Postcards from the Rogue Valley

“My identity in my house is ‘the one that goes to college, the one that is trying to do something for her life.’ Everybody looks at me, they’re proud of me,” a student who was the first in her family to go to college told me years ago. “Just to know that somebody is proud of you makes you reach for more.” 

We each have our passions and one of mine, for fifty years, has been helping high school students like Shyann, marginalized by class and/or race put college in their sights. For many years, the biggest battle was encouraging these students to believe in themselves. “I’m not college material,” they said. 

Teachers and counselors, unwittingly or not, often fortified this message. What made these students “not college material” had more to do with the education system in which they’d been forged than anything to do with their abilities or drive.

Happily, one doesn’t hear the phrase “college material” as much anymore. Today’s Damocles Sword is the cost of college attendance. For students who would be the first-in-their-family to go to college, believing in themselves is not enough. 

“My family doesn’t have that kind of money”

Years ago, when you and I were aspiring college students, the cost of college was certainly a hill for some of us, but nowhere near the mountain it is today. 

Here in Oregon, the 2024 – 2025 cost for tuition, room, board, and incidentals at the state’s public universities averages $35,00. The University of Oregon tops out at $37,092.; Southern Oregon University, two miles from our house, stands at $31,692. The  full bill at Oregon’s largest private university, University of Portland, exceeds $75,000 in 2024-25.

The “good” news is that the invariably low family income that makes college financially out of reach for low-income students can be offset, in part, by federally-funded Pell grants — up to $7,500 per year — combined with state and local scholarship awards, albeit small. (Note: At the time of this writing, the Musk chain saw had put Pell grants and federal college loans in the danger zone. The day after this news broke, I was helping college-bound seniors at Ashland High School complete various financial aid applications. The question topmost on their minds was not how to answer a particular question on the online form but whether their college dreams were dying.)

The bad news is that financial aid from the federal government, even when “fully” funded, barely gets most students past first base. Many must still secure loans that can take years to repay. And private colleges and universities are out of the question unless their endowments (think Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Occidental, and the like) can subsidize students with serious financial need.

Out-of-state public universities, where costs for non-residents mirror the tab at private institutions and financial aid is lean, are equally out of reach. Tuition alone for out-of-state students at University of California at Berkeley, for example, is $50,808 in 2024-25.

“How did college get so damn expensive?” 17-year-old Marco, whose father works in construction, asked me as he filled in his federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, otherwise known as FAFSA. “My family does not have that kind of money.”

“Out of sight and out of mind”

Families move to Ashland, as the saying goes, “for the schools.”

Folks will tell you that the city’s high school (Ashland High) has long enjoyed a reputation as a college prep stalwart — although it ranks average among public high schools statewide on this score.  For better or worse, like hundreds of high schools nationwide that I’ve studied and supported over the years, Ashland High is one of those schools where there are enough higher-socioeconomic students headed to prestigious private colleges and universities to burnish the image.

But these students are the exception, not the norm. Buried in the real estate ads and the city’s sense of itself is the fact that, according to the latest census figures, an astonishing 26 percent of children in Ashland, ages 5 – 17, live below the poverty line. (For 2025, the federal poverty guideline for a family of four is $32,150.) In contrast, the average child poverty rate for Oregon is 13 percent and 16 percent nationwide. 

In a city where almost a third of the population is over 65 and only a fifth of the households have children under 18 living with them — and Shakespeare fans fill the downtown six months of the year — children occupy the margins. Children below the poverty line are even less visible, though they make up 29 percent of the 950 students at Ashland High.

“Kids like me,” Marco told me, “are out of sight and out of mind.”

Supporting students who need it the most

Two years ago I signed up to mentor students at Ashland High School who had college in their sites but few supports to travel the distance — part of a statewide initiative called ASPIRE, aimed at filling the hole left by the decline of guidance counselors in high schools locally and nationwide and a rise of college-bound students.

That is how I met Shyann Colman, a striking young lady with a poise beyond her years. (Please watch her video at the top of this post). She had just moved from Las Vegas to Ashland to join her parents, both auto body mechanics, who had found work here months earlier. We sat in the high school library whose huge windows looked out on the Cascade mountain range. “As you probably know,” she said, “the only mountains in Las Vegas were inside me.”

