Over a decade has passed since I published my first-ever viral essay.

I was struggling to make ends meet while pursuing my journalism degree at Long Beach City College when a friend said something that sounded crazy: have a baby.

The more I thought about what she said—about how the government would assist me (and this theoretical child) not just with my education, but also with subsidized housing, food, and other necessary resources—the more I started to question why the system was set up to support single mothers but not low-income college students.

I was 22 years old, living at home with my very supportive grandmother; my only income was the $5,000 Pell Grant I received annually. I traveled two hours on the bus to get to school and then two hours back because I didn’t have a car. I struggled (if I could put that in red writing, I would). But what kept me going—and helped inspire me to write that essay—was that I wasn’t alone in what I lacked.

Society feeds young adults the message that we should have our lives together in our 20s. But I could not name 10 young adults in my friend group or my beloved community of Watts who had gotten their college degrees by 22.

Ten years ago, I asked: Shouldn’t students from neighborhoods like mine have access to necessary resources to help us succeed in higher education?

Today, I am still asking that question.

Soon after the story published in 2014, I lost my Pell Grant and could no longer afford to attend college full-time. So I made the only decision I could: I temporarily switched my focus to finding work.

This, I told myself, would allow me to finance my education, support my family, and start to save for a dream that had started to take shape when I wrote that article: to open my own higher education resource center in Watts. I knew I wanted to be part of the change in my neighborhood and make it easier for future college students to succeed.

By 2016, I was exhausted, but still trying to do it all: working full time at LAX cleaning planes on the graveyard shift and taking classes during the day. My resource center was still at the front of my mind, and that year I even located a venue in Watts that agreed to house it. But I could not afford to launch it; I was working so many hours that I could not concentrate on my own schoolwork, let alone assist others.

Finally, I made the hard decision to stop taking classes, table the idea of a resource center, and focus on work—for now.

In 2018, I got a full-time job with the City of Los Angeles at a 24-hour call center that came with a good salary and paid benefits, including school tuition assistance. I was 28 years old and so happy; I felt more equipped to excel in school than ever. But this job came with new hurdles. I could not enroll in school until I’d completed an 18-month training and probation process. I told myself this was just one last temporary setback, and I tried to make the most out of my hard-fought financial stability—the new salary allowed me to move out of my grandma’s house to a nice apartment, and even travel and see some of the world. But the job itself was not something that felt rewarding. My commute took hours (one month, I did the math and realized I had spent over 50 hours in traffic). The schedule was constantly changing, too—10 times in an 18-month span.

Then, my grandmother got sick. She spent most of 2019 in the hospital, and by early 2020, she was gone.

That was my lowest point.

Losing my grandmother, my biggest champion, was impossible. What made it even worse was that after her death, I didn’t feel like I could really grieve my loss. All those years in survival mode did not equip me to take care of my own mental health when faced with mourning someone I’d loved my whole life.

I knew that my grandmother would not have wanted this level of unhappiness for me. Eventually, I started going to therapy, which assisted with improving my mental health and provided me with insight into ways I can be more focused, disciplined, and consistent, regardless of the circumstances.

Months after my grandmother’s death, with my probation period finally over, I could officially resume my studies—this time, in her memory. I started school remotely amid the pandemic, with a newfound interest in working in the mental health field.

The idea of trying out a new career path, now in my 30s, scares me, but I know that I owe it to myself to try. After all of this struggle, I want a career that pays well, that serves others, and that I will enjoy.

This fall, I enrolled in the last three classes I need to transfer to a university. I have big plans for the degree I’m working toward.

In the last decade, I’ve been asked time and again to pick between my educational dreams and my survival needs. But I have never given up on my goals, despite the obstacles in my path. Instead, I’ve continued to find ways to fulfill the ambitions I have set for myself.

Looking back, I am so proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish. I’ve continued writing and publishing articles. I’ve played a role in raising my younger siblings. I’ve helped out in Watts by delivering food for seniors, painting houses, and hosting several community empowerment events, which I view as practice for the resource center that I still plan to open one day.

I wish that I and so many others weren’t put in the position I’ve so often found myself in, making choices that feel more like hitting limits. But despite the lack of support and resources out there, I refuse to see the pursuit of higher education as an impossible task.

My grandmother used to tell me each morning, “You can do anything that you put your mind to.” I still take that affirmation with me, knowing that ultimately, regardless of the circumstances, I will prosper.

The post Does My Neighborhood Want Me to Drop Out of College? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Comedian Steve Martin once said that teaching is like show business. Keeping this metaphor in mind, I try to approach each of my lectures like a live set. The idea is to keep my students present and engaged so that we can learn together in real time.

But what happens when the entertaining professor gets upstaged by a chatbot that can produce the lecture as well as write student papers and take the final exam? Does the college class become a meaningless joke?

Well, no.

There are people who fear that ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI bots will let students outsource their own learning. But I teach media history. I know that new media technologies do not make people obsolete. Video did not kill the radio star.

So rather than slip some language about ChatGPT in the policy section of my syllabus about plagiarism (which won’t stop students who know about the apps that can rewrite papers to evade detection), my plan this fall is to focus on creating interactive lessons that incorporate chatbots directly into my teaching.

Instead of letting chatbots change the learning process, I’ll show my students that anything that chatbots can do, they can do better.

Many of my students were already trying ChatGPT out last year. Because chatbots can be especially useful for performing routine tasks, one student explained that she had started to use ChatGPT at her job in customer service to generate quick responses to complaints, which she would then rewrite to improve.

While chatbots are able to do that kind of task well, more complicated tasks, such as historical essays, can be a disaster. But these limitations also open the door to teaching exercises that show students how to utilize this technology in their work.

Professors teaching writing skills can have chatbots generate outlines, drafts, and other lists of ideas. Then, the professor can direct students to work in small groups to rewrite the text for greater originality.

Chatbots also offer an opportunity to teach critical thinking and media literacy skills. ChatGPT is prone to making up false information out of the data-driven cloud—a phenomenon its handlers euphemistically call “hallucinations.” This means that students have to learn how to check facts and verify information, using citable sources and databases.

Professors can also teach students to be alert to the systemic racism and sexism that AI bots can perpetuate and amplify because of the source texts they’re drawing from. I once asked ChatGPT to write a list of some of the leading scholars of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. Its response only included white men—as if no person from another background, ethnicity, or gender ever studied the U.S. Constitution.

A solution to this problem? Show students how they can give the chatbot follow-up prompts that generate more complete answers—say, specifically to include persons of color, different genders, and diverse backgrounds. When I did this, ChatGPT readily listed Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ange-Marie Hancock, and other prominent constitutional scholars.

