As the rest of campus looks forward to spring break and the respite it offers, I begin to prepare for the semesterly rebirth of College Prep, the Community Impact course I co-teach with Professor Emeritus Robert W. Hanning, the course’s originator.
College Prep is a six-week-long seminar that professor Hanning and I offer local members of the New York City community who are either preparing for or have recently attained the GED. We emphasize written and oral presentation in order to better acclimate our students to the demands of college-level work.
Most students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and often left high school under the most difficult of circumstances. Their teenage years are often beset by the hardships of violence, gangs, drugs, alcohol, teenage pregnancy, sexual assault, and jail time. One of the driving goals of our course is to empower our students to move beyond their past by giving them the skills to succeed in college. We work to shape their personal experiences into a compelling narrative—a written life story of the challenges they have faced and the obstacles they have overcome. From this narrative emerge the seeds of their college admissions essays, giving them a head start on the most important part of their applications.
As we renew our commitment to the local community this year, the program is being reborn in new and exciting ways: Community Impact has introduced a mentoring program for our students. Each GED student is assigned a mentor from the School of General Studies. A significant body of research suggests that GED attrition rates may be improved by the presence of a social support system—the mentors provide that social counterpart to the work that Professor Hanning and I do in the classroom.
With work and family obligations pulling them in different directions, our students find themselves both overwhelmed and isolated—college seems like a distant dream, divorced from the reality of their everyday lives. By pairing our GED students with GS mentors who often come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and who have frequently overcome similar life obstacles, college suddenly becomes a plausible reality—both in the classroom and the mentor meetings, our students are reminded of the possibility of a different kind of life.
We feel that the combination of College Prep and the mentoring program will put more of our students on the path to college and a degree. And we have good reasons for this bright forecast. Last semester, we had our lowest attrition rate in years, and our brightest and most energetic group of GED students in memory. This semester the program expands even further, with a new section of the course being offered by professor David Carr of Union Theological Seminary. The program is growing, and with the expansion, we will be able to reach, prepare, and encourage even more students for futures as college graduates.
As a Teaching Fellow in the Core, I have never doubted that higher education has the capacity to transform and to inspire, and ultimately to create better citizens. Our student body at Columbia, however, represents an admittedly narrow segment of the national population. Higher education remains a luxury of the elite, with the upper and upper-middle classes making up the majority of the national student population. For this reason, the mentoring program and the work of Community Impact are essential to the idea of Columbia as a whole. If we believe in education as one of the most powerful forces of a democracy, and if we unite as students and as teachers in that belief, we must then be committed to its dissemination to all levels of society.
My students in Literature Humanities have been thinking about the differences between moral thought and moral action for almost a year now, and have debated the role of the heroic ideals and glory in Homer, the call to duty and nation in Virgil, and the commitment to the life of mind and spirit in Augustine and Dante. But regardless of our diverse beliefs and backgrounds, as a community, education is the value that unites us—it is a value we share by choosing to be at Columbia and by participating in university life. We must then move beyond the gates of 116th Street and dive headlong into the city, with Virgil, Dante’s Beatrice, and professor Hanning as our mentors and guides. Another kind of education awaits us, and through our work, a better democracy. At Community Impact and in College Prep, we strive to live this ideal in our own small way, hoping to impact and improve individual lives if we are at all able. I invite you to join us in our endeavor. New York City and Community Impact await you.
The author is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English and comparative literature. She is a Teaching Fellow for the Core Curriculum.
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