I really shouldn’t be here.
Fifteen years ago I was just a little black girl from Brooklyn. I had a single mother with three jobs. We shared a three-room apartment with an angry and determined cavalcade of roaches. The local public school had been dismantled for underperformance and overcrowding. The neighborhood businessman sold crack at bargain prices. The chances of me ending up at a top-20 university were laughable at best.
Thanks to tireless maneuvering by an obstinate mother, private and government programs that helped me overcome the prescriptions of circumstance, and — most of all — a load of luck, I’ve ended up in a place where only 7 percent of low-income youths ever arrive — a four-year college. One look at the makeup of Northwestern will attest that my background is not the norm. The norm is richer, whiter and better prepared.
I guess the Bush administration doesn’t think I should be here, either.
In his highly criticized 2006 budget, President Bush proposed to eliminate the Perkins Loan, a $7.5 billion program serving 500,000 students across the country. To offset this giant loss, he wants to increase Pell Grants by a joke of a margin — about $500 for the poorest students.
But that’s not all.
The New York Times reports that Bush has attempted to cut three more programs: Leap, Gear-Up and Trio, an apparently unnecessary academic preparation program started during Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. The budget removes over $800 million in grants, loans, courses and services from low-income students.
These programs help intelligent, promising and needy kids escape the quicksand of inner-city, high-poverty life. The unpopular truth is the level playing field we all champion is riddled with mountains and basins. These programs give agency to people determined to escape poverty.
Removing the Perkins Loan program (which aids 2,500 NU students for $33 million, according to the Office of the Provost) is at best a careless misinterpretation of the needs of our poorest citizens. At worst, it’s a value judgment of the political and educational worth of our nation’s neediest.
Education should never be a privilege of the rich. If the abundance of wealthy students in college are any indication, that’s precisely what education in America has become. Like almost everyone at NU, I worked extremely hard to get here. But there is no conceivable way I could have done it without government programs like the Perkins Loan.
Too often this administration dubs education as a way to overcome economic disparity. In the 2004 campaign, education was Bush’s panacea for everything from job recovery to welfare reform. But by stymieing the ability of lower-class children to attain it, the administration has made clear how intent it is on helping the growing number of poor Americans pull themselves out of poverty.
Rina Martin is a Communication sophomore. She can be reached at
