MORE THAN ANYTHING, Heather Lowe didn’t want her children to grow up in poverty.
The 27-year-old had already had more interactions with social services than most ever will. As a child, she had been in and out of foster care and witnessed her parents’ struggle with drug addiction. She had her first child at 19. She soon found herself bouncing between homeless shelters with her infant son. She even did a stint at a domestic violence shelter.
“I needed to do better for my kids. I needed to do better even for myself,” she says. “A lot of people were very much like, ‘All you’ll ever be is a single parent. And you’ll be an uneducated person for the rest of your life.’”
When her son was 2 years old, she went back to school, finishing several associate degrees and then completing a bachelor’s in psychology from California Lutheran University. But even then she struggled to find work that paid enough.
“I got offered $15 an hour with a bachelor’s and four associates,” Lowe says. “So I was like, ‘Well, I have to get my master’s, and I’ll be a therapist.’”
Lowe soon settled on entering a Master of Social Work (MSW) program. She scoured the internet for MSW programs, best MSW programs, affordable MSW programs. One school kept popping up: USC.
The University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work is the largest social work school in the world. In 2016, university officials estimated that as many as 1 in 20 graduate-level social workers in the nation were educated there.
Soon Lowe found herself on the phone with a USC representative, who she says aggressively sold her on the school’s MSW program.
“There was like a sense of belonging when they talked to you,” Lowe recalls. “It was very much like, ‘Don’t even worry about the other programs. We know that we’re the most affordable, and we know that we will give you the best education.’”
Lowe had been thinking about abandoning her plan to enroll in a master’s program because of the hefty price tag, but USC wouldn’t budge. “They kept calling me. And they kept telling me, ‘Your story matters. You should work with
