SOURCE Scholars

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SOURCE Scholars is a blog published by the SOURCE on Community College Issues Trends & Strategies. Blog posts and comments are welcome from anyone who has an interest in community colleges.  If you would like to submit a blog post(s) to SOURCE Scholars, please email your post along with your photo (in jpeg format) and contact information for consideration to info@edpath.com. 

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20 "eLearnings" From Two Months on the Road(trip)

Been a busy couple of months of elearning road-trips. From EDUCAUSE to Online EDUCA, from WCET to WICHE, from DevLearn to AECT (with a little bit of virtual Sloan-C tossed in for good measure). Literally thousands of plenaries, presentations, and poster sessions from which to choose, along with hundreds of vendor stands and trade show booths. Here are some of my big take-aways:

via elearningroadtrip.typepad.com

On Repairing Community College Online Degree and Certificate Program Websites

by George Lorenzo

Last week The SOURCE published a relatively brief report titled “What Community Colleges Need to Know About Advertising & Marketing Online Programs.”  It generated hundreds of downloads and some very interesting comments.

For example, please see the email below I received from a community college director of online learning. The director’s sentiments are similar to many others in the same line of work.

”Thank you for sending the link to your report. I read through it and found it to be full of very helpful, practical tips. Unfortunately, I did not find that our college is doing many of those things at all. I have a lot of work to do!”

The director added that he would get back with me for possible assistance/advice related to fixing their website sometime in the unknown future.

Well, the time is really now. Having a website that provides meaningful information is a basic necessity. It does not have to be real sophisticated in the beginning – just enough to show your visitors in a clear and informative fashion what you are offering and how they can apply or obtain more information. Keep building on that in a continuous improvement cycle to include many of the other features noted in the aforementioned report, and you are on your way.  

Many postsecondary colleges that offer online associate degree and certificate programs face similar circumstances. Why?  I don’t know the answer.  Is it because funds are not allocated for, at the very least, making their web pages more comprehensible and easier to navigate? Is it because online learning departments don’t get the attention they might deserve from community college IT departments and/or high level administrators?

I have had some conversations with people who know a lot about how community colleges operate and have been told that they often have very poor practices related to accounting and money management. Plus, faculty members, as well as administrators, have told me that online education is still not fully accepted by the professionals who run some community colleges at the highest levels.  So, perhaps it is a combination of several things – poor fund allocation strategies, or no funds, and no real support – in which case we’ll continue to see some online learning department websites out there that are pretty dismal.

Other community college professionals have told me that their websites are under development (going on over nine months now with no significant improvement).

That’s all too bad, really. We are not talking about investing huge sums of money to fix a website in order to have a basic, first-phase presence that looks professional and has information that could be the right catalyst for getting student enrollments. I think, depending on how many web pages and features need to be revamped, you could be looking at anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for a quick repair. Perhaps, however, getting this kind of minimal support is extremely hard to obtain or next to impossible for some community colleges? 

Comments, of course, are welcome.

Higher Education is at a Strategic Inflection Point

by President of Shoreline Community College
and SOURCE Editorial Board Member Lee Lambert
reprinted from President's Blog/Lee Lambert: Sustaining Shoreline for Student Success

In “Only The Paranoid Survive,” Andy Grove, co-founder and chairman of the board of Intel Corporation wrote, “a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it can just as likely signal the beginning of the end.”

This is the case for public education as a whole and especially true for Washington state’s community and technical colleges. There are many factors driving the need for change in our system. Dramatic cost shifts to students in the form of tuition and fees, significant reductions in state support, globalization and technological advances are driving the need for envisioning a new future for our colleges.

This new vision must include a dramatic shift from the model of teaching and learning currently deployed in our system. The community and technical college system in its present form was enacted into law in 1967. Under past circumstances, the system served the residents and businesses quite well. With its emphasis on open access, the system paved the way for scores of individuals to receive a quality education at an affordable price. Many of these individuals have gone on to be business leaders, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, teachers and the list goes on. Legislators, past and present, should be proud of the system they helped form. The countless educators, staff, administrators and boards of trustees deserve our respect and appreciation for the outstanding work they have done to educate and train the residents of Washington state. Employers – large and small, past and present – should be thanked immeasurably for their commitment to partnerships with colleges and support for the students that often go on to become valued employees.