For my classes this fall, I’m also creating “AI Moments,” where my students will get a chance to see who does it better: the robot or the professor.

After I present a new lesson and talk about it with my students, I’ll prompt ChatGPT to give a lecture on the very same subject.

To test out this idea over the summer, I asked ChatGPT to rewrite my short lecture on the history of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, the text it generated was horrible. Just one cliché after another. It was as cold and dull as that slice of ham still relaxing in my refrigerator from the Fourth of July. Now there’s an unexpected image for you—the kind of surprise turn that ChatGPT will never accomplish. The AI-generated draft also made bad word choices—replacing the word “media” with “platform” (not all media are platforms).  It also changed my question, “Did the emergence of broadcast TV mean the end of going to the movies?” and instead asked “whether the emergence of broadcast TV resembled the demise of cinema attendance caused by the rise of radio.” This word choice altered the meaning of the point, which is that new media does not replace the old.

When I recreate this exercise in my classroom, I plan to have my students search ChatGPT’s lecture for bad writing that they will rewrite, turning each cliché into original imagery and poor word choices into something more precise. I’ll also ask them to find and eliminate bias and fact-check for inaccuracies.

What I learned from my practice matches with ChatGPT is that I know more about teaching journalism, writing, and media history—even though the chatbot can draw from vast amounts of information on the internet. And more importantly, it cannot share ideas accurately or in a creative and engaging way.

This is the kind of realization I want my students to have this fall when we engage with the AI-generated text, openly and transparently. My hope is that they will learn to learn to use AI effectively since these tools will become ever more common and maybe even indispensable in workplaces and in education. But also that through this they realize that when it comes to the contest of students versus robots, they will always come out on top.

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Who needs ivy-covered walls, Palo Alto farms, or Telegraph Hill when you could study in America’s Finest College Town?

That’s the thinking of more California kids in the 21st century. Led by its two dynamic and forward-thinking public universities, San Diego, which once billed itself as “America’s Finest City,” is turning itself into a paradise for students.

San Diego’s public schools—San Diego State and UC San Diego—are bucking recent state and national declines by boosting enrollment. And in an era when California is retreating from developing, they are building a new campus, new housing, and even a new transit line.

At the heart of the story is San Diego State. The university’s dramatic run to the NCAA men’s basketball championship game this spring echoes the university’s rise over the past generation, from party school to academic leader of the California State University system.

San Diego State now trails only Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in selectivity in the Cal State system. It accepts about 37 percent of its applications—a lower rate than some UC schools, and far below the system-wide acceptance rate of more than 80 percent. As it gets more competitive students, its graduation rate has soared. And it has claimed to be the first campus in the system to have “effectively closed” the gap in graduation rates between underrepresented freshmen and the rest of the student body.

The university has invested aggressively in private fundraising and made major gains in research dollars and faculty quality. And with less room for new construction on its campus in the mid-city College Area, it obtained voter approval to build a new campus down the hill in Mission Valley.

The most high-profile piece of the Mission Valley development, the 35,000-seat Snapdragon Stadium, is already open, and hosting not just university teams but other San Diego squads in sports like soccer and rugby. The rest of the new campus, still under construction, is supposed to serve the city as well as the university, with new housing, a hotel, retail, an “innovation district,” and plenty of open space, including a 34-acre River Park.

Meanwhile, UC San Diego, over in La Jolla, is also busy connecting itself to San Diego. In late 2021, the UCSD-sponsored UC San Diego Blue Line, an extension of San Diego’s trolley system, opened with multiple stops on campus. Students can take a train from their dorms to downtown San Diego or all the way to the Mexican border at San Ysidro.

It’s not hard to imagine San Diego as the future flagship of the UC system. After all, UC Berkeley seems ungovernable and is at war with its neighbors. And UCLA already moved its athletics to the Big Ten, showing its shaky allegiance to the UC system.

UC San Diego often seems more nimble and more relevant than those older, more high-profile institutions. That reputation is grounded in its highly rated programs in biology, engineering, and computer science, and in the campus’ growing enrollment, increasing student diversity, and improving national rankings.

UC San Diego also shot far ahead of other campuses and institutions during the pandemic. It earned national recognition for designing its own COVID response program, called “Return to Learn,” which combined extensive testing (of people and of wastewater), monitoring, notifications, and educational tools. As a result, UCSD had more students on campus during the pandemic, while keeping infection rates far lower than the rest of the state and San Diego.

To visit the UCSD and San Diego State campuses, as I did recently, is to be struck by how connected these places are to the city, and how new these universities appear—despite the fact that San Diego State was founded in 1897, just a year after UC Berkeley.

It also made me think of my own children, the oldest of whom starts high school this fall. My wife and I met in one of those ivy-covered colleges back East, but that was a long time ago. These days, I want my kids and their friends to experience the future of higher education, so I’m hoping that, for college, they might head south, to the academic center of San Diego.

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Mulvenna was bright and resourceful and full of promise when he enrolled at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta seven years ago, but he jumped into a higher education system stacked against anyone who is a first-generation college student, who does not have money, and who is non-white. Mulvenna had all three strikes against him. He is biracial, and was raised by a single mother in a small town 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. He was the first in his family to go to college and could draw on no resources beyond what he could cobble together from grants, loans, and the jobs he worked on evenings and weekends.

But Mulvenna was fortunate in one way: timing. Just a few years before Mulvenna arrived on campus, Georgia State had an undergraduate drop-out rate of well over 50 percent. Most, like Mulvenna, were capable and eager to learn but hit brick walls because of money, university bureaucracy, or both.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, though, Georgia State administrators decided it was no longer acceptable to wish good luck to promising students and then watch them fail over and over. The university went out on a limb and took responsibility for those it had deemed worthy of admission—and Mulvenna, with this support, was able to blossom into a star student.

Today as the United States grapples with its legacy of racial bias and a yawning gulf between rich and poor, many educational institutions are wondering how they can change and do better. Georgia State offers an inspiring glimpse of how things can be different.

Instead of clinging to the status quo, Georgia State chose to turn its leadership structure upside down, restructuring the jobs performed by professors and administrators around students’ needs, not the other way around. The results have been extraordinary. Georgia State has eliminated all achievement gaps between rich and poor, and between white and nonwhite students. It has also enjoyed a dramatic leap in the number of lower-income students on campus (now well over half the student body) and a parallel leap in graduation numbers.

Tyler Mulvenna could have dropped out of school at any of several critical junctures. The first big crunch came at the end of his freshman year, when a maddening combination of state regulations, university strictures, and financial realities blocked his path to a crucial state grant, without which he could not afford to continue. Mulvenna had come to Georgia State with a high school grade point average just shy of the 3.0 he needed to qualify for Georgia’s merit-based HOPE scholarship, which covers most tuition costs, and he’d staked everything on doing well enough in his freshman year to earn the scholarship thereafter.

