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.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Our second education story is about a Brooklyn high school that has not yet graduated its first class, but it’s being closely watched for its approach to providing lower-income students with college tuition and the special skills to get a job — one of its distinct features, a lot more time in the classroom.
President Obama sang its praises again this week and announced two more schools like it will be opened.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story as part of our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): When it comes to high school, should six years be the new four? It is a question that Cletus Andoh has times to think about every day as he rides New York City subway from his home in the Bronx to his school in Brooklyn, a journey that takes him an hour-and-a-half each way.
Cletus is a junior at Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH. P-TECH is a six-year public school where students like Cletus are expected to leave with a high school diploma and a two-year associate of applied science degree, basically finishing community college for free. --- HARI SREENIVASAN: Giving students from low-income families the chance at free college tuition was the brainchild of a public-private partnership developed by IBM, the New York City Education Department, and the City University of New York. --- HARI SREENIVASAN: IBM’s Stanley Litow, a former deputy schools chancellor for New York City, helped starts Brooklyn’s P-TECH in 2011, and has since overseen the creation of seven similar schools in New York and Chicago.
Students have longer school days, attend classes year-round, and get hands-on training in job skills that companies like IBM say their entry-level employees often lack.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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