When they were established, community and technical colleges were an innovative response to serious needs. However, the law is nearly a half-century old and crafted for a different era. As they say on Wall Street, “Past performance does not guarantee or imply future success,” a warning well worth heeding. Colleges can once again be an innovative response to serious needs, but not without significant changes made as soon as possible. I believe the challenges are clear and the solutions available for a brighter future where the system can continue to be an innovative leader.

Forces driving change

It is tempting to attribute today’s challenges to the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. This is akin to saying the problem is not of our doing, placing the blame at someone else’s doorstep and shunning responsibility and accountability. Undoubtedly, the recession is painful, but it obscures the truth that the winds of change have been gathering strength for decades. As Walt Kelly’s cartoon-strip character, Pogo so pointedly said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As I reflect on my own schooling, I realize that I received a less-than optimal education in high school. And, that was from 1977-81. In 1983, the “A Nation at Risk” report was released, signaling the need for change or America’s standing would be compromised. Another important snapshot, published this past May by the independent Washington State Budget and Policy Center, reveals a slow-but-steady shift over the past two decades away from public support for higher education to placing a greater burden on students for the cost of their education. All the while, positive student learning outcomes at all levels are in serious doubt and U.S. students face increasing competition from abroad in a globalized economy.

For the first time in U.S. history, the current generation of college-age Americans will be less educated than their parents’ generation, according to the non-profit group, Achieving the Dream. If our state, and nation hope to attract and retain the best talent in order to maintain economic viability, we must raise the educational standard for all residents.

The 21st Century version of globalization – as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likes to call it, Globalization 3.0 – has made human capital the No. 1 currency. According to the World Economic Forum report, “Human capital is replacing financial capital as the engine of economic prosperity.” The ability to attract and retain the best talent from wherever will define a nation’s, a state’s, a company’s success or failure. Therefore, a nation’s or a state’s success, will turn on its ability to train and educate its citizens. However, the skills needed are those that the current system is failing to deliver.

What are those skills? Tony Wagner, in “The Global Achievement Gap,” details the Seven Survival Skills our students must acquire to be globally competent. While much more is needed and expected for ongoing success, these skills are foundational to that success. In “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Friedman and his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum, argue that individuals need to think, act and perform like an immigrant, a waitress and an artisan. In other words, everyone is going to have to develop extra skills and abilities.

Another key consideration is the need to close the educational achievement gap, especially for our low income, disadvantaged populations. The recent report released by the American Council on Education, “Minorities in Higher Education – Twenty-Fourth Status Report: 2011 Supplement,” underscores the pressing challenge facing us as a nation. This challenge continues to persist with very little cost saving scalable solutions being piloted.

The clarion call has been sounded time and time again with little or no meaningful gains being made. The Educational Testing Service, in its 2007 report, “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” writes, “there is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem…we must raise our learning levels, increase our reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps…” This report utilized data and was released before the current economic crisis. If we thought it was difficult during good times to solve this national and state-wide challenge, it may seem near impossible giving the current set of circumstances. However, I don’t believe or accept the premise the challenge can’t be solved now. It will require a laser like focus, and a total restructure of how we approach teaching and learning to turn the tide.

Fortunately, there are positive solutions we can employ now. These innovative approaches will require all of us to collectively and dramatically shift our thinking, and create systems and processes that will welcome current innovations and allow for experimentation.

At Shoreline, we’re trying changes to meet students’ needs. For example, we are piloting a modularized developmental math program. Students move through the modules at their own pace, completing what they can during the quarter. What they pass, they keep, and pick up where they left off the next quarter. We’re building on our successes in the online environment, including fully online health informatics and supply-chain management degrees. We’re creating a virtual college that can serve students wherever they are in the world. Our automotive technician and CNC machinist programs are the blueprints for delivering employable skills with third-party verified, portable certifications. We’re expanding our international education program to benefit both domestic and foreign students. We’re actively courting private-side partnerships to offset the continuing loss of public funding.

These are all efforts within the existing regulatory framework, but systemic change will require systemic solutions. To that end, we’re also working with the decision-makers to look at how best to change outdated rules when they get in the way of our mission of helping students, our community and our state.