Sure enough, Mulvenna sailed through his classes, but at the end of the year he found himself three credit hours short of the 30 required to qualify for HOPE. That was because Georgia State had put him in a special support program for academically promising students from vulnerable backgrounds, and the program had put a cap on the number of credit hours he could take at 27.

Mulvenna had been learning French—which would end up being one of his three majors—and he decided he’d make up the credits with a summer course in France, even winning a scholarship to cover some of the travel expenses. But he was still around $2,000 short of what he needed. The bill for summer tuition was due up front, but the HOPE money wouldn’t come through until fall.

He was a thriving student with a 3.2 GPA, and he’d hit a dead end at exactly the moment he should have been receiving maximum encouragement. It didn’t help that he’d crashed and almost totaled his car the summer after high school and couldn’t work as many hours as he’d planned. Unable to build up any savings, he’d taken out a high-interest commercial loan and was struggling to pay it back.

What came to his aid at this first juncture was a university micro-grant, designed for just this sort of eventuality, when an academically strong student is just a few hundred dollars short of what they need to keep going. Georgia State had introduced these grants just a year before Mulvenna enrolled, calculating—correctly—that the investment would pay for itself. The university would recoup thousands of dollars in continuing tuition fees and grants that would have been lost if the student dropped out.

Then came sophomore year. Thanks to HOPE, Mulvenna could afford his classes, but he was still drowning in debt and needed to work. Since he couldn’t afford a car and he couldn’t get to a job without one, he persuaded an auto mechanic in his family to stretch out the crumpled body of the Ford Fusion he’d smashed up a year earlier so it would be more or less roadworthy. It was a desperate move, because the car couldn’t pass the state tests required to get license plates. Without tags, Mulvenna was at risk of being ticketed every time he drove or parked on the street. But he depended on the car, sleeping in it several nights a week to save himself the gas he’d otherwise need to commute to and from his mother’s house.

Things became a little easier junior year, because Mulvenna was finally able to afford campus housing. But the pressure of studying full-time while logging as many as 30 hours a week at paying jobs was unrelenting. Mulvenna came down with shingles, strep throat, tonsilitis, and mononucleosis, each of which disrupted his studies and his ability to pay for them.

Microgrants from the university helped Tyler Mulvenna graduate with a triple major. Courtesy of Carolyn Richardson/Georgia State.

Any of these setbacks could have ended his studies—and without an additional two micro-grants from Georgia State before graduation, they would have. Instead, Mulvenna graduated on time with a triple major in French, marketing and international business—and a rack of university honors to his name.

Similar problems derail hundreds of thousands of students across the country each year. Students rise to the academic challenge of college but cannot always handle the precariousness of scrimping for every dollar when one slip-up or unforeseen crisis—a family illness, or an overstretched credit card, or a scheduling clash pushing a key course requirement back by a semester—can blow up their finances and make it impossible to continue in higher education.

Guiding Georgia State’s radically different approach was the firm refusal to accept that students from disadvantaged backgrounds were doomed to fail in large numbers. Tim Renick, the university’s student success guru and driver of its most important reforms, knew this received wisdom was wrong because he’d seen students of all kinds thrive during his years as a gifted young religious studies professor.

When Renick began his administrative job devising student success strategies in 2008, the economy was collapsing and the university was beginning to view higher retention and graduation rates as a way of compensating for a sharp drop-off in state funding. But Renick was driven, above all, by a conviction that loading students up with debt and sending them away without a degree was morally abhorrent.

Renick’s approach tracked students based on individual need, not by race or family income. The university then used the data it collected to identify and remove obstacles standing in students’ way, and to sell policy changes to faculty leaders who were resistant to change by temperament, and reluctant to accept that they could be doing a better job.

Renick transformed the university’s academic advising service to ensure that it reached out to every student, not just the ones who elected to seek help on their own. A cutting-edge advising platform processed tens of thousands of data points, including years of past grades and graduation outcomes, to offer students a predictive model showing them what degree path was most likely to be successful. Renick used similar data analysis to show deans and department heads how to change class schedules and move students along more quickly.

To help students negotiate the thicket of financial forms required to set foot on campus, Renick’s team helped develop an artificial intelligence chatbot to answer questions and offer reminders of looming deadlines. To assist the most vulnerable first-generation students, at risk of getting lost on a large urban campus, they set up a summer academy to give them a head start. And they set up the micro-grants and awarded them automatically. Academically deserving students did not have to apply; they simply saw debt wiped clean from their university accounts.

More than 55,000 students now benefit from Georgia State’s brand of individualized, micro-level assistance. Students who struggle with homelessness and food insecurity now graduate at the same rate as the children of wealth and privilege. The four-year graduation rate, which hit a low of 32 percent in 2003, is now close to 60 percent, with the six-year graduation rate pushing 80 percent. Remarkably, the university has done this while greatly expanding its numbers of lower-income and nonwhite students. For each of the last eight years in a row, more African Americans have graduated from Georgia State than from any other institution in the country—an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that, two generations ago, African Americans were locked out as a matter of official policy.

The student success work has continued despite the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a university where students are trained to be conversant with multiple technologies from day one, the move to online classes was relatively seamless, and the spring semester saw a class attendance rate of more than 98 percent. Graduation and grade point average numbers were up too.

Nothing about these achievements has been simple. The university leadership had to win over multiple constituencies, including a ruby-red state legislature suspicious of academia and internal critics who thought Georgia State shouldn’t bother admitting students who, through no fault of their own, arrived less than fully prepared for university-level calculus, or organic chemistry. Many thought a smarter response to the 2008 recession would have been to raise admissions standards and weed out students like Tyler Mulvenna—the ones most in need of what the campus had to offer and just waiting to be given their chance. It’s difficult not to hear echoes of Georgia’s ugly racial history, in the way these arguments were framed.

Georgia State’s successful interventions gives students the sense someone is in fact looking out for them and eager to see them thrive. That feeling of connection is huge—especially for Black and other minority students who just a few years ago, found themselves overlooked as a matter of course. Cary Claiborne, now a senior member of Georgia State’s advising staff, remembers being told as a failing community college student in the early 2000s that “the world is not designed for people like you to do what you want to do. You’re supposed to fail out of school.”

Claiborne found his own path to success, earning a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Georgia State, and now makes sure to communicate a very different message to new students. Everything you do matters, he tells them, and the university’s job is to help you graduate and get out into the world as quickly as possible. The result is a new, vibrant, extraordinarily diverse generation of college graduates who promise to change the face not only of Atlanta—but the country as a whole.