Shortly after Shyann arrived in Ashland, an acute viral infection landed her in intensive care for two weeks. “Some might think this was a curse, but for me it was a blessing,” she said. “I’d never been so cared for before and I left sure of one thing: I wanted to be a nurse.”

Her parents had her when they were teenagers, Shyann continued. At the time, her mom was already taking care of two of her younger siblings. Early on, Shyann figured out that she was responsible not just for herself but for her younger brother as well. “Many days I gave him my lunch money so that he could have something he needed,” she told me.

When she moved to Ashland her junior year, she began working up to 40 hours a week at Starbucks (sometimes opening at 4:30 am before heading to school at 8:30) so that she could pay her parents rent, buy her own food and cover other expenses, including paying for dual credit courses at Southern Oregon University whose challenge she relished. Getting good grades had never been a problem for her.

When I first met Shyann, she figured the local community college was all that she could afford. Two years later, she crossed the high school graduation stage to receive a four-year, $40,000-a-year scholarship from Oregon’s Ford Family Foundation (with possible continuing support through graduate school). 

“Maybe I’ll become a nurse practitioner or, better yet, a doctor,” she told me when we celebrated her triumph the next day.

Girls with wings

While high school boys have been part of my first-in-the-family universe, it is the girls —balancing hardship, family responsibilities, and an intense sense of purpose — that I know best.

This year, I’ve overseen a small scholarship from the local branch of the American Association for University Women (AAUW) designated for a senior Ashland High School girl who will be a college pioneer in her family. Ten girls applied and the committee reviewing the applications selected three finalists. At a recent meeting of the Ashland AAUW, I shared their snapshots. (The names are aliases.)

Asmara, a top student academically who lost her home to wildfire in the midst of the COVID epidemic, spent a year traveling with her family from one shelter to another until they settled in Ashland. An officer in the high school’s Key Club, Asmara has helped raise over $150,00o for local groups. She also took up the cause of homeless girls and women with no access to menstrual products, starting her own outreach which she calls “Every Woman.”

Asmara writes: “Here in Ashland, I take charge of planning food, clothing and blood drives, as well as pep rallies, school dances, beautification and cultivating change simultaneously at school and off campus. I take on issues in my communities, wherever they are, with intention, perseverance, and purposeful action.”

Asmara wants to major in business and psychology.

Shanique imagines a career in the medical field. She has good grades, she’s an athlete (cross country, track, basketball, golf), she is a leader — and for the past three years she has worked as a server at Martino’s Restaurant (an Ashland fixture for three decades), logging over 2,500 hours.

Shanique’s story is heartbreaking though not unusual for the invisible children in our community with families in crisis. Her mother disappeared when she was 9, her father was an addict and often homeless, and she has lived with her 70-something-year-old grandfather the past six years.

“Today my dad is doing so much better,” she writes, “and we have managed to strengthen our relationship by making up for missed time. Hardship has taught me skills that will last a lifetime.”

Jia moved from Henan, China to Ashland when she was fourteen. Her mother had married an American (indeed, a lawyer from Ashland) many years who senior who soon became disabled. Jia’s first challenge was learning English. Excelling academically soon followed. Overcoming shyness, she threw herself into activities that were personally meaningful:  joining the high school’s Asian Student Union, working as a teacher aide in Chinese language classes, playing in the school band, becoming a Taekwondo Athlete. Meanwhile, she has put in more than 500 hours working at Wendy’s.

Jia is determined to honor her mother’s sacrifices. “She has worked hard every day of her life, always standing, earning little, never asking for help,” Jia writes. She wants to give back to society, too, particularly to girls like her: “If my future is as I hope, then I will do my best to help those girls who have dreams like me, to help them get of out of cages that trap them and welcome a new life.”

Jia hopes to become a math teacher.

An afterword

Today, the stories of Shyann, Asmara, Shanique, and Jia are buried in a larger narrative about the elitism of American colleges and universities. In truth, higher education institutions have been a powerful engine of social mobility in the U.S. for more than a century. Adult children born to parents in the bottom quintile of the income distribution are about four times as likely to reach the top quintile by attending college, studies show. 

To be sure, there is evidence that complicates this long-established narrative:

“Low-income students still attend highly selective colleges at much lower rates than their peers from richer families, and their enrollment at the mid-ranking institutions that are most effective at propelling them into higher income brackets has actually been declining over the past two decades.” (The Guardian, March 6, 2025)

The answer, however, should be more, not less, investment in expanding access to higher education.

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