Are We on a Path Toward an Unprecedented Societal Crisis?

by George Lorenzo, Editor of the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

For a great story about how someone beat the odds and pulled himself up from poverty through higher education and sheer hard work and determination, beginning with community college attendance, see SOURCE Editorial Board member Terry O’Banion’s  “I Am a Community College Student” essay reprinted  in Community College Week. Terry’s longstanding upwardly mobile career as a leader in the community college sector spans 50 years, from living in a chicken coop as a boy to President Emeritus of the League for Innovation and currently Senior Advisor at Walden University.

I’m sure there are many stories of a similar nature  to Terry’s, including my own featured in the earlier three-part series of this blog,  in which hard-working community college students from poverty-stricken or low-income  families pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. However, I also believe that the higher education playing field has changed dramatically since my days as a college student as well as since Terry’s, making the likelihood of such successes much harder to achieve than in years past.

Consider the following information from an article published inside the recent October 31 issue of Time Magazine, appropriately headlined “I Owe U.”:

• “The cost of college has soared 538% over the past 30 years. That’s more than four times the growth of consumer prices and almost twice the increase in health care costs.”
• According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the wages of those with a college degree have been roughly flat for 10 years.”
• U.S. student-loan debt has exceeded credit-card debt for the first time and is on track to reach $1 trillion. College graduates in 2011 are labeled as the “Most Indebted Class Ever.”
• Increased college costs, more borrowing, and a lack of good-paying jobs could result in long-term stunted economic growth in the U.S. as “today’s grads end up being too poor to start a business or buy a house or send their own children to a university.”

What does this all mean for the future of our adult society in the U.S.? Are we producing a large population of stressed-out, overly debt-laden people who can’t see the light out of their lower economic status, regardless of the degrees they earned?  

In addition, how does this scenario play out for community colleges? You would think that enrollments would continue to be rising due to the simple fact that community colleges are more affordable, but that does not seem to be the case. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, made note of enrollments slowing down at community colleges.  In another story from The Chicago Tribune, it was explained that a recent drop in enrollments at Illinois community colleges could partially be due to more financially strapped students choosing work over school.

I hate to sound like an alarmist, but the so-called “College Payoff” theme, whereby we are advising students that going into debt in order to ultimately earn a degree can be considered a wise pathway in the long term, looks like a bad idea.  Instead, shouldn’t we be advising students who do not have any financial support to avoid going into deep debt and to work at whatever job(s) they can find and enroll in only those courses they can pay for out of their pockets combined with any aid they may qualify for through federal and/or state grants?

All these challenges also point toward a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we increasingly becoming a society in which only the wealthy can go to a decent college or university?  Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are students with lots of student-loan debt and no decent employment in sight.  Are such examples of discontent the beginning of an unprecedented societal crisis or am I being overly alarmist?

Comments welcome…. 

Part III: A Personal Story Illustrating College Readiness, the Completion Agenda and the Great American College Payoff

Wrapping it All Up: The Rest of the Story and Its Relationship to the College Payoff Message

The Fourth Payoff
Again, without going too deep into details, I left the marketing director’s job and re-entered the world of self-employed entrepreneurism, but this time in education writing and publishing, where I quite happily sit today after more than a decade. I have taken a few stabs at earning a master’s degree in liberal arts online, but I have come to the conclusion that this will not happen until I reach the age of getting social security checks in the mail.

The position I am coming to at this point in this three-part blog post is that I would have never reached this plateau in my career had I not earned a bachelor’s degree. So, as noted, there have indeed been college payoffs for me, but  I think it is equally important to note that a  payoff will definitely NOT come to everyone who earns a degree.  

Where Some of My Peers Ended Up
Growing up in a city neighborhood during the 60s and 70s put me in contact with literally hundreds of people whom I still know and occasionally have the opportunity to interact with today. They represent a wide diversity of career pathways. Many have not earned a bachelor’s degree and are quite successful, especially some who are entrepreneurs in the home improvement business. Some without baccalaureate degrees did very well working for the post office, UPS, FedEx, in retail, in manufacturing, for utility companies etc.  and have reached a very comfortable retirement stage in their lives. Another is a self-employed, hard-working bread delivery entrepreneur. Others own restaurants and pizzerias that have brought them a fair amount of financial security. On the other side of the spectrum, some never held steady jobs or created businesses and have passed away under extremely unfortunate and horrible circumstances. 

