AACU: On Campus with Women

Just after reading copy for this issue of On Campus with Women, I visited Wilson College, a residential liberal arts campus that in 1996 had decided not to let their unused dormitory space lay vacant. Instead, they boldly initiated a groundbreaking program that redesigned the dorm floor plans to link rooms in order to accommodate single mothers. The program is thriving. Thirty women with their families are attending this semester, which represents just under ten percent of their student body.

Through funds raised when the program was initiated, the Women with Children program provides single mothers and their children with year-round, on-campus housing. Without such support, it is unlikely these students would be able to complete their college degrees while also providing for their children.

I thought a lot about Nolita Clark and Shannon Sheffield who tell readers in their OCWW article that it was the intervention of Hamilton College's ACCESS program that transformed their lives and the future of their children. Without Hamilton's proactive outreach to low-income women like Nolita Clark and Shannon Sheffield, they might have faced a life just on the edge of poverty, with little hope of altering the conditions of their lives--or those of their children's.

But while at Wilson, I learned that a few of the traditional-aged undergraduate students felt it "wasn't fair" that the older women "got a free ride." Those are both familiar concepts to all of us--fairness and free rides. According to the cliché, America is a land of opportunities and if one works hard enough, one can pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. It is, however, nearly impossible to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. Despite the popularity of the Horatio Alger myth, a child born into poverty in the United States is likely to remain impoverished throughout life. That is part of the reason why one can predict whether an infant is likely to go to college by knowing his or her zip code at birth.

	Guest OCWW Editor
	Lee Schwentker, summer intern for AAC&U's Program on the Status and Education of Women, served as guest editor for this issue of On Campus with Women. read more >>

That is, unless someone thinks such a reality is "unfair" and intervenes in the structured impoverishment to create opportunities. That is exactly what the University of California--San Diego did six years ago when they established The Preuss School UCSD, on their campus. To attend the school, students had to be children of parents who had not graduated from a four-year college. Last June, fifty-five students graduated from the charter high school. This fall, nineteen of them will attend UCSD, others will go onto Ivy League schools, and every one of them will attend a four-year college, which is a strong predictor of getting a bachelor's degree. What astounding success! A university weighed in with its resources, set high expectations for the students in its new school, and was determined to increase the college going rates of low-income students in California.

But to do that, they had to assume that equality was not sameness. Equality, it turns out, is far more complicated. To offer equal opportunities, UCSD had to treat students differently. That is what Wilson College and Hamilton College discovered, too. Instead of hoarding opportunities, they chose to even them out and watch the miracles happen.

One of the miracles is not just the dazzling array of possibilities that unfold in an individual person's life, like in the life of Vivyan Adair, who moved from being on welfare to earning her PhD. It is also the public good that accrues to so many people. Children can grow up in a house instead of a battered woman's shelter. Instead of ending up in dead-end jobs, they are more likely to end up in college. Women, the most impoverished of the poor, can begin to determine the trajectory of their own lives.

That is why it is especially troubling that federal policies written into the current welfare "reform" act force low-income women to drop out of college in order to take minimum wage jobs that do not support them or their families. Such policies hoard opportunities for the few, increase the likelihood that poor women will remain poor, and deprive colleges of the assets such women bring to campuses. It's simply not fair.