The post A Micro-Loan at a Time, an Atlanta University Is Bridging the Racial Achievement Gap appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is one of the lessons I learned, all too well, when I was trying to support my college education by cleaning the insides of airplanes at LAX in the middle of the night.

When people think about working at the airport, they often think of the romance of being a pilot or a flight attendant, traveling for free, being paid decently, maybe meeting a few celebrities in first class. They don’t often think about working on “the ramp” side of the airport, the behind-the-scenes jobs that few people seek out, but can teach you quite a bit about life and yourself.

I’m still surprised I ended up cleaning planes. When I attended Long Beach City College in 2013, I believed life could not get any better. I had good friends. I was passionate about my major (sociology). I even enjoyed the astronomy lectures, despite their tendency to put the class to sleep. A typical Tuesday night consisted of listening to my favorite Pandora radio station while writing psychology terms on an index card. I couldn’t have been any happier.

But by the middle of the semester, my contentment started to decline. The trouble was financial, not academic.

It’s no secret that college is expensive. I received financial aid, and I was able to cover the cost of enrollment, books, supplies, course materials, and additional school-related fees. But I could not afford housing, transportation, food, healthcare, or other basic necessities. The longer each semester went on, the harder the choices became. In a given week, I often had to choose between eating lunch and having bus fare to attend class.

When spring semester ended that first year at Long Beach City College, I had good grades, and books I no longer needed, but I did not have two quarters to my name. I decided that if I was going to be able to afford to be a full-time student, I would need to work a full-time job.

I applied for every entry-level job I could think of. I applied at the nearby McDonald’s and was told I was overqualified. I applied for a nine-week certified nursing program but could not wait nine weeks to receive my first stipend, or payment, so I had to deregister.

Eventually, I applied for janitorial work with a contract company under American Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport. The contractor granted me employment, and on paper, it appeared to be a pretty decent job. We received full-time hours, a flexible schedule, heath care benefits, and decent pay ($9.40 per hour was OK in 2013, when the California minimum wage was $8).

I started working at the airport in November 2013 as a cleaner of aircraft cabins. My first shift at the airport was a graveyard shift, where I detailed aircraft of varying sizes. After a safety briefing, during each shift my coworkers and I were split into crews of five to six people, and we were assigned three to five aircraft.

As a cleaning crew, we spent around an hour or two doing “deep cleaning” on each aircraft. During the graveyard shift, “deep cleaning” meant everything—cleaning each tray table, window, wall, and armrest, and securing all compartments in the cabin. We cleaned and restocked the lavatories, cockpit, and galleys. We also checked every safety compartment and replaced any missing items.

And then we had to dismantle the cabin, essentially doing an extensive security search that involved taking the aircraft apart. We pulled all the cushions of the seats up, opened all the surrounding compartments, and checked all the seals around the seats to make sure nothing had been tampered with. That’s right, the TSA does not secure aircraft; cabin cleaners do.

This could be disgusting work. Planes would be relatively clean if the flight had been from some place nearby, like San Francisco or Las Vegas, but when planes were coming in from London, Sydney, Narita or Hong Kong, it was horrible. Trash would overflow every bin, and was stuck in every compartment. You’d find throw up in the sink, and feces spread in places both inside and outside bathrooms.

We didn’t always have enough supplies. One time, we ran out of cleaning chemicals and trash bags. It was a disaster. We mixed soap and water to clean, but that does not really disinfect. And you have to clean everything, all of it, or else. An unclean plane is considered a security breach.

Despite such work, I discovered—to my surprise—that I enjoyed how peaceful the airport could be at night. The work went by fast. I enjoyed spending time with my co-workers and became good friends with many of them. I also began learning about other jobs at the airport. The various opportunities fascinated me so much that I considered a career there. I even thought about changing my major from sociology to aeronautical engineering. 
 
But working at the airport and going to school did not fit easily together. In the spring of 2014, a new semester at Long Beach City College was beginning. My intentions were to juggle both school and work at the same time, but it was hard to do both. Some days I was too exhausted after working a graveyard shift to get to class. Other days I didn’t have time to complete school assignments because of a busy workday. I also struggled at work. On the days I went to school, I would oversleep for work and come late.

By fall 2014, I had gone from taking a minimum of four classes a semester to taking only one class—and I failed it. At the end of the fall semester, I was on academic probation and I had received a final warning for my attendance at my job. Once again, I was between a rock and a hard place and had to make a decision. I wanted to go to school and excel, but I also had grown accustomed to financially supporting myself, as well as my family. Ultimately, I chose to temporarily stop going to school and to continue working, a decision I would later regret.
 
My family was disappointed that I was no longer enrolled in school. My grandmother, with whom I lived at the time, stressed that a job is temporary but an education is forever. I justified missing school by deciding that I would get everything I could out of the work experience. So I rose beyond cleaning, to working as an operational dispatcher for cabin services in the American Airlines traffic control center. As an operational dispatcher, it was my responsibility to assign a cleaning crew to each incoming aircraft as it arrived and to assign a timeframe to clean the aircraft to prevent departure delays.
 
Being a dispatcher was unlike being a cabin cleaner. Where cabin cleaning required much physical work, being a dispatcher required a lot of planning, strategizing, and documentation. My daily shift began at 4 a.m., before the first aircraft would land at the terminal for American Airlines.

The purpose of the early shift was to plan the day, but the airport was so unpredictable it was hard to plan even two hours ahead. Sometimes, I would assign eight employees to clean a wide-body aircraft leaving for Miami in two hours, and within 15 minutes the same aircraft would suddenly leave instead for Sydney, without waiting for the cleaning we had planned. Eventually I stopped planning out the day and I started exercising instantaneous solutions to problems as they came—thinking on my feet—which worked out well. 

Unfortunately, management loved this skill so much they overworked me. I often felt pressured and mistreated—forced to dispatch for eight hours straight without a lunch or a break. When I tried to bring it to the attention of a manager, my complaints would be dismissed. I thought about quitting and going back to being a struggling student, but I feared that might be worse.

Then new management arrived. They pushed even harder, demanding even more work without breaks, and forced overtime. People were terminated or quit and weren’t replaced. As a dispatcher, I went from having 40 employees (10 crews of four employees) on a shift to having 18 to 20 people (6 crews) in a matter of months. But there were still just as many planes to clean.

Spring break and the holidays were the airport’s busiest times, with American adding between 20 and 40 flights a day. These weeks broke our team. We were understaffed and unprepared. I ended up helping exhausted coworkers clean planes, or cleaning aircraft by myself. By the end of the holidays, co-workers, after picking up blankets from a New York flight and diapers from a Miami flight, would be sick. Our security checks of the planes felt rushed. We complained, and we asked for raises—each cleaner was doing the work that three people had once done—but got nowhere. We couldn’t quit. My coworkers and I depended on the income.