Most of my peers with four-year degrees or above have done well, working in the medical field or with major corporations in high-level positions that have put them into the upper middle class.  Some with four-year degrees have done poorly over a lifetime.  Having a degree never really got them out of the lower middle class or even what can be considered close to or at poverty levels.  In short, there are numerous people with baccalaureate degrees who are unemployed or working at low-wage jobs, struggling month-to-month to meet their basic financial obligations. 

What it Means to be Economically Secure Today
Relatively new research out of the University at Buffalo School of Social Work (quoted below) shows that achieving even basic economic security in America is definitely a challenging proposition.

". . . single workers  need more than $30,000 a year for economic security. Single-parents with two children need nearly twice the income ($57,756) to cover basic expenses and save for emergencies and retirement, while dual-income households with two children require $67,920. These figures are well above – sometimes several times – traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage designed to show what workers require for a basic standard of living. The 2010 national poverty level is $10,830 for a single-person family and $18,310 for a family of three. "

While Americans strive to reach, at minimum, basic economic security, the notion of having to simultaneously go into what can be considered extreme debt in the tens of thousands of dollars while attempting to earn a college degree does not look like an enticing pathway to pursue.

The Debate Ensues
A substantial debate has ensued since the Georgetown College Payoff report came out.  Without citing all kinds of references to articles, reports and blog posts that can be seen in all the major education media, I’ll simply say that both sides make valid points. While the cost of earning a degree continues to skyrocket above the cost of living, the number of student loans continues to increase, as well as the number of student loan defaults.

Still, earning a bachelor’s degree with tens of thousands of dollars in debt is not so horrible if you can get employed in a decent-paying career that provides you with enough money to have a comfortable lifestyle while simultaneously paying off your debt in, let’s say, five to seven years.  For most humanities majors, that may not be doable. For certain STEM-related majors, the odds are much better.

Cost-Savings Advice
Regarding how to deal with the rising costs of higher education, I thought a relatively brief post by Washington Post writer Jay Matthews in his “Class Struggle” blog made a lot of sense.  In short, Matthews provided some common sense advice, such as “pick a school that does not cost so much” and look into food budgeting and finding housing arrangements with roommates to cut room and board expenses. He also noted that job opportunities can become more available to students if they look beyond their course work and become involved in extracurricular, institution-supported activities.

Nonetheless, a lot more needs to be done by higher education to enable students to pursue associate and baccalaureate degrees in greater numbers without incurring too much debt - which takes me back to the press conference mentioned at the beginning of part I.

A Reinvention Need
During the question and answer period I explained how I thought the crux of the problem in relation to the so-called “completion agenda” is that many students simply cannot afford to go to college. “If they don’t have the money, they don’t have the money. What’s the solution?”

Lumina’s Merisotis said that “what we really got to do is reduce the cost, bring down the cost side and develop a more efficient and effective system of higher education. Getting to the productivity of the system is ultimately the way to bring down the price, and that is going to require us to think hard and invest more in reinventing how we deliver higher education. Simply delivering it in the way we have been delivering now isn’t going to be possible for the growing number of people that you are talking about. ”

The Moral of This Story
So where does all this take us? Obviously there is a great need to reform the cost of higher education, but don’t hold your breath for that reform to take place anytime soon. Tuition and fees are still going up everywhere.

I think the message that needs to be dispersed to prospective students more than ever is pretty simple, and it’s not a new one: If you’re going to college and do not want to take on an enormous amount of debt and want a good shot at being financially stable after graduation, you have to work extraordinarily hard and do much more than simply go to class and earn decent grades.  You will have to work more than a part-time job at times while attending school full-time; you’ll have to figure out what you can realistically afford and plan accordingly; you’ll have to get involved with extracurricular activities that interest you and will help you make connections and find networking opportunities that could lead to job opportunities;  you’ll  have to accept that it’s okay to lose some sleep in order to earn money instead of borrowing money ; and you’ll have to pay close attention to your health and habits so you don’t burn yourself out while working hard through your academic career (in other words, “do the right thing”).

In the end you’ll look back and realize that your college days were, indeed, extraordinarily great days, despite all the challenges you imposed on yourself. 

