Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty
Russell Lowery-Hart spent a Texas winter weekend sleeping outside, even when a light rain fell and it grew so cold that he forced muddy shoes into his sleeping bag to warm his feet. By day, the 48-year-old became increasingly sunburned crisscrossing the streets of Waco, applying for fast-food jobs and searching for soup kitchens. He arrived at one charity at noon to find that lunch ended at 11:30; luckily, a homeless woman shared her cinnamon bread with him.
He was unshowered and unshaven, in the same secondhand clothing the whole weekend. By Sunday morning, the humiliations had undone him. When a family heading to church crossed the street to avoid him, he hollered out, “I’m a fucking college president, you can look at me!”
The family hustled away. But Lowery-Hart is, in fact, a college president. And he was on the streets to find a better way to lead a school where poverty intrudes into the classroom every day.
Lowery-Hart is the president of Amarillo College, a community college on the Texas Panhandle, and he had driven seven hours down to Waco to participate in a two-day, two-night simulation of homelessness run by a religious charity, in the hopes of more deeply relating to his many students who live in poverty. “Just having a food pantry like we do isn’t enough,” Lowery-Hart said in a video diary recorded by a friend that Sunday morning last February. He was flat on the grass, still burrowed inside his sleeping bag as if fending off the trials yet to come that day. Then, in a kind of a forlorn chant, he added, “It isn’t enough, we’re not doing enough, we have to do more.”
Lowery-Hart was already doing a lot more than running a food pantry at Amarillo College. The school of 10,000 students has an emergency fund that can cut a check within hours to cover the car-repair or water bill that could push a student to drop a class—or quit school for good. The school employs social workers who counsel students through these types of financial crises, runs a legal-aid clinic, and offers free mental-health counseling (the latter is standard at private colleges but spotty in the community-college world). Last fall it debuted a low-cost day-care center that keeps its doors open 14 hours a day to serve student parents with jobs in the early morning or evening; students who qualify for a state subsidy only pay $5 a week. Tutoring is available evenings and weekends.
Administrators are working on an alert system that flags incoming students who are at high risk of struggling academically, and then assigns professors to reach out to them before trouble hits. In the fall, staff called and emailed over 800 students who had at least one dependent and a family income under $19,600 a year—less than half of what would be a living wage for a single parent or a one-income household with a child—to make sure they know about the school’s support services. In its quest to improve student performance, the college is questioning academic traditions as fundamental as the length of a semester, which has been cut in half for many classes.
What separates Amarillo College from most of its peers is not any particular program, but how much it focuses on addressing the effects of poverty. The school and Lowery-Hart are being watched by college leaders all over the country, because finding realistic solutions for student poverty could be transformative for the U.S. higher-education system.
Among the poorest 40 percent of Americans, only 12 percent of young people born in the 1980s by age 25. But a college degree is not optional for most good jobs in today’s economy, so more and more students from low-income backgrounds are pursuing higher education, and they are most likely to end up at community colleges. Despite President Trump’s recent that “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” these institutions comprise more than 40 percent of the country’s to support the needs of the modern workforce—which would of course improve students’ livelihoods as a result—they weren’t explicitly designed to relieve poverty. Yet by default, given the limited reach of programs such as and , community college has become one of America’s largest and most important anti-poverty programs.