I tried to think of ways to make the job easier for my coworkers. During one miserable day in 2016, I decided to become a supervisor. Fortunately, the contract company again had new management, which was open to hearing from employees. I wasn’t everyone’s favorite supervisor—some people resisted my efforts to change things—but I felt I was being heard. By 2017, more employees were being hired, and coworkers were getting raises and promotions—and recognition for their hard work.

When 2018 began, I found myself at peace with work, so I approached my manager about my return to school. I asked if he would be willing to work around my schedule so I could go back and finish. To my surprise, he said yes. I had been out of college for three years, and planned a slow return, taking just one class. But just as the new semester was about to begin, we learned that our company lost its cabin services contract with American Airlines. By the fall of 2018, a new company would take over the cleaning and securing of American Airlines aircrafts at LAX.

I felt stupid. I had put a lot into this job, even sacrificing my education, and now I would have neither job nor education. If I could have found a way to stay in school full-time, I would have had my bachelor’s degree in spring 2017.

The new company hired me in the fall of 2018, but it felt like all the progress we’d made before the change in contractors had gone out of the window. I left and never returned.

I still talk to co-workers there, many of whom have lost work and jobs because of the decline in air travel under COVID. The airport taught me lessons that school could not—about business, strategizing, work ethics, the value of a dollar (we worked so hard for our money), and how to clean up throw up on a flight from London.

But I wanted a different journey, and a different career. And I wanted to go back and complete school. After five years dealing with dirty planes at LAX, and never flying on one of them, I’d finally learned what my grandmother meant when she said that your job is temporary, and your education is forever.

The post I Got an Education Cleaning Airplanes in the Middle of the Night  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my teenage dreams have now come true in a time when I cannot enjoy them without guilt. It started in the last days of February, just after Carnival—our most famous festivity—when the National Department of Health confirmed the first case of coronavirus infection in the country. Twenty days later, all schools and stores were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. TV drama production and all cultural events were suspended because of this disease that spreads fast and could kill up to 200 thousand people by August here in Brazil.

Since then, I’ve been teaching my college classes online. I’ve managed to keep my job, which I find surprising, because the other industries I’ve worked in have all suffered recent disasters, leaving my friends out of work. For many years I had worked as a screenwriter, but I gave it up for an old dream of dedicating myself to the low-paid profession of novel writing. So I started to work part time as a college instructor, saving some free hours in the afternoon to write. Teaching proved to be a wise choice last year, when a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, assumed office and suspended federal funding for films. Film festivals, new productions and even films in post-production were paralyzed in the president’s “culture war.”

Things were no better for the book industry. Publishers and bookstores were in deep financial crisis due to five years of poor national economic conditions. Even children’s books became targets in the trophy hunting of a president who declared school textbooks have “too much writing on them.” He chose an education minister“ready for battle” to “clean up” textbooks of the “filth” they see, for example, in the picture of a healthy and happy kid with LGBT parents. We were sure these problems were unbearable enough.

No one expected things to get even worse.

Just a week into quarantine it was clearer than ever that my steady job was a privilege. Newspapers reported that 13 million people lost their income overnight and didn’t have savings that would cover more than a week of food. In Brazil 40 million people work in the gray economy. I used to see some of them selling corn, pizza, beer, and brigadeiros (local chocolate sweets) on the sidewalk right in front of my college, at the end of the day. With the students at home and no one on the sidewalks, all these people lost their already meager earnings.

I also know my assured monthly salary won’t last long. College tuition is already too expensive for many families and students. With unemployment rising, many of them will quit studying. Almost every day, my department head sends emails asking teachers to be extra dedicated, sympathetic, and charming to avoid student dropout. We had to come up with homework they could do at home with their cellphone cameras. Acting teachers perform alone in front of the computer to show how well or badly a scene can be done. We cannot ask for too much work from students, otherwise they will get stressed. We cannot take attendance, because it would be unfair to students with internet connection problems. But as hard as we tried, two or three students dropped out every week—in a department with only 150 of them to begin with.

Worrying too much about tomorrow is of no help. For today I have a job, so the best I can do is to sit down and work. In the first week of the quarantine I was a bit nervous about handling a whole class of 30 students in an online platform. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. Screenwriting programs are about exchanging ideas, and that works online. I talk for 60 minutes, show my notes on slides, and ask them to watch short films and selected episodes of national web series. That’s how I try to prepare them to work in the entertainment industry that I quit.

My desk is in the TV room, the same room where my partner and I read, write and watch our favorite films and series. We both have indoor personalities. We both love to stay home and do exactly what I am doing in this quarantine. But I keep this contentment to myself, because I don’t want to sound like the fitness influencer who posted a video of her party, shouting “Screw life!” My comfort now comes with guilt.

Meanwhile, I am moved by the stories about poor neighborhoods that I read in online newspapers. A father buys hand sanitizer for his kids and is left with no money to eat. A mother works as a cleaner for a doctor and keeps going to work on a bus full of people; her employer won’t pay her if she doesn’t work.

Unemployment is a sensitive matter for me. The shadows of poverty still hover over my family, which reached the middle class not that long ago. My mother and father were the first generation in their families to finish high school. When I was a teenager, my mother made bread at home and sewed our sweaters herself to save money to pay for our English classes. The year I graduated from university, my father lost his job and could never find proper work again.

If not for my partner, Dani, maybe I wouldn’t even think about why all of this is happening. While the quarantine has secluded me, she works for a large university hospital that offers free, high-quality healthcare for everyone who needs it.

As a psychiatrist in the mental health institute, Dani is not on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Appointments with regular patients have been suspended, but emergency cases still show up. In the first weeks, psychiatry patients suspected of COVID-19 infection were transferred to the “covidario,” a unit prepared for the illness. Now this unit has reached full capacity, so the mental health institute have to admit its own suspected cases. But short supplies and bureaucracy make it hard for psychiatrists to get protective wear—even though we live in the most prepared state to handle the outbreak. Some of Dani’s colleagues have become infected. “Doctors feel the anguish of knowing the danger, even when they can do nothing to prevent it,” she told me.

Dani comes home every evening with news from the hospital. I feel myself changing, as the world changes dramatically outside my apartment. I read with great sadness that many artists I admire are dead now from COVID-19: Naomi Munakata (64), Daniel Azulay (72), Rico Medeiros, Aldir Blanc (73), Abraham Palatnik (92), Sérgio Sant’Anna (78). Journalists warn us that young people can also have severe symptoms, but the unexpected death of old people strikes me more. It is terrifying to realize that our elected president is insensitive to all this danger and pain. He makes things worse by inciting people to “go back to normal” and forcing doctors to use some medicine that does not help and could even be harmful. He stated before the election that he had no sympathy for gays, women, black, and poor people. Now it is clear that he does not even care for old and sick people. Arnaldo Lichtenstein, technical director of the hospital where Dani works, declared in a live news broadcast that this cruel reasoning has a name: eugenics.