Part II: A Personal Story Illustrating College Readiness, the Completion Agenda and the Great American College Payoff

by George Lorenzo, editor-in-chief, The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

Working Hard Toward College Completion & Earning the College Payoff
I have always considered my four years as an undergraduate some of the best times of my life. I had all this energy and maturity to learn and grow. I was not a student who came to class and left.  In addition to working on and off as a night auditor on the graveyard shift, I joined the student newspaper, first as a copy editor and moving  up to editor-in-chief. I wrote prodigiously about everything and anything and was proud to see my byline on cover stories and my name in the student newspaper staff box.

There were times when I spent the entire weekend in the student newspaper office, sleeping on a beat-up couch.  I got to know all of my professors and took advantage of their office hours, spending time asking about homework assignments and papers to write. I participated in class, talking vigorously about literature, philosophy, psychology and political science. I read one great piece of literature after another (no Cliff notes).   I spent a great deal of time in the campus library conducting research. The first full-blown paper I wrote was on the history of the English language, and my professor gave me an A+, noting that my work was at the graduate level. What a blast, indeed!

As a kind of sidebar to this, I remember going on a date with a young women who lived on campus and drove a new Mercedes Benz.  We got into a discussion about grades, and, come to find out, she was failing, despite that everything in her life was being taken care of by her wealthy parents and all she had to worry about were her grades. That was our one and only date.

All the work I did as an undergraduate led to getting a journalism scholarship, a stipend and tuition fee-waiver for being editor, and a paid summer internship with a major metropolitan newspaper. All my clips from writing and editing for the student newspaper had paid off, saving me money and enabling me to more easily afford the price of going to college. I also took advantage of a work-study program in which I tutored English composition. 

During my last semester as a senior I took 20 credits and earned a 3.8 GPA. After I had taken my last exam, I threw my backpack filled with all its notebooks from 20 credits of study, into a garbage bin. I did not attend the graduation ceremony because I was alone, and there were not any family members or close friends to celebrate with me. I did, however, take a lot of self pride, and obviously still do, in the fact that I had earned a BA in English entirely on my own without incurring all kinds of unneeded student-loan debt. I did not need a commencement ceremony to validate anything. 

Next, I was awarded a Teaching Assistantship in the English Department, and the following semester I started to pursue a master’s in English with an emphasis in creative writing. As part of the assistantship I taught Freshman English 101 and 102 – an enlightening experience.
I stayed in the graduate program for one year and then dropped out. I was 32 and tired of being a poor student and I was over anxious to get out into the so-called real world. I had come to the conclusion that I did not want to be a low-paid teacher or newspaper journalist, and I set my sites on finding gainful employment as soon as possible, perhaps in some kind of business-marketing field. 

The First Payoff
Without making this story too long, I will simply explain that I wound up getting hired in what could easily be considered a stable, life-career-oriented position as director of communications and publications for a small community college in a small town in Northern New York State.  This was my first job with all the retirement, health insurance, vacation and education-reimbursement benefits one could possibly want. I had made it to the “College Payoff” Promised Land. Before long, I had a decent car, nice clothes, a nice apartment, and a respectable job with an office that had a beautiful view of the entire campus.

I resigned after about 8 months and moved back to Las Vegas. Small town life in Northern New York State was not where I wanted to spend my days.

The Second Payoff
So, there I was driving across country back to Las Vegas, thinking about what I was going to do next.  I had a very lucky moment on the second day after my arrival, landing another relatively decent job as a marketing and communications manager for a newly opened sports and entertainment arena on the UNLV campus.  Again, in hindsight, I should have immediately re-enrolled in graduate school and completed my master’s degree. Instead, I was pretty much enjoying the fruits of my labor, living a bachelor’s life.  After about one year of irresponsibility, I met my future wife. We got married in 1989. I was 35 years old.  Together we bootstrapped a small advertising and marketing agency that was launched out of the townhouse we lived in.  I had now officially entered the ranks of a self-employed entrepreneur. Everything I learned in college and on the job had now culminated into this new career pathway. Our clients included casinos, real estate companies, banks and my alma mater. At one point we had a small executive office located on the 11th floor of a bank building with a panoramic view of the Las Vegas city lights.

The Third Payoff
Our daughter arrived in 1991, and our son arrived in 1994. The advertising and marketing business was growing, especially with the real estate boom happening in Las Vegas at that time.  Nonetheless, we decided that our children should grow up where most of our extended family lived in Buffalo, NY, so we sold the townhouse and packed up the business and our belongings when our son was six-weeks- old and our daughter three-years old, and headed back East. 

