Excerpt
SUMMARY: For many students at LaGuardia Community College in New York, making it from the first day of school to graduation is a struggle. And they’re not alone. Part of this national problem? We don't have a good idea of who's going to college, and the ways their complex lives and extra costs can trip them up. Hari Sreenivasan reports as part of our series Rethinking College.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Gail Mellow points to LaGuardia undergraduates like Diamond Stanback to bring attention to what she says is a misconception of the nation’s college students.
Your average student isn’t what most Americans think of as a college student. Is there a gap here in our conception of what a college student is and the reality of what you see everyday?
GAIL MELLOW, LaGuardia Community College: There’s such an enormous gap between who goes to college in the United States and our very old and stereotyped image. More than half of all American college students, undergraduates, go to community colleges.
More than half of those can’t go full-time. About a quarter of our students are working more than 30 hours a week to make ends meet. More than half of them are living at home with parents. So, the idea of college as being this time away, right after high school, it’s not true.
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