For Bolsonaro, “the rain is there” and “some people will drown.” He says families should put their “grandpas and grandmas in a corner of the house.” How do we react to that?

My mother is 72 now. My father is 76. My stepfather is 81. They all live in the city of Curitiba, where I was born, 250 miles south of where I live now. They are all healthy, smart, and funny as always. We talk on the phone every week, and from their voices I hardly notice they are getting older. In my mind they are still 50, and I easily forget that I am nearly 50 now myself.

When the quarantine began, in the third week of March, my mother was part of a group touring Brazil’s southern wine routes. She sent a photograph of herself and my stepfather smiling behind a fountain of red wine in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil’s “wine capital.” They were having dinners in large hotel restaurants with 200 or so other retired travelers.

I was suddenly worried. She had to come back and protect herself.

Dani’s parents live nearby, so she meets them every Saturday, at safe distance, when she brings them groceries. She is attentive to any sign of bad health: a hoarse voice, a complaint of fatigue. Since we’ve been together, I have become aware that parents may hide minor symptoms of weakness because they don’t want their children to worry. They don’t want to waste our time together talking about suspicions of diseases. It is we, the adult children, who must stay aware and offer help before being asked.

In my late 20s, I watched the serious illnesses of my grandparents in their last years. I saw how my mother and father were worried and stressed. Still absorbed by my youthful fantasies, I thought my parents were overreacting. Losing health and lucidity in your 80s is nothing but normal, I told myself. We should just accept that life will end someday.

Today I’m old enough to know how wrong I was then. I want my mom and dad alive and happy for our weekly phone calls and our holiday reunions, for as long as possible. I don’t even want to think that it could end someday, and the possibility that a sudden disease could take them away terrifies me.

The fear invades my silent and peaceful landscape. Inside the apartment, one day after another, I see the quiet city from my window. The air is cleaner and the sunsets are beautiful. The irony is that I was just beginning to write a fantasy novel about a future when the human population was drastically reduced. I have spent most of my adult life creating strategies to stay at home alone, with my books and my ideas—ideas such as a wish-fulfillment story of a more empty world.

Now there’s no need to fantasize. I gave up the fantasy novel and started a short story about a woman during the quarantine. She finds the courage to confess an old secret love for her closest friend. Declaring our deepest feelings is what matters for me now.

In a good story, the hero often goes after his goal only to find out he was wrong from the very beginning. That’s how I feel. I hope for my partner to come home by the end of the day. I call my parents to hear their voices. And I wonder what Patricia Highsmith would say about these days, if she were still there, in her stone house in Switzerland.

The post A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many faculty members objected to the holiday, but few were as visible and vocal as professor Burt Green Wilder, who would go on to become a defining, if little-known, figure in American higher education.

Spring Day built upon a relatively new tradition: During the 1890s students began holding a dance and fundraiser, the Navy Ball, prior to major fall regattas. Not surprisingly, on the day of the regatta, class attendance was low. But attendance became even more abysmal in 1901, when the students moved the Navy Ball to March and reorganized it as a “circus parade” and noontime concert to benefit the Cornell Athletic Association. Faced with almost no students in classes, the administration capitulated and declared Spring Day a holiday. But Wilder, a pioneering physician, anatomist, and natural historian, hated it—for reasons that turned out to be prescient.

Hired in 1867 as one of Cornell’s original professors, Wilder was a man of 19th-century values but 20th-century sensibilities. Whenever the Spring Day festivities took place in front of McGraw Hall, where his office was, he made clear his feelings about the concession, by writing his disapproval in five languages on a large blackboard, according to the Ithaca Journal-News. He began in French, “O athletique, que de folies on commet et ton nom,” and continued in English and Latin—“In an individual folly may be merely a fault; in a university it is a crime. From fake show to fake scholarship facilis descensus (it is easy to descend).”

Yet students who dismissed him as a curmudgeon or an anachronism were wrong, or at least not entirely right. Wilder could be grumpy, surely. But what is the point of aging if you can’t be grumpy? And Wilder’s case of grumpiness is instructive. In the ways he insisted upon applying traditional values to the culture of higher education, he proved to be a man well ahead of his time.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of exceptional transformation in the United States. An older culture that had emphasized the importance of character and stressed moral qualities was eroding. By the turn of the century, a new one emphasized materialism, scientific and technical improvement, leisure time and recreation. The concept of character was replaced by a focus on personalities, one that stressed the need for respect, admiration, and above all, success.

Wilder felt the tension of being caught in between. As a scholar of anatomy, he was an agent of change and progress. And he was optimistic by nature. But he was also grounded in the principles of his youth, principles that were fixed in the crucible of the Civil War. The words that Wilder associated with his youth were words such as duty, discipline, work, honor, reputation, morals, and integrity.

Wilder was born in Boston in 1841 to parents who were “members of the New Church,” also known as Swedenborgians; as such they were homeopaths, haters of oppression, and strict vegetarians. Late in life he summarized his parents’ influence. From his father he inherited “a hopeful spirit and tendency to seek new facts and to devise original methods.” From his mother, he gained a disposition “at once active and cautious, an unwillingness to sacrifice principle to expediency, and a tenderness towards animals which has prevented his hunting for sport and restricted his physiologic experiments to such as are painless.” From both parents he drew a life-long commitment to personal and societal improvement.

When Wilder graduated from Harvard with a comparative anatomy degree in 1862, he knew he should join the Army of the Potomac but he believed he lacked both the training and aptitude necessary. Fortunately, he was offered a position as an acting medical cadet in a Washington hospital.

The war, which was transforming American medicine and medical research, created the opportunity for a bright comparative anatomist with little medical background but with a compulsive work ethic, an ability to perform autopsies, and access to medical texts to grow professionally. Wilder soon found himself at the forefront of anatomy and medicine.

He also had his consciousness expanded. By May 1863, he had accepted a commission as an assistant surgeon in the newly formed black 55th Massachusetts Volunteers. During the 28 months that he served in the regiment, he developed a profound respect for the courage and commitment of the black soldiers.

His army experience also let him develop professionally. In what little time he had when he was not attending the sick and wounded or studying medical books, he collected species for his natural history collection, including a large silk-spinning spider he discovered on Folly Island in 1863, that was later given his name (Nephila wilder).