From a business and financial point of view, the opportunities in Buffalo were very limited, especially in comparison to what was then a very positive business climate in Las Vegas. After two years of attending Rotary meetings and trying everything I could to get an advertising and marketing business up and running successfully, I was forced to go back into the job market and was again lucky enough to land a decent job, this time as  marketing director for a major manufacturing company.

The new job included education benefits, so I enrolled in a graduate-level seminar at the University of Buffalo called “Communications in the 21st Century.”  During one seminar meeting we were visited by a professor who talked extensively about a relatively new development in the world of higher education, online learning. I was fascinated, and this one lecture became the impetus of my future career as an education writer/researcher/publisher from that point forward.

End of Part II
Part III: The Rest of the Story and Its Relation to the College Payoff

Part I: A Personal Story Illustrating College Readiness, the Completion Agenda and the Great American College Payoff

This is the first post of SOURCE Scholars, a group blog that will feature opinions, essays, and various other information resources from some of the Editorial Board members of The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies.

This first relatively long post is from George Lorenzo, editor-in-chief of The SOURCE.

If you were paying even a little attention to the news about higher education on Thursday, August 4 and up through the weeks after, you probably would have noticed a major buzz that was first generated by a telephone press conference featuring Tony Carnevale from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, along with Jamie Merisotis from Lumina, talking about the Center’s latest report, “The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings.”

The report covered a lot of ground about education-attainment levels as they relate to income over a lifetime, presenting findings in 2009 dollars of full-time workers over 40 years of their lives, from 25 to 64 years old. The findings/data in the Center’s report were culled from the authors’ (Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose and Ban Cheah) analysis of the 2007-2009 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The Big Payoff of a Bachelor’s Degree
For this informal blog post I am going to focus only on one sentence of the report about earning a bachelor’s degree: “With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor’s degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate’s degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma.”

First, I think it is very important to note that the aforementioned focused on “median earnings,” not “average earnings.” Second, the American Community Survey that this report was based on questions about 3 million households each year.

I don’t know how many people actually filled out the American Community Survey that was mailed to them, but even if everyone did fill out the survey, it means that the Center’s report data is based on about 9 million households from 2007 to 2009. According to 2005-2009 figures from the Census Bureau, the US has a little more than 112 million households.

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG STORY in Three Parts
During the telephone press conference, Carnevale and Merisotis repeatedly pointed out that, from a lifetime perspective, what you earn with a degree under your belt most definitely pays off, even if you are like many Americans who must go into deep debt to complete a bachelor’s degree - which brings me to my personal “college payoff” story.

I think my story is a microcosmic slice of American life as it pertains to the so-called completion agenda, college readiness and their relationship to earning a living and what people end up doing with their career pathways after they earn, or not earn, a bachelor’s degree.

My College Readiness
I grew up in a small, lower-middle-class, city neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo, NY that was comprised mostly of blue-collar working families. I graduated from high school in 1971. I am a first-generation college graduate with a BA in English that I earned in 1985 at the age of 31.

I was not a good high school student. I attended an all-boys Catholic high school that I hated, resulting in a grade point average somewhere below 2.0. This included a final grade of 65 in Geometry (the highest level of math I took), giving me the distinction of having earned a high school diploma through sheer luck. My high school teachers were mostly Franciscan priests, whom, in those days, were allowed to use corporal punishment. I quite vividly recall being punched in the face once for talking out of turn in class, getting whipped across the back of my head numerous times with the rope that circled the waistline and hung down the side of the customary Franciscan cassock, as well as having to kneel on my hands after school as punishment for getting into a fight.

I also attended K through 12 in the Catholic education system, where pulling sideburns was a fairly common practice among the nunnery (Ouch!).

All this, and more, resulted in a lack of enthusiasm for academics, but I was smart enough to understand that I would need to go to college. My parents, however, did not have the funds to support any kind of higher education endeavor, nor did they encourage it. My father suggested that I go apply for a job at the steel mill, auto plant or railroad, all of which accepted my application form and nothing else. So, off to the local community college I went. Thank goodness for open enrollment!

