away from my current life at Yale University, where I am now a doctoral student in American studies. My journey to the Ivy League began at a place many would consider unlikely: a community college. As wells of underestimated promise, community colleges are packed with students who have been stigmatized by the place such colleges hold in the hierarchy of education. They are places where people like me often find it hard to imagine themselves in roles of significance or power, but also where many students embody the resilience, experience, and drive needed to succeed in graduate school.
Elite universities have the most to lose in failing to engage students from community colleges.
My unlikely journey was made possible through perseverance and support, but also through the key role that a community college played in my life. I was born in Cotui, a small city in the center of the Dominican Republic, in 1990. My family moved to New York in search of opportunity when I was 5. Though plagued by a thriving drug trade and the violence that went along with it, Washington Heights became home to my brothers and me. Protecting our bodies was our first concern, but our education was close behind. We struggled financially, and the year after we were evicted, moved to Philadelphia, where rents were cheaper and where we had relatives. My dad eventually had a small flea-market business, and my mother worked at several nail salons.
North Philadelphia revealed a different type of hardship. Residents suffered from generational cycles of urban poverty, less familiar to me as an immigrant. In high school, a Dominican teacher in his late 20s served as an example of what “getting out of the hood” might look like. He taught history, and I decided I wanted to be like him. So I began my studies at the Community College of Philadelphia, where I developed close relationships with people of varying ages and backgrounds. After earning an associate degree in history and secondary education, I set my eyes on a bachelor’s degree.
I assembled sandwiches at a downtown branch of Au Bon Pain for six months before I saved enough money to take a Greyhound bus to Chicago. On the coast of Lake Michigan, Loyola University Chicago, which had offered me the most financial aid, awaited. When I learned that a dual degree in history and secondary education would require me to stay an extra year (and incur an extra $30,000 in student loans), I decided to pursue a stand-alone major in history.
During my senior year, in what proved to be a pivotal life moment, an urban historian mentioned to our “Rebels and Reformers” class that she sought a research assistant to collaborate with her on a project related to the riots that devastated Camden, N.J., in 1971. Seeking new opportunities, I eagerly approached her after class.
This professor, Michelle Nickerson, who remains on Loyola’s faculty, changed the course of my life. She sat with me patiently at the student center, in her office, and in coffee shops discussing my project and the research skills necessary to tell a compelling story. She showed me what it meant to be a historian. And she taught me to harness life’s shortcomings to make a contribution.
My motivations to study Camden and the riots — sparked by racial tensions ignited by the police beating of a Latino man, who later died — were rooted in an urgent need to understand other “hoods.” What accounts for the similarities and differences in disadvantaged urban areas is a question that continually arises in my work.
Growing up in a tough New York neighborhood, and then another in Philadelphia, I didn’t think twice when I decided to trek around Camden, which by 2013 had become one of the nation’s most dangerous and poorest cities. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the city’s plight.
I did, however, feel empathetic as I listened to Camden’s residents recall those warm summer days in 1971 that led up to the riots. I set about writing a research paper on the riots and their origins — an undertaking that would later lead me to Yale.
Here at Yale, I study the relationships between marginalized urban communities and the government agencies responsible for their well-being. While our American-studies department is a very diverse intellectual space, I’ve encountered few people at Yale, and academe in general, who understand firsthand the sort of poverty and violence that so many people have experienced on the streets of urban America. At times, it is easy to feel alone.
I recount my journey not to seek sympathy, but to illustrate the hurdles that low-income people face and to show what forms of knowledge we might contribute to our universities. In moments of uncertainty and discouragement, I find strength in the fact that I am in a position to tell the stories of those at the bottom of society’s racial and economic hierarchy, to discuss the intersections of race and capital in urban America. That is where I come from, where many of my dear friends remain, and where I root my academic research as I continue to navigate this Ivy League world.
Ultimately, elite universities have the most to lose in failing to recruit students from community colleges. Imagine an economics department influenced by faculty members and students from low-income, working-class backgrounds. Go further. What might an architecture school look like? A medical school? Classrooms and labs would reflect different research perspectives, interests, and priorities.
If universities are truly invested in creating new types of knowledge, they must look beyond their peer institutions when recruiting graduate students. They must devise initiatives to enrich their graduate departments with the perspective of working-class students, or risk perpetuating the same systems of inequality they claim to oppose.
We’re not hard to find; many of us are located in the nation’s community colleges. Universities, shed your reservations and open the gates to your ivory towers.
Pedro A. Regalado is a doctoral student in American studies at Yale University.