In the two years after the war, Wilder obtained a medical degree from Harvard while also working at its Museum of Comparative Zoology and publishing a half-dozen scientific papers. That, and a glowing reference from Louis Agassiz, a prominent naturalist, led to his appointment as Professor of Natural History at Cornell University, one of the new land-grant colleges. He would teach there until 1910.

At Cornell, he developed a reputation as an innovative teacher and a captivating lecturer. He pioneered pre-med education, introduced dissection and laboratory methodology into undergraduate courses, built up a natural history museum at Cornell, and established the Cornell Brain Collection. As president of the American Neurological Association in 1885 and the Association of American Anatomists in 1897, he used his research on the human brain to challenge the scientific racism and gender biases of the time.

In 1893 his former students recognized his contributions to Cornell and their debt to him by producing one of America’s first Festschrifts—a German term for a collection of writing published in honor of a scholar.

While Wilder was a progressive where science and society were concerned, his perception of student conduct remained rooted in an earlier era. By the turn of the century, that brought him into greater conflict with some he called “stoodlums.” Cornell students in 1900 were different from the first students whom Wilder had taught. Students now expected an element of fun and diversion while at college. Football had become an all-encompassing passion.

Wilder disagreed. He had always argued that university students were a special and privileged group. Given the sacrifices that others made on their behalf and the benefits which they would receive, Wilder believed college students should be more strictly held to account than their peers. “Leniency towards transgression, particularly when intoxication is pleaded in extenuation, is seldom really kind to them,” he wrote to the university president in 1909. It was also unfair to well-behaved students.

A portrait of Burt Green Wilder in 1889. Courtesy of Kevin S. Weiner.

Wilder had a long list of student activities he opposed. He was foresighted in his targets, pointing at activities that still create problems for universities today. He objected to secret societies, intercollegiate athletic competition of any kind (on-campus sports were fine), betting and gambling, hazing, campus smoking, alumni buffoonery, Spring Day, leaves of absence for other than personal or scholastic reasons, and “stamping in class-rooms.”

He gained national notoriety in the 1880s and 1890s for his opposition to the growing popularity of football. Not only did that sport take students away from their academic work, he argued, but it caused more serious injuries than other activities and also coarsened its audience.

Wilder was always willing to challenge authority in ways that might resonate today. In June 1905, Wilder responded to an article by U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge in the New York Daily Tribune titled “The Young Man and College Life.” Among other things, Beveridge had written, “I never took much stock in the outcry against hazing.” How could the senator defend the practice, Wilder railed, when his government, after a long investigation, had just dismissed cadets and midshipmen from West Point and Annapolis in 1901 for their hazing abuses? Hazing, Wilder continued, corrupted law, morals and ethics by giving one group of students’ arbitrary power and authority over others. Hazing always implied a preponderance of power or advantage on the part of the aggressors. As a result it was not only brutal and unjustifiable, Wilder believed, “but mean, despicable and cowardly.”

Wilder, who had long supported women’s rights, took even greater exception to another of the senator’s paragraphs headed, “The More Fun the Better.” Beveridge claimed that nobody cares how mad the student pranks were. Wilder challenged Beveridge’s argument that, “We cannot change our sex or the habits of it. A young man is a male animal after all, and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with nature.” Although Wilder accepted that, “we cannot change our sex” as a truism, he was convinced “there are many, in college as well as without, whose unsexing would render this a cleaner and safer world.” While agreeing that the “habits of our sex” might not be changed in a day or a decade, Wilder was adamant that change was possible—and had to be possible if man was to be more than an animal.

Sometimes, perhaps, an anachronism is really not an anachronism.

The post The Pioneering Cornell Anatomist Who Sought to Bring ‘Honor’ and ‘Duty’ to College Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the message of a Zócalo lecture entitled, “Are College Campuses Rewriting the Rules of Sex in America?” by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and author of Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus.

Grigoriadis, speaking at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles, detailed the difficult and messy story of how universities have come to confront sexual assault on campus—and the backlash against these efforts.

“What’s happening on college campuses has a lot to do with the meaning of consent, and the need for us to change that meaning for a new generation,” she said. Through her extensive reporting on campuses, which involved spending time with students and others in social situations, she witnessed how a standard of affirmative consent before sex—also known as “yes means yes”—has taken hold among college students.

She also praised the state of California for adopting “yes means yes” in state law, and requiring it be part of the high school curriculum. But the standard is still largely confined to universities.

“The rules on college campuses are not the rules in the rest of America,” she said.

Grigoriadis offered a history of the movement to adopt affirmative consent that began with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which bars discrimination in education. More progress was made thanks to efforts by the Obama administration to make clear that Title IX applied to sexual assault, and to force universities to reckon more aggressively and clearly with the problem, she said.

She credited President Obama—who wrote about his two daughters—personally with acting on data that showed sexual assault on campus was a significant problem. But she added that the government and universities only got serious under pressure from students who organized to make sure new federal rules for handling sexual assault cases on campus were followed. Students at east coast universities were successful in lobbying schools and Washington politicians on the issue, and students at west coast universities led the way in making the issue bigger in the media.

But the momentum of the past few years has been reversed since Rolling Stone published a story in late 2014 on a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that was later proved to be false. The resulting backlash came from fraternities, conservative and libertarian lawyers, religious institutions, and especially from the parents of accused students, who organized to push back against the Obama administration’s rules on sexual assault cases. “It turned out that there were problems with the campus courts, and there were some boys being railroaded,” she said. As a result, “what we’ve been watching since early 2015 is the death of the campus movement.”

This culminated recently in U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s decision to reverse two sets of the Obama guidelines on sexual assault. DeVos argued that the guidelines—specifically a standard of “preponderance of the evidence,” or proving that an assault occurred “more likely than not”—did not do enough to protect the rights of accused students.

Grigoriadis countered that the preponderance standard is high—and justified—because such cases are so messy and hard to prove.

And she added that DeVos’ decision, and statements by the secretary and her aides that exaggerate the incidence of wrongly accused students, are part of a major problem with misinformation on the campus sexual assault issue.

Grigoriadis warned that extreme or exceptional cases of sexual assault were creating false impressions. Made-up stories and railroaded students are actually exceptional, she said. So are cases of fraternity brothers using drugs to rape students. She also said perceptions of universities as having failed in this area—a claim made by the documentary The Hunting Ground—are exaggerated.

The problem, she said, is that sexual assault has become a hot button issue. “I can’t tell you how many parties I’ve been to where I’ve been cornered by someone who tells I’m totally wrong about sexual assault, or I’m totally right about this,” she said, adding that people are basing their opinions on preconceptions rather than facts.

At the same time, Grigoriadis was critical of universities for tolerating fraternities and protecting important athletes. And she called the online webinars and trainings that universities require students to take on sexual assault “a total mess.” In particular, while trainings often focus on “bystander education” for people who may witness sexual assault, she said that teaching self-defense strategies was more effective. In particular, people can avoid dangerous encounters by learning ways to identify students who were most likely to commit sexual assault by their behavior (“It’s the guys who are very misogynistic, who interrupt women, who make sexualized jokes,” she said.)

In response to questions from audience members about specific high-profile cases, Grigoriadis argued for not getting trapped in the back and forth of particular controversies. We should focus instead on establishing and teaching affirmative consent, she said, which requires changing social norms. And the good news is that today’s college students have already made that shift and support affirmative consent. Fundamentally, changing the definition of consent to “yes means yes” is “about gender parity in the bedroom.”

This is a shift, and a subject, that “is kind of a mess,” she concluded. “The last few years have been very messy. But the point is getting across.”

The post Can Colleges Teach America What Consensual Sex Looks Like? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Being undocumented in California wasn’t easy. My parents first left Los Angeles a few years ago because they were being threatened by a gang member because they wouldn’t pay protection money for the right to sell food on the street. Their undocumented status made it hard for them to complain to the police.

But living in Indiana—now as a college student—has given me new respect for how Los Angeles deals with its undocumented citizens.

I started my college studies in Los Angeles, and received tremendous support in learning to navigate the educational system and create study habits. I paid in-state tuition for my courses at East Los Angeles College, as a result of 2001 state legislation. Students like me also benefit from the California Dream Act of 2011, which has helped undocumented students get access to more scholarships and state financial aid. A more recent California State Assembly bill, AB 1366—if passed—would encourage universities to provide more resources to help undocumented students complete their degrees.

In essence, the state of California treated me like other Californians: It was investing in me. Which made sense. More than one-third of California’s workforce is immigrants, and undocumented people are needed for their work and productivity, and as future taxpayers. And making sure undocumented people had college degrees was good economics; RAND’s Immigration Policy Center has estimated that the average 30-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in the United States with a bachelor’s degree will pay $5,300 more in taxes annually compared to the same individual who holds a high school diploma or less.

None of this made getting an education easy in Los Angeles, a very expensive place. I was living on my own with a well-paid job as a salesperson at a Chevrolet dealership, but to make a good living I had to work more than 40 hours and sell eight cars a month. I soon noticed my grades falling. So I took fewer classes, in order to sell more cars. Eventually, I decided to move to Indiana with my parents in order to finish my education.

The differences here in Hoosier State are startling. Indiana has a history of seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants such as myself from higher education. In 2011, Indiana passed House Bill 1402, which prohibits in-state tuition for students who are unlawfully present in the United States. To be undocumented in Indiana means to be a worker—not a student. But many students in Indiana have defied the state’s limits by going to college.

I learned from Radi, an undocumented student from Ivy Tech Community College in Elkhart, where she is president of the Latino Student Alliance (LSA) club, that at first she had decided not to go to college because of House Bill 1402. She has been living in the United States with her family since 1997, and has been an Indiana resident since she was a girl. But she couldn’t afford higher education as an 18-year-old, so she took a couple years off to save up for community college.

Then the good news: The establishment of the DACA program opened the door for her and other students, making it easier for them to stay in the country and work so they can go to school. But they still do not receive in-state tuition from the state where they grew up. This puts incredible stress on undocumented students who are pursuing a higher education to find good-paying jobs, to apply for many scholarships, and to keep up their grades so they can hold onto the scholarships they win.

And if they do graduate, undocumented bachelor’s graduates may not be able to pursue work in their chosen profession in Indiana particularly if they involve any sort of state licensing. I know a registered nurse here in Indiana not able to start her career as a nurse in the state because of her undocumented status. She meets all the state’s requirements for testing. She has the state approval in Illinois and passed her licensing in Michigan. But two years after graduating with a nursing degree in Indiana, the state denies her the right to take the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX).

This reality is pretty jarring for an undocumented Californian.

DACA was established by President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order—it protects undocumented immigrants by giving them a work permit if they pay $495, pass a background check, and provide their biometric data. But President Trump has the power to end the DACA program. If he does so, as he promised during his campaign, young people who pay taxes, attend college, and own homes could be deported to countries they don’t really know. And America will be poorer; the Center for American Progress estimated that ending the program would reduce the U.S. Gross domestic product by $433 billion over the next decade.

The state legislature in Indiana is following Trump’s lead by putting more pressure on undocumented students. In 2017, two state bills were introduced in Indiana’s House and Senate that would prohibit state universities and colleges from adopting sanctuary policies to protect immigrant students. Another bill would prohibit educational institutions and agencies from acting to restrict federal immigration law in anyway. Failure to comply would make institutions ineligible to receive state funds.

As a student in Indiana, it’s hard to understand this failure to invest in undocumented students who want to get college degrees, and eventually master’s degrees.

I’m one such student, and I think I’ve had an impact. At Ivy Tech Valparaiso, I served as the Student Government Association (SGA) vice president. My responsibilities were to make our school campus inclusive for all students, engage students in campus life, and create a culture of civic engagement and cultural acceptance. To meet those goals, my cabinet and I created voter registration drives, took a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, connected students with the Campus President and Chancellor, and provided support to the Straight and Gay Alliance club. I filled this student government role while working 40 hours a week to pay for school, which was about $2,000 per semester, and keeping my GPA above 3.5.

In my last semester at Ivy Tech I was accepted to Valparaiso University, a private Lutheran school listed in the Forbes Top College list, with a $27,000 scholarship per year. This fall I will start my junior year, studying political science.

At my graduation in May from Ivy Tech Community College Valparaiso, Ivy Tech’s President Sue Ellspermann, who was Indiana’s lieutenant governor under Governor and now U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, said that the new economy will require workers with degrees. She added that today’s graduates still represent a minority of Hoosiers who have earned a degree, and that the states need more degree holders. As I walked the stage, I shook hands with Ellspermann, and made a point of telling her that to fulfill her mission of increasing the number of graduates and preparing Hoosiers for the future economy, the state needs to invest in undocumented students too.

Earning my Associate’s Degree is one of my proudest achievements.

The tale of my two states speaks volumes about values. California seeks to include everyone, and Indiana does not. In my short time here, I have heard a lot of conversations about Hoosier values, which are hard work, personal responsibility, and faith. So why doesn’t Indiana value undocumented Hoosiers who work hard, take responsibility for themselves, and pursue their dream with the faith that they will be respected and treated equally, someday, in the state where they have made their home?

Indiana doesn’t have to look overseas to know how to do this. They could go to California to see what sorts of policies are needed. Or they could ask me, and I would be sure to find some time between my full-time class and work schedules to explain how it’s done.

The post Why an Undocumented College Student Left California for Indiana appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.