Self Support and Freedom
I was working as a pizza delivery guy, driving a junky Oldsmobile that got me where I needed to go, making enough money to rent a room (that I shared with an international student from “Bombay”) in a nice suburban home located near campus that was owned by a friendly senior-aged couple. I also took out a small student loan to help make ends meet. I managed to figure out how to be free and on my own, but I was also a naïve 18-year-old that did not seek out any advice in relation to academic achievement and career advancement. Like most 18-year-olds, I had no idea whatsoever about what I wanted to do with myself, except that I had this sincere desire in my heart to travel the world.

Dropping Out and “Studies” Abroad
During my second semester, while walking past a bulletin board, I spotted an advertisement from a company called “Student Overseas Services.” Not long after that, during the middle of my second semester as a community college student, I was sitting in coach on an Icelandic Airline flight to Luxembourg, on a one-way ticket, with, if I recall correctly, about $500 dollars in my pocket.

The Student Overseas Service on rue des Etats-Unis in downtown Luxembourg was overflowing with students like me from all over the U.S., waiting to be assigned a job somewhere in Europe. The letter they had sent to all of us duly noted that they had “tentative” work available (mine happened to stipulate that it was located in Switzerland) if we just filled out the application that cost $60 to process and got our asses over to Luxembourg.

The waiting period for actual deployment to a real job took about two weeks. During that period, myself and two fellow New Yorkers that I befriended at the Student Overseas Office pooled our meager financial resources together in order to rent an inexpensive room, including breakfast, in a home nearby that was owned and managed by an extraordinarily warm-hearted and friendly elderly couple. We had a place to sleep, shower and eat breakfast.

Days were spent at the Student Overseas Office waiting. Nights were spent at the local downtown disco where we nursed beers and danced with European women. Soon a dozen drifting young American men temporarily stuck in Luxembourg (myself obviously included) were offered employment at a steel mill in a small town in Northern Germany. The job included a dormitory setting where migrant workers from all over Europe lived and worked. I stayed there for two months, earning Deutsche Marks and learning a lot about German culture first hand. I then spent about one month traveling up and down the Rhine until I got homesick and was left with just enough money to purchase another one-way ticket back to Buffalo on Icelandic Airlines.

In hindsight, this became my unique, self-funded study-abroad program that my wealthier student counterparts were able to take advantage of through the generosity of their parents, and earn credit for, at actual higher institutions of learning located overseas. I learned about European society as an “Amerikaner” working hand-in-hand with hard-working Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Turks and Persians at the steel mill, as well as from sleeping in youth hostels and at camp sites, and drinking white wine with locals at beautiful inns along the Rhine and Mosel rivers.

Back to Square One and Onward
After returning home from my European exploits, I did not go back to school (but should have). I got a job as a waiter and bartender at the neighborhood Italian restaurant. I had temporarily lost my desire for academics and was still feeling a strong desire for more traveling and sowing of wild oats. Always wanting to get out from the Buffalo winters, I went to Florida; I lived in Arizona; I lived in California; I lived in Hawaii; and I wound up in Las Vegas in 1981, where I first shared an apartment with a Buffalo neighborhood friend. The apartment was within walking distance from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I was 27-years old and enrolled as a non-matriculating student in English 101, and I got a full-time job as a night auditor at a small hotel located on the Las Vegas Strip. During my days in Hawaii and Arizona, I had worked in the hospitality industry as a bus boy, room service waiter, desk clerk and night auditor, so my experience got me hired, but not exactly at a high wage.

I was able to transfer over the one semester of community college credit I had earned years back. In relatively short order, I was considered a full-time matriculated student majoring in English, with an unofficial minor in communications studies with an emphasis in journalism.

By now I was mature enough to realize that if I did not get a bachelor’s degree I would probably be stuck behind a hotel desk working the graveyard shift for most of my life. Some of my peers who had completed college by now were working in decent jobs, raising families and buying homes, while I was struggling to pay tuition and clothe, feed and shelter myself.

I eventually moved into my own place, a very small studio apartment near the campus. Thankfully, it wasn’t as hard as it sounds, primarily because I was single at the time. Plus, I had a lot of energy and self discipline to push myself forward. Still, through most of my undergraduate years, I could not afford a decent and reliable automobile and was often forced to transport myself back and forth from school to work and home via a ten-speed bicycle or taxi cabs.

End of Part I
Part II : “Working Hard Toward